His Birth and Origins

In the preceding article we followed the spiritual and political development of West Africa in the century that preceded the birth of al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, and we saw how the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the four Islamic reform movements of Nasir al-Din ﵀, Karamoko Alfa ﵀, Abdul Qadir Kane ﵀ and Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had together formed the spiritual framework in which a child born into a Tooroodo family of Fouta Toro would grow up. This article turns to the birth of that child himself, in the Tooroodo village of Halwar on the northern bank of the Senegal River, in the year 1794 or, according to a few minority reckonings, in 1796 or 1797. It considers the family, the naming, the early childhood, the first teachers, and the formation that would make him, in his youth, a scholar of regional renown even before he left his village for his long journey to Mecca.

Halwar on the Senegal River

Halwar, in the Tooroodo pronunciation Aloar or Aaloare, is a village in the northeast of present-day Senegal, in the Podor region, a short distance from the northern bank of the Senegal River and only a few meters above the level of the stream. It lies in a district where the river in its upper course forms a fertile valley that is fed in the rainy season by flooding and sustained in the dry season by irrigation from the river itself, and in 1794 it was a village of modest size with a few hundred inhabitants, mostly Tooroodo and Fulbe, who drew their livelihood from the mixed economy of rice and millet cultivation, from fishing in the river, from the herding of the zebu cattle typical of the Fulbe, and from the extensive craftwork that a river village of that time required.

Geographically, Halwar lay in the heart of Fouta Toro, the basin of the middle Senegal that stretched from the eastern border with Bambouk in the east to close by the mouth of the river in the west, and politically it lay within the sphere of influence of the Imamate of Fouta Toro, which had been founded in 1776 by Sulayman Bal ﵀ and which in 1794 was ruled under the Almamis of the Tooroodo aristocracy. For a child born in Halwar, the outside world was both near and far. Near, because the Senegal River was the great artery of connection that linked the village, a day’s journey downstream to the market of Saldé, two days to Matam, and a week to the French trading stations of Bakel and Saint-Louis. Far, because the difficult slowness of movement in a tropical river delta, with its seasons of flooding and drought, its threats of banditry, and its logistical constraints, turned the distances measured in real travel time into greater distances than they were on a geographical straight line.

The village and its mosque

At the center of Halwar stood a mosque in the simple Tooroodo style, with thick clay walls that were restored in each rainy season, with a flat reed roof on a framework of palm trunks, and with a simple mihrab in the eastern wall that indicated the direction of Mecca. Attached to the mosque was the Qur’an school, called duudal in Pulaar, where the boys of the village learned the Qur’an by heart from their fifth or sixth year in the classic West African method of study, in which a wooden board, called alluwal in Pulaar, was inscribed with the sura of the day, from which the pupil learned the text by heart through repetition and correction, and which at the end of the learning process was washed off with water so that it could be inscribed anew with the sura of the following day.

It was in this duudal, under the guidance of the local imam of Halwar and under the additional supervision of his own father Saidu, that the young Umar received his first formation. He was, according to what tradition records and according to what his later scholarship in Arabic and Pulaar suggests, an exceptionally eager learner from his earliest years, and he completed the hifz (memorization) of the Qur’an at an age when other boys were still somewhere in the middle of their memorization work. The celebration of his completion, which in the Tooroodo tradition was a festive event shared by the whole community of the village, took place around his eighth or ninth year, and the sources record that his father had a sheep slaughtered on this occasion and that the whole village community took part in a communal meal in thanksgiving for the completion.

The Tooroodo conventions of village life

For anyone who wishes to picture the daily life of Halwar in 1794, it is important to keep in mind that a Tooroodo village distinguished itself in its internal organization from neighboring villages of other social ranks. The Tooroodo villages often lay somewhat elevated above the riverbank, in an attempt to protect themselves against the seasonal flooding, and in their street plan they had a recognizable shape in which the mosque and the duudal stood at the center, surrounded by the dwellings of the scholarly families, with the dwellings of the Subalbe fishermen and the Maccube dependents on the outer edge of the village. The internal hierarchy of the village was not formalized in a written form of governance, yet it was visible in daily dealings in the seating in the mosque, in the order in which the men met one another at gatherings, and in the place that each family took in the communal labors.

