The Political Blueprint

In the previous article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ was initiated into the Tijaniyya tarīqa at Aïn Madhi and how Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ granted him the exceptional ijaza for the establishment of the Tijaniyya throughout sub-Saharan Africa. We followed him on his return journey through Morocco and Mauritania and saw how, at every stage of the journey, he began to exercise his new responsibility in gradually developing form by conferring Tijani initiations on scholars who approached him out of interest in the tarīqa. This article follows him through the years between 1835 and 1850 in his West African return, in his residence in Fouta Djallon and in Sokoto, and in the gradual development of the political blueprint on which his later jihad state in Dinguiraye and in Karta would be built.

The spiritual bearing of a changed man

When Umar Tall ﵀ returned to West Africa in 1835 or 1836, he was in his outward and inward bearing an entirely different man from the one who had departed from Halwar in 1828. Outwardly he now carried the honorific title al-Hajj before his name, in his dress a style in which his West African Tooroodo appearance had been supplemented with elements from the Moroccan and Egyptian traditions he had encountered on his journey, and in his manner of speech a more extensive use of classical Arabic than would have suited his earlier village scholarship. Inwardly he carried, alongside the ijaza status of the Tijaniyya, a spiritual experience that could not have been formed in his earlier years in Halwar, and which through his direct contact with the holy places, with the Egyptian and Moroccan scholarly circles, and with the Tijani discipline had acquired a deeper form that would resonate recognizably in his later work.

For his native Fouta Toro this changed bearing meant that the returned son of Saidu Tall could no longer be absorbed into an ordinary village-scholar position, and for the wider West African Muslim world it meant the arrival of a spiritual authority of a kind the region had not known since Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀. The reception that awaited him at every stage of his return journey, and the influx of visitors who came to his new settlements to request initiation, reflected this recognition, and they gave his work in the years between 1835 and 1850 a gradual unfolding whose form would provide the channel for the jihad phase that would be proclaimed at Dinguiraye in 1852.

The return to West Africa

Towards the end of 1835 or in the early spring of 1836, after an absence of nearly eight years, Umar Tall ﵀ reached the region of his West African return. His first principal residence, however, was not Halwar in Fouta Toro but Sokoto in the caliphate territory, where he was received with honour in a personal audience by Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ and where, with the approval of his father-in-law, he began a renewed period of residence that would keep him in the immediate circle of the caliphate for the following three to four years. The choice of Sokoto over Halwar was, in its effect, a considered strategic decision by which Umar Tall ﵀ wished to continue his work in a spiritually and politically highly developed environment before proceeding, in a further phase, to his own West African state-building enterprise.

In Sokoto, in the years 1836 to 1839, he built up his own spiritual circle, with an extensive series of students who approached him both from the Sokoto aristocracy and from the wider West African Muslim world for initiation into the Tijaniyya and for further instruction in fiqh and in tasawwuf. He gave lessons in the Sokoto mosques that were attended by a considerable audience, he completed the first long work that he had carried in draft since his youth, and in his free hours he pursued the scholarly conversations with the Sokoto court circle that had already been of great importance to his formation during his first stay in Sokoto. It was, in its character, a phase of spiritual deepening and of gradual broadening of his Tijani presence, whose full effect would still take several years to arrive.

The death of Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀

In 1837 Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ died after a long illness, and the Sokoto throne was taken over by his brother Abu Bakr Atiku ﵀ in a succession grounded in the formal Sokoto tradition of rotation between different branches of the ruling family. For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the death of his father-in-law was a heavy personal loss, for in Muhammad Bello ﵀ he had lost not merely a father-in-law but a spiritual teacher who had supported his intellectual formation in a profound way. For his political position in Sokoto, however, the death also meant a change, for his direct bond with the court circle was rendered less central by the passing of the sultanate to Abu Bakr Atiku ﵀, and he understood that his continued presence in Sokoto in the years that followed could no longer take place in the same immediate proximity to the Sokoto administration.

