This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An Islamic reform jihad led by the Fulani preacher Seku Amadu in the Inner Niger Delta of what is now central Mali began in 1818 against the animist Bambara Empire and its Fulani vassals, and against the loosely observant Islam Amadu judged had spread among the region's own Muslim populations. Inspired directly by Usman dan Fodio's recent jihad in Hausaland to the east, Amadu's much smaller force won a decisive early victory at the Battle of Noukouma against the numerically superior Bambara-allied army, an outcome he and his followers read as divine confirmation of the cause.
Amadu went on to found the Diina of Maasina, called the Caliphate of Hamdullahi after its capital, a strictly governed theocratic state that enforced sharia law, banned alcohol, tobacco, music and dancing, and built roughly six hundred Quranic schools across its territory. Framing the jihad as a restoration of genuine Islamic observance against a syncretic faith he saw as compromised by animist practice, Amadu placed the Diina, in Trimingham's account, within the same wave of West African Islamic reform jihads as Usman dan Fodio's Sokoto Caliphate to the east.