The Tooroodo women, in their own sphere, maintained their own hierarchy and their own communal labors. The grinding of the grain, the preparation of the meals, the care of the children, the weaving of textiles, and the tending of the communal herb gardens were tasks carried out in a fixed division, and the older women enjoyed in their own circle an authority that was sometimes, in its effect, more decisive than that of their husbands in the public space. For the young Umar, this shape meant that from his earliest years he knew not only the male sphere of the mosque and the duudal, but also the female sphere of his mother and her co-wives with its own forms of piety, of work, and of the exercise of authority, and in his youth he developed a natural sensitivity to both spheres that would remain recognizable in his later life.

The Tall family

The Tall family to which the young Umar belonged was a Tooroodo clan of considerable spiritual reputation in Fouta Toro. Its members had, over the three or four preceding generations, produced imams, qadis, and Qur’an teachers, and it was known in the Tooroodo network of Fouta Toro as a family whose members studied Maliki fiqh with considerable precision and whose spiritual standing was honored as far as the neighboring villages to the south and west of Halwar. The family had no claims to the Almami throne of Fouta Toro, for that was in 1794 in the hands of the rival Tooroodo clans from the western part of the basin, but it maintained good relations with the Almami clan and it was a valued member of the spiritual aristocracy within the scholarly circle of Fouta Toro.

The head of the family in 1794, and the father of the young Umar, was Saidu Tall, a scholar-imam who administered the local mosque in Halwar and who had himself in his younger years studied in the madrasas of Pir Saniokhor in the western Fouta Toro. He was known as an eloquent preacher, as a precise fiqh judge, and as a gentle father who in his household combined the strict Tooroodo discipline with a natural warmth toward his wife and his children. Saidu Tall married, according to the Tooroodo custom of his time, several wives, and from his various marriages he had in all ten or eleven children, boys and girls, of whom Umar, according to most sources, was the seventh or eighth in order of birth.

The lineage of the Tall family

The Tall clan traced its lineage, according to the Tooroodo tradition of the spiritual aristocracy of Fouta Toro, to a common ancestor who in the sixteenth or seventeenth century had migrated from the Maliki teaching center of Pir Saniokhor, or possibly from farther east, to the basin of the middle Senegal, and who had established his own school in one of the Tooroodo villages of the region. Whether this ancestor was an actual historical figure or a later genealogical construction can no longer be determined with certainty today, but it is, in the West African Tooroodo context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no unusual thing to develop such genealogies in order to anchor the Tooroodo status of a family in a long tradition. The Tall family belonged in any case to a recognizable subgroup of the Tooroodo aristocracy that found its internal cohesion in its specific clan name and that held its members together across the generations in a connected network of marriages and scholarly exchanges.

For the young Umar this meant that in his village and in his wider family network he knew not only a direct father and mother, but an extensive circle of blood relatives in the Tooroodo clans that were spread across all of Fouta Toro. In his youth he met cousins in villages from Saldé to Matam, he had uncles and aunts in the scholarly families of Pir Saniokhor and of Bababé, and from his earliest years he developed a network awareness that would serve him well in his later life when, in his imamate work, he had to bind the Tooroodo scholars of Fouta Toro together into a common enterprise.

The mother Sokhna Adama

The mother of the young Umar was named Sokhna Adama Aysa Hammadi, in her shortened form Adama, and she was a Tooroodo woman from a village neighboring Halwar. She was, according to tradition, a woman of deep piety, of some learning (she had learned to read Arabic in her youth and could recite Qur’an passages by heart), and of a remarkable personal authority in her household and in the wider family. With her husband Saidu Tall she held a position of some inner precedence over her co-wives, despite not being the first wife in chronological order, and she exercised over the upbringing of her sons, and in particular over that of the young Umar, a spiritual influence that is repeatedly recalled in his later testimonies and in the tradition of his closest associates.

