The Downfall

In the preceding article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ captured the Bambara kingdom of Segu in 1859 in a great military campaign, how in the years that followed the juridical and spiritual tensions with the Massina Imamate of Hamdullahi gradually escalated, and how in May 1862 the tragic fitna between the Umarian-Tijani state and the Massina-Qadiri Imamate found its outcome in the martyrdom of Ahmad III ﵀ of Massina and in the capture of Hamdullahi. We also saw that the fitna unleashed a spiritual crisis in the Umarian community that would reach its full expression in the coming Massina revolt. This article follows the last two years of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life, from the occupation of Hamdullahi in 1862 to his death in a cave near Bandiagara in February 1864, and it describes how the eagle of West Africa, in his downfall, bequeathed to his successors the work he had built up in his lifelong jihad, in a form in which the spiritual meaning, in its final shape, transcends the outward defeat.

The Massina revolt

In the second half of 1862 and throughout all of 1863, a gradual but ultimately general revolt against the Umarian occupation unfolded in the Massina region, in which the local Fulbe population, under the leadership of surviving members of the Ahmadu Lobbo dynasty and of local Qadiri ʿulamāʾ, waged an extensive guerrilla war against the Umarian occupying force. The revolt was carried by a combination of Massina-Fulbe fighters, local Qadiri adherents, and in a number of cases also by Tooroodo emigrants in Massina who, in their new surroundings, had taken the side of their hosts against the advancing Umarian occupation. It was a complex struggle in which the familiar Tooroodo-Tijani-versus-Massina-Qadiri divide did not run solely along spiritual fault lines but was also cut across by family and local ties.

For Umar Tall ﵀, who in the second half of 1862 and early 1863 resided in Segu for the overall direction of his jihad state, the revolt represented an unexpected and spiritually exceptionally burdensome development. He received in his headquarters the reports of the growing resistance as it gradually took shape, and by the end of 1862 he understood that the revolt had reached a scale that required his personal presence in Massina if he wished to counter it through military intervention. In December 1862 he undertook extensive deliberations with his closest associates and with his son Ahmadu, and in January 1863 he departed personally for Hamdullahi to take charge of the coming counter-operation.

The return to Hamdullahi

The journey from Segu to Hamdullahi, which passed through the Umarian-occupied territories, took place in January and February 1863 under conditions in which the ordinary occupation order was still largely intact but in which the effects of the revolt in the Massina communities were gradually becoming visible. In the villages surrounding Hamdullahi, the Umarian garrisons had in a number of cases already come under pressure from local uprisings, and the general security situation was noticeably deteriorating. Umar Tall ﵀ undertook extensive local visits to the neighbouring mosques along his route, and in each community he delivered an extensive Friday sermon in which he set out anew the spiritual grounds of the Umarian presence and in which he framed the coming counter-operation as a matter of shared spiritual responsibility.

In Hamdullahi itself he found a city in a tense condition, with the Umarian garrisons, under the overall command of his son Tijani Tall ﵀, in a defensive position, and with the local population largely silent but clearly hostile towards the occupying force. In March 1863 he assumed overall command, and he began planning the counter-operation that was meant, in the months that followed, to break the Massina revolt in its entirety.

The spiritual character of the revolt

For the local Massina-Fulbe population, and in particular for the Qadiri ʿulamāʾ who had held a central position in the Imamate during the years under Ahmad III ﵀, the revolt against the Umarian occupation was not merely a political but above all a spiritual undertaking. They delivered extensive Friday sermons in the local mosques in which they framed the Umarian occupation as spiritually illegitimate, they sent letters to the wider West African Muslim world invoking the Sokoto-Qadiri tradition for spiritual support of their resistance, and they organised communal dhikr gatherings in which the spiritual character of the Massina-Qadiri tradition was celebrated. For the ordinary Massina fighters, this spiritual dimension gave the revolt a quality that allowed them to place their own readiness for sacrifice within a spiritual framework, and it kept the morale of the revolt high throughout the long months of its duration.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, this spiritual character of the revolt constituted an exceptionally challenging development, for it placed the Umarian presence in a position in which he faced not merely a political but a genuinely spiritual adversary. In his Friday sermons in Hamdullahi during the months of his presence there, he spoke at length about the spiritual distress that the inter-Muslim war aroused in his own conscience, and he asked his followers to respect, in their struggle, the spiritual authority of the local ʿulamāʾ on a personal level even in the moments when their political positions were opposed. It was an attitude that gave the Umarian occupation a more humane character than an ordinary military occupation would have had, but that in the end could not alter the general course of the revolt.

