The Tragic Fitna

In the preceding article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ conducted a long and ultimately futile siege of the French Fort de Médine in the summer of 1857, and how, after its relief by Faidherbe, he personally reoriented his jihad in September 1857 in an altered strategic form, away from direct confrontation with the French colonial power and toward eastward expansion against the Bambara kingdom of Segu and the Sahelian states situated there. This article follows the campaigns of 1858 to 1862 in which the Umarian state reached its greatest territorial extent, and it concentrates in its second half on the tragic fitna of 1862, the inter-Muslim war between the Umarian Tijani state and the Qadiri state of the Massina Imamate of Hamdullahi, a conflict that leaves a deep spiritual unease in Umarian history to this day and whose consequences prepared the ground for the eventual fall of Umar Tall ﵀ himself.

The Segu Campaign

In the spring of 1859, roughly a year and a half after the failure at Médine and after an extensive strategic reorientation, Umar Tall ﵀ began the campaign against the Bambara kingdom of Segu that had been envisaged in its preliminaries as early as 1855. Segu, located on the upper reaches of the Niger in present-day central Mali, was the larger and militarily stronger of the two Bambara kingdoms, with a capital of several tens of thousands of inhabitants, a traditionally strong political organization under the Massassi dynasty, and an extensive military force consisting of thousands of horsemen and a large contingent of infantry.

The Umarian force deployed in this campaign was of an even greater size than in the Kaarta campaign of 1855, numbering by the most common estimate around thirty thousand men, including the core corps of talibé fighters armed with firearms, the Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka militias from across the Umarian state, and additional contingents from Bambouk and Bondou that had joined the jihad state in the preceding years. Supreme command was exercised by Umar Tall ﵀ personally, with his son Ahmadu in an increasingly independent position as second-in-command, and with Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ and Tijani Tall ﵀ in other important command positions.

The Fall of Segu

The campaign against Segu lasted, according to the usual reconstruction, about three months in its main phase, with the initial advance from Dinguiraye in May and June 1859, a series of battles against the neighbouring Bambara allies in July and August, and the decisive battle before the capital Segu in early September. The Bambara troops, consisting mainly of horsemen with edged weapons and a smaller contingent of musketeers, fought their defence with considerable courage, and the fighting was among the heaviest the Umarian jihad had experienced up to that point. But the combination of Umarian firepower, Umarian discipline and Umarian numbers ultimately drove the Bambara troops into a succession of defeats that found its tragic conclusion in the fall of Segu on the 9th or 10th of September 1859.

The Massassi king Ali Diarra, who in his final resistance in the capital wished to preserve the honour of his dynasty, fell in a last personal sortie against the Umarian troops before the main gate of his palace. The Umarian troops gradually took possession of the capital in street fighting, with the capture of the royal palace on the 11th of September and the definitive submission of the garrison on the 14th of September. The fall of Segu marked the fall of the largest non-Muslim kingdom in West Africa since Songhai in the Sahara, and it gave the Umarian jihad a standing that was noted throughout West Africa.

The Conquest of the Books

Among the spoils of war that fell into Umarian hands with the capture of the palace of Segu was, among other things, an extensive collection of Arabic manuscripts that had been gathered over the centuries by successive Massassi kings, partly through Bambara conversions to Islam and partly through trade or gifts from neighbouring Muslim states. Umar Tall ﵀ received the collection in a personal inspection, and he gave orders for the manuscripts to be transferred to Dinguiraye, where they were placed in a library of their own. The collection comprised works of general Islamic importance, including a number of rare copies of the works of Imam Malik ﵀ and of Imam al-Suyuti ﵀, and it constituted a considerable acquisition for the scholarly standing of the Umarian state.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the conquest of the books was a spiritual high point of the campaign, and he regarded it as a sign of Allah’s ﷻ goodness in which the spiritual purpose of his jihad was fulfilled not only in territorial expansion but also in the protection of Muslim scholarship. In a Friday sermon in Segu in the following month he devoted extensive attention to the spiritual significance of this conquest, and he compared its import with the scholarship that had been preserved in Timbuktu in earlier generations by the Songhai-Saharan states and that had gradually been lost through the Moroccan invasion of 1591.

