Conclusion

So how “imperial” was this caliphate? It was clearly less “imperial” than any caliphate in the Middle East, and perhaps importantly, it did not expect to exist for very long: it was a polity awaiting the imminent coming of the Mahdi, at which point the authority of the amir al-mu’minin as leader of the umma would pass to the Mahdi himself.

Hence there were no imperial buildings or infrastructures put in place; wealth and show were kept to a minimum, as was the deployment of military force; it was a low-cost caliphate. The overall result was relative peace for nearly a century—in stark contrast to the endless warring that had gone on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the major Hausa cities struggling between themselves for supremacy. With relative peace came mercantile prosperity across a huge trading area, despite the lack of roads, bridges, or wheeled vehicles: instead there were recognized camping sites for caravans where food and fodder were available (but no finely built caravanserai). There were fewer famines as grain could be sourced from over a wider area. There was, too, a common rule of law, as set by Shari‘a law and judges who mediated in disputes, especially in markets (the political authorities were major mediators of more social conflicts). Furthermore, at least in the powerful, prosperous central emirates, there was a common set of values underwritten by a common (Hausa) culture and language, enabling outsiders to become Hausa. Marked features of this common culture were not only piety (giving alms as well as regular prayers) but a code of gentlemanly behavior (kirki) that meant adult men did not shout or act violently.^[2490] Quarrelling even inside the house was strongly decried by both women and men; purdah was the norm in cities, as was polygyny. Elite households could grow large very fast, with 20 or more children not unusual in a single ordinary household, with the domestic slaves and freedmen performing a range of services, including the care for the household’s livestock (cows, goats, sheep, poultry; donkeys and sometimes a horse).

The essence of this culture was the preservation of stability, both within the household and within the community. Assistance to others, and the repayment of that assistance later, was the mark of a “good” man or “good” woman. Because even what went on in private life was apt not only to be open to others, but talked about, any delinquent behavior had to take place well outside one’s home community. Hence, the ability to move around an extensive caliphate and beyond it was an essential safety-valve. Each emirate had its inner zone, some 60 miles in diameter around a major city, and then beyond that zone a further band of territory that was marginal, both politically and economically. There was an intelligence system based in the core city that effectively spied (often by infiltrating an agent) on whatever dissident groups had relocated out to the margins—but out there they could rarely do any harm to the emirate. Within the inner zone, however, surveillance was close: observation was ubiquitous and reports traveled fast. In many emirates all the senior men of power were kept in the city, only sending out messengers to their estates and to the towns they were responsible for. Those emirates that had decentralized structures often had trouble with outlying fief-holders who sought greater autonomy. But permanent splits were rare.

The model for this caliphate was always, first, the Prophet's own community in Mecca and Medina, and, second, the rules of government as depicted in books on the Abbasid Caliphate and the Maliki law books which were the standard sources.^[2491] As the nineteenth century went on, the strictly reformist impulse of the founding shaikhs in Sokoto and elsewhere weakened: population growth among the elite (whose sons were not encouraged to go into trade) meant that the competition for the few key political posts grew intense, with conflict breaking out as lineage contested against lineage for the emirship; for if you failed to win, then your family was ruled out of contention forever.

Fewer scholars were writing texts; other scholars took to the study of numbers and thus the potential for profitably doing “magic” to help worried clients—but at the caliphate's center, efforts continued to perpetuate the values of their parents' jihad even if, at the margins, other values (e.g., wealth, militarism) were dominant.