In these years, however, he did complete the first phase of his writing of the Rimah, the Arabic work in which he systematized his Tijani exposition in its West African application. In its completed form the work comprised roughly three hundred and fifty pages in a printed edition, and it was finished in its definitive form around 1845, during his later years in Fouta Djallon. In the decades that followed it would circulate in West Africa in numerous handwritten copies, and it would become the most important theological work for the Tijaniyya in its Tooroodo establishment. In modern historiography it is regarded as one of the most important Arabic works of nineteenth-century West Africa, and its translation into French and other languages has brought it recognizable renown in European scholarly circles as well.

The political vacuum after 1837

The transition of Sokoto to Abu Bakr Atiku ﵀ and the subsequent internal dynastic changes in the Sokoto caliphate in the years 1837 to 1841 created a political vacuum in which the court circle no longer displayed the centralized spiritual and administrative character it had possessed in full measure under Muhammad Bello ﵀. For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, this phase was on the one hand a loss of political support, and on the other a growing freedom to steer his own course in his own spiritual and political preparation. He used this phase, as his works and his notes suggest, for a deepened reflection on his own future work, and already in these years he spoke in confidential conversations with his closest associates about his intention to undertake a jihad enterprise of his own outside the Sokoto context. The unconcern with which he could speak of these plans, attributable to the absence of a strong central Sokoto authority that might have seen in such plans a rival claim, was of great importance to his preparation.

The growth of the Tijani circle

Alongside his writing and his teaching in the Sokoto mosques, Umar Tall ﵀ in these years also expanded his network of Tijani initiations, and in his Sokoto zawiya he received a gradually growing circle of students who in the following decades would form the channel for the spread of the Tijaniyya in West Africa. Among his direct students in these years were Alfa Umar Cherno Baila, who had already accompanied him on his hajj, a number of young Tooroodo men who had travelled from Fouta Toro to Sokoto to study with their famous countryman, and several Hausa and Fulbe youths from the Sokoto caliphate itself who sought in the Tijaniyya a spiritual form they did not find in the established Sokoto Qadiriyya.

The growth of this Tijani circle in a region of Qadiri predominance was, in the perception of both Umar Tall ﵀ himself and his contemporaries, not without tensions. Some Sokoto scholars viewed his Tijani preaching with suspicion and held that he was undermining the spiritual unity of the caliphate, while other Sokoto scholars regarded his work as a legitimate extension of the general Muslim community and received his Tijani exposition with openness. Umar Tall ﵀ for his part remained moderate and circumspect in his attitude towards the Qadiriyya, and he refused to turn against the Sokoto Qadiris in polemical fashion, but at the same time he held fast to his conviction that the Tijaniyya in its spiritual character possessed a higher station than the Qadiriyya could offer.

The brief visit to Fouta Toro

Between his Sokoto years and his definitive settlement in Fouta Djallon, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook in 1840 or 1841 a brief visit to his native Fouta Toro, and in these months, for the first time after nearly twelve years of absence, he was back in his village of Halwar and in the Tooroodo community from which he had come. The visit was in its nature a mixture of personal and political considerations. He wished to see his parental home again if his father Saidu Tall ﵀ were still alive (which, according to most sources, was no longer the case), he wished to meet his mother Sokhna Adama and his elder brothers and sisters, and at the same time he wished to carry out among the Tooroodo scholarly circle of Fouta Toro the first Tijani initiations for which he had been equipped at Aïn Madhi.

The visit proceeded, as the tradition relates, in a manner that combined his recognition as a scholar of international renown with a gradual tension surrounding his Tijani transmission. The Tooroodo aristocracy of Fouta Toro stood for the most part within the Qadiriyya, and the arrival of a returned Tooroodo son who had converted to a new tarīqa and who claimed for that tarīqa an outspokenly superior status was not without spiritual embarrassment for the local Almamis and their ʿulamāʾ advisers. During his few months in Fouta Toro, Umar Tall ﵀ succeeded in initiating a circle of several dozen Tooroodo scholars into the Tijaniyya, but he obtained no formal Tijani affiliation from the Imamate as an administrative entity. It was with this mixed outcome that he departed for Fouta Djallon to establish his more permanent base of operations.

