The Slave Trade and Islamic Revolution

Before al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ was born in the Fulbe village of Halwar on the bank of the Senegal, before his name would penetrate the court halls of Sokoto and the Sufi brotherhoods of Fez, the western bend of Africa between the Atlantic coast and the Niger was already caught up in a double contest whose outcome would determine the spiritual and political shape of the region for the next century. One side of this contest was the transatlantic slave trade, which in its geographical and human effects reduced the entire western flank of the continent to a state of permanent devastation. The other side was a succession of Islamic reform movements, carried by Fulbe scholars and by Sufi brotherhoods, each of which in its own territory sought to give a political answer to the spiritual and political chaos that the slave trade had caused. Whoever wishes to understand the life of Umar Tall ﵀ must begin with this double contest, and indeed in a century in which he had not yet been born but whose effects would colour the whole course of his life.

The transatlantic slave trade and its effects

In the second half of the seventeenth century and throughout the entire eighteenth century, the western flank of Africa, from the mouth of the Senegal in the north to the Bight of Biafra in the south, lay in the grip of a trading structure whose scale and destructive impact had until then known no equal in world history. Ships of the English Royal African Company, of the Compagnie du Sénégal, of the Dutch East India Company and of a great number of Portuguese and Danish trading companies lay at anchor along the West African coast, and over the course of two centuries they carried away, according to the most cautious estimates, at least ten million Africans to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean, North America and Brazil. A number that must be multiplied by the deaths in transit and by the various forms of internal disruption in order to bring the true human cost into view.

For the Senegal basin, for the interior of Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon, for the bend of the Niger and for the Sahelian kingdoms of the Bambara and Songhai, this meant that the slave trade was not merely an external plunder carried out along the coast, but that in the interior itself it produced a chain of violent politics in which local rulers waged war in order to supply slaves to the European traders on the coast, in which capture and abduction became a normal economic activity, and in which the population structure of entire regions was undermined at its foundations. The Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, which emerged in their full form on the upper Niger over the course of the eighteenth century, derived a considerable part of their economic base from slave raids on neighbouring populations, and they sold their captives through intermediaries to the European coastal stations. For the scholars of the Fouta who observed this development at close quarters, Bambara policy was not merely a political enmity but a spiritual scandal, for in its execution it often also involved the capture of Muslims by non-Muslims, a fact that according to the Shariʿa justified an immediately necessary jihad.

The internal disruption

The internal disruption caused by this trading structure was not limited to the areas directly exposed to the raids. It extended across a network of caravan routes, marketplaces and political alliances that reached deep into the Sahelian interior, and it forced the Fulbe herders and the Muslim farmers of Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon to build fortified villages, to organize self-defence in the harvest months in which the raids usually concentrated, and to confront a spiritual question that became the central subject of reflection in the scholarly circles of the region. Could a Muslim be sold as a slave to a non-Muslim, and if so, on what grounds. What was the duty of the Muslim states towards their brothers who had fallen into foreign hands. And, more fundamentally, what was the Muslim community’s own responsibility for the existence of a political order that permitted this tragedy to be carried out.

It was around these questions that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a series of Islamic reform movements arose in West Africa, each of which in its own geographical space undertook an attempt to protect the population against the external and internal threat of the slave trade through the establishment of a state guided by the Shariʿa. These movements, although they differed from one another in form and although they did not always stand in direct contact with one another, together constituted a spiritual movement that in modern historiography has sometimes been designated the West African Islamic revolution, and which in its final phase, under al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, would receive its most ambitious form.

The four forerunners

Four movements are singled out by name in the historiography of this phase, and each of them added to the legacy on which Umar Tall ﵀ would build in his own work an element that would recognizably return in his later strategy.

Nasir al-Din ﵀ and the War of the Marabouts

The first of these movements was the war of the marabouts in the Senegal basin in the years 1673 to 1677, carried by the Berber scholar Nasir al-Din ﵀, a Zawaya shaykh from the southern Mauritanian desert who, through a combination of spiritual authority and military action, turned against the black kingdoms of the lower Senegal region. Nasir al-Din ﵀ declared that it was the duty of the Muslims to bring their pagan neighbours to Islam or, if they remained unavailable to it, to force them into a subjugated status in which the slave trade for the benefit of Christian merchants would no longer be possible. His movement, although it achieved considerable success in its first years and temporarily managed to seize power in Fouta Toro and in Waalo, was finally defeated in 1677 by a coalition of local rulers and French auxiliary troops, and Nasir al-Din ﵀ himself met a martyr’s death in the battle at Tin Yefdad in the south of Mauritania.