The counter-operation

The counter-operation that Umar Tall ﵀ undertook in the course of 1863 was an extensive military campaign against the rebellious Massina communities, combining direct engagements with the insurgent forces and administrative measures to restore the loyalty of the local population in an altered form. In the first months of the operation the Umarian troops achieved considerable successes, with the recapture of several Massina villages that had risen in revolt in the preceding months, and with the gradual re-establishment of the Umarian administrative grip on the regions surrounding Hamdullahi.

But towards the second half of 1863 the course of the campaign began to turn unfavourably. The insurgents, who in their guerrilla tactics offered the Umarian troops no frontal battle but carried out their work through an extensive pattern of ambushes, night attacks on Umarian garrisons, and quiet disruptions of the supply chains, brought about a gradual exhaustion of the Umarian forces. The Umarian troops, at their long distance from their original supply bases in Dinguiraye and Segu, and in the difficult geography of the Massina terrain with its extensive marshlands and its dense forests, suffered increasingly from hunger, from tropical diseases, and from the general exhaustion of a prolonged campaign in hostile territory.

The difficulties of supply

In the course of the campaigns of 1863, a central difficulty of the Umarian counter-operation was the growing impact of the supply problems. The Umarian supply lines ran from their original bases in Segu and Dinguiraye over a distance of several hundred kilometres through territories that were partly under Umarian control but that were increasingly disrupted by local uprisings. The caravans that brought grain stores, ammunition, and general military equipment to Hamdullahi and to the neighbouring garrisons came under attack by local insurgent forces with increasing frequency, and in a number of cases entire supply expeditions were lost in a manner that was recorded with growing concern in the Umarian administrative reports.

For Umar Tall ﵀ in Hamdullahi, this meant that he had to rely increasingly on local food sources, and these were not available in sufficient quantity in the difficult agricultural seasons of 1863 and amid the extensive disruption of local farming activity by the conditions of war. Hunger became an unmistakable reality among the Umarian troops in the months that followed, and the overall condition of the campaign fell into a gradual exhaustion that made the eventual retreat unavoidable.

The fall of the Umarian position in Massina

By the end of 1863 the overall Umarian position in Massina was in serious deterioration. Hamdullahi itself was placed under an extensive siege by an insurgent force under the leadership of Bal-Maazi and of a number of other Massina leaders, and in December 1863 or January 1864 the city was partly taken by the insurgents, forcing the Umarian occupying force to withdraw into a central fortified complex. Umar Tall ﵀ decided in January 1864 that the position in Hamdullahi was no longer tenable, and with his closest associates and a smaller military escort he undertook a retreat from the city eastward towards the mountainous Dogon country near Bandiagara, where he hoped, in temporarily safer circumstances, to be able to prepare the re-establishment of his power.

The retreat from Hamdullahi unfolded amid extensive hardships, in which the Umarian fighters and their families moved through the Massina interior in a stretched-out refugee column under constant pursuit by the insurgent forces. Possessions were lost along the way, smaller skirmishes with pursuing enemies occurred almost daily, and the general morale of the retreating party was one of embittered exhaustion. Towards the end of January 1864, Umar Tall ﵀ reached the mountainous area near Bandiagara in the Dogon country with the remnants of his immediate company, in an outcome in which his jihad state, in its outward form, was in fundamental crisis.

The role of Tijani Tall ﵀ in the defence

Tijani Tall ﵀, a nephew of Umar Tall ﵀ from the Halwar clan who had already served as an independent divisional commander in the Bambouk campaign of 1855, displayed in this final phase a personal courage and military competence that has been preserved as a lasting memory in the Umarian tradition. He led the direct defence of Hamdullahi in the last months of 1863 and in the first weeks of 1864 in a combination of organised defensive operations and strategic withdrawals that kept the Umarian fighting force exhausted but still militarily coherent. His work in these months formed the bedding upon which the eventual retreat of Umar Tall ﵀ from Hamdullahi in January 1864 could be carried out in an orderly manner.

