Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1985. 420 pages
The historiography of the Central and Western Sudan has been dominated by the themes of long distance trade, state formation and islamization. The story usually begins in about AD 800 with the trans-Saharan trade caravans which connected the savannah zone with the Maghrib and the Near East. It runs through the medieval states of Ghana, Mali, Gao-Songhay, Hausaland, and Kanem-Bornu, and then culminates in the jihaads, or holy wars, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the states which resulted from them 1. The narrative is complemented by the theme of islamization: Muslim enclaves succeeded by Muslim courts which give way, via jihaad, to Muslim societies. Here Islamic law is practised for the first time among the majority of the population 2.
The main sources for these interpretations have been Arabic documents. In the earlier periods they were written largely by outsiders. By the time of the Songhay Empire and the “ high ” period of Timbuktu, the literary initiative had shifted to the savannah. The leaders of the jihaads capped the trend, furnishing the principal material for understanding their movements. Because of this documentation, a premium has been placed on the philological training of the Islamicist 3. Many of the most influential interpreters of savannah history have come from an “ Orientalist ” background, just as many of the most visible Africanist historians of other parts of the continent began in European imperial history. The availability of documentation, the training of the scholars, and the influence of the dominant views have reinforced one another.
The great contributions of this literature have been to provide a chronological and geographical context for savannah history and a very substantial account of the Muslim commercial, political and religious sites. Problems arise, however, when the views of the Arabic documents are taken as the history of the whole region and its people. The economic and ethnic contexts are not clearly seen. The training and self-interests of the authors are too rarely examined. The situations of the majority classes and the motivations of “ pagan ” dynasties are not explored.
These concerns become particularly acute when it comes to interpreting the five, Fulbe-dominated jihaads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The leaders of this ostensibly final process of islamization were also the authors of the documents. Often they were acting against obvious exploitation by non-Muslim or nominal Muslim authorities, and in the late nineteenth century they sometimes turned the instrument of jihaad into a defence against European intrusion. As philosopher kings, social protesters, and resistance heroes, they become irresistibly attractive. Their view of themselves as instruments of the faith and defenders of the homeland 4 coincides with the predilections of many modern scholars.
The jihaads should not be approached from such a narrow base. Some clerics wrote in opposition to them. The oral tradition of some societies and classes has already been collected, while much more can still be obtained through patient field work. European and colonial archives provide other perspectives. Some Africanists have used this broader documentation to explore the social and economic contexts of the movements, the connections between the jihadic states
and the larger region, and the connections between the jihidic leaders and scholars with quite different interests 5. It is within this broader base and richer vein of interpretation that I wish to set this study of thejihdd of Umar Tal, which is the fifth in the conventional series.
Umar waged a holy war in the Western Sudan between 1852 and 1864. In the process he created an ephemeral empire which resembled, in its expanse, the Sokoto confederation which emerged in the Central Sudan fifty years earlier. Umar's life was a study in the linkage of the earlyjihdds and states. He was born in Futa Toro in the Senegal River valley. He studied in Futa Jalon, the mountain kingdom of Guinea, and he returned there to lay the foundation for his movement. He visited Masina and the Sokoto confederation on his way to and from Mecca; indeed, he spent six years of his life in Sokoto at the court of Muhammad Bello.
In this study I will argue, with the grain of the dominant historiography, that Umar was deeply affected by his experience in these societies which shared both his religious aspiration and his Fulbhe ethnic identity. Moreover, I will show that his jihaad was inconceivable without the previous movements in the two Futas, which provided a Fulbe constituency that had been educated in the faith but had
grown dissatisfied with the material conditions and religious practice at home. This awareness and dissatisfaction had roots in religious affiliation, ethnic identity and class position within Futanke society.
At the same time I will go against the prevailing grain of the literature in demonstrating that the framework of Umar's jihaad differed radically from the dominant structures of the earlier movements. While the previous leaders sought to implant Islam primarily in their own societies, Umar recruited Muslim Fulbe to conquer other areas, notably the Mandinka and Bambara regions which separated the Futa states from Masina. An imperial structure was imposed by a Senegambian and Guinean “ west ” upon a Malian “ east ”. When this structure tried to encompass the Masina Fulbhe as well, it broke at the seams and the ephemeral empire shrank back to a series of garrison islands in a generally hostile sea. The imperial jihdd and its successor states stressed Fulbe colonization and privilege, not the creation of the institutions of islamization, and they should not therefore be inscribed within a grand arc of islamization 6.
