Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions. Paul E. Lovejoy
intellectual and religious pedigree with reference to one’s teachers and in turn their teachers. The identification with a chain of authority (silsila) that was historical established specialization and knowledge of a specific curriculum. The extensive bibliography that has been assembled of indigenous writings and the distribution of books brought from North Africa and other parts of the Islamic world further attests to the level of Islamic scholarship of long standing, to which the jihād tradition owes its origins.19 By the late seventeenth century this literate component of Islam had been consolidated in West Africa, largely under the leadership of the Qādiriyya brotherhood and its standardized curriculum. Children, particularly boys, learned the rudiments of Arabic from Muslim scholars wherever there was a Muslim community in West Africa. Those students who showed particular promise were encouraged to study further. Commercial households and the political elite were most seriously committed to assuring that the literate tradition was sustained.20
That Islam was deeply rooted in West Africa is occasionally questioned because of the presence of certain practices that some people who are not Muslims have considered non-Islamic, including the widespread use of amulets, divination, and spirit possession. Amulets were small leather pouches that contained excerpts from the Qurʾān written in Arabic and sometimes have mistakenly been thought to be charms or survivals of non-Muslim practice. Rather, they were associated with writing and the mysticism associated with the Qurʾān. Those who made these amulets were usually Muslim scholars and teachers who sold them as a way of securing an income, and the people who bought them included both Muslims and non-Muslims because of the mystical powers that were attributed to them.21 Similarly, divination was a recognized Islamic science and was studied at mosques and with scholars along with other subjects, like jurisprudence (fiqh), the study of the sayings of the Prophet (Ḥadīth), theology (kalām), and astrology. Forms of Islamic divination are thought to have influenced the spread of divination among non-Muslims, including the Ifá divination of the Yoruba and the river-pebble divination (aŋ-bere) of Poro society in the interior of Sierra Leone and Liberia.22 Finally, spirit possession (bori, gnawa, zar), which is sometimes thought to be in violation of Islamic practice and hence a remnant of pre-Islamic belief or non-Muslim behavior, was in fact very much a part of Islamic tradition and was found throughout West Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East.23 Rather than perceiving the use of amulets, divination, and spirit possession as deviant features of Islam or evidence of non-Muslim syncretism, it is more accurate to consider that these mystical expressions and practices were integral to Islam in West Africa.
The tradition of jihād was closely associated with the Qādiriyya brotherhood, which was predominant among Muslims in West Africa by the late seventeenth century and particularly in the eighteenth century. The brotherhood (ṭarīqa) traces its origins to the teachings of ʿAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī (1077–1166) of Baghdad, a respected scholar and preacher originally from the Iranian province of Mazandaran. The order relies strongly on adherence to the fundamentals of Islam, particularly to the outward practices of Islam as determined by the Sunna, that is, the documented practices and customs of the Prophet Muhammad. Those who adhere to the Qādiriyya are very well disciplined, are known for a commitment to the “inner” jihād, and attempt to display saintly living. Jīlānī specifically emphasized what he described as the desires of the ego, the “greater struggle” or jihād against greed, vanity, and fear. Although the brotherhood has had a strong influence across the Islamic world, my concern here is with its influence in West Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, the most prominent Qādiri intellectual was Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (1729–1811), who was based in Azawad, in the Sahara, northwest of Timbuktu. Al-Kuntī was associated with the caravan towns (qṣar) of the Sahel, especially Walāta, Tichitt, Timbuktu, Wadan, Asawan, and Shinqīt, where the Ḥassāniyya had established centers of education focused on a core curriculum that emphasized jurisprudence (uṣūl) and syntax (Arabic-language study). Through the scholars at these centers, the Qādiriyya was transformed from an essentially private commitment into a corporate identity that emphasized public membership.24 Although the emphasis on jihād was personal and peaceful, and al-Mukhtār was respected for his ability to negotiate among Muslims in dispute, especially the Tuareg of the desert, this commitment could extend to violent confrontation. Indeed, al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī clearly reached this conclusion in extending his support to the jihād of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, one of his former students, in 1809, thereby providing his blessing for the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate as a jihād state.
Finally, there is a common misconception that jihād is a movement directed against non-Muslims, not Muslims, although it should be clear that the different meanings of jihād, as described by Willis, concern purification, including the purging of evil among Muslims.25 Indeed, the jihād movement, which is the subject of this book, often targeted governments that were at least nominally Muslim, but that proponents of violent jihād considered lax in their commitment to Islam, often tolerating practices that were sometimes considered unorthodox, such as the use of amulets, as condemned in the teachings of Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī. The arbitrary incursions of warrior elites who were known locally as ceddo in Senegambia, as well as the Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, were pervasive. The Hausa governments and even the Sayfawa dynasty of Borno were also subject to criticism, although these governments often claimed allegiance to Islam and usually supported the Muslim scholarly community, even being educated by it. As I will discuss later, one of the most serious grievances was the failure of governments to protect the status of freeborn Muslims and otherwise allow Muslims to congregate more publicly, as the Qādiriyya brotherhood was increasingly advocating under the spiritual leadership of al-Kuntī.
Slave Resistance, the Age of Revolutions, and Islamic West Africa
The question of the resistance of slaves is at the heart of the social and cultural history of slavery. Specifically, historians have been preoccupied with a comparison of resistance among the different European colonies in the Americas, with a particular focus on the significance of revolt in St. Domingue and the establishment of the revolutionary state of Haiti for subsequent events of resistance in the Americas. Undoubtedly, as Hobsbawm characterized the period from 1789 to 1848, an “age of revolution” resulted in “the transformation of the world,” what he referred to as the “dual revolutions,” that is, the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous British Industrial Revolution.26 Although Hobsbawm focused on transformations in northwestern Europe and by extension the global dependencies of Britain and France and the emerging independent countries of Latin America, he was aware of possible reverberations in Africa and elsewhere. However, there is no indication in his work that he appreciated that revolution and transformation might occur largely independent of western Europe, as in the case of the jihād movement of West Africa, and thereby have an impact on shaping the modern world in ways that intersected with the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas. Moreover, there can be little doubt that forms of resistance to slavery were different before 1793 from those after that date, the separation being marked by the revolutionary events in St. Domingue and the establishment of independent Haiti, as Genovese first suggested.27 Their pioneering insights have shaped historical discourse for the past half century. Genovese’s analysis of the changing nature of slave resistance has resonance in Africa through the impact of the British abolition movement and the founding of Sierra Leone, although he did not venture to explore these implications. The intersections of the ages of revolution in Africa and the Atlantic world have yet to be explored. This chapter is intended to demonstrate the ways in which West Africa did and did not fit into the pattern elsewhere, as suggested by Hobsbawm and Genovese.
Despite the significance of the dual revolutions of industrializing Britain and political change in France that helped shape the world, Hobsbawm was mistaken in thinking that “the Islamic states were convulsed by crisis; [and] Africa lay open to direct conquest” in the period 1789–1848.28 Hobsbawm may have been correct for the Ottoman state during the Napoleonic era and the resulting reform in Egypt, as well as the British conquest of Islamic areas of India, but his observations do not extend to West Africa. Rather, Africa did not lie open to “direct conquest,” at least not before the French conquest of Ottoman Algeria in 1830–47 and its continued occupation of St. Louis and Gorée, although