Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions - Paul E. Lovejoy

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misrepresented the historical context to which a significant proportion of the population of the Americas traced its origins. My aim is to draw attention to the fruits of African historical research so that information on the jihād movement can be incorporated into the historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world. Any conception of the Atlantic world has to include those parts of Africa that actually bordered the Atlantic and thereby helped define the geographical boundaries of analysis. The Atlantic world does extend to the Americas from England, France, Spain, and Portugal, but the connections are not just to Brazil, the Caribbean, Hispanic America, and North America but also to various parts of West Africa and indeed to Angola and Mozambique, whose involvement in the era of revolutions should be considered because of the links of these areas to the Atlantic world. Indeed, without the forced migration of Africans to the Americas, there would not have been an Atlantic world.

      My focus here is on the jihād movement of West Africa and specifically the consolidation of states that were founded in jihād and that came to dominate much of West Africa during the same period as the age of revolutions. I argue that, as with western Europe and the Americas, the history of West Africa was also characterized by an age of revolutionary change. Although jihād was not inspired by the same sentiments and forces that characterized the history of Europe and the Americas, there were important similarities and interactions that provide a new perspective on the Atlantic world and the age of revolutions. The jihād movement affected the forms and intensity of slave resistance in the Americas, particularly in Bahia and Cuba. Jihād was also responsible for the continuation of slavery in West Africa on a massive scale. My intention is to demonstrate how the West African jihāds helped shape the Atlantic world and therefore why this history should be incorporated into the analysis of the age of revolutions. Muslims were found in all parts of West Africa except in the coastal forests inland from modern Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire and the interior of the Bight of Biafra (plate 1). Their political control of the interior and their commercial domination of trade almost everywhere were factors that affected the Atlantic world.

      When the jihād movement was first identified as a “neglected theme” in West African history in the 1960s, the focus of African historical research was on Christian missions, European colonialism, and the nationalist thrust toward independence. It can be legitimately claimed that since then, the study of Islamic Africa has become a major theme of historical research and analysis, but unfortunately that analysis has often been ignored in the historiography of the Americas. The extensive research that has been undertaken in the past generation has radically transformed our understanding of African history, especially those areas where Islam was predominant. Moreover, with access to the huge libraries of Timbuktu and many other centers, the amount of available documentation has mushroomed, with the result that the study of Islamic West Africa will continue to be subjected to revision and further analysis. Islamic Africa, specifically including sub-Saharan Africa, has come into its own, even without the attention that radical Islam in the form of al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other manifestations of contemporary jihād has generated. Despite the recognition that the Islamic presence is substantial, the history of Islam in West Africa has not entered the mainstream of historical analysis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the silence of historians on West Africa during the age of revolutions, which is seen as focused on Europe and the Atlantic world to the exclusion of Africa and Asia.

      There is a long tradition of jihād in the history of the Islamic world, beginning with the initial jihād led by the Prophet Muhammad. Subsequent jihāds of later eras referred back to the founding of Islam and favored strategies and ways of legitimization with reference to the original jihād. The power of this tradition was realized in West Africa, beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century and becoming manifest in the eighteenth century with the establishment of Fuuta Bundu in the 1690s, Fuuta Jalon in 1727–28 and especially after 1776, and Fuuta Toro in 1775 and most especially in the nineteenth century with the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804, the reform of Borno after 1810, and the establishment of Hamdullahi in Masina in the middle Niger basin in 1817. It can be said that by 1835 West Africa had come under the dominance of jihād regimes that would then be expanded further with the launch of the regime established by al-Hājj ‘Umar (map 1.1). As an ideology, a military strategy of conquest, and an intellectual reformation, the jihād movement shaped West Africa and laid the foundation for the conversion of the majority of people in West Africa who were not already Muslims to Islam.

      Not only was the region of West Africa transformed, but the influence of the movement that materialized in West Africa eventually reached as far east as the Nilotic Sudan, where the Mahdist state was established after 1884. The Mahdist movement in turn reverberated back westward, challenging the continued legitimacy of the Sokoto Caliphate, Borno, and other Muslim states that had been founded or reformulated as a result of jihād. The incursions of the Mahdist leader, Rābiḥ ibn Faḍl Allāh, into the Lake Chad basin and his conquest of Borno in 1893 threatened the stability of the Sokoto Caliphate as Hayatu, a direct descendant of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, rallied to Mahdism and claimed legitimacy as the leader of the Mahdist cause there. Mahdist resistance to the colonial occupation in the Sokoto Caliphate in the early twentieth century proved particularly threatening until the Mahdists were crushed at Satiru, near Sokoto, in 1906.9 Hence the tradition of jihād that began with the Prophet Muhammad intensified first in West Africa, and its influence was spread through migration and propagation of the ṣūfī message of the Qādiriyya. In turn, the Qādiriyya presaged the Tījāniyya movement of al-Ḥājj ‘Umar and the Mahdiyya of the Nile and its subsequent offshoots to the west as far as Lake Chad and beyond.

      MAP 1.1. The Jihād States in the Atlantic World, 1850.

      Source: Henry B. Lovejoy, African Diaspora Maps.

      Many Muslim jurists have characterized jihād as an obligation of all believers. As ʿUthmān dan Fodio established in his Bayān wujūb al hijra ʿalā ’l-ʿibād (The exposition of obligation of emigration upon the servants of God), based on references to the interpretations of earlier Muslim scholars, jihād was defined as an effort to confront impure acts or objects of disapprobation through the use of the heart, the tongue, the hands, and military action. John Ralph Willis has characterized these four manifestations of jihād as follows:

      The jihād of the heart was directed against the flesh, called by the Sufis the “carnal soul.” It was to be accomplished by fighting temptation through purification of the soul. The jihād of the tongue and hands was undertaken in fulfilment of the Qurʾānic injunction to command the good and forbid the bad. And the jihād of the sword was concerned exclusively with combating unbelievers and enemies of the faith by open warfare.10

      The reflections of ʿUthmān dan Fodio in his commitment to jihād were based on these distinctions. He was preoccupied with the personal purification of the soul and with prescriptions that upheld good behavior and condemned what was considered to be immoral. His call for jihād fi sabīl Allāh (jihād in the path of Allah) through military confrontation and conquest was a last resort, not the sole aim of his dedication to Islam. Moreover, his commitment was based initially on withdrawal and the avoidance of confrontation, which in the classic interpretation of Islam was the hijra, in imitation of the Prophet’s withdrawal from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. As Willis has explained, “Turning one’s mind from evil and things temporal was hijra of the heart. Withdrawal of verbal or physical support for actions forbidden by Qurʾān, Sunna, or Ijma’ realized hijra of the tongue and hands.” The Sunna refers to the social and legal customs and practices of the Muslim community, while Ijma’ is the consensus of the Muslim community, especially jurists, on religious issues. Finally, jihād of the sword only followed after Muslims removed themselves from the world of unbelievers and those who would harm Islam, explicitly because of the threat against their survival as a community. As is clear, the doctrines of jihād were revivalist, calling for a return to the customs and actions of the Prophet and rejecting reforms and changes that deviated from the original traditions of Islam.

      An understanding of the

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