The significance of his movement, however, lay not in its immediate military outcome, for that was temporary and largely undone, but in the legacy it left among the religious scholars of Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon. For the first time, a serious attempt had been undertaken in this region to curb the slave trade through Islamic state formation, and the memory of this attempt would still be present in living form in the scholarly circles of Fouta Toro more than a century later, at the moment of Umar Tall’s ﵀ birth in 1794.

The Tooroodo aristocracy

A distinction that was of central importance in the Fouta Toro society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that would repeatedly surface in the personal life of Umar Tall ﵀, was the distinction between the Tooroodo clans and the other population groups of the Senegal valley. The Tooroodo, in Fulfulde a plural form of toorodo, was the designation for the scholarly aristocracy of Fouta Toro: families who derived their social position from their long spiritual and scholarly traditions, who had produced generations of Quran teachers, fiqh judges and Arabic linguists, and who had risen as the governing elite in the organization of the Imamate of 1776. Alongside the Tooroodo, Fouta Toro also contained the Sebbe (warrior class), the Subalbe (fishing class), the Wammbaabe (griot historiographers) and the Maccube (dependent class), each with its own traditions and its own place in the social order.

For a child from a Tooroodo family this meant that from his early youth he grew up not merely in a literate environment, but in an environment in which literacy formed the fundamental attribute of his social identity. A Tooroodo son was initiated into the Quran school of his village from his fifth or sixth year, he learned to read and write Arabic before he truly mastered Pulaar, his own language, and in his adolescent years he received a training in the fiqh of the Maliki school of law that was generally followed in Fouta Toro. It was this education that the young Umar Tall ﵀, born into a prominent Tooroodo family from Halwar, received in his first years of life, and that made him, in his later studies in Sokoto and in his affiliation with the Tijaniyya in Aïn Madhi, already a fully formed scholar at an age at which other travellers were still taking their first steps.

Karamoko Alfa ﵀ and the founding of Fouta Djallon

In the mountainous interior of present-day Guinea, south of the source of the Senegal, a second movement developed in the first decades of the eighteenth century under the leadership of the Fulbe scholar Ibrahim Musa, better known by his honorific title Karamoko Alfa ﵀, which in Fulfulde denotes the eminent scholar. In the years between 1715 and 1725, Karamoko Alfa ﵀ assembled a coalition of Fulbe clans that took the exclusion of the Fulbe herding population from the pagan Soussou and Jallonke forms of government as the basis for a reform movement on an Islamic foundation, and from 1725 onward he undertook a series of military campaigns that found their provisional culmination in 1727 or 1728 with the proclamation of the Imamate of Fouta Djallon.

The Imamate of Fouta Djallon was the first durable Islamic state formation in West Africa since the Songhai-Sahara period, and its administrative form was built on a combination of Fulbe clan structures and the Shariʿa as the general legal framework. Under the successor of Karamoko Alfa ﵀, his cousin Ibrahim Sori ﵀ Mawdo (the Great), who took over the leadership in 1751 and who during his long reign until 1791 brought the Imamate to its full territorial extent, a form of state took shape in which the population, partly through voluntary affiliation and partly through military subjugation, was organized into a network of diiwal (provinces) under ʿulamāʾ governance. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, Fouta Djallon became a spiritual centre for the interior of West Africa, and its scholars received students from Fouta Toro, Fouta Bundu, and from the far-flung Fulbe communities that in these centuries were spread across the entire Sahelian belt.

Sulayman Bal ﵀, Abdul Qadir ﵀ and the Imamate of Fouta Toro

In Fouta Toro itself, the Senegal valley basin where Umar Tall ﵀ would be born in 1794, a third reform movement took place in 1776 under the leadership of the Tooroodo scholar Sulayman Bal ﵀, who in that same year drove out the Denyanke dynasty that had governed the area for the preceding two centuries in a combination of loose Islamic acknowledgement and effective freedom in the slave trade. Sulayman Bal ﵀ died in 1776 or 1777, before the new state had acquired its full administrative form, and his successor Abdul Qadir Kane ﵀ completed the establishment of the Imamate of Fouta Toro with the proclamation of a state led by an elected almaami, in which the Shariʿa was laid down as constitution and in which the slave trade against Muslims was expressly forbidden.