For the young Umar this meant that he grew up not only in a lettered Tooroodo environment, but in a household in which the spiritual seriousness of his father was complemented by the inner piety of his mother, and in which faith was presented as the general framework of life for both the outward work of the men and the quiet work of the women. It was this spiritual layering in his household that would remain recognizable in his later life, for in his own later imamate he treated his wives and his daughters with the same inner respect that he had experienced in his parental home, and he gave his daughters the same spiritual education as his sons, a choice that in nineteenth-century West Africa, though not unheard of, was certainly uncommon.

The naming and the first years

The young Umar was, according to the Tooroodo custom, given his name on the seventh day after his birth in an aqiqah ceremony in which the child was presented to the community, a sheep was slaughtered for him, his hair was shaved, and the adhan was whispered into both his ears. The name Umar was chosen by his father in honor of the second Rashidun caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, and it was, in the Tooroodo naming tradition, a name with a program: the child who bore it was to develop the qualities of the second caliph in a form adapted to his own time. The Tooroodo convention prescribed that the name was not called out to the child in his first years in its full Arabic form but in its shortened Pulaar form Umaru or Umar, and it was under this name that the boy was known in his younger years in his village.

In the first four or five years of his life he grew up in the normal daily rhythm of a Tooroodo boy in a Fouta Toro village of his time. He played with his brothers and with the other children of Halwar in the dusty little streets of the village and on the bank of the river, from his fourth or fifth year he helped his mother with small household tasks such as fetching water or watching over the small livestock, he ate the ordinary Tooroodo meals of millet porridge with milk in the morning and of rice with fish or meat in the evening, and he slept with his mother and his younger brothers and sisters in her part of the polygamous family dwelling. It was a normal Tooroodo childhood, and nothing in his early years pointed to the exceptional turn his life would take in the decades that followed.

The first signs of exceptional gifts

By his sixth or seventh year, according to what tradition records and according to what his father Saidu Tall confirmed in his later statements to his closest associates, signs of exceptional spiritual gifts began to manifest themselves in the boy. He was not only faster than his peers in memorizing the Qur’an suras that were given to him in the duudal, but he put to his father and to the imam of Halwar questions that in their depth were exceptional for his age. The content of these questions, insofar as it has been preserved in tradition, concerned, among other things, the relationship between the suras revealed in Mecca and those revealed in Medina, the meaning of certain fiqh distinctions he had noticed in the coursework, and the relationship between oral and written transmission in the science of hadith.

Saidu Tall, according to tradition, answered these questions with the care that their seriousness deserved, and he understood from these early years that his son Umar possessed a spiritual gift that could surpass the ordinary Tooroodo formation of his village. He therefore decided, in a choice that would prove to be of great importance for the further development of his son, to send the boy from his ninth or tenth year to a broader learning environment than Halwar alone could offer, and he sent him to the neighboring Tooroodo villages where specialized scholars were active in various branches of the Islamic sciences, with the intention that the boy might receive a varied education over the course of several years.

The experience of traveling between learning environments

A feature of Tooroodo scholarly work that distinguished it from many other systems of education was the custom that the pupil, from his ninth or tenth year, did not stay in one place for his education but studied in a succession of different villages under different teachers before growing, in his early adult years, into a formed scholar. This custom had for the young pupil three important consequences that would remain recognizable in the formation of his character. First, from his early years he learned to adapt to changing living conditions, for each new place of study had its own household customs, its own community life, and its own unspoken hierarchies in which the pupil had to find his place. Second, he learned to deal with different teachers of different styles, and in his comparative experience he developed a feeling for the variations within the common Tooroodo tradition that would give him a judgment of his own in his later scholarship. Third, he came to know the geography, trade routes, and political relations of different districts of Fouta Toro, and he developed a regional knowledge that would serve him well in his later imamate work.