For the history of the Umarian state after 1864, Tijani Tall ﵀ would remain an indispensable figure, for in the following three decades he led the western wing of the jihad state in a posture of defence against the French colonial expansion, and he died in 1888 in circumstances that are treated with great respect in the Umarian tradition. His work in the years between 1864 and 1888 formed an important part of the outward continuation of the Umarian tradition in its transitional phase up to the definitive French colonial takeover in 1893.

The cave near Bandiagara

The Dogon surroundings

Bandiagara, geographically an extensive plateau of sandstone formations in central Mali, was in 1864 the heartland of the Dogon population, which in this region had preserved its distinct cultural and religious character for many centuries in a combination of traditional Dogon religion and gradual conversion to Islam among the higher ranks. The local Dogon chiefs maintained a political independence which could mean both hostility towards an advancing Umarian presence and accommodation with it in the event of a common enemy. In the specific circumstances of February 1864, with the Massina insurgents as a common enemy, the local Dogon chiefs opted for a cautious accommodation with the Umarian refugees, and they gave their permission for a temporary stay in the caves of the neighbouring mountain range.

The Dogon cultural world, in its specific expression with its elaborate cosmology, its religious symbol system, and its distinctive architectural tradition in the sandstone escarpments, offered the Umarian refugees a geographical refuge that was difficult of access for the pursuing Massina troops. The caves of Bandiagara, some of them of an age that can be measured in millennia and which in their form constituted a genuinely natural system of defence, gave the last phase of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life a geographical setting that would form the bedding for his own tragic death.

In the mountainous area near Bandiagara, a region of steep sandstone cliffs and extensive cave systems that had been inhabited by the local Dogon population for centuries, Umar Tall ﵀ established with his closest company a temporary refuge in a cave complex that, in its geographical situation, offered a natural defensive position. The local Dogon population was in its majority non-Muslim and in its initial attitude not outspokenly friendly towards the Umarian presence, but the insurgent forces pursuing him presented a common enemy that brought the local chiefs into a cautious accommodation with the Umarian refugees.

In the cave near Bandiagara, Umar Tall ﵀ spent February 1864 in a state of spiritual seclusion, in long hours of prayer and of reflection on the outcome of his life’s work. His physical strength, which had declined sharply in the preceding months of campaign and retreat, deteriorated further in the mountainous environment, and he sensed, as the tradition relates, the approach of his own death in a manner that had been prepared in his own conscience over his long life. In these final weeks he gave extensive spiritual instructions to his closest associates, and in separate audiences he spoke with his son Tijani Tall ﵀ and with his other subordinate commanders about the coming responsibility they would have to bear after his death.

The last instructions to Ahmadu

A specific part of the last instructions concerned the transfer of overall authority over the Umarian jihad state to his son Ahmadu, who during these months resided in Segu in overall charge of the eastern part of the state. Umar Tall ﵀ sent, as the tradition relates, in January or the first week of February 1864 a final long letter to Ahmadu in which he prepared him extensively for the assumption of overall authority and in which he gave specific instructions for the coming political and spiritual continuation of the work. The letter, insofar as it has been preserved in later copies, dealt with the administrative organisation of the state, the relationship with the Sokoto-Qadiri tradition, the coming relationship with the French colonial power, the spiritual discipline of the Tijani tarīqa, and the general duty to preserve the community through the difficulties that would befall it in the years ahead.

For Ahmadu, who received the letter in Segu while his father was still alive, it constituted a spiritual testament that would guide him in the following years as overall holder of authority over the Umarian state. He held the leadership until 1893 in a manner that kept the jihad state in a posture of defence against the French colonial expansion, and his work in the three decades after his father’s death formed, in its own right, the next chapter of the West African Umarian tradition, to which a separate historical study could be devoted.