The Imamate of Fouta Toro, because of its geographical position in the immediate vicinity of the French trading posts at the mouth of the Senegal, stood in unbroken tension with the Compagnie du Sénégal and with its successors, and in the 1780s and 1790s it fought a number of limited wars in which the Tooroodo troops repeatedly intercepted the French convoys on the river and attempted by force of arms to prevent the transport of slaves from the interior to Saint-Louis. It was into this state, with its traditions of elected almaami governance and with its spiritual authority concentrated in the Tooroodo clan, that Umar Tall ﵀ came into the world in 1794, and it was this state that formed the first political reality in which he grew up during his childhood years and that would shape his later political thought in a fundamental way.

The diiwal structure of Fouta Djallon

The administrative apparatus that was set up in Fouta Djallon under Karamoko Alfa ﵀ and his successors deserves closer consideration, because in its structure it was the most elaborate example of a state led by ʿulamāʾ in West Africa before the time of Umar Tall ﵀, and because in the years in which Umar Tall ﵀ was developing his own political thought, it formed the principal model of reference. The land was divided into nine diiwal or provinces, each with its own Almami as provincial governor who combined both worldly and spiritual leadership, and the central state was led by an Almami-Mawdo (Great Almami) who, in a principled rotating system, was chosen alternately from two rival clans, the Soriya and the Alfaya. Below the provincial Almamis stood a corps of ʿulamāʾ judges, mosque imams and Quran teachers, and below them in turn an extensive network of village mosques that offered a spiritual centre in every Fulbe village.

For Umar Tall ﵀ in his adolescent years, when he heard about Fouta Djallon from his father and from the older scholars of his village Halwar, this structure formed a living example of what a West African state guided by the Shariʿa could become in practice, and it will not have escaped him that the outcome of Fouta Djallon, although in its durability it had already surpassed the older Fouta Toro, had, in its internal political tensions between the Soriya and the Alfaya, taken on a form that had not preserved undiminished the spiritual earnestness of the original jihad’s design. This observation, in its later elaboration, would lead to some of the administrative choices that Umar Tall ﵀ would make in his own imamate project, and in particular to his refusal to build a comparable rotation structure into his own form of state, which he believed would weaken the spiritual core of a jihad state across the generations.

Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and the Sokoto Caliphate

The fourth and, in its scale, largest of these reform movements took place in the eastern part of the Sahelian belt, in the Hausa lands between present-day northern Nigeria and southern Niger, under the leadership of the Fulbe scholar Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀, who in 1804 proclaimed a formal jihad against the Hausa city-states and who in the following five years established the Sokoto Caliphate as the largest Islamic state of nineteenth-century West Africa. Shaykh Usman ﵀, who was a scholar of exceptional eloquence and who had elaborated his theological and juridical thought in a long series of Arabic works, provided in his writings the ideological framework that would serve as the general point of orientation in the West African Islamic revolution of the nineteenth century.

Under his son and successor Muhammad Bello ﵀, who took over the Caliphate in 1817, Sokoto reached its greatest territorial extent, and in the course of the 1820s it became a spiritual and political point of reference for the entire Sahelian belt. When Umar Tall ﵀ passed through Sokoto in 1828 on his way to Mecca and spent several years there in the immediate circle of Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, he was thus present not in a remote periphery but in the very heart of the West African Islamic civilization of his time, and the influence he underwent in these years would continue to play a decisive role in his later political thought.

The spiritual coherence of the four movements

When we place these four reform movements side by side, a pattern emerges that has become ever clearer in the West African historiography of the past fifty years and that remains central in its implications for the life’s work of Umar Tall ﵀. The four movements were not four independent eruptions in four sealed-off regions; rather, together they formed a connected spiritual movement in which the students of one movement became the teachers of the next, in which the written works of one jihad leader became the study material in the madrasas of the following generation, and in which a common literary and juridical language in Arabic created, across the entire Sahelian belt, a spiritual space in which the local political outcomes were taken up into a shared spiritual framework. A student who studied in Fouta Toro in the 1810s or 1820s read the same works of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ as his contemporary in Sokoto, and he regarded the jihad attempts of the preceding generations in Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro as part of a common history to which he himself would have to contribute in his own time.

