The Great Journey

In the previous article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ was born in 1794 in the Tooroodo village of Halwar on the bank of the Senegal River, how in his youth he received, within the spiritual aristocracy of Fouta Toro, an exceptional formation in Maliki fiqh and in Arabic letters, how in his younger years he attached himself to the Qadiriyya, and how by around 1820 he had grown into a scholar of regional renown. In this article we follow him on the long journey he undertook in 1828, or perhaps already in 1826, setting out from Halwar in an eastward-moving migration that over the course of several years would carry him through Bondou, through Fouta Djallon, through Sokoto, through the Sahelian kingdoms of Bornu and Wadai, through Egypt and finally across the Red Sea to Mecca, to perform the hajj that would mark the pivotal moment of his life in his spiritual and personal development.

The spiritual significance of the hajj in the Tooroodo tradition

For the Tooroodo scholar of the early nineteenth century, the hajj was not merely a ritual duty laid down in Maliki fiqh as an obligatory act for the physically and financially able Muslim, but a spiritual station of a particular stature that in the Senegambia region, since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had granted the pilgrim a social and religious standing of his own. A Tooroodo who had completed the hajj received in his village the honorific title al-Hajj before his name, and this title was no loose addition but a serious elevation in rank: in the local mosque he was given a higher seat, in scholarly discussions his opinion was weighed with greater authority, and in legal matters a higher transmission was ascribed to his pronouncements. The hajj was, in short, a spiritual change of status that in the West African Tooroodo context came together with the outward and the inward form of the pilgrim in one inseparable whole.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally this meant that his hajj journey was not merely a private act of piety but an undertaking with a pronounced social and spiritual character, one in which his return to West Africa would take place in a new position. He knew, before he departed, that he would return as al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, and that his earlier standing as a scholar from Halwar would be absorbed into a wider spiritual and social position in which he could exercise, throughout Fouta Toro and across all of West Africa, an authority different from what his previous Tooroodo status alone would have granted him.

Preparing for departure

In the years between 1822 and 1828 a gradual preparation for departure took shape in the personal life of Umar Tall ﵀, one that in its character was less a planned political undertaking than a spiritual necessity ripening within him until it could no longer be postponed. He had by now become a respected figure in the scholarly circles of Fouta Toro, he taught in the mosque of Halwar and in the neighbouring villages, he received students who came to him from other Tooroodo villages for further study, and in his household he kept an ordinary Tooroodo family life with his first wife Penda and their children together. Yet in his inner meditation there grew, according to the account of his closest associates, a restlessness that no local learning could still, one that turned toward direct spiritual contact with the source of the faith in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

He spoke of this intention repeatedly in his village and among his wider family, and in his years of preparation he undertook a number of shorter journeys through Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon in order to speak, in the mosques of Timbo, Labe and other spiritual centres, with hajj veterans about the proper preparations, the routes to follow, and the spiritual discipline they had found in their own travels able to sustain the pilgrim in his endurance. He assembled, in keeping with the Tooroodo convention of his time, a considerable travelling outfit that included not only his personal needs but also gifts for the scholars and rulers he would meet along the way, and in the trading town of Saint-Louis he exchanged part of his possessions for silver Maria Theresa thaler coins, which were accepted as currency throughout the entire Trans-Saharan commercial sphere.

The travelling company

He departed, as the tradition records, not alone but in the company of a group of six to eight young Tooroodo students who had served in his instruction and who over his years of preparation had bound themselves to his person, wishing to accompany him on his long journey and to learn further from his scholarship in his lessons along the way. Among them, the tradition records, was the young Alfa Umar Cherno Baila, a Tooroodo scholar from neighbouring Bababé who in the following decades would become one of his closest associates during the jihad years. The company was small enough to remain mobile on the difficult caravan routes, and large enough to face the dangers of banditry and of local political complications with some measure of confidence.

The departure from Halwar took place, according to the most common reconstruction, in the spring of 1828, though some sources place the date two years earlier and others set it in the late spring of 1827. The community of Halwar gathered, according to Tooroodo custom, before the enclosed prayer hall of the mosque, and in a brief ceremony the local imam commended the travelling company to the protection of Allah ﷻ with the Qur’anic formulas customary for travellers in West African Maliki practice. Penda, his wife, and the children he left behind in his household took their leave of him in a more personal form in his ancestral home. He promised them that he would return whenever Allah ﷻ, in His wisdom, should ordain it, and he commended them to the care of his father Saidu Tall.