The Administrative Organization after Segu

After the capture of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook in the following months the administrative organization of the conquered territory, which placed the Umarian state within a considerably larger geographical compass than had been the case in the preceding years. He appointed his son Ahmadu as governor-general over the Segu territory, with the detailed instruction to introduce the Shariʿa legal order gradually among the largely still un-Islamized Bambara population. He carried out an extensive programme of mosque building in every larger settlement of the conquered territory, and he sent Tooroodo teachers to the local villages for Quran instruction of the Bambara youth in a gradual Islamization. Zakat collection was instituted in an organized form, and the spoils of war were distributed among the fighters according to the conventions of fiqh.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, this administrative phase was a gradual transition from direct military campaigning to the stabilization of the jihad state in its enlarged extent, and he spent about a year in Segu in a combination of administrative work, scholarly activity and spiritual guidance of the processes of Islamization. It was a quiet labour that showed the jihad in its consolidation, before the tragic consequences of the Massina fitna would take shape in the years that followed.

Toward Massina

After the fall of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ faced the choice of his next expansion. The Bambara population of Segu territory had to be brought gradually to Islam and incorporated into the Umarian state, a process carried out in the following months through his administrative organization. But the coming strategic expansion, in his deliberations, lay in the direction of the Massina Imamate, which extended further eastward along the middle reaches of the Niger and which, under Ahmad III ﵀, held the spiritual and political leadership of a Muslim state guided by the Qadiriyya.

The choice was, in its implications, spiritually delicate. Massina was not a non-Muslim state as Segu and Kaarta had been, and it therefore fell outside the legal grounds on which Umar Tall ﵀ had justified his previous jihad operations. But Massina, in its Qadiri identity, stood in a fundamental relation to the Umarian Tijani character that would flare up in an exceedingly sensitive manner in the years that followed, and in its political conduct during the Segu campaign it had taken a stance that in the Umarian reading had become unacceptable. From both issues, and in particular from the second, the coming fitna would take its shape.

The Mande Allies of Segu

A specific consequence of the Segu campaign that became significant in the broader West African political landscape was the treatment of the Mandinka and Soninke allies of Segu in the campaigns of 1859. Over their years of political consolidation, the Massassi kings of Segu had maintained an extensive alliance with neighbouring Mande communities that in their own position were likewise threatened by Umarian expansion, and in the run-up to the Segu campaign these allies had placed their troops under Massassi command. For the Umarian strategists this meant that the Segu campaign, in its full scope, was not merely an operation against the Massassi kingdom but against an extensive Mande coalition, in which the definitive outcome would have to bring the Mande allies themselves to an eventual Umarian submission.

In the months after the fall of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook an extensive diplomatic campaign among the Mande allies in which he presented them with the choice between voluntary submission to Umarian sovereignty or continued resistance with the coming armed confrontation as its consequence. The majority of the Mande leaders chose voluntary submission, and in the following months they were incorporated into the Umarian state through a thorough administrative arrangement. A smaller minority chose continued resistance and was subdued in a series of smaller military campaigns in the course of 1860.

The Massina Imamate

The Massina Imamate had been founded in 1818 by Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀, a Fulbe scholar from the Maasina communities on the middle reaches of the Niger, in a jihad that was comparable in character to the Umarian undertaking but that in its geographical setting had taken place roughly half a century earlier. Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀ had brought Massina under a state guided by the Shariʿa in the Qadiri tradition that had been general among the West African Fulbe communities since Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀, and in his life’s work he had built a polity whose administrative organization and spiritual discipline had become a sustaining framework for the Fulbe-Massina interior.

In 1859, the year in which Umar Tall ﵀ took Segu, Massina stood under the leadership of Ahmad III ﵀, a grandson of Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀, in his early years as imam. Ahmad III ﵀ was a scholar of stature in his own right, trained in the Qadiri tradition and in the Maliki fiqh of the Massina Imamate, and he led his state in a manner that was effective in its internal organization but that stood in an uncertain position in its relation to the gradually growing Umarian state. In 1859 he received the reports of the fall of Segu with considerable concern, and he understood that the coming Umarian expansion threatened to draw Massina too into its sphere of influence.

