Usman dan Fodio

Works

• c. 1793Revival of the Sunna and Destruction of Innovation

  A handbook written before the jihad on the correct practice of ritual and everyday life according to the Sunna and on the innovations that are to be rejected.

• 1806Explanation of the Obligation of Emigration upon the Servants of God

  A legal and political treatise after the break with Gobir: when rulers oppress believers, emigration and jihad become a duty; it also sets out the duties of a just ruler, judges and officials.

Position

Usman dan Fodio understood his work as the renewal (tajdid) of Islam. In “Revival of the Sunna” he described the correct practice of religion and rejected customs that mixed Islam with older religious practices. In his political writings, such as “Explanation of the Obligation of Emigration” (1806) and “Kitab al-farq”, he distinguished just Islamic government from the rule of the Hausa kings, which he accused of illegal taxes, bribery and oppression, and he set out the duties of rulers, judges and officials. When rulers oppress believers, emigration and jihad become a duty. These arguments were contested at the time: the scholar al-Kanimi of Bornu objected in letters that the jihad was being waged against Muslims. A Qadiri Sufi, dan Fodio reported visions in which Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani confirmed his mission. In “Light of the Hearts” (Nur al-albab) he criticised scholars who taught others while leaving their wives and daughters in ignorance, and insisted that women had a duty to learn; his daughter Nana Asma’u continued this commitment. The jihad was also a war of conquest, and the caliphate he founded became one of the largest slave societies of the nineteenth-century world (P. Lovejoy and J. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery, 1993); how far the reformers’ legal argument that free Muslims must not be enslaved was applied in practice is studied by historians. His legacy has been claimed by very different movements in modern Nigeria, a fact historians handle with care.

Life & context

Usman dan Fodio (Uthman ibn Fudi) was born on 15 December 1754 in Maratta in the Hausa kingdom of Gobir, in what is now northern Nigeria, into a Fulani family of scholars. He studied the Qur’an, law and theology with relatives and with Jibril ibn Umar of Agadez, a scholar who called for radical reform. From about 1774 he travelled as a preacher through Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara and gathered a large community of followers; he also taught women, which some scholars criticised. For a time he was a teacher at the court of Gobir and obtained concessions for the Muslim community, but relations with later rulers broke down. In 1804 he and his followers emigrated (hijra) to Gudu, elected him commander of the faithful and began a jihad that by 1808 had overthrown Gobir and other Hausa kingdoms. He left the administration largely to his son Muhammad Bello and his brother Abdullahi and returned to scholarship. The state he founded, the Sokoto Caliphate, became the largest state in nineteenth-century West Africa. He died in Sokoto on 20 April 1817.

Further main works

• Light of the Hearts (Nūr al-albāb)
• Explanation of the Obligation of Emigration (Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā al-ʿibād, 1806)
• The Book of the Difference (Kitāb al-farq, on just and unjust government)
• Poems in Fulfulde and Arabic