The Brother Who Stopped at Kano: Abdullahi dan Fodio and the Conscience of the Jihad

He was the man who wrote the legal handbooks, recited the qasidas, and decided not to follow his army any further when he saw what his young commanders were doing in the name of Islam. Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ was no pamphleteer. He was the voice that said: this is no longer what we set out from Degel for.

Two Brothers, One Movement

Begin with the family portrait. In the village of Degel, somewhere in Gobir, south of present-day Sokoto, Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was born in 1754. Twelve years later, in 1766, his younger brother Abdullahi was born to the same father, Muhammad Fodio, and the same Fulbe-Toronkawa line. They grew up as brothers in a learned family: their father was malam, their mother Hauwa was from a Fulbe clan with its own ulama tradition, their uncle had studied under Jibril ibn Umar in Agadès. They read together, prayed together, studied together. Their intellectual formation was parallel: Maliki fiqh under the same teachers, tasawwuf in the Qadiriyya tariqa, Arabic grammar according to the Ajurrumiyya, tafsir in the classical manner.

But they developed differently. Usman ﵀ became the preacher, the visionary, the man who according to his own writings received a vision in Degel in 1794 or 1795 in which he was — through the intercession of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ — appointed by the Prophet ﷺ as reformer, as mujaddid of his time. He was handed the sayf al-haqq, the sword of truth, in that vision. This is the charisma moment, the moment when an ordinary teacher became a movement leader.

Abdullahi ﵀ was not in that. Not because he was absent — he simply lived in Degel — but because he had a different mind. Abdullahi ﵀ was the writer, the jurist, the systematizer. He thought in chapters, not in visions. He worked with commentaries and super-commentaries, with Maliki fiqh compendia like Khalil’s Mukhtasar and Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani’s ﵀ Risala, with tafsir works like al-Baydawi ﵀ and al-Qurtubi ﵀. He was what in a more classical Arabic world would be called the faqih-mudarris: the jurist-teacher, the man who builds the legal infrastructure of a movement while another carries the flame.

Both roles were necessary. No jihad movement in Islamic history has functioned without such a combination. Muhammad ﷺ had his Abu Bakr ﵁ and his 'Umar ﵁. 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri ﵀ had his legal advisers. The jihad of Shaykh Ahmadu in Masina, of which we shall yet speak, would yield a comparable pair of brothers. In Fodio land, Usman ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀ were that pair.

The Hijra to Gudu

February 1804. Tensions with the Hausa sultan Yunfa of Gobir are running high. Yunfa has openly threatened Usman’s ﵀ followers. There have been skirmishes around Degel. The shehu decides on a hijra — a migration-to-safety, deliberately modeled on the Prophet’s ﷺ hijra from Mecca to Medina in 622. The whole community — ulama, women, children, Fulbe herds — leaves Degel for Gudu, a village a few days’ journey away.

Abdullahi ﵀ is there. He writes, later, in his Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, with visible emotion about that journey. He describes the dust, the thirst, the elderly who could not walk fast enough, the children who were carried. He describes the moment when his brother was chosen as amir al-muʾminin, as commander of the believers, under a tree in Gudu. He describes his own bayʿa, his oath of allegiance, to his brother. He describes the poems he composed along the way — a qasida that begins with the image of the traveler longing for the umma, a second about the sword of truth that does not rust.

These qasidas are still present in the Sokoto repertoire. The Tazyīn al-Waraqāt — about which more shortly — preserves them, for Abdullahi ﵀ quotes his own poetry at strategic moments in his autobiography to anchor the emotion of an event. This is no vanity. This is craft. The early Islamic tradition of the sira, the life-narrative, works the same way: Ibn Ishaq’s Sira of the Prophet ﷺ continually quotes poems by Hassan ibn Thabit ﵁ to carry the emotional weight of events. Abdullahi ﵀ works in that line.

The Campaigns and the Command

From 1804 to 1807, Abdullahi ﵀ is in the field. He commands an army on the right flank of the jihad, while his nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀ — still young, in his early twenties — leads the left flank and the shehu himself holds spiritual command. They fight Yunfa’s army at Tabkin Kwotto in 1804 and win. They march in plundering fashion through Gobir, Kebbi, parts of Zamfara. They build a coalition of Fulbe clans, they recruit Hausa peasants who have had enough of Yunfa’s taxes, they extend their authority steadily.