For Umar Tall ﵀, who consciously absorbed this common history in his own formation from his sixteenth or seventeenth year onward, it formed not merely a historical background but a spiritual commission that he was to realize in his own work. The four forerunners had each completed, in their own geographical space, a portion of West African Islamic state formation, and it was, in his reading, the duty of his own generation to close the remaining gaps, to bring the pagan Bambara states of the upper Niger into the project of the Shariʿa, and to bring the spiritual unity of the West African Muslim world to completion in a new form. It was this commission, shared in its spiritual framework yet entrusted in its personal form to him alone, that would form the inner engine of his later imamate projects.

The Tijaniyya Brotherhood

Alongside these four political reform movements, a spiritual development took place in the same period, from the second half of the eighteenth century onward, which in its later effects would be of equally decisive importance for Umar Tall ﵀. In 1782 or 1783, the Algerian scholar Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Tijani ﵀, born in 1737 in Aïn Madhi in the south-western part of present-day Algeria, received, in a spiritual visionary experience that he would later describe in his works, a direct transmission from the Prophet ﷺ of a new wird and of a new tarīqa that in the following decades would be spread under the name Tijaniyya throughout North Africa and West Africa.

Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ established his zawiya first in Fez in Morocco, and later, after his death in 1815, the tarīqa was spread under his sons and under his closest khalifas in an extensive network across North Africa, the Sahelian belt and the Maghreb. The Tijaniyya distinguished itself from the older Qadiriyya and Naqshbandiyya in a number of respects that would prove of great importance for the political life of nineteenth-century West Africa. First, it taught that affiliation with the Tijaniyya conferred a definitive spiritual status, in the sense that the murīd could receive his salvation directly through Ahmad al-Tijani’s ﵀ wasilah to the Prophet ﷺ without needing further transmissions. Second, it imposed strict demands on its disciples, including the prohibition on following a second tarīqa alongside the Tijaniyya, a demand that throughout its history made the Tijaniyya a tightly knit and internally unified organization. Third, it spread with remarkable speed in regions where the Qadiri network was already established, and in these regions it produced a spiritual rivalry that in its effects sometimes also took on political forms.

When Umar Tall ﵀, on his way to Mecca in 1828, visited the zawiya of the Tijaniyya khalifa Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ in Aïn Madhi, and during that visit joined the tarīqa and was initiated into its community, he received in this initiation not merely a personal spiritual status but also the duty to build the Tijaniyya in West Africa into a firmly established form. The later fulfilment of this duty, in the 1850s and thereafter, would determine the spiritual map of West Africa for the following century and a half, and in the Hamdullahi fitna of 1862 it would also issue in a tragic political outcome to which a later article will have to devote its attention.

The economic form of the West African jihad states

Alongside their spiritual and political form, the West African jihad states of the eighteenth century developed a specific economic form that was of great importance in its effects on the region, and that would recognizably resonate in the later project of Umar Tall ﵀. They were agricultural states that founded their base on the production of millet, sorghum, rice and cotton, with Fulbe cattle herding as a parallel economic sector, and with the markets of Timbo, Labe and Pita in Fouta Djallon and the markets of Saldé, Bababé and Matam in Fouta Toro as the nodes of an internal trading network that extended as far as Walata and Timbuktu. For the financing of their ʿulamāʾ administration and of their military campaigns they relied on the collection of zakat according to the rules of Maliki fiqh, on what in Arabic is called the khums or fifth, that is, the share of war booty that supplied the state treasury in times of jihad, and on various local types of taxation whose legal grounds had been worked out in the fiqh handbooks of the jihad leaders.

The slave trade was formally restricted in these states, in the sense that a Muslim could not be sold as a slave and that the slave market was brought under ʿulamāʾ control, but it was not completely abolished, for Maliki fiqh permitted the enslavement of non-Muslim prisoners of war, and in practice the Fouta states made use of slave labour in their agricultural sector and in their households on a scale that modern historians characterize as considerable. For the Atlantic slave trade this was a mixed result. On the one hand, they withdrew from the European coastal stations a considerable part of the population that would otherwise have been sold into the transatlantic trade. On the other hand, they maintained internal slavery in a manner with which modern moral judgement sits uneasily, and in their own times of military expansion they themselves sometimes carried out slave raids on neighbouring non-Muslim populations. It is a mixed picture that gives the jihad states of nineteenth-century West Africa their specific historical character, and that has not gone unnoticed in the assessment of the work of Umar Tall ﵀ by both his contemporary and his modern historians.