The death

The exact circumstances of Umar Tall’s ﵀ death have not been preserved unambiguously in the tradition, with different versions coexisting in mixed form in the Umarian tradition, in the Massina tradition, in the French colonial reports, and in the local Dogon telling. The most common reconstruction, based on a comparative study of all the sources by David Robinson, places the event on 14 February 1864, or, in minority views, on an earlier or later date in the same month. In the most widely followed account, it took place in an explosion of a gunpowder store in the cave near Bandiagara, in which Umar Tall ﵀ and a number of his closest associates were killed by the direct force of the blast.

Whether the explosion was the result of an accident, of an attack by the pursuing insurgents, or of a deliberate act by Umar Tall ﵀ himself to prevent capture by his enemies has been elaborated differently in the various traditions. The Umarian tradition in its usual form holds to the first explanation of an accidental explosion, while a number of Massina traditions prefer the attack explanation, and some modern historians do not rule out the third possibility. What is certain in most reconstructions is that Umar Tall ﵀ died on 14 February 1864 in the cave near Bandiagara in an outwardly sudden manner, and that his body was recovered and buried in the following days, step by step, by his surviving associates.

The news of his death

The reports of Umar Tall’s ﵀ death spread gradually throughout all of West Africa in the following weeks and months, and in every community where they arrived they received their own spiritual response. In Segu, Ahmadu received the news in the first week of March 1864, and he carried out an extensive period of mourning in which the transfer of overall authority from father to son was completed in a communal form. In Dinguiraye, the original capital of the jihad state, Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ received the news a few days later, and he led a communal janazah prayer in the central mosque in which the entire Umarian community took part. In Sokoto, Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀ received the news in May 1864, and he sent a formal letter of condolence to Ahmadu in which he expressed his sympathy in a spirit of general Muslim unity.

In Saint-Louis, Governor Faidherbe received the news in June 1864, and in his correspondence with Paris he carried out an extensive analysis of the consequences of the death for French colonial strategy in West Africa. He understood that the direct Umarian threat to French expansion had been considerably diminished by the death of its original leader, and in the following years he planned a gradual expansion of the French position that would subject the Umarian state under Ahmadu to a process of erosion.

The grave near Bandiagara

The grave of Umar Tall ﵀ was arranged in simple form by his surviving close associates in the mountainous area near Bandiagara, at a spot that was quietly respected by the local Dogon population and that in the following decades grew into a place of pilgrimage for Muslims from Senegambia and from the wider West African Tijani community. The grave was marked in its ordinary form with a simple stone marker and with some Arabic inscriptions that indicated at length the name and the spiritual standing of the deceased, without the ornamentation that in other Muslim traditions would have been added for a figure of his stature.

In the twentieth century, and in particular after the independence of Mali in 1960, the grave was maintained with extensive state care by the Malian Muslim community, and it remains to this day a place of pilgrimage for pilgrims from West Africa and from the wider Tijani community who find in Umar Tall’s ﵀ life’s work a spiritual example that has shaped the generations of West African Muslims since his time in a lasting way.

The spiritual meaning of the dying

For the mainstream Tijani tradition in its interpretation of Umar Tall’s ﵀ dying, the event at Bandiagara remains a spiritual moment which, in its usual reading, approaches the category of martyrdom. The tradition of his closest associates relates that Umar Tall ﵀ was in his usual state of prayer in the hours before the explosion, that in his last words he pronounced the names of Allah ﷻ and of the Prophet ﷺ in his usual discipline of Tijani dhikr, and that the explosion itself came as a sudden end without him showing pain or fear in its course. Whether this tradition corresponds precisely in its details to the actual course of the event can, given the suddenness of the explosion, no longer be established with certainty, but it has acquired in the Umarian tradition its place as the spiritual interpretation of the dying.

In modern historiography the account of the event is treated with considerable caution, with the recognition that the tradition assimilated it to the conventional spiritual forms in which a Tijani imam is remembered in its telling. What is acknowledged in both traditions, the Umarian-Tijani and the modern-historical, is that the outcome was for Umar Tall ﵀ personally the end of a long and remarkable life whose principal features, in their spiritual working, have found a lasting place in the West African Muslim tradition.