For Umar Tall ﵀ in his youth, this custom meant that between his ninth and his fifteenth year he stayed in at least four or five different villages of Fouta Toro, that he studied under at least as many different teachers, and that in his early adult years he possessed a broader knowledge of the Tooroodo world than a pupil who had stayed in one place could ever have acquired. It was this experience that gave him, in his later journeys, from the hajj to Mecca to the years in Sokoto and the eventual jihad in Massina, the natural ability to enter quickly into a new environment and to preserve fully, in a foreign milieu, his spiritual discipline and his capacity for work.

The formation of a Tooroodo scholar

Between his ninth and his fifteenth year the young Umar traveled, in the company of an older blood relative who acted as his protector, between different learning environments in the Tooroodo villages of Fouta Toro. In Tuldjé, a village west of Halwar, he studied Arabic grammar with a scholar known as Sheikh Mukhtar, who was known in the region for his precise knowledge of the Ibn Malik tradition. In Bababé, a Tooroodo town in the central Fouta Toro, he studied Maliki fiqh in a madrasa that placed at the center of its curriculum the classic works of al-Risalah of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ and the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀. In Pir Saniokhor, in the far west of Fouta Toro, he studied for about a year tafsir and the science of hadith with a scholar who had himself studied in Morocco in his younger years and who used in his madrasa the works of Imam al-Suyuti ﵀ and of Imam al-Qurtubi ﵀ as the basis of his teaching.

In each of these learning environments the young Umar showed the same exceptional gifts that his father had already noticed in his early years, and in a remarkably short span of time he acquired the basic tools of Tooroodo scholarship in their full form. By his fifteenth year, according to tradition and as his later scholarship at the time of his hajj departure in 1828 suggests, he had mastered Arabic in reading and writing at the level of an advanced scholar, could apply the most common juridical distinctions in Maliki fiqh, and had worked through the basic texts of Sufi literature in a first approach, in particular the works of Imam al-Ghazali ﵀ and of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀.

The daily life of a Tooroodo student

The student life of a Tooroodo boy in the years 1808 to 1815 in a Fouta Toro village of some learning had a fixed daily schedule that had changed little in its form over the centuries. The pupil rose before the fajr and performed the morning prayer in the mosque of the village, he continued with a first session of Qur’an recitation and memorization in which the text of the previous day was reviewed, and he breakfasted around the second prayer with a simple Pulaar meal of millet porridge or of rice gruel with milk. The morning program was devoted to the fiqh lessons proper, in which the teacher read aloud a passage from a handbook, explained it piece by piece, and allowed the pupils to put questions that were discussed in a free discussion. The afternoon was devoted to personal study in which the pupil reviewed the texts of the morning, ordered his notes, and did the exercises the teacher had assigned him.

After the evening prayer there followed a communal meal, often in the house of the teacher or in a communal space of the madrasa, and after that a final session of Qur’an recitation or of dhikr according to the Qadiri wird in which the pupils, under the teacher’s guidance, invoked the names of Allah ﷻ in a communal rhythmic form. The young Umar followed this program with the discipline his father had instilled in him, and he used the hours in which his fellow pupils took their rest for further personal study in which he extended his reading to the works that lay beyond the prescribed coursework of his madrasa. It was, in its daily form, a life of strict regularity and of spiritual seriousness, and it was in this form that the foundation of his later international career was prepared.

The first attachment to a Sufi order

In his youth, around his fifteenth or sixteenth year, Umar attached himself for the first time to a Sufi order, and he chose here the Qadiriyya, the tarīqa that had, since the time of the first reform movements, been the most widespread form of organized Sufism in Fouta Toro and throughout the West African interior. His initiation took place under the guidance of a local Qadiri shaykh in neighboring Bababé, and he received in this initiation the ordinary Qadiri wird that he incorporated in the following years into his daily practices alongside his formal study of fiqh, tafsir, and hadith.