The Family Ties between the Two States

A specific aspect of the relationship between the Umarian state and the Massina Imamate that made the coming fitna all the more tragic was the extensive family connection that had arisen in the preceding generation between Tooroodo emigrants in Massina and Massina Fulbe families. In the course of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, many Tooroodo families from Fouta Toro had emigrated to Massina in a movement that preceded Umar Tall’s ﵀ own call to the hijra, and in Massina they had built their new communities amid a welcoming reception, in which marriages with the local Fulbe population bound the two communities together in an extended family network. For the coming war this meant that fighters on both sides would face blood relatives, and that the spiritual weight of the fitna would become recognizable down to the ordinary families of both parties.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, this family connection was a spiritually aggravating circumstance that he discussed at length in his Friday sermons in the run-up to the campaign. He acknowledged that the fitna would place the ordinary families of both parties in a tragic position, and he asked his followers to spare the local families as much as possible in their fighting, with particular attention to the sparing of women, children and non-combatant men on both sides of the confrontation.

The Diplomatic Exchange

In the winter months of 1859 into 1860, an extensive diplomatic exchange took place between Umar Tall ﵀ and Ahmad III ﵀ in which the spiritual and political shape of their coming relationship was explored. The letters, insofar as they have been preserved in later copies, show a conversation between two West African Muslim leaders who each in their own position acknowledged the spiritual authority of the other, but who in their specific standpoints on the proper form of the coming relationship ran into fundamental differences.

Umar Tall ﵀ requested of Ahmad III ﵀ in his letters a formal Massina recognition of Umarian state sovereignty within a framework of spiritual cooperation in which the two states would unite in a common Muslim undertaking under the spiritual leadership of the Tijaniyya. Ahmad III ﵀ replied that in his Qadiri identity he could not be placed under Tijani sovereignty without damaging Massina’s own spiritual identity, and that he recognized the Umarian state as a neighbouring Muslim sovereignty of equal standing but did not wish to be bound to it in a subordinate position. The exchange came in its course to an impasse, and in the course of 1860 the first signs of a coming armed confrontation began to show themselves on both sides.

The Ulama Debates of 1860–1861

In the years 1860 and 1861, in the run-up to the armed confrontation, extensive ulama debates took place throughout West Africa on the legal character of the coming conflict. In Hamdullahi itself, Ahmad III ﵀ requested detailed fatwas from the established Massina scholars, and they ruled in a majority opinion that the Massina position, in its refusal of the extradition, was legally defensible on the grounds of the protection doctrines of Maliki fiqh. In Dinguiraye and in Segu, comparable consultations were carried out by Umar Tall ﵀, and the Umarian ʿulamāʾ ruled in their majority that the Umarian position, in its demand for the extradition, was legally defensible on the grounds of the sovereignty doctrines that in such cases ought to take precedence.

In Sokoto and in Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro, comparable considerations were discussed in scholarly assemblies, and the differences of opinion were more substantial in these communities than in the immediate Umarian or Massina circles. The scholars of the Sokoto Qadiri tradition inclined toward a Massina-friendly interpretation, while the scholars of the Tooroodo-Tijani presence in Fouta Toro inclined toward an Umarian-friendly interpretation. The debates, in their effect, reflected in spiritual form the broader spiritual division between the Qadiri and the Tijani traditions in West Africa, and they gave the coming war a character in which the legal grounds lay in a mixed state, without an unambiguous outcome that would be accepted by both traditions.

The Segu Fitna in Its Spiritual Dimension

Alongside the general impasse over questions of sovereignty, an exceedingly sensitive spiritual exchange took place between the Umarian state and Massina in 1860 and 1861 around a specific case that would become the direct occasion for the coming armed confrontation. In the chaos of the Segu campaign of 1859, a number of Bambara leaders of the Massassi clan had escaped to Massina territory, where they were granted asylum by Ahmad III ﵀ under the customary Massina conventions of political refugee protection. Umar Tall ﵀ demanded the extradition of these leaders in a correspondence, with the legal argument that under ordinary Maliki fiqh they, as non-Muslim fugitives, could not be brought under the protection of a Muslim state without that state itself falling into an unlawful position.