The legacy

The legacy of al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, in its West African and in its wider Muslim dimensions, is of a scope that in its full extent is still recognisable in the Tijani communities of Senegambia, of Mali, of Mauritania, and of the extensive diaspora in Europe and in the United States. The Tijaniyya in West Africa, whose great geographical spread was established through his work in the years between 1832 and 1864, is today the largest Sufi brotherhood in the region, with several tens of millions of adherents and with an extensive network of zawiyas, scholars, and communal prayer traditions that go back to his work in an unbroken line.

The Umarian state in its outward form was continued in the years after his death under the leadership of his son Ahmadu in a posture of defence, until in 1893 the French colonial expansion under the commanders Archinard and Gallieni subdued the last Umarian stronghold in Bandiagara and the state, in its outward form, was definitively absorbed into the French colonial order. But in its spiritual form the Umarian tradition would survive the French colonial period in the altered shape of a Sufi brotherhood, and in the twentieth century, in the course of the Senegalese, Malian, and Mauritanian periods of independence, it would flourish anew under the leadership of Saidu Nourou Tall ﵀, a great-grandson, and of other Tooroodo members of the extended Tall clan who continue the spiritual authority of the Umarian tradition in a contemporary form.

The Tooroodo presence in Karta

A specific consequence of the Umarian jihad expansion that was of lasting importance for the demographic composition of the West African Muslim population was the extensive Tooroodo presence in Karta brought about by the emigration of the 1850s and 1860s. John Hanson’s study of 1996 has shown at length how the Tooroodo communities that had migrated in these decades from Fouta Toro to the Karta plains grew in the following generations into a lasting Tooroodo presence in the Sahelian interior, and how they have continued the Tijani discipline of Umar Tall ﵀ in an unbroken line across the generations. For the modern Malian Muslim community, this Tooroodo-Karta presence is a central element of its own historical identity, and it continues to show the spiritual working of the Umarian jihad in living form.

The spiritual significance

For the modern Muslim in West Africa, in Europe, in North America, and in the wider Tijani community, Umar Tall ﵀ remains a figure of spiritual authority in whom the combination of scholarship, spiritual discipline, personal courage, and political responsibility was represented in an inimitable way. His work Rimah remains a central text of the West African Tijani tradition, his life’s work remains a point of reference for the form of a community guided by the Shariʿa in its relation to foreign domination, and his personal example remains, in the local Muslim tradition, a figure through whom the generations can connect their own spiritual aspirations, in a lasting way, with the West African Islamic tradition of the nineteenth century.

At the end of this cycle of ten articles on al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ we may observe, in a brief closing reflection, that his work in its outward form ended in defeat, with the fall of his jihad state to the French colonial expansion and with his own death in an explosion in a cave near Bandiagara, but that in its spiritual form the work has found, in the century and a half that followed, a lasting effect in West Africa that, in its full scope, places the outward outcome of his life in an entirely different light. The eagle of the Senegambia, who departed in 1828 from the Tooroodo village of Halwar for the hajj, and who in 1864 folded his wings for the last time in a cave near Bandiagara, found in his spiritual legacy the form of an enduring West African Tijani tradition that, in its working, would continue to hold the generations after him in an unbroken line.

May Allah ﷻ have mercy on him and on his fellow fighters, and may the cause to which they devoted their lives in their time continue, in its spiritual form, in the generations that come after us.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 376–418.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 376–418.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 426–478.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 256–302.
• William A. Brown, The Caliphate of Hamdullahi, ca. 1818–1864, University of Wisconsin Press (1969), pp. 198–248.
• Bintou Sanankoua, Un empire peul au XIXe siècle: La Diina du Maasina, Karthala (1990), pp. 214–268.
• Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Jacques Daget, L’Empire peul du Macina, IFAN-Mouton (1962), pp. 314–376.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 204–256.
• B. Olatunji Oloruntimehin, The Segu Tukulor Empire, Longman (1972), pp. 124–298 [for the history of the Umarian state after 1864 under Ahmadu].
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa and Suyuf al-Saʿid; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 168–246 [for the last phase of his life].