The first stage: through West Africa to Sokoto

The route that Umar Tall ﵀ chose for his hajj, and which was generally followed in the West African pilgrimage tradition of his time, ran not in a direct eastward line but in a great south-easterly arc through the Sahelian interior as far as Sokoto, and from there eastward through the Chad basin and the Sahelian kingdoms of Bornu and Wadai, and finally northward through Darfur and Kordofan to Egyptian territory, where the pilgrim could descend the Nile to Cairo and from there reach the Red Sea by caravan or by ship. The total distance from Halwar to Mecca along this route was almost six thousand kilometres, and the journey required, by the usual estimate of his day, at least a year and a half in one direction.

The first part of the journey, from Halwar to Sokoto, led through the Tooroodo territory of Fouta Toro, then through the kingdom of Bondou, which functioned as a vassal of the Imamate of Fouta Toro, then through the Imamate of Fouta Djallon, which had its headquarters in its interior Imam-city of Timbo, and then through the territories of Karta and Beledougou where the Bambara states held their political grip. In Timbo the company stayed several months with the Almami of Fouta Djallon, and Umar Tall ﵀ used this time for extensive scholarly discussions with the Fouta Djallon ʿulamāʾ about the condition of the Imamate in its second half-century and about the challenges facing the interior jihad state in its daily governance.

The passage through Bambara territory

The passage through Bambara territory between Fouta Djallon and Sokoto was the most dangerous phase of the first leg of the journey, for in these years the Bambara states were in continual war with the Muslim states along their western and northern borders, and they regarded a passing Tooroodo scholar with a certain reserve. Umar Tall ﵀ and his company had to apply, as the tradition records, a combination of diplomacy and of secrecy during this phase of the journey, and in various places they received guidance from local Muslim communities that existed as minorities within the Bambara kingdoms and that saw in the passage of a scholar of his stature a spiritual encouragement.

It was during this passage, as the tradition records and as his own later statements in his works confirm, that Umar Tall ﵀ observed for the first time at close hand the Bambara kingdoms of Segoe and Kaarta in their political and spiritual form, and that he formed the conviction that the liberation of the Sahelian Muslim population from their grip would be a central task for the West African Muslim world of the coming generation. This conviction, fixed within him in the spring of 1828, would twenty years later take working shape in his own jihad from Dinguiraye, and so it was already present in his hajj journey as an inner decision before outward circumstances made it possible.

Sokoto and Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀

In the late spring of 1829 the company reached Sokoto, the capital of the caliphate that had been founded by Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and that in these years was ruled by his son Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀. In 1829 Sokoto was the largest Islamic state in all of sub-Saharan Africa, with a territory stretching from the present-day northern Nigerian border with Niger southward to the central Nigerian plains, and with a capital that had been built up, in its administrative and spiritual character, into a learned court centre in which Arabic literature, fiqh debate and Sufi brotherhood activity were pursued at a level that existed nowhere else in West Africa.

Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, who had succeeded his father Shaykh Usman ﵀ in 1817 and who in 1829 was himself about forty-four years old, received Umar Tall ﵀ in a formal audience in his court building and recognized in the young Tooroodo scholar a kindred spiritual disposition for which he felt a personal esteem from their first meeting. He invited Umar Tall ﵀ to stay in Sokoto longer than the customary few weeks, and he offered him a place attending lessons within his own court circle and debating with the scholars of Sokoto on the legal and spiritual questions that were then arising in the caliphate. Umar Tall ﵀ accepted this proposal with gratitude, and in this first stage of his journey he stayed in Sokoto for about a year, from 1829 to 1830, in a sojourn that would leave a deep imprint on his personal and intellectual formation.

The library of Sokoto

One particular aspect of Umar Tall’s ﵀ stay in Sokoto that does not always receive sufficient attention in the historiography was his access to the extensive library that Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ and his father Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had built up in the caliphal palace over the preceding decades. This library held several hundred manuscripts in Arabic and in Fulfulde, among them the complete corpus of the works of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀, the works of Muhammad Bello ﵀ himself, a large collection of classical Maliki fiqh handbooks, Sufi works of the Qadiriyya, and in a number of cases works of scholars from the Maghreb and from the Middle East that had reached Sokoto by way of the Trans-Saharan trade routes. For Umar Tall ﵀ this library was a scholarly wealth that he would have found nowhere else in West Africa, and he devoted an important part of his Sokoto stay to a thorough study of it.