But what is happening in the Fulani armies while they fight? That is the question Abdullahi ﵀ would later have the courage to ask. For under the banner of the jihad gathered not only learned warriors with pure motives. There also came Fulani youths who seized upon the war to enlarge their own clan wealth. There came opportunists who saw a kafir in every peasant the moment the jihad legitimized their plunder. There came commanders who took slaves from Muslim villages on the pretext that these villages were “syncretistic.” There came ranks and command structures based on Fulbe clan solidarity, not on Islamic communal law.

Abdullahi ﵀ saw it. And he became sick of it. Not dramatically sick, not spectacularly so, but in the slow way a learned man falls ill when day after day he notices that what he had helped to launch is no longer what he had signed up for.

The Refusal at Kano

Here comes the moment that marks Abdullahi ﵀ in history. 1807. The Fulani armies are marching north for a decisive campaign against Alkalawa, the Gobir capital. Yunfa is there with his last troops. If Alkalawa falls, Gobir falls, and if Gobir falls, the jihad becomes a completed project.

Abdullahi ﵀ must go along. He is the right hand, the commander, the brother of the shehu. His absence would be noticed. But he turns back. He arrives in Kano — the city that had just been taken by the jihad fighters, under the emirate of Sulaimanu — and stops there. He goes no further north. He settles in Kano for a period that lasts several months, according to some sources a year.

Why? The Tazyīn al-Waraqāt is explicit. Abdullahi ﵀ writes that in the last campaign he had seen something he could no longer endure. He writes — and we must quote this passage literally, for it is the heart of his legacy — that some of the jihad commanders, despite the orders of the shehu, had divided the spoils unequally, treated Muslims as kuffar when it suited them, raped women whom under shariʿa they were not permitted to take, and sown fitnah within their own ranks. He writes that he gradually realized that he himself had not spoken sharply enough to stop it. That his legal advice to the commanders had been ignored. That his brother, the shehu, had by now become too ill and too distant to control every action of his deputies. That the jihad in its spiritual-reformist core was being betrayed by the very people who outwardly accepted it.

He therefore wrote, in Kano, a text that is partly autobiography, partly lament, partly self-criticism and partly self-quest. The Tazyīn al-Waraqāt bi-jamʿ baʿd ma li min al-ashʿar, “The Adornment of the Pages by the Gathering of Some of My Poetry.” He recounts his life up to that point. He quotes his own poems. And he confesses, with remarkable honesty, that he had considered walking away from the jihad to make hijra to Mecca, to devote the rest of his life to prayer and study rather than to commanding young men who would not be corrected.

This was, for an eyewitness and co-architect of a jihad, an extraordinary commitment to honesty. There are few parallels in the Islamic reform tradition. The Tazyīn is, in this respect, comparable to the Munqidh min al-Dalal of al-Ghazali ﵀, the spiritual autobiography in which that great thinker describes how at the height of his juristic career in Baghdad he left everything behind to rebuild his faith in Damascus and Jerusalem. Abdullahi ﵀ writes from the same tradition: a scholar willing to criticize his own position, a faqih with enough tasawwuf in him to see the gap between the lived jihad and its ideal form.

The shehu heard about it. Messengers went back and forth. In the end, Usman ﵀ persuaded his brother not to leave for Mecca but to return to the movement, on one condition: Abdullahi ﵀ would no longer involve himself in the central administration but would receive his own sector, his own emirate, where he could shape his legal and spiritual program without having to bow to Fulbe commanders who ignored him. That sector became Gwandu.

Gwandu: The Western Emirate

Gwandu lies at approximately 12.69° north and 4.60° east, about a hundred kilometers southwest of Sokoto, on the eastern edge of the Rima River valley. In 1808 it was formally assigned to Abdullahi ﵀ as emir’s seat. The emirate he governed comprised the western vassal emirates: Kebbi, parts of Nupe land, Ilorin (Yoruba territory, later an emirate in its own right), Nikki, and the upper-Niger region including what is today northern Benin and western Niger.

This is an area as large as the Netherlands and Belgium combined, with great ethnic variety: Fulani, Hausa, Kebbi, Zabarma, Nupe, Yoruba groups. Abdullahi ﵀ had to build an Islamic administration there from scratch. He did so with his characteristic systematism. He founded madrasas. He appointed Qadis. He wrote administrative advice. He acted personally as jurist in complex matters, for example concerning the treatment of non-Muslim Nupe peasants who fell under the emirate of Ilorin.