The departure for Fouta Djallon

By 1839 or 1840 Umar Tall ﵀ decided to leave Sokoto and to continue his work in a region further to the west, and he departed with his family and with a considerable circle of his Sokoto students on a long journey westward through the Sahelian interior towards Fouta Djallon. According to the tradition, the journey lasted about a year, with stops in several Sahelian towns in which he carried out Tijani initiations and further expanded his circle of students, and by 1841 or 1842 it brought him to Fouta Djallon, where he established a new base in the Imamate city of Timbo and in the neighbouring villages.

In Fouta Djallon he was received with honour by the Almami of the Imamate, and he settled with his family in a settlement near Timbo where, in the years that followed, he continued his work in a twofold form. On the one hand he gave lessons in the mosques of Timbo and carried out Tijani initiations for a now rapidly growing circle of Fouta Djallon students. On the other hand, in these years he undertook the first concrete steps towards the organization of a military force that would form the basis of his later jihad, and around his settlement he gathered a gradually growing group of scholar-soldiers who would accompany him on his later exodus to Dinguiraye.

The military preparation in Fouta Djallon

Alongside his spiritual work in Fouta Djallon, Umar Tall ﵀ in these years also undertook the first systematic preparation of a military force that would form the basis of his later jihad state. Around his settlement he organized a growing group of young men who were prepared for their future role in the jihad through a combination of scholarly formation and military training. The military training was conducted in a manner unusual in nineteenth-century West Africa, with daily exercises in the handling of firearms, in tactical movement in smaller units, and in the organizational discipline necessary to a professionalized fighting force. Through Mauritanian and Senegambian traders he obtained a gradually growing supply of European firearms, chiefly of British and French origin, and in a number of cases he also undertook the direct purchase of weapons through intermediaries in Saint-Louis and in Bakel.

This military preparation, in its combination with the spiritual discipline of the Tijani tarīqa, gave his movement a character that was neither an ordinary tarīqa zawiya nor an ordinary military force, but a hybrid formation in which spiritual earnestness and military strength came together in a common form. For his followers this form was the realization of the prophetic example of Medina, where the community under the Prophet ﷺ had lived in a similar communal union of faith and struggle, and it gave his movement an inner cohesion that the established Imamate structure of Fouta Djallon could not match.

The formation of his political blueprint

In his years in Fouta Djallon, which by the usual reconstruction lasted roughly from 1841 to 1849 or 1850, there took place the gradual formation of what in his later work would be called the political blueprint for his jihad state. It was not a suddenly conceived plan but a gradual synthesis of the observations he had made on his preceding journeys, of the works he had studied in Sokoto and at Aïn Madhi, and of the conversations he had held during his West African return with numerous scholars of different traditions. In its final form the synthesis acquired four load-bearing elements, each of which would recognizably return in his later form of state.

The first element was the combination of the Tijaniyya as the spiritual supporting structure with Maliki fiqh as the juridical supporting structure, in a union that joined the tarīqa and the Shariʿa in their complementary forms without subordinating the one to the other. The second element was the centralization of spiritual and political authority in the person of the imam, without the rotating electoral traditions that had led to internal tensions in Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro. The third element was the organization of a military force that in its discipline and in its armament would far surpass the ordinary Tooroodo village militias and that would be built on a professionalized basis. The fourth element was the duty of hijra, the emigration from territories under non-Muslim or compromise-Muslim rule to the jihad state to be built, a duty he would demand of his followers as the expression of their earnestness in the cause.

The letters to Fouta Toro

From his settlement in Fouta Djallon onwards, Umar Tall ﵀ maintained a dense correspondence with the Tooroodo scholars of his native Fouta Toro, and in these letters he gradually worked out the spiritual argumentation with which, in the years that followed, he would move Tooroodo families to emigrate to his movement. The letters, insofar as they have been preserved in West African archives and in French colonial collections, show a gradual development of his argumentation. In the early letters of 1842 and 1843 he spoke chiefly of the Tijani discipline and of the spiritual benefits the murīds of his settlement could receive; in the later letters of 1846 and 1847 he spoke increasingly of the political form of a community guided by the Shariʿa; and in the letters of 1849 and 1850 he already spoke in outspoken terms of the duty of hijra and of the impending move to Dinguiraye in which his recipients would be called to take part.

These letters were passed on to a wide audience in the Tooroodo communities of Fouta Toro, and in the 1840s they brought forth in these communities a spiritual awakening whose visible effect would appear in the following decades in the exodus of thousands of Tooroodo families to the Umarian state.