These findings and interpretations have shaped the organization and sequence of this study. Part I provides the foundations. The first chapter analyses the full range of available sources on the basis of a division into external and internal perspectives. The second provides the historical background to the Fulbe Jihaads which conditioned the Umarian enterprise. I have placed Umar's childhood and early education here to suggest the context and consciousness of his formative years. Part II provides the narrative of the jihdd. Chapter 3 deals with Umar's adult career of travel, teaching, and writing and his transition into leadership of a holy war. Chapters 4 and 6 tell about his competition with an expanding French force for the resources of Senegambia, while Chapters 5 and 7 describe his struggles against the Bambara states of Karta and Segu. Chapter 8 relates the encounter that should never have happened, according to Islamic doctrine, when Muslim Fulbe fought against Muslim Fulbe in Masina. It ends with the death of Umar, which in turn ends the jihaad. In each area I examine the impact of the fighting by looking at the available information on Umarian administration in the late nineteenth century. These passages are highly speculative, but they are necessary to draw out the implications of the jihaad and suggest lines of future research.
Part III consists of Chapter 9. It examines the structure, constituency and opposition to the jihaad, estimates its overall impact, and evaluates it in the light of the traditions of islarnization and resistance to European penetration.
The existing accounts of the Umarian movement range between two poles. At one end stand scholars who have worked primarily with the Arabic documentation generated by the jihadists. They cast the story as another episode of the advance of Islam in the savannah 7. At the other stand the intellectuals who work primarily with European archival materials from Senegambia. They emphasize the middle period of the holy war, when French and Umarian forces fought for control of the Upper Senegal valley. They neilect the other periods and miss the main structure of the jihaad 8. No scholars have worked across the full range of documentation, including the abundant oral tradition, and none have provided a full account and plausible interpretation.
Notes
1. Throughout this study I use jihaad to mean the Jihad of the sword' or the military effort to establish and spread Islam. In Islamic doctrine the military initiative is often portrayed as the “ lesser jihaad ” in comparison to the more important efforts directed at purifying oneself and persuading one's contemporaries to change. This usage is emphasized in John Willis's article on Umar (Jihaad fi sabil' Allah, its doctrinal basis in Islam and some aspects of its evolution in 19th century West Africa ”, JAH 1967). From the word jihaad I derive jihadists, jihadic and mujadhid, “ one who wages jihaad ”
2. Most of the surveys of the history of the West African savannah follow this general formula. See the Cambridge History of Africa, vols. 25, and Humphrey Fisher, “ Conversion reconsidered: some historical aspects of religious conversion in Black Africa ”, Africa 1973.
3 These methodological and interpretative problems are analysed by Maxime Rodinson in La Fascination de l'Islam, 1980.
4 As examples of this convergence of attitude in subject and scholar see some of the essays in John R. Willis, ed., Studies in West African Islamic History: the Cultivators of Islam (vol. 1, 1979); Michael Crowder, West African Resistance, 1971.
5 For example, see :
Paul Lovejoy, “ Plantations in the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate ” JAH 1978Lovejoy and S. Baier, “ The desert-side economy of the Central Sudan ”, IJAHS 1975 Marion Johnson, “ The economic foundations of an Islamic theocracy - the case of Masina ”, JAH 1976; Richard Roberts, “ Long distance trade and production: Sinsani in the 19th century ”, JAH 1980: Elias Saad, “ Social history of Timbuktu, 1400-1900: the role of Muslim scholars and notables ”, Northwestern University, Ph.D thesis, 1979; Charles Stewart, “ Southern Saharan scholarship and the Bilad al-Sudan ”, JAH 1976, and Islam and Social Order in Mauritania, 1973.
6. My View is close to that expressed by D. M. Last in “ Reform in West Africa: the jihaad movements of the 19th century ”, in J. Ajayi and M. Crowder, eds., History of West Aftrica, vol. 2 (1974), pp. 17-21.
7. The main published source reflecting this documentation and its views is Fernand Dumont, L'Anti-Sultan, ou Al-Haj Omar Tal du Fouta, Combattant de la Foi (1794-1864), 1971. Two important and widely used dissertations have been written in this vein:
8. This category includes the apologists of French expansion such as Louis Faidherbe in his Annales sénégalaises (1885) and Le Sénégal: la France dans l'Afrique Occidentale (1889). It also includes those who glorify Umar as a resistance hero, such as Oumar Bâ, La pénétration française au Cayor, 1976; Djim Momar Gueye, “ Les trois objectifs et les quatre caractères de la lutte d'El Hadj Cheikh Oumar Tall: héros musulman de notre résistance nationale ”, Dakar: Vers l'Islam, May-June 1956, pp. 7-10; and Amar Samb, “ Sur El-Hadj Omar (à propos d'un article d'Yves Saint-Martin) ”, BIFAN, B, 1968, pp. 803-5. It also includes the work of Yves Saint-Martin: L'Empire toucouleur et la France: un demi-siècle de relations diplomatiques (1846-1893), 1967; L'Empire toucouleur, 1848-1897, 1971; and the controversial article which provoked the Samb reply cited above, “ La volonté de paix d'El Hadj Omar and d'Ahmadou dans leur relations avec la France ”, BIFAN, B, 1968, pp. 785-802. A more recent synthesis, B. O. Oluruntimehin's The Segu Tukolor Empire (1972), does not fall into either category. It is not well conceived nor thoroughly researched. I have indicated some of the problems in my article, “ Another look at the Umarian state ”, IJAHS 1975.