Ahmad III ﵀ refused the extradition on the grounds of Massina’s own legal traditions and on the grounds of his judgment that the Bambara leaders had meanwhile accepted Islam in a formal manner that bound them to Massina sovereignty. Umar Tall ﵀ regarded this answer as unacceptable in its legal character and as a direct challenge to Umarian sovereignty, and in the second half of 1861 he began preparations for an armed campaign against Massina. It was a tragic outcome of an inter-Muslim conflict that neither leader had himself desired, but which in the gradual escalation of positions no longer permitted a peaceful outcome.

The Spiritual Embarrassment

For the entire West African Muslim world, the coming Umarian-Massina war was a spiritual embarrassment that placed the character of the Muslim undertaking in nineteenth-century West Africa before a fundamental challenge. In Sokoto, Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀ expressed his concern about the coming confrontation in a letter to Umar Tall ﵀ and asked him to seek a peaceful outcome. In Fouta Djallon and in Fouta Toro, the legal grounds of the Umarian campaign were discussed at length in scholarly assemblies, with differences of opinion between scholars who defended the Umarian position and scholars who considered the Massina position legally in the right. For the ordinary Muslim population in both states, the coming war was a spiritual trial whose outcome was uncertain and which in its nature would seriously threaten the common Muslim unity.

The Last Attempt at Mediation

In the early spring of 1862, before the Umarian troops set out, one last attempt at mediation took place, in which Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀ of Sokoto wrote to both Dinguiraye and Hamdullahi through a formal delegation of Sokoto scholars with the call for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The Sokoto delegation travelled to both capitals in March and April 1862 and held extensive talks with Umar Tall ﵀ and with Ahmad III ﵀, in an attempt to find a common ground in which both standpoints could be brought together in a spiritual compromise.

The efforts were received by both parties with respect and with serious attention, but in their outcome they could produce no peaceful resolution. The foundations of the conflict, as they had been laid down in the legal positions of the preceding years, had in both parties grown into a form from which neither could withdraw without loss of face. The Sokoto delegation returned empty-handed in May 1862, and Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀ received the news of the coming armed confrontation with a spiritual distress that was expressed at length in his own Friday sermons in Sokoto. For the West African Muslim world, the failure of the mediation was a confirmation that the conflict could no longer find a common resolution, and that it would have to be fought out in its tragic form.

The Attack on Hamdullahi

In the spring of 1862, Umar Tall ﵀ launched the campaign against Hamdullahi, the capital of the Massina Imamate, with a force of about thirty thousand men and with the declared objective of incorporating the Massina state into Umarian sovereignty. The campaign led through the middle-Niger territories and was resisted in its execution by the Massina troops under Ahmad III ﵀ personally, in a manner whose courage and personal readiness for sacrifice was recognizable as the spiritual character of the Massina Imamate.

The decisive battle took place on the 17th or 18th of May 1862 before the city wall of Hamdullahi, in an outcome in which the Massina troops, despite their courageous resistance, were defeated by the superior Umarian force. Ahmad III ﵀ fell in this battle in a personal sortie against the Umarian troops, an outcome that gave a martyr’s death to a Muslim leader who had defended his state against another Muslim state in a conflict that by its nature could have no true victor. Hamdullahi fell to the Umarian troops on the 19th or 20th of May, and Massina was incorporated into a nominal Umarian sovereignty.

The Fighting before Hamdullahi

The fighting before Hamdullahi unfolded in a manner that has been preserved in separate accounts by both sources, Umarian and Massina, and that showed the war in its full dimensions as the heaviest of Umar Tall’s ﵀ campaigns. The Massina troops, consisting mainly of Fulbe horsemen and an organized contingent of musketeers, fought with the declared readiness of a community defending its spiritual identity, and in the first two days of fighting they inflicted considerable losses on the Umarian troops. Ahmad III ﵀ personally led several sorties from the city wall, and in this final phase of his life he showed a personal courage that has been preserved as a lasting memory in West African Muslim tradition.

On the third day of the fighting, on the 17th of May 1862 according to the most common reconstruction, Ahmad III ﵀ undertook a last sortie with his most trusted companions, in which he met a martyr’s death. He fell in combat before the main gate of Hamdullahi with sword in hand and with the takbir on his lips, in a manner that in the Massina tradition has grown into a spiritually venerable end. His body was drawn inside the walls by his companions, and he was buried with the proper rites in the central mosque of Hamdullahi before the city was taken by the Umarian troops in the days that followed.