In his notes, preserved in later copies made by his closest associates, there are many references to works he was able to read for the first time in this library, and the influence of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio’s ﵀ works on his own later writings has been frequently established in modern historiography. In its effect on the young Tooroodo scholar, the Sokoto library became a kind of second madrasa that gave his West African scholarly world a fundamental intellectual expansion and that set his later political work upon a thorough theoretical foundation.

The marriage to Maryam

In the course of his stay in Sokoto, Umar Tall ﵀ entered into a marriage bond that would prove of great importance in his later life and in his political stature. He married Maryam, a daughter of Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, in a union proposed by the sultan himself as a token of his appreciation for the Tooroodo scholar and of his wish to bind him in a lasting familial relationship with the Sokoto court circle. The marriage was performed in a dignified ceremony, and Maryam accompanied Umar Tall ﵀ in the following years on his further journey to Mecca and on his later return through West Africa.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally this marriage was more than a dynastic bond. Maryam was, according to what the tradition records and according to what her place in his later imamate years shows, a woman of independent spiritual development and of her own intellectual ability, and in the following decades she grew into one of his closest confidants and a counsellor in matters where he sought her independent judgment. In his later imamate work he regularly consulted with her about the political decisions he had to make, and her Sokoto background gave him in his work a lasting spiritual and political connection with the caliphate of Sokoto that he would not otherwise have had.

The scholarly discussions with Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀

Besides the marriage and his participation in daily court life, the central experience of Umar Tall’s ﵀ stay in Sokoto was the long series of scholarly discussions he held personally with Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ about the spiritual and political questions of the West African Muslim world. Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ was, alongside his role as caliph, a serious scholar in his own right, and in the preceding decades he had written numerous works in Arabic on fiqh, on tafsir, and on the specific challenges of the West African jihad state. His work Infaq al-Maysur on the history of the Sokoto jihad, and his handbooks on the application of Maliki fiqh in the caliphate, were widely disseminated in West Africa, and Umar Tall ﵀ had already studied them in his younger years in Halwar.

In their conversations, as the tradition records and as Umar Tall’s ﵀ own later works confirm, they treated such themes as the proper relationship between the Shariʿa and local customary law in a West African jihad state, the form of governance in a territory where the population had not yet been fully drawn into the jihad cause, the relation between the Sufi brotherhoods and the general political order, and the foreign relations a West African Muslim state ought to maintain in the nineteenth century. In these discussions Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ was in effect giving instruction in statecraft to a pupil who would in his own future undertake the same work, and Umar Tall ﵀ received it with the care that marked him in all his learning.

The second stage: from Sokoto to Mecca

In the summer or early autumn of 1830 Umar Tall ﵀ left Sokoto with his enlarged travelling company, which in the intervening time had been augmented by his wife Maryam, by several servants in her service, and by a number of Sokoto students who wished to seize the opportunity to travel with the Tooroodo scholar as far as Mecca. The route now led eastward through the kingdom of Bornu, which in these years was ruled by Sheikh Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi ﵀, a learned head of state who had himself studied in Cairo and in Mecca and who governed his kingdom in a conservative but capable manner.

In Bornu’s capital Kuka, situated on the western shore of Lake Chad, the company stayed several weeks with Sheikh al-Kanemi ﵀, and Umar Tall ﵀ held with him too extensive conversations about the spiritual and political questions of his time. In his spiritual disposition Sheikh al-Kanemi ﵀ stood within a more cautious tradition than Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, and he approached the possibility of an armed jihad against non-Muslim states with more restraint than the Sokoto circle, a difference of view that in the following decades would play a recurring role in the West African jihad debates. For Umar Tall ﵀ the stay in Kuka was a useful complement to his Sokoto experience, for through this encounter he came to know the breadth of the West African Muslim world in its various spiritual forms better than any single source could have shown him.

