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Hausaland Before The Jihad
In the entire corpus of Arabic sources for West African history there is no reference to the Hausa states, with one exception. When in Takedda in the Aïr (the mountainous region in north-central Niger), Ibn Battutah referred to Gobir as one of the destinations for the export of Takedda copper. Because the information of the Arab geographers came through commercial routes, Hausaland was not directly connected to North Africa by trade routes across the Sahara.
The Kano Chronicle, which is the principal source for the development of Islam in Hausaland, had first been written in the middle of the seventeenth century. The reigns of leaders and the events since 1650 were recorded as contemporary or eyewitness accounts. Records of the century before 1650 were based on living memory. But accounts of earlier periods were basically oral traditions, reflecting seventeenth-century interests and realities. The Kano Chronicle provides a chronological framework for the opening of trade routes to Hausaland. In the middle of the fourteenth century Mandingue traders, the Wangara, came from Mali in the west. A century later salt came from Aïr (called Asben until conquered by Berbers) in the north and kola nuts from Gonja in the south. Bornu traders came from the northeast.
Traders from Mali brought Islam to the central African region of Hausaland in the fourteenth century. Pre-Islamic traditions remained strong and were often integrated into traditional Islamic practices. This small copy of the Qur’an, made in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, combines a distinctive African type of Arabic script with bold graphic designs.
The Wangara ulama that accompanied the traders from Mali in the fourteenth century are credited in the traditions of Kano as being the first to bring Islam to Kano. Under their influence, the chief of Kano began to pray, and a mosque was built beneath the sacred tree. The leading ulama were given official appointments to serve the king and the Muslim community. Opposition to the Muslims came from the local priests, but they were unable to stand the magical power of the Muslim prayers. The custodians of the traditional religion were defeated on their own ground by a superior magical power. But the real test to the efficacy of the new religion was when the Muslims brought victory to the king of Kano over his most forceful enemy. During the first crisis, when the king of Kano failed to win a war, disappointed by the Muslims, he turned back to the traditional priest, who promised his help if the king restored the rites that his father had destroyed. The chief of Kano complied and the traditional priest secured victory over the enemies. Islam temporarily lost ground.
The second generation reverted to traditional religion, but the third generation turned over completely to Islam. In Kano, as in other African states, kings’ sons received elementary Qur’anic instruction. A few went beyond what was expected of princes, became attached to their masters, and turned sincere Muslims. There was, however, the built-in contradiction between being a warrior chief and being a Muslim. This was explained to Umar, the king of Kano, by his Muslim friend, after which Umar remained faithful to Islam and abdicated as king. The coming of Islam to Kano coincided with the shift of the Saifawa dynasty from Kanem to Bornu, closer to Hausaland. Although the first Muslim ulama came from Mali in the west, it seems that Islamic influence from Bornu was at least as important.
In the middle of the fifteenth century the Toronkawa, settled Fulbe scholars, brought a higher level of Islamic learning compared with that of the earlier Wangara ulama. The Islamic tradition of learning among the Toronkawa was similar to that in Timbuktu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Toronkawa lived in rural enclaves, did not render religious services to the local rulers, and were not involved in non-Islamic ceremonies. They communicated with the rulers but did not become integrated into the political system. The tensions generated by that mental and physical distance later led to confrontation and to a jihad. The Toronkawa did not seem to have been softened physically by their clerical habits, and unlike urban scholars, they were not strangers to horsemanship and warfare. Islam became integrated into Hausa religious, social, and cultural life without breaking with the past, which was symbolized by the cutting of the sacred tree under which the original mosque had been built. This reform is associated with the king of Kano, Muhammad Rumfa, a contemporary of the reformist kings Askiya Muhammad in Songhay and Ali Ghaji in Bornu. The reformist ideology was articulated by Abd al-Karim al-Maghili, the North African militant scholar, who visited Kano in 1491 before his visit to Songhay.
In the sixteenth century the level and sophistication of scholarship was heightened, with the growth of the repertoire of books taught in Kano. Piety and scholarship among the kings of Kano seem to have reached their peak in the second half of the sixteenth century, a period parallel to that of Mai Idris in Bornu. Scholars from Timbuktu visited both Kano and Katsina, the most important market town in Hausaland until the end of the eighteenth century, on their way to the pilgrimage to Mecca, taught there for some time, and contributed to the growth of local Hausa scholarship. Non-Muslims who were absorbed in the Hausa states and culture became known as Maguzawa, from the Arabic majus, “the Magi.” They were of diverse ethnic origins but shared a common Hausa language and culture. For the majority of the peasants, Islam was no more than one cult among many. The cult of bori spirits was the most widespread pre-Islamic practice that survived in Hausaland, mainly among women. Bori spirits were given Muslim names, and Muslim jinns (genies, whose existence are completely accepted in official Islam) became identified with the bori spirits. The fact that the bori spirits became Islamized made it more difficult to eradicate them.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Kano was repeatedly attacked by the Jukun, called Kworarafa in the Kano Chronicle, from the south. The kings of Kano sought relief in rituals and magic from both “non-Muslim” Maguzawa priests and from local Muslim divines who employed similar practices. Each of the Hausa city-states had its own experience with Islam. Katsina also had the largest Wangara commercial community, which influenced politics there. By the end of the eighteenth century the rulers and the population of Katsina were largely Islamized. But the legitimacy of the dynasty was still based on the traditional belief system. Even those rulers more committed to Islam were genuinely torn between two systems of religious beliefs. The slaves of the palace opposed attempts to revive the Sunna and to impose the shariah.
The ulama, who were alienated from the rulers, preferred to live in the periphery of Katsina, in towns within a radius of fifteen kilometers from Katsina, where they enjoyed greater autonomy. The mosques of these towns attracted more people to pray than mosques in the capital. The rulers ignored them because of their small numbers and their peripheral location, but it was from these small towns that the supporters of the jihad of Uthman dan Fodio (1755–1817) came. Yandoto had been created by the Wangara merchants for the trade in kola nuts from the Akan forest, southwest of Hausaland. Yandoto prospered in the second half of the eighteenth century when the kola trade was at its peak, which made its merchants and scholars supporters of the status quo and opponents of the jihad of Uthman dan Fodio. He enumerated the sins of the Hausa rulers that justified the jihad: the veneration of trees and rocks by making sacrifices and pouring libations; divination by sand, stars, spirits, and by the sound of the movements of birds; consultation with soothsayers; use of magic; and writing of the names of Allah or extracts of the Qur’an on polluted things, such as the bones of the dead, and drinking the solution when it is washed off and mixed with snake skin. All these “sins” may be counted in many Muslim societies in Africa, representing the surviving pre-Islamic traditions. Most scholars did not challenge this ambiguous situation. The dramatic point of no return in the development of Islamic militancy was when militants reintroduced the concept of takfir by declaring as infidels those who had previously been considered Muslims.
Hausaland Before The Jihad
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Last Updated: 04/2022
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