Would the caliphate have survived much longer, had European colonialism not burst in on it? Would it have changed, as modernity reached it, and more complex institutions of government been introduced? Was the “will to empire-build” ever there? Would a new militarism, in defense of the caliphate, have come into being, and an effective caliphate-wide force have been established? I think, with hindsight, the answer to all these questions is probably “no”: it is hard to see who, among the elite in power ca. 1903, would have freed all the slaves or brought in “modern” schools. The answer, current ca. 1900, was that the whole umma needed to reform and to get back to the ways of the jihadi forebears—that is, if the Mahdi was not coming, despite all the signs of chaos (such as lethal civil wars) that are meant to indicate his arrival to lead the umma. Surely empires with such a sense of their own impermanence are scarcely an “empire”? Instead I see the caliphate as a strikingly successful confederation that allowed its citizens freedom to be the sort of Muslim they wished to be, more or less in peace and with a considerable degree of prosperity. But these generalizations of mine refer only to the emirates under Sokoto: the caliphate's smaller emirates to the west, under Gwandu's looser suzerainty, had a much harder nineteenth century. In general, it seems that the authorities in Gwandu were simply not interested in implementing direct government or even detailed oversight over the western territories they were responsible for: very little correspondence survives. The first emir in Gwandu, ‘Abdullah b. Fudi, was more engaged in writing many books and teaching than in administration.

After Nupe and Ilorin, Liptako was perhaps the main emirate under his nominal control, and it kept in touch intermittently with Gwandu but it was in practice autonomous. However, in any future assessment of the Sokoto Caliphate as an “empire,” these western emirates should perhaps not be again left out.

A final point: for both some Nigerian historians and some Britons, the use of the label “Fulani Empire” (or indeed “British Empire”) was to underline their argument that the Sokoto Caliphate was established and run by men who saw themselves primarily as tribal “Fulani” and not as, say, reform-minded Muslims. The underlying idea here is that “empire” simply means the imperium of one race or tribe over another one. It is certainly true that the overwhelming majority of emirs appointed by Shaikh ‘Uthman were Fulfulde-speakers (though not of his particular group, the Torobe). But he chose them on the basis that they were primarily learned, pious scholars who could be counted on to ensure good Islamic government. It is also true that a large proportion of Shaikh ‘Uthman’s followers and fighters in the jihad were also Fulfulde-speakers—and it is this fact that gave rise to local accusations that the war was not a jihad but a Fellata coup d’etat. But there is some evidence that the leaders of the jihad recognized there was a problem with ethnic and sub-ethnic chauvinism among their followers and tried to restrain it. Furthermore, by using classical Arabic as the lingua franca of formal government and scholarship, they emphasized the Islamic model they were using. Colloquial Fulfulde was not essential; classical Arabic was.

If the Sokoto Caliphate was designed to transform the Imamate of Shaikh ‘Uthman ibn Fudi into a formal Islamic state, to which all Muslims and converts to Islam in western Africa, black and white, would owe allegiance, then it largely succeeded—notwithstanding that as soon as Shaikh ‘Uthman died, many withdrew their allegiance from his successors.

This response underlines how it was that Shaikh ‘Uthman himself had been the ultimate figurehead, the spiritual symbol and inspiration, of the new reformist polity that his jihad had set in motion. The long-term purpose of the caliphate, then, was explicitly to perpetuate a polity in which all Muslims could perfect themselves in readiness for the coming of the Mahdi and the ensuing end of the world and the Day of Judgment. Thus each amir al-mu’minin was in principle personally responsible for the piety of his whole jama’a—j ust as Shaikh ‘Uthman, as mentioned, had nightmares over what some of his mujahidun might be found guilty of. In this sense, the amir al-mu’minin was a “universal” sovereign, not just politically, but morally too, linking himself into a universal eschatology that included not just the entire Muslim world but, in their eyes, all humankind. So when the colonial Christians took over his land, within weeks of his defeat the amir al-mu’minin had little choice but to head off toward Mecca. The political system he thus abandoned then became a kind of much modified neo-caliphate in which the Muslim population turned to greater piety in order to please Allah who in His time, they believed, would remove the Christians. The century that had seen Muslims rule their own caliphate became, in recollection, a golden age that had been marred by the desperate competition for power within the Muslim elite. For historians and ordinary people alike, the Sokoto Caliphate and the reforms of its Shaikh ‘Uthman remain the country’s greatest achievement, perhaps not an “empire,” but a polity that united Muslims and brought them Islamic justice as never before. It is even a model for the current extremist movement, Boko haram—though I suspect Shaikh ‘Uthman would have been horrified, quoted though he is on takfir (the justification for killing Muslims) by Boko haram's leadership.

