Islamic Takrur

On the Senegal River, where fishing nets hang heavier than anywhere else, one king spoke a word no one in West Africa had spoken before him. He said: from today this land belongs to Allah ﷻ.

The River Nobody Knew

Far to the west of Kumbi, toward the lower reaches of the Senegal River, lay a region that not every caravan visited and that on the Mediterranean world maps of the 11th century was often marked with no more than a vague line. Yet the Senegal is no small stream, but one of the great waterways of the Sahel, a river lined with villages of fishing and farming, whose fertile floodplains produce better grain than the surrounding savanna. Here, in the 11th century, lay a kingdom that the Arabic sources call Takrur, a name that refers both to a specific town and to the whole realm that arose along this river, under a people who would later be called the Toucouleur but who in their own language called themselves Haalpulaar’en, the speakers of Pulaar. It is this Pulaar, also known as Fulfulde, that in the centuries to follow would move through Africa as one of the great engines of Islamization.

A King with a Name

The king of Ghana often remains nameless in the Arabic sources, “the Ghana”, not a person but an office, whereas the king of Takrur does have a name that has been preserved: War Jabi, sometimes written as War Ndiaye, sometimes as Labi, and in the Arabic sources as حرب جابي. Historians agree that he converted to Islam somewhere around the year 1040, and since according to al-Bakri ﵀'s later note he died in 1040 or 1041, his conversion and his active period as an Islamic king must have fallen before 1040, somewhere in the 1030s, perhaps earlier. What the sources clearly tell us is that War Jabi did not merely become a Muslim himself: he declared Islam the religion of the state, he pressed his subjects strongly to follow his example, he introduced the sharia into the administration of justice, built mosques and sent envoys to the Almoravids in the western Sahara.

He was the first West African king who was not only a Muslim, but whose entire project of state was Islamic.

Why Takrur and Not Elsewhere

Why is it Takrur that makes this leap? Several factors come together.

1. Geography: Takrur lies closer to the Almoravid movement rising in the western Sahara, and the Sanhaja Imazighen among whom the Almoravids emerge, the Gudala, the Lamtuna, the Massufa, are geographically and ethnically linked to Takrur’s northern border region, so that the fever of Islamic reform that will produce the Almoravids is also felt by War Jabi.

2. The lightness of its political inheritance: Takrur is no imperial heir like Ghana, it has no massive priestly caste defending a fully developed pre-Islamic state religion, and its royal legitimacy is younger and more flexible, so that a king here can push through a religious change of course without immediately dismantling an internal bloc of power.

3: The class of Islamized Pulaar speakers already present. Before War Jabi’s official conversion there had already been generations of Muslims in Takrur, in the merchant class, in parts of the military aristocracy, and above all in a rising group of the Islamically educated who had already catalysed the king’s conversion. Al-Bakri ﵀ mentions that War Jabi had followers who were Muslims before him, so that his conversion was no one-man decision but the making official of a process already under way.

Al-Bakri’s Record

Al-Bakri ﵀ mentions it explicitly in a short, almost passing sentence: “The king of the Takrur, who converted to Islam and died on the path of goodness, was War Jabi.” He also relates that War Jabi’s son, who ascends the throne around 1040 or 1041, continues the Islamic course and even allies himself militarily with the Almoravids, so that when Abdallah ibn Yasin ﵀, the great spiritual leader of the Almoravids, fell in 1058 in a battle against the Godala clan, Takruri support stood among the Almoravid troops. The ties were warm, strategic and mutually advantageous. The Tarikh as-Sudan takes over this information centuries later but adds accents of its own, and al-Sa’di ﵀ presents War Jabi as an early hero of Islam in bilad al-sudan, a forerunner of the great Muslim rulers who would come later. Thus his name spread and his example endured, for in the memory of later West African historians War Jabi was not the king of a small state but the first head of state to set the good example.

