Introduction

Until ca. 1964, Africa's largest pre-colonial state was known (in English) as the Fulani Empire and in French as l'empire peul; from 1808 to 1903 it governed almost the entire eastern half of savanna West Africa.

In Hausa, the local lingua franca, it had sometimes been known as the daular ‘Uthmaniyya (the ‘Uthmani state)—but that could confuse readers who might think the Ottoman state, the original daular ‘uthmaniyya, was being referred to. The decision to relabel the historical state whose capital was at Sokoto was partly intellectual, partly political: intellectual, because we needed a properly Islamic term for a properly Islamic state (and a term that could be justified both on textual evidence and on a technical legal rationale); political, because the newly autonomous regional government of Northern Nigeria needed a model on which to base its new political morality of “work and worship.” The relabeling was not in any way official. Professor H. F. C. Smith in the History Department, first at University College Ibadan and then at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, liked to use the term “caliphate” when teaching the histories of, first, the Nigerian Shaikh ‘Uthman ibn Fudi, the leader of the jihad and first imam of his community (1804-1817), and then of his son and heir Muhammad Bello, who was the new state's first Amir al-mu'minin or commander-in-chief (1817-1837). It was this chapter's author, then a graduate of the University of Ibadan, who chose “The Sokoto Caliphate” as the title of his history of the pre-colonial state (and its office of the vizier);¹ Professor Smith, as his supervisor for the PhD, preferred “The Caliphate of Sokoto,” but reasons of euphony prevailed—and from then on the term “Sokoto Caliphate” became universally used. Some scholars contested the rationales for the label, to no avail.² Today, the Hausa version is Daular Sakkwato, in all kinds of contexts, including vehicle license plates.

I have explained here the origin of the name, just to put on record how such historical labels can come into being, and to emphasize the distaste we had then (in the anti-imperialist late 1950s and early 1960s) for such a term as “empire”; neither Smith nor I were Nigerian citizens, nor

¹ Last 1967; it is the printed version of the Ibadan University PhD thesis, Last 1964.

² Some historians (such as Johnston 1967), based abroad in Europe or in the US, ignored the change and continued to use the old terms, Fulani Empire/l'empire peul, sometimes because their sources or their focus were Christian at heart. The few Muslim Nigerian scholars who disputed the use of “caliphate” did so on constitutional grounds.

Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0040. even Muslims then, though as researchers we were taught by local Nigerian scholars and intellectuals, such as the vizier of Sokoto, alhaji Junaidu, whose command of the Arabic manuscripts recording local history was profound.^{^[2450]} In a way, we were their self-appointed mouthpieces vis-à-vis the wider English-speaking world.

“Caliphates” were in fashion in 2014 as part of the rhetoric of insurgents both in Syria/Iraq and in northeastern Nigeria. But the use of “caliphate” goes back much further in time, especially in West Africa, where the logic is simple: if there is no effective connection between your region and the Ottoman caliph's territory, then as the independent imam of a large umma or close-knit set of Muslim communities you are entitled to call yourself Amir al-mu'minin or caliph. There cannot be caliphs in contiguous emirates.^[2451] In West Africa's case, there is the Sahara to make Ottoman claims of connection largely implausible; based in the Lake Chad region there was an ancient Islamic polity, first in Kanem and then (by the early sixteenth century) in Borno, that had periodic control of the Fezzan (in today's southern Libya). But by the late eighteenth century, Borno had lost much of its controlling power as the senior Islamic polity in the region, though its cadre of Muslim scholars and the extent of its merchant networks, traveling both through to North Africa and westward into the city-states of the savanna, were very significant: Borno had even long maintained a student community in al-Azhar in Cairo.^[2452] In 1806 jihadi forces loyal to Shaikh ‘Uthman captured Borno's capital despite its ancient history of being an Islamic state: the attack was justified by Shaikh ‘Uthman on the grounds that Borno had been tolerating traditional practices among its population and had given support to the enemies of the jihad.^[2453]

Furthermore, the argument for a proper caliphate at Sokoto was strengthened by the fact that within West Africa there were substantial belts of no-man's-land that effectively denied contiguity between states, or so it was claimed: “caliph,” it was argued, could therefore be in this context a valid, if somewhat local, title.

But by 1900, colonial interventions by Britain, France, and Germany had seriously reduced the Sokoto Caliphate by seizing territories at its margins—France on the west, Germany on the east, detached portions of the caliphate, as Britain, using ships on the river Niger, had started to do in the south. In March 1903 Britain then attacked the center by land and established its over-rule by forging a drastic modification of Sokoto's precolonial system: it was a Nigerian version of the Indian princely- states model already developed by British administrators in India but now grandly theorized by its new governor, Lugard, as “indirect rule”: in short, it was an “empire” within an empire, or so the Britons in charge thought. It is important to realize that local Muslims within that “empire” did not imagine the Christians (Nasara, as they were first called) were more than a temporary phenomenon, like a storm that can turn a stream into a flood but soon passes.^[2454] That “storm” was presumably Allah's will, as punishment for Muslim malpractice; He would soon remove the Nasara, people thought, once the Muslims had returned to proper Islamic practice. In short, their “caliphate” would be re-established, even though the last proper caliph had fled Sokoto, and was then killed, en route to Mecca, by a small British-led force late in 1903.^[2455] The new Muslim leader, resident in the caliph's house at Sokoto, was known locally as Sarkin Musulmi, the Hausa version of the technically correct amir al-mu'minin; but in English he was never called a caliph—the Britons now in charge referred to him as the “sultan of Sokoto,” a title never held in Sokoto before: “sultan,” for a speaker of Arabic, was much lower in status than a caliph, and in the nineteenth century was only used for subordinate rulers, like the later emirs of Kano and Zaria, both major, wealthy cities answerable to the caliph at Sokoto. For the British, however, “sultan” was the top title; and in independent Nigeria today, he still is given that title. “Caliph” is obsolete except in its pre-colonial, historical context, and even then it is not often found in surviving Arabic manuscripts: the ruler was more often referred to, in Arabic documents of the time, as amir al- mu'minin, the “commander of the faithful.” It is that title we will use here.

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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

Introduction

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