And he wrote. The Gwandu years are Abdullahi’s ﵀ most productive. It is here that he completed his juristic magnum opus.

The Diya al-Hukkām: A Handbook for Muslim Rulers

Diya al-Hukkām fīmā la-hum wa ʿalayhim min al-aḥkām — “The Light of the Rulers Concerning What Their Rights and Duties Are According to the Law.” The title is difficult and so is the content, for Abdullahi ﵀ was not the kind of jurist who simplified to reach a broad audience. He wrote for other scholars, for Qadis, for emirs with their own legal advisers.

What is in it? A systematic treatment of administrative and criminal law within the Maliki tradition, applied to the specific circumstances of a newly founded Islamic state in Hausaland. Chapters on the rights and duties of the Amir al-Muʾminin, the caliph. On the appointment and dismissal of Qadis. On the requirements for witnesses in court cases. On ḥudud punishments and their conditions. On taʿzir punishments and the discretion of the judge. On warfare: which wars are jihad, which are not, how spoils must be divided, which captives may be enslaved and which not, how a treaty with a hostile state must be legally concluded.

This last chapter — spoils and captives — is the place where Abdullahi ﵀ converts his Kano experience into juristic norm. He is sharp. He states that ghanima, war booty, is legitimate only if strict conditions are met: the war itself must be lawful jihad, the opponent must be non-Muslim (or a legitimately combated apostate state), the division must take place according to shariʿa with one fifth for the state and four fifths for the warriors, female captives may not be taken if they are Muslim, Muslim property may not be looted under any pretext whatsoever. Every violation makes the spoils haram and the warrior accountable in the hereafter.

This is, in code form, the Tazyīn’s lament. What Abdullahi ﵀ had painfully witnessed in Kano he sets down here as juristic norm to which every future jihad commander must adhere. It is legislation by experience.

The Diya al-Hukkām became the standard work for the Sokoto Qadis and for the rulers of Gwandu and Sokoto. It was copied, commented upon, taught. As late as the late nineteenth century, Kano Qadis were citing it in their judgments. Together with al-Maghili’s ﵀ Tāj al-dīn and Usman’s ﵀ own Bayan wujub al-hijra, it is one of the three fundamentally juristic texts of Islamic Hausaland. Modern editions exist, including one by the Nigerian scholar Shehu Yamusa.

The Other Work: Commentaries, Poems, Sermons

The Diya is not Abdullahi’s ﵀ only book. He wrote a tafsir — a Qur’an commentary — called Diya al-Ta’wil fi Ma’ani al-Tanzil, which runs to four volumes and stands in the Maliki commentary tradition. He wrote Sabil al-Najat, a manual on the basic obligations of a Muslim, intended for beginning students. He wrote dozens of risalas on specific juristic questions. He wrote Kitab al-Niyya, a work on intention as the basis of shariʿa action, deeply rooted in the tasawwuf tradition. And he kept writing poetry, all his life, in Arabic and in Fulfulde.

Add up his writings and you get, by estimate, between fifty and sixty separate works — an oeuvre comparable in scope to the production of al-Suyuti ﵀ or al-Sakhawi ﵀. Not everything has been preserved; not everything has been published. But enough to say: Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ is one of the most prolific Islamic scholars West Africa has ever produced.

The Tension with Sokoto

Let us now come to a painful theme, for it belongs to the truth about Gwandu. The relationship between Abdullahi ﵀ and his nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀, after the death of the shehu in 1817, was not always cordial. It has been carefully reconstructed by modern historians such as Murray Last and Hamza Muhammad Maishanu from letters, notes in the Tazyīn and from supplementary Gwandu correspondence.

Abdullahi ﵀ was the elder, the uncle, the brother of the shehu, and the most important still-living scholar from the jihad generation. When the shehu died, part of the ulama expected that Abdullahi ﵀, not Bello ﵀, would become the next caliph. But Bello ﵀ was confirmed. The arguments for Bello ﵀: he was the effective organizer, he had built the new Sokoto, he had written the Infāq, he was closer to the operational center. The arguments that Gwandu circles could have advanced for Abdullahi ﵀: age, intellectual authority, direct bond with the deceased shehu.