Through Wadai, Darfur and Kordofan

Beyond Bornu the route led through Wadai, a Sahelian sultanate ruled in these years by Sultan Muhammad Sharif ﵀ and maintaining in its internal organization a combination of Arabic-Maliki administration and local customary law. The passage through Wadai lasted, according to the tradition, several months, with breaks in the capital Abeche where Umar Tall ﵀ was received by the Sultan in honourable audience and where his company took a rest before the coming passage through the difficult Trans-Saharan zone between Wadai and Darfur. The Darfur sultanate, in these years under Sultan Muhammad Fadl ﵀, was likewise the rule of a learned head of state who received the pilgrim with respect and who facilitated the passage in honour.

In Kordofan the company at last crossed into the Egyptian sphere of influence, for since 1820 the region had stood under the control of the Egyptian Muhammad Ali regime, which in the following decades would extend its influence into the Sudan basin. In the town of El Obeid in central Kordofan, and later in Khartoum at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile, the company stayed for some time for the logistical preparations for the final part of the journey, namely the descent of the Nile to Cairo and from there the passage across the Sinai or the crossing over the Red Sea to Jedda.

The arrival in Cairo and the Egyptian ulema

In the winter of 1830 or the early spring of 1831 Umar Tall ﵀ reached Cairo, and he stayed there several months in a sojourn that would leave a deep imprint on his later scholarly stature. He visited the al-Azhar mosque, the high court of Sunni scholarship in existence for a thousand years, and he held conversations with some of the most respected scholars of his time, among them Sheikh Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi ﵀, who in these years taught Maliki fiqh at al-Azhar, and Sheikh Ibrahim al-Bayjuri ﵀, who would later take office as rector of al-Azhar and who was acknowledged as an authority throughout the entire Sunni Muslim world.

For Umar Tall ﵀ this stay in Cairo was his first direct contact with the scholarly tradition of the Maliki-Egyptian establishment, which was known in West Africa through the works of its rectors but which he could now observe in its living form, and in these conversations he obtained insights into fiqh and into tasawwuf that he had not been able to acquire to the same depth in his West African education. He received from several of his Egyptian interlocutors formal ijazas for specific fiqh handbooks, an honour that on his later return to West Africa would confirm his position as a scholar of international renown.

The Trans-Saharan caravan route

The Trans-Saharan caravan route between Kordofan and the Egyptian margin was in the early nineteenth century still one of the most difficult travel routes in the entire Muslim world, and it demanded of the traveller not only physical endurance but also a considerable logistical preparation in which the right choice of caravan leader, of pack animals and of water supplies could decide between life and death. The caravan with which Umar Tall ﵀ and his company covered this phase consisted, according to the tradition, of about two hundred pack animals and some twenty other pilgrims who had joined him along the way, and it followed the customary Daar al-Hajj route that over the centuries had been trodden by tens of thousands of West African pilgrims. The passage from Kordofan to Aswan lasted, by the estimate of his fellow travellers, about three months, and it led through regions where the water supplies were so scarce that the caravan sometimes had to travel four or five days without a new well.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally these months of extreme exhaustion in the Sahara zone formed a spiritual exercise recalled more than once in his later works. In the evening hours, after the communal prayers and the modest meals the caravan could afford, he carried out his customary dhikr exercises according to the Qadiri wird, and he used the long hours of the journey for reading in the manuscripts he had brought in his travelling outfit. In its physical and spiritual character, the Trans-Saharan phase became a kind of seclusion avant la lettre in which his formation in West Africa was brought to a final maturation before he would acquire his new spiritual form in Egypt and in Mecca.

Mecca and the hajj

In the late spring or early summer of 1831 Umar Tall ﵀ set out with his company from Cairo for the final part of his journey, first by caravan across the Sinai to the Red Sea and then by ship to Jedda, where in the first hajj month of the year 1247 of the Hijra reckoning, that is the late spring of 1831 in the Gregorian reckoning, he set foot ashore in the city where the pilgrim dons his pilgrim garments for the last stage to the holy places. The journey from Jedda to Mecca, a distance of about eighty kilometres through the dry mountainous Hejaz, he made in the usual manner, and he entered the holy city for the first time in his life with the heartfelt emotion that every pilgrim experiences at that first sight of the Ka’bah.

He performed the tawaf around the Ka’bah, he carried out the saʿy between Safa and Marwa, he stood at Arafa on the ninth day of Dhul Hijja in 1247 amid the stillness of the thousands of pilgrims gathered from all parts of the Muslim world, and he completed the remaining rites of the hajj in a spiritual form that his fellow travellers later described with reverent admiration. He then stayed, according to the hajj convention of his time, some months in the holy cities, during which he took part in Mecca in the halqas of local scholars, visited in Medina the grave of the Prophet ﷺ in honourable silence, and, in the wider international Muslim community present in Mecca and Medina in these months, bound himself in an extensive series of personal encounters.