The Tooroodo visitors and the shape of the emigration

In the years 1843 to 1849 Umar Tall ﵀ received in his settlement near Timbo an increasing number of Tooroodo visitors from Fouta Toro, who approached him in a spiritual and political spirit in which the turn of his work towards a new phase was being prepared. Some of these visitors came to be initiated into his Tijani discipline and then to return to their own villages in Fouta Toro; others came to join his movement definitively and to live, in the following phase, in the jihad state he was to build. The group of permanent adherents grew in the course of these years to several hundred families, and it settled in and around Umar Tall’s ﵀ settlement in an expanded community that in its form already began to show the first contours of a future jihad state.

For the Almami of Fouta Djallon, the growth of this community was at first viewed with favour, for it strengthened the spiritual standing of the Imamate and added new scholarly members to the Tooroodo aristocracy. But in the course of the 1840s the Almami began to worry about the increasing independence of the Tall community and about its growing military character, which threatened to come into acute tension with the local political order. By the end of the 1840s the relationship between Umar Tall ﵀ and the Almami had reached a delicate stage, and Umar Tall ﵀ understood that his future work could no longer be continued in the immediate vicinity of Timbo without coming into conflict with the local authorities.

The tension with Fouta Djallon

The growth of Umar Tall’s ﵀ military power in Fouta Djallon, although in its full form it did not yet pose the direct question of sovereignty for the local Almami, threatened in the course of the 1840s to reach a point at which the Almami would feel obliged to take systematic countermeasures. It was this gradually growing tension that in 1849 or early 1850 prompted Umar Tall’s ﵀ decision to leave Fouta Djallon and to move his base of operations to the more northeasterly Dinguiraye region, where he would be able to build his jihad state in independence without coming into direct confrontation with the Imamate structure of Fouta Djallon.

In the exchange of farewell letters conducted in these months between Umar Tall ﵀ and the Almami of Fouta Djallon, insofar as it has been preserved in the West African archives and in the French colonial collections, he addressed the Almami in a spirit of respectful acknowledgement of his authority, but at the same time he held fast to his mission to continue his own jihad work in a new form. He requested from the Almami peaceful passage for his followers to Dinguiraye, which was granted him on the condition that he would not return to Fouta Djallon without a formal invitation from the Imamate. Umar Tall ﵀ accepted this condition, and he undertook the move in a manner that was, in its effect, less a flight than a dignified transition.

The preparation of the departure for Dinguiraye

In 1849 or 1850 Umar Tall ﵀ began the preparation of what in his later history would become known as the hijra to Dinguiraye, namely the emigration of his community from Fouta Djallon to a new settlement in an adjacent region where he would be able to build his jihad state in independence. The choice of Dinguiraye, in the northeastern part of present-day Guinea at a short distance from the border with Mali, was not accidental. The place lay in a region that the Almami of Fouta Djallon acknowledged as outside his own direct rule, but that at the same time was strategically favourable in its location for the coming operations against the Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta to the north and against the Mandinka states to the west.

For the gradual working out of this hijra he cooperated closely in 1849 and early 1850 with a group of his closest associates, among them his son Ahmadu (later known as Ahmadu Cheikou), who would play a central role in his jihad in the years that followed; his senior associate Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀, who had already accompanied him on his hajj; and a group of Tooroodo officers who had attached themselves to his movement in Fouta Djallon in the preceding years. The preparation comprised the logistical arrangements for the relocation of several hundred families, the organization of a first exploratory military mission to Dinguiraye to prepare the local population for the coming arrival, and the coordination of a number of political and spiritual announcements by which the hijra would be formally proclaimed to the wider West African Muslim world.

The elaboration of the hijra doctrine

In the course of 1849 and 1850 Umar Tall ﵀ completed, in a number of Arabic writings and in an extensive series of Friday sermons, the doctrine of hijra that he would demand of his followers. The doctrine, in its elaboration, held that a Muslim whose community lived under non-Muslim or compromise-Muslim rule, and whose personal and family circumstances permitted emigration, was bound in conscience to move to the jihad state then taking shape and to settle there. The doctrine was modelled on the hijra of the Prophet ﷺ from Mecca to Medina, and it gave his followers in West Africa a framework in which their own relocation to Dinguiraye was taken up into the prophetic example.