A State Religion in the Pulaar Manner

The notion of a “state religion” means something different in the 11th century than in modern times. It does not mean that every subject is individually a Muslim, but that the royal office, the law, public proclamation and ceremony are all framed in terms of Islam, so that villages beyond the capital could long keep their own customs, while anyone who wished to function publicly in Takrur did so within an Islamic framework. That framework was shaped by a Pulaar-Arabic blending that acquired a flavour of its own, and the mosques of Takrur, whose architectural remains are limited but of which Arabic sources and later oral traditions speak, were built in local style, of mud, wood, flat roofs and a square minaret. The sermons were presumably still delivered in Arabic for the scholars among the Muslims, but explanation and qiyas reasoning will doubtless have taken place in Pulaar as well.

What arose here was an example of Islamization that was direct, institutional and top-down, and that at the same time preserved cultural continuity with what came before: Islam was not set apart from the Pulaar identity, but woven into it.

The Edge of the Sword: Expansion in the Name of Religion

For all the spiritual value of this transformation, the politics must not be forgotten, for War Jabi and his son also used Islam strategically, defining their non-Muslim neighbours as targets for campaigns and sending expeditions against the peoples further south, often the Serer and the Wolof in their early, pre-Islamic forms, in which pressure to convert and political subjugation ran through each other. Ibn Battuta ﵀ will still be writing a few centuries later of Takrur as an especially pious Islamic region where the practice was strict, and that reputation was formed in this early phase, with a hard edge beside its spiritual shine.

The Influence on the Almoravids, and the Other Way Around

The classic telling is that the Almoravids Islamized West Africa, and in part that is true, but in part the influence ran the other way, for Takrur supplied troops to the Almoravids, and Takrur’s piety and early Islamization of the state were a source of inspiration for Abdallah ibn Yasin ﵀, not only the reverse. The Almoravid movement was no northern import that came to reform the south, but was to a significant degree a product of the Saharo-Sahelian frontier, in which northern Sanhaja and southern Takruri marched together. This matters for how we understand the Islamization of West Africa, for it is no one-way traffic from the Maghreb but a two-way process, in which black African Muslims were co-authors of the entire movement that historians usually call “Almoravid”, even though the leaders whom modern historiography remembers are mostly more northern.

A Model That Lived On

Takrur lost its position as the leading Islamic state in West Africa after the 12th century, politically overshadowed by the rising Mali and later by the Fulbe jihads that would follow centuries afterward. But the model that War Jabi had established remained available as an option in the West African political imagination: a king who makes his throne explicitly Islamic, who raises the sharia to the foundation of law and who actively calls his subjects to conversion. When Sundiata Keita founded Mali in the 13th century he was himself not yet a rigorous Muslim like War Jabi, but the memory of what Takrur had been, of the possibility of an explicitly Islamic kingship, was available, and later Mansas would build on it.

The Landscape of the Conversion

Before the story of Takrur is closed, a look is due at the physical and human setting in which this conversion took place.

The Senegal valley is a remarkable region, for on one side stretches the endless Sahel with its dry grasses, while on the other, northward, the Sahara approaches quickly, and the river itself runs like a green cord through these contrasting landscapes. On the north bank in the 11th century live mainly Islamized Amazigh groups and their Pulaar-like allies, while on the south bank and in the higher interior live Serer, Wolof and Mandinka-related groups, who for the most part kept their own religious traditions, so that the river was not only border but also connection. Takrur itself encompassed territory on both banks, but its heartland lay on the north bank, where places such as Walaldé, Silla and the town of Takrur itself formed the centre: here War Jabi built his first mosques, here his fiqh classes were taught, and here spiritual leaders from Sijilmasa and Awdaghust received guests on their journey southward.

The physical remains of this early Takrur are thin, for modern archaeology has excavated a few sites, but the scarcity of worked material makes large-scale reconstruction difficult, so that much of what we know, we know from the words of al-Bakri ﵀, al-Idrisi and the later West African chronicles.