The role of the scholar-trader in the region

A figure who occupied a place of his own in this West African spiritual space, and who also repeatedly appeared in the surroundings of the young Umar Tall ﵀, was the Sahelian scholar-trader, a type designated in modern historiography as the djoula or the dyabra, a combination of merchant and scholar who spread the Islamic faith through the ordinary connections of trade within the extensive trading networks of the region, and who in the market towns from Senegambia to Kano often also acted as local fiqh judge. These scholar-traders travelled between Saint-Louis, Bakel, Kayes, Bamako, Timbuktu, Kano and further eastward as far as Sudan, and with their caravans they brought not only goods but also news of the spiritual developments in the other parts of the Sahelian belt, the manuscripts of the jihad leaders that circulated in handwritten copies, and the accounts of the Sufi brotherhoods that governed the region in its spiritual organization.

For the young Umar Tall ﵀, who from his early years in his village of Halwar was in contact with these travelling scholar-traders, who on their way to Bakel or Saint-Louis through the Senegal valley often made a stop in Halwar, this class formed a window onto the world that opened a broader horizon in his budding spiritual thought than the ordinary Tooroodo upbringing of Fouta Toro alone could have offered him. From them he heard about Sokoto and about the condition of the caliphate under Muhammad Bello ﵀, he heard about Aïn Madhi and about the true spiritual stature of Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ in his final years, and he heard about the vastness of the trans-Saharan caravan routes that connected the West African Muslim world with Morocco, Egypt and the Hejaz. It was, in its own way, his first education in a world horizon that in the years to follow would take on concrete form in his own Great Journey to Mecca.

The world at the moment of his birth

When Umar ibn Saidu Tall was born in 1794, or possibly in 1796 or 1797 according to the minority datings in some sources, in the Tooroodo village of Halwar on the bank of the Senegal river, in the heartland of the Imamate of Fouta Toro, his world was steeped in the double contest sketched above between the transatlantic slave trade and the Islamic reform movements. On the Atlantic coast of Senegal and Gambia the French and English trading stations stood full of waiting slaves who had been driven from the interior to the coast, and between 1790 and 1810 their ships were still sending several tens of thousands of Africans each year to the Caribbean plantations. In Fouta Djallon the Imamate reigned under the successors of Ibrahim Sori ﵀, in Fouta Toro the Imamate under the successors of Abdul Qadir ﵀, in the interior of the Niger the caliphate under Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ in its early phase, and in Aïn Madhi, at the end of his life, Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ was still training his disciples in the spiritual discipline that within a few decades would receive its greatest expansion in West Africa.

It was a world in the grip of a double movement whose outcome still lay open, and the child born in Halwar would, in the course of his life, seek to bring this double movement to a new synthesis in his own work. He would continue the legacy of the four forerunners in his own jihad, he would build the Tijaniyya in West Africa into its greatest organizational form, he would wage the struggle against the Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta on a scale that the three preceding reform movements had never known, and at the end of his life, in his confrontation with French colonization under Faidherbe and in his tragic conflict with Hamdullahi, he would undergo trials whose severity and outcome found their only parallel in the occupation of Dagestan under Imam Shamil ﵀.

To this long work, and to his birth in the quiet village of Halwar where his parents as yet suspected nothing of it, the next article devotes its attention. In this article we have seen how the world into which he was born had already been shaped in its spiritual and political contours by the slave trade and by the Islamic revolution that sought an answer to it, and how this double contest provided the channel in which his own work would come into being in its full form.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 16–66.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 12–48.
• John Hunwick, Arabic Literature of Africa, Vol. 4: The Writings of Western Sudanic Africa, Brill (2003), pp. 195–246.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans (1967), pp. 1–60.
• Lamin Sanneh, The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism, Westview (1997), pp. 78–124.
• Roman Loimeier, Muslim Societies in Africa: A Historical Anthropology, Indiana University Press (2013), pp. 142–188.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 90–162.
• Yves Person, Samori: une révolution dyula, tome I, IFAN-Dakar (1968), pp. 78–124 [for the broader context of the West African jihad movement].
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle: la Tijaniyya de Saïku Umar Futiyu contre les pouvoirs traditionnels et la puissance coloniale, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 36–88.