This first attachment to the Qadiriyya was, in the light of his later transfer to the Tijaniyya in Aïn Madhi in 1828, a provisional phase that was not contested by his father Saidu Tall and that was regarded in his own spiritual development as a natural continuation of his education. It was not yet a definitive spiritual form, and it would in his later life be replaced by the pronounced Tijaniyya attachment, but it was indeed a first step in the Sufi discipline that would color his later life as a whole. For most Tooroodo pupils of his time the Qadiriyya would have remained the definitive tarīqa, and the fact that Umar would later leave it for the Tijaniyya was in his life course not a matter of course but a deliberate choice to which he would devote many years of reflection.

The first marriage

Around his eighteenth or nineteenth year, that is around 1812 or 1813, the young Umar entered into marriage with his first wife, who is referred to in tradition by the name Penda and who came from a Tooroodo family in a village neighboring Halwar. The marriage was, according to the Tooroodo convention of his time, arranged by his father Saidu Tall with the father of Penda, and the bridal gift was set at a modest amount that confirmed the spiritual aristocratic status of both families without degenerating into an excessive financial burden. Penda was, according to tradition, a woman of gentle character and of some piety of her own, and in her form she suited well the spiritual seriousness of her husband.

From this first marriage several children were born in the years 1814 to 1822, among them a son who, according to the Tooroodo convention, received the name of Umar’s father Saidu and who in his later life would fight at his father’s side in the jihad. It was an ordinary start to a Tooroodo household, and nothing in the first years of the marriage pointed to the exceptional journey that Umar would undertake in the coming decade, or to the way in which this journey would immerse his household and his life course in an entirely new form.

Toward the Great Journey

By 1820 or 1822, at his twenty-sixth or twenty-eighth year, Umar Tall ﵀ had become a scholar of regional renown in Fouta Toro. In the preceding years he had given lessons in several Tooroodo villages in Arabic grammar, in Maliki fiqh, and in tasawwuf, he had been able to welcome the first of his children by his first wife, and he had grown in his village of Halwar into a respected figure of the spiritual aristocracy of Fouta Toro. But he felt, according to tradition and as his own later statements in his works confirm, an inner urge that wished to carry him beyond the borders of Fouta Toro, to the holy places where the Prophet ﷺ had lived and where the spiritual fountain of Islam itself was situated.

It was this urge that would lead him, in 1828 or possibly already in 1826, to decide to leave his village for the Great Journey to Mecca, a journey that in its long duration, in its far distance, and in its ultimate spiritual outcome would mean the true turning point in his life and that would bring him, in place of the Qadiriyya, to the Tijaniyya, in place of a village scholar, to a khalifa of the tarīqa, and in place of a village leader, to a figure of international spiritual and political significance. To this journey, and to its preparations, undertakings, and spiritual outcome, the following article devotes its attention.

In this article we have seen how, in the Tooroodo village of Halwar on the bank of the Senegal River in 1794, a child was born into a family of spiritual aristocracy, how in his youth he showed an exceptional spiritual gift that moved his father to have him taught beyond the borders of his own village, how in his youth he received a broad education in the classic Islamic sciences in the Tooroodo villages of Fouta Toro, and how in his fifteenth or sixteenth year he attached himself for the first time to a Sufi order, the Qadiriyya. The Tooroodo formation of his youth was, considered as a whole, the foundation upon which his later international career would be built, and without its thorough execution the Great Journey of 1828 would not have found the spiritual outcome that it found in its actual course.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 66–96.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 48–82.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 88–124.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa: The Futanke Colonies in Karta, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 24–48.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 56–96.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa, Longman (1984), pp. 226–256.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 162–208.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim ʿala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, Arabic original circa 1845; French translation Gallica BnF (1856) and critical edition by Madina Ly-Tall, Dakar (1985).