The spiritual experience of Mecca

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally the hajj was, as he would confirm in his later works, a spiritual experience that placed his whole view of the world within a deeper framework than his preceding scholarly formation could have foreseen. He stood in Mecca amid pilgrims from Morocco, from Malaysia, from Java, from India, from Bukhara, from Turkey, from Egypt and from every corner of a Muslim world that in its common form possessed a real spiritual unity despite its immeasurably vast geographical dispersion. In his personal prayer at the Ka’bah he experienced the certainty of which he had read in his West African studies but which he now confirmed in its living reality, and in his own heart he made a commitment to the cause of the spiritual continuation of the work of the Prophet ﷺ in his own time and in his own region, a commitment that in his later life would continue to serve as the inner engine of all his actions.

It was during his stay in the holy cities that the definitive conviction ripened within him that after his return to West Africa he could no longer live on as an ordinary village scholar but would have to act in a form of spiritual and political responsibility that his previous Qadiri affiliation could no longer bear. The preparation for this transition took place in the following months, and it would take its formal shape in 1832 in his affiliation with the Tijaniyya at Aïn Madhi.

The encounters in Mecca and Medina

During his months-long stay in the holy cities, Umar Tall ﵀ had a considerable number of encounters that would remain recognizable in his later spiritual form. He met Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghali al-Tijani ﵀, a Moroccan khalifa of the Tijaniyya who was at that moment in Mecca for his own hajj and who, in a personal conversation with Umar Tall ﵀, lifted the first veil upon the tarīqa that in West Africa would become his own. He met an Indian scholar from Delhi who told him in a number of conversations about the condition of the Muslims in British India and about the reform movements that had arisen in northern India in the eighteen-twenties under the leadership of Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi ﵀. And he met pilgrims from Java and Aceh who told him about the spiritual condition of the Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and about their beginning contacts with the Dutch colonial power.

For a Tooroodo scholar from a Senegalese village who until then had never left his own region, these encounters meant an expansion of the spiritual horizon that in his early years had never been foreseen. He returned from Mecca not merely as a hajj veteran in the ordinary sense of the word, but as a scholar whose spiritual world now encompassed the whole Old World from the Indonesian archipelago to the Moroccan Atlantic coast, and whose later political undertaking in West Africa would be presented within such a spiritual framework as a contribution to the general form of the Muslim world in the nineteenth century.

Toward Aïn Madhi

When Umar Tall ﵀ left Mecca in the late autumn of 1831 or the early spring of 1832 for the return journey, he chose not the direct return to West Africa but a detour through northern Egypt and through Morocco, with the pronounced intention of visiting along the way the zawiya of the Tijaniyya at Aïn Madhi in order to be initiated into this tarīqa. His choice, in its spiritual background, was the fruit of the reflections he had carried out in his years of hajj residence, and in its practical execution it required of him and his company a further journey of several thousand kilometres through Egypt, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and the eastern part of Algeria before he could arrive at Aïn Madhi.

To this affiliation with the Tijaniyya at Aïn Madhi, and to the particular spiritual experience he received in the zawiya of Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀, and to the manner in which in this encounter he was granted the khalifa station of the Tijaniyya for all of West Africa, the next article will devote its attention. In this article we have followed how the Tooroodo scholar from the village of Halwar travelled, in a journey lasting three years, through West Africa, through the Sahelian kingdoms, through Egypt and finally to Mecca, how in Sokoto under Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ he underwent a formative experience and entered into a dynastic bond with the Sokoto court circle, and how in the holy cities he underwent the spiritual experience that prepared his later turn at Aïn Madhi.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 96–128.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 82–124.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 124–168.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans (1967), pp. 60–112.
• Knut S. Vikør, The Maghreb since 1800: A Short History, Hurst (2012), pp. 56–88 [on Aïn Madhi and the Tijaniyya transmission].
• Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World, Oxford University Press (1965), pp. 36–62.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim, Arabic original circa 1845; French translation Gallica BnF (1856), pp. 12–48 [autobiographical elements concerning the hajj].
• B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa, Cambridge University Press (1976), pp. 68–98.