There was no open conflict. Abdullahi ﵀ gave bayʿa to Bello ﵀. He recognized him as Amir al-Muʾminin. But the relationship was uneven and the unevenness hurt. Letters from the first years after 1817 show Abdullahi ﵀ as someone who maintained formal correctness but who clearly operated at a distance. In 1820 or 1821, brief unrest broke out between Sokoto troops and Gwandu troops over a border dispute at Kalambaina — never really a war, but enough to require diplomatic mediation by other emirs. Abdullahi ﵀ wrote afterward that he was shocked that blood had flowed between mujahidin.

And there was a deeper theme. Abdullahi ﵀ was, from Kano 1807 onward, always a jurist of strictness. He felt that the jihad had drifted too far from its original pure ideals. Bello ﵀, by contrast, was more pragmatic; he accepted compromises in administrative practice, he negotiated with the slaveholding economy, he sent Clapperton trade openings. For Abdullahi ﵀ this was going too far with the world. For Bello ﵀, Abdullahi’s ﵀ strictness was untenable in daily administration.

We are now reconstructing this from fragments. We must not exaggerate. The two men loved each other — that emerges from their letters. They respected each other. But they did not agree on how the jihad should be consolidated after its military victory. And that disagreement became a structural tension between Sokoto and Gwandu that would outlive them both.

Gwandu After Abdullahi

Abdullahi ﵀ died in 1828 or 1829 — the sources differ on the exact date — in Gwandu. He was sixty-two. His grave is still there, a place of pilgrimage for students and scholars. His son Muhammad Buhari ﵀ succeeded him as emir of Gwandu. The dynasty of Gwandu emirs remained the western pillar of the caliphate until the British colonization in 1903, and ceremonially still exists: the current emir of Gwandu, at the time of our lecture, is a direct descendant.

The specific cultural identity of Gwandu, as Abdullahi ﵀ shaped it, remained recognizable. Gwandu was stricter than Sokoto. Gwandu leaned more heavily on legal scholarship and less on diplomatic flexibility. Gwandu produced, in the decades after Abdullahi ﵀, more Qadis and fewer military commanders. This suited its founder. Every community carries something of the personality of its founder; Gwandu carried the personality of a conscientious jurist.

What We Learn from Him

Why do we devote a whole scene to Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, a figure unknown to many in the Dutch Antillean public? For two reasons.

First: because a mature relationship with our Islamic history requires us to see how the ulama criticized their own movements from within. The Islamic tradition is not only a tradition of victories. It is also a tradition of honest self-examination, of jurists who had the courage to write against their own movement, of reformers who saw that their reform itself needed reforming. Abdullahi ﵀ is an example of this. He is the internal corrector, not the external critic. That role has been needed in every Islamic civilization — and exists today, both in North Africa and in the Dutch mosques where our discussions on fiqh, gender and governance are taking place.

Second: because as Afro-Caribbean Muslims in the Netherlands, we must not reduce our heritage to a single kind of story. There is a triumphant story — our ancestors ruled empires, our scholars wrote masterpieces, our civilization at its height was internationally recognized. That story is true and important. But there is also a story of conscience-struggle, of jurists who refused to participate, of brothers who criticized each other’s projects, of holy movements that ran into their own excesses. That story is just as true and just as important. Abdullahi ﵀ stands in that second tradition.

Our ancestors, wherever they came from — from Gwandu, from Sokoto, from Kano, from Ilorin, from the bend of the Volta — carried both legacies with them across the Atlantic. Some came into contact with the jihad; others were carried out of it by slavery before its writings reached them. What we do today in our salafiyya and madhhab discussions in Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague is the continuation of a centuries-old internal debate within West African Islam. Abdullahi ﵀ is in that debate, even if we usually do not know it.

The Transition to the High Point

Abdullahi ﵀ died in 1828. His nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀ died in 1837. The generation of jihad founders had thereby left the stage. What followed, in the decades 1830-1860, was the Sokoto Caliphate at its zenith. An empire of thirty emirates, ten to fifteen million subjects, internationally recognized, economically diversified, culturally productive — and at the same time already showing the cracks that in 1903 would lead to its fall under British colonial firepower.

To that high point, with its glow and its fragility, we now turn.

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