Kanem-Borno and Hausaland
The third great trans-Saharan route which ran from Tripoli through the Fezzan down to the Lake Chad region, was in use from the late eighth century and continued to be important right down to the colonial period.
As early as the mid-eleventh century a ruler of the emerging state of Kanem became a Muslim and by the mid-thirteenth century one of its rulers was known to the Andalusian geographer Ibn Sa‘id as ‘celebrated for his pursuit of the jihad and for acts of religious charity’. He may have been the same ruler who sent an embassy to the Hafsid ruler of Tunis and established a college-hostel (madras- sah) in Cairo for Kanemi students. By the late fifteenth century the ruler of Borno, an offshoot of Kanem situated to the west of Lake Chad, was using the title amir al-muminin, ‘Commander of the Faithful’, stressing the religious basis for his legitimacy, while the late-sixteenth-century ruler Mai Idris Aloma fought a series of jihad-like campaigns to Islamise or drive out remaining non-Muslim groups in Borno. Study of the Islamic sciences, already established in the thirteenth century, flourished in the sixteenth when we see the first local chronicles appearing, while in the following two centuries Borno scholars established a reputation well beyond the confines of the state. Nevertheless, as in most Sudanic states, political institutions remained indigenous and social customs were only slightly modified by Islamic norms. In the early nineteenth century Muhammad Bello, son of Shaykh Uthman b. Fudi, openly condemned the Bomoans as unbelievers, accusing them of pagan sacrifices, disregard for Islamic female dress norms and gross irregularities in their Islamic legal system. Al-Kanemi, ruler of Borno, despite an elegant rebuttal of the charge of paganism, did not in fact deny that there was some truth behind the accusations.The above controversy took place within the framework of a jihadist movement which originated in the north-western corner of what is modern Nigeria, inspired by Shaykh Uthman and largely conducted by his brother Abd Allah and his son Muhammad Bello, leading to the establishment of a large Islamic state with its capital at Sokoto (founded 1809).
The jihad was principally directed against the rulers of the Hausa states who were accused, in lengthy polemics, of being unbelievers. Islam had, in fact, probably begun to infiltrate Hausaland as early as the thirteenth century from Kanem-Bomo, was strengthened in towns such as Kano and Katsina by immigrant Dyula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in the countryside by influxes of Islamised Fulani from the fifteenth century onwards. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries both Kano and Katsina were visited by Muslim scholars of repute from North Africa and Timbuktu and by the seventeenth century Katsina had developed its own teaching and writing traditions. The ruling family in Kano became Muslim from about the mid-fourteenth century, those of Katsina and Zaria in about the midfifteenth, Kebbi no later than the early sixteenth, Zamfara and perhaps also Gobir in the mid-seventeenth century.The jihad raised by Shaykh Uthman against the Hausa rulers highlights the tension which grew over the centuries between traditional West African ruling elites whose ancestors had made a formal profession of Islam and scholarly elites of teachers and preachers whose perception of Islam was a social and political one grounded in the notion of a perfect system of law—the Shari*a—being universally applied in a society governed by the idealised principles of the ‘Rightly-guided’ caliphs and the institutional theory of the late Abbasid period. The commitment of the rulers to Islam was often no more than formal and ceremonial—appearance in public at Friday and festival prayers and fasting by day and feasting by night during the month of Ramadan. Holymen were often retained at court to recite the Qur’an, to lead prayers, make amulets for the ruler and courtiers and to accompany armies into battle. A few rulers even made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But the point of such pilgrimages, as well as other overt manifestations of piety by rulers, was to reinforce the ruler’s authority while preserving the status quo rather than to create a state based on Islamic principles.
They were not reformers but eclectic statesmen whose problems were to defend their territory, suppress rebellion, gather taxes and maintain the authority and prestige of their lineages. Little thought was given as to whether their practice accorded with Islamic theories in such matters. This blending of the traditional with the imported Islamic, each being blended in very varying proportions in different times and places, was typical of Sudanic Muslim societies down to the thirteenth Islamic century (1785-1882), not only at the level of the ruling elites, but more broadly throughout these societies. Among the Muslim scholarly elite, however, a tradition of reform, based on the Maliki school of law, had been establishing itself in West Africa from the late fifteenth century. At the political level the scholars had done no more than try to influence the rulers, from near or far, to uphold the Shari'a and observe its teachings. It was only in the thirteenth Islamic century that the scholars themselves initiated action to overthrow existing structures and to take the reins of government into their own hands. By way of illustration we shall look in more detail at the movement of Shaykh Uthman b. Fudi in northern Nigeria, comparing it and contrasting it with that of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad in the Nilotic Sudan.