The Tragic Dimension

The outcome of the battle of Hamdullahi had for Umar Tall ﵀ personally a deep spiritual weight of mourning and inner unrest. The death of a fellow Muslim leader in a conflict that in its spiritual character could not be settled by an unambiguous legal ruling was, for a scholar of his stature, an inner trial that was expressed at length in his Friday sermons in the following months. He spoke of Ahmad III ﵀ with respect for his spiritual character and for his personal courage, and he indicated in his preaching that the outcome of Hamdullahi was not to be celebrated as an Umarian victory but as a tragically necessary outcome within a common Muslim community that in its internal division had lost its own leaders.

The spiritual effect of the fitna on the Umarian community was, in its working, a diminished morale and a growing internal division. Many Umarian fighters and their families underwent an inner crisis in the months after Hamdullahi, in which they questioned the rightness of the campaign in their own consciences, and in a number of cases they asked Umar Tall ﵀ personally for clarification of the spiritual meaning of the event. Umar Tall ﵀ answered these questions with the eloquence and the spiritual seriousness that characterized him in all his work, but the internal unrest in his community persisted and would find its tragic outcome in the coming Toucouleur-Massina revolt of late 1863.

The Outcome for Umar Tall ﵀ Personally

In the months after the fall of Hamdullahi, a period of heightened intensity unfolded in Umar Tall’s ﵀ personal spiritual life, in which he worked through the outcome of the fitna in his own conscience in long hours of seclusion and prayer. His close companions relate in later tradition that in these months he spent more time in silent prayer than ever in his preceding jihad years, that he performed Quran recitation in personal devotion more often than usual, and that in his immediate presence he showed a markedly diminished degree of outward fervour. For those who met him closely in these months, his outward appearance was that of a man who felt the burden of his life’s work with growing weight, and who carried the spiritual costs of the Hamdullahi fitna in his own soul in a way he did not express in public words.

In his Friday sermons in this period, however, he spoke undiminished of the spiritual cause of the Umarian jihad, and he called his community to a renewal of Tijani discipline that might transcend the fitna through a heightened spiritual seriousness. The effect of this preaching on his followers was, in its result, a mixed matter, for the inner unrest over the fitna could not be removed by spiritual exhortation alone, and the coming Massina revolt would in its course show the lasting spiritual and political consequences of the conflict in their full extent.

Toward the Downfall

The years between 1862 and 1864 would form the closing phase of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life’s work, in a course that in its unfolding would show the tragic consequences of the Hamdullahi fitna in their full extent. The Massina population, which in its Qadiri tradition would not let itself be brought under Umarian-Tijani sovereignty without resistance, rose in a general revolt against the Umarian occupation in 1863, and in the following months a long war of attrition unfolded that would find its end in 1864 at Bandiagara in the personal death of Umar Tall ﵀. To this final phase, and to the manner in which the eagle of West Africa folded his wings in a cave near Bandiagara, the last article of this cycle devotes its attention.

In this article we have seen how in 1859 the Umarian jihad took the largest of the Bambara kingdoms at Segu, how in the following years a gradual escalation took place between the Umarian state and the Massina Imamate over the extradition of the Bambara leaders, how in May 1862 Ahmad III ﵀ of Massina met a martyr’s death in the tragic battle before Hamdullahi, and how the outcome of this fitna plunged the Umarian community into a spiritual crisis that would prepare the ground for the coming downfall.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 334–376.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 334–376.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 376–426.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 212–256.
• William A. Brown, The Caliphate of Hamdullahi, ca. 1818–1864: A Study in African History and Tradition, University of Wisconsin Press (1969), pp. 124–198.
• Bintou Sanankoua, Un empire peul au XIXe siècle: La Diina du Maasina, Karthala (1990), pp. 156–214.
• Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Jacques Daget, L’Empire peul du Macina, IFAN-Mouton (1962), pp. 256–314 [for the Massina side of the conflict].
• Yves Person, Samori: une révolution dyula, tome I, IFAN-Dakar (1968), pp. 168–212.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa and additional writings on the Hamdullahi fitna; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 88–168.