Bibliographic Note

The sources for the history of Sokoto are found in three categories of material:

The oral records among local men and women initially collected by British colonial officials and organized by them for such administrative purposes as making appointments to office in local government. The potted histories were stored in “District Notebooks,” but some British officials treated the local history of the area where they were posted as a long-term personal hobby—most notably a senior official like H. R. Palmer in Katsina and in Bornu for 30 years (ca. 1906-1936). The two most comprehensive texts of this sort, written by former British colonial officers, are S. J. Hogben, A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, The Emirates of Northern Nigeria;^[2492] and H. A. S. Johnston, The Fulani Empire of Sokoto.^[2493] Many a doctoral thesis, by both students from abroad and by Nigerian scholars, has been written using similar sources. A list of these theses, emirate by emirate, is in an appendix to an article by Philip Burnham and Murray Last, “From Pastoralist to Politician: The Problem of a Fulbe ‘Aristocracy.' ”^[2494] ^{^[2495] The most remarkable of these one-emirate histories is that by Professor M. G. Smith: his Government in Kano, 1350-19504 was researched in great detail in 1958-1959 but only revised and published posthumously in 1997. Based on his fieldwork in 1958-1959, he wrote other single-emirate histories;^[2496] his one on Sokoto is still awaiting publication. 2. The journals and edited travel accounts written by European visitors to the Sokoto Caliphate in the course of the nineteenth century. The most notable of these are (a) by the British naval officer Hugh Clapperton who stayed in Sokoto in the mid-1820s, and on his second visit died there; his Cornish assistant John Lander brought his papers back from Sokoto to Britain. The publications are Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa,^[2497] and Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa.^[2498] (b) the German traveler Heinrich Barth, who was gathering economic and political intelligence for the British government and visited the area between Lake Chad and Timbuktu over the course of some four years (1851-1855); he kept copious diaries which were published in five volumes as Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa;^[2499] ^{^[2500] they appeared also in various European languages (with minor differences to the texts) in addition to English. (c) Paul Staudinger, one of several travelers in the 1880s and 1890s when European interest in the Sokoto Caliphate was growing apace because of impending imperialist competition (some journals were “fake,” being clever fiction), in 1885-1886 visited the cities of Zaria and Kano and went to salute the caliph on behalf of the Kaiser (Wilhelm). He published a detailed diary in German (Im Herzen der Haussalander)^[2501] which has been translated by Johanna Moody in two volumes as In the Heart of the Hausa States.^[2502]}
3. The local manuscript texts and documents, all in classical Arabic, written as histories or memoirs by scholars working in the Sokoto Caliphate, as well as the late nineteenth-century bureaucratic correspondence written by officials as they governed the various emirates under their supervision. The bulk of this correspondence is in Sokoto (in the vizier's house) and in Bauchi. The Antiquities Department's library in Jos has Arabic material collected in the 1950s and preserved there. The key historian who knew all of this material (most of which was housed in his family's library) was the late Wazirin Sokoto, alhaji Junaidu; he also knew much oral history, especially that relating to his faction within the Sokoto elite. He wrote a history in Arabic (Dabt al- multaqatat)⁵⁵ which was later partially translated into Hausa and published as Tarihin Fulani.^[2503] Otherwise, the main text that utilized all this material is Murray Last's The Sokoto Caliphate;^[2504] ^{^[2505] but its real interest lies in its detailed study of the office of the vizier—no other office-focused analysis has yet been written. Another, broader study using this material (and more) but looking at the wider caliphate is Rowland A. Adeleye's Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria.⁵⁵}
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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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