A Scholar's Quarrel That Became a State

The Sokoto jihad began as a dispute inside Islam rather than between Islam and anything else. Hausaland in the late eighteenth century was ruled by Muslim kings, and Usman dan Fodio had preached in Gobir under their tolerance for a quarter of a century. His charges against them were legal and specific: that they levied taxes with no basis in the sharia, that they conscripted men unlawfully, that they permitted practices he classed as unbelief alongside the observance of Islam, and that they were now moving against scholars and their communities. The break came in 1804 with a withdrawal, deliberately modelled on the hijra of the Prophet, followed by war. By 1808 most of Hausaland was under the new authority and its emirates were being organised from Sokoto. What made the movement durable was not the fighting but the paperwork.

Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son Muhammad Bello each wrote at length on what a legitimate Islamic government owed its subjects, on the limits of the ruler, and on the conditions under which rebellion was permitted, and those texts became the constitutional literature of the caliphate. The state fell to a British column in 1903. The scholarly lineage did not, and the sultanate of Sokoto remains the senior Muslim office in Nigeria.