For the Tooroodo communities in Fouta Toro and for the Fulbe communities in Fouta Djallon and in Massina, who in the years that followed would answer the call in their tens of thousands and move to Dinguiraye and later to the jihad territories, the hijra doctrine was a spiritual framework in which their personal and family suffering in the impending relocation was taken up into a spiritual meaning that made it possible for them to undertake the emigration with spiritual joy despite its material costs. The doctrine would live on in the West African Muslim world for the following century and a half as a central element of the Umarian tarīqa tradition, and its influence has remained recognizable even in the twentieth century in West African Muslim migration movements.

The role of Abu Bakr Diouri

An important figure in these preparations, who in most popular narratives about Umar Tall ﵀ does not receive the attention he deserves, was Abu Bakr Diouri ﵀, a scholar from Karta who had joined the Tall movement in these years and who, through his personal connections with the Mandinka communities along the upper reaches of the Senegal River, formed an indispensable intermediary for the coming relocation to Dinguiraye. In 1849 and early 1850, on the instructions of Umar Tall ﵀, Abu Bakr Diouri ﵀ undertook several journeys to Dinguiraye and to the neighbouring Mandinka villages to prepare the local chiefs for the coming arrival and to conclude the first political agreements that would ease the execution of the hijra. His work in these months, a combination of diplomacy, spiritual persuasion, and political negotiation, was of a kind that played a decisive role in the later success of the Dinguiraye settlement.

The Rimah as theoretical foundation

In the work Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim ʿala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, which he had completed in its definitive form some years earlier, around 1845, Umar Tall ﵀ laid the theoretical foundation on which his practical state-building enterprise would be constructed. In its completed form the work comprised several hundred pages and treated, in orderly fashion, the following questions. First, the confirmation of the spiritual authority of Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ in his direct reception of the tarīqa from the Prophet ﷺ, and the status of the Tijani murīds that flowed from it. Second, the duty of armed jihad in situations in which a Muslim community lived under non-Muslim or under unlawful Muslim rule. Third, the form of government in a jihad state guided by the Shariʿa, with the institution of the qadis, the collection of zakat, and the general administrative organization. Fourth, the relation between the Tijaniyya and the other Sufi brotherhoods, in a form that maintained Tijani superiority without condemning the other brotherhoods in polemical fashion.

In the years that followed, the work was copied in many manuscripts across West Africa, and both in its theoretical and in its practical parts it became a load-bearing reference for the Umarian jihad state that would take its full shape in the 1850s and 1860s. For the modern historian who wishes to understand the working out of Umar Tall’s ﵀ political blueprint, the Rimah remains the indispensable primary source, and its thorough study by Madina Ly-Tall in her critical edition of 1985 has at last made the work accessible to modern research in its full philological form.

Towards the first phase of the jihad

By the end of the year 1850 the hijra from Fouta Djallon to Dinguiraye was complete in its preparation, and Umar Tall ﵀ stood ready for the transition from his long preparatory phase to the actual execution of his life’s work. He was by now fifty-eight years old, over the preceding two decades he had developed a scholarly, spiritual, and political stature that had scarcely an equal in the West African Muslim world, and he stood at the head of a community that in its spiritual discipline and in its political preparation was ready for the coming formation of the jihad state.

In this article we have followed how, in the years between 1835 and 1850, his political blueprint gradually took shape during his Sokoto residence under Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, in his working years in Fouta Djallon and in the gradual expansion of his Tijani community, and we have seen how this blueprint was worked out in four load-bearing elements that would recognizably return in his later jihad state in Dinguiraye and in Karta. To the actual move to Dinguiraye in 1850 and the proclamation of the jihad in 1852, and to the first military campaigns of his imamate state, the next article will devote its attention.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 168–214.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 168–212.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 212–248.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 48–86.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans (1967), pp. 112–148.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa, Longman (1984), pp. 256–296.
• Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya, Oxford University Press (1965), pp. 98–124.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim ʿala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, Arabic original circa 1845; critical edition by Madina Ly-Tall, Dakar (1985).
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 96–134.