Читать книгу Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions - Paul E. Lovejoy - Страница 14

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THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Eric Hobsbawm described the period between around 1775 and 1850 as the “age of revolution” that marked a turning point in modern history.¹ For Hobsbawm and subsequent historians, revolution altered the course of world history, or at least the history of that part of the world centered on Europe and by extension the Americas and what has come to be known as the Atlantic world. The political transformations that undermined autocratic and aristocratic governance were matched by economic change, especially the intensification of industrialization and the emergence of the modern global economy. The powerful arguments supporting this view of historical change challenge scholars of Africa and the African diaspora to understand how people of African descent fitted into this period of history. Clearly, the St. Domingue revolution and many slave revolts that occurred during the age of revolutions can be understood to be part of the historical trend identified by Hobsbawm. Indeed, Eugene Genovese has argued as much, envisioning the St. Domingue revolution as a turning point in the history of resistance to slavery. According to Genovese, resistance before the St. Domingue uprising idealized a politically independent African past, while subsequently the enslaved population concentrated on overthrowing the system of slavery rather than on establishing enclaves of restoration of some reconstructed African past.² As David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have noted, the identification of the “age of revolutions” is one of “the most enduring period markers known to modern historians and has often been used by scholars invested in identifying pivotal moments in the emergence of a putatively modern world.”³

What is not clear is how the African regions that bordered the Atlantic and the people who constituted the African diaspora in the Americas related to the global pattern that is identified as the age of revolutions in the Atlantic world. According to Joseph C. Miller, the age of revolutions was only “one phase in a longer cycle of militarization and commercialization in the greater Atlantic world that becomes visible when the dynamics of African, rather than Euro-American, history are used to define and calibrate the dimensions of transformation.”⁴ My purpose is to expand on Miller’s conception of the longue durée by focusing on jihād in West Africa as a means of establishing a clearer outline of the periods in African history. In this perspective, a large part of West Africa witnessed revolutionary changes at the same time as the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas, which help establish how the homelands and regions of origin of the enslaved were affected by transatlantic historical forces. It is surprising that Africa has largely been excluded from the discussion of the Atlantic world and the era of revolutions, except when enslaved Africans were taken to the Americas and expressed their resistance to slavery.⁵ In introducing African history into this discourse of revolutionary change, the aim is examine how the homelands of enslaved Africans can be brought into the discussion. The period of revolutions in the narrowly defined “Atlantic” world of western Europe and the Americas coincided with an era of jihād that was part of Miller’s “longer cycle of militarization and commercialization.”

Clearly, the economic consequences of the Atlantic slave trade in the development of the global economy were profound, as was long ago recognized by Eric Williams. Barbara Solow, who provides one of the best overviews, has outlined many issues relating to the relative importance of slavery in the economic transformation of the Atlantic world and western Europe, but without any consideration of the African dimension of slavery. Her complete silence on African history, not just the jihād movement, suggests that her analysis has to be taken much further than she dared to go.⁶ What constituted the Atlantic world in this period, and why is most if not all of Africa excluded from discussion of that conception? It is perhaps not surprising that the idea of Atlantic history has received considerable criticism, but the place of Africa in a global perspective is still largely ignored. As David Armitage has proclaimed, “We are all Atlanticists now,” and an examination of the jihād movement shows how this pronouncement can extend into the interior of West Africa.⁷ James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have challenged what is meant by “Africa.” They have shown that various parts of Africa have to be distinguished from each other, and I would add that it has to be determined how different regions fitted into the Atlantic world, if they fitted at all.⁸ Despite the asymmetrical relationships that characterized the regions that bordered the Atlantic Ocean, it can still be asked what those relationships entailed, even though many scholars have avoided a meaningful discussion. The considerable interest in the origins of enslaved Africans and their influence on the development of the “creole” societies of the Americas might suggest that the study of the Atlantic world would have corrected this distortion, but it has not. In fact, this interest in the origins of enslaved Africans rarely includes an understanding of the historical context in which people were enslaved in Africa, marched to the coast, and sold to the captains of the ships destined to cross the Atlantic. Yet this migration occurred during the age of revolutions, and Africans and people of African descent played a major role in the events of the Caribbean, North America, Brazil, and Hispanic America, and indeed in the abolition movement against the slave trade and slavery.

Cultural influences, such as the religious practices and beliefs of the Yoruba; the resistance of slaves and the assignment of ethnicity to resistance, as with Akan in Jamaica; and the cultural links between Brazil and Angola, as expressed in capoeira, have been central in the study of slavery. Although we know the regions of Africa from which people came, too often the African component is amorphous, timeless, and devoid of the rigorous methodology of historical analysis, except among specialists who have not been concerned with how African regions fitted or did not into the age of revolutions. My contention is that historians of slavery in the Americas and the resistance to slavery in the age of revolutions have sometimes ignored and often misinterpreted and misrepresented the historical context to which a significant proportion of the population of the Americas traced its origins. My aim is to draw attention to the fruits of African historical research so that information on the jihād movement can be incorporated into the historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world. Any conception of the Atlantic world has to include those parts of Africa that actually bordered the Atlantic and thereby helped define the geographical boundaries of analysis. The Atlantic world does extend to the Americas from England, France, Spain, and Portugal, but the connections are not just to Brazil, the Caribbean, Hispanic America, and North America but also to various parts of West Africa and indeed to Angola and Mozambique, whose involvement in the era of revolutions should be considered because of the links of these areas to the Atlantic world. Indeed, without the forced migration of Africans to the Americas, there would not have been an Atlantic world.

My focus here is on the jihād movement of West Africa and specifically the consolidation of states that were founded in jihād and that came to dominate much of West Africa during the same period as the age of revolutions. I argue that, as with western Europe and the Americas, the history of West Africa was also characterized by an age of revolutionary change. Although jihād was not inspired by the same sentiments and forces that characterized the history of Europe and the Americas, there were important similarities and interactions that provide a new perspective on the Atlantic world and the age of revolutions. The jihād movement affected the forms and intensity of slave resistance in the Americas, particularly in Bahia and Cuba. Jihād was also responsible for the continuation of slavery in West Africa on a massive scale. My intention is to demonstrate how the West African jihāds helped shape the Atlantic world and therefore why this history should be incorporated into the analysis of the age of revolutions. Muslims were found in all parts of West Africa except in the coastal forests inland from modern Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire and the interior of the Bight of Biafra (plate 1). Their political control of the interior and their commercial domination of trade almost everywhere were factors that affected the Atlantic world.

When the jihād movement was first identified as a “neglected theme” in West African history in the 1960s, the focus of African historical research was on Christian missions, European colonialism, and the nationalist thrust toward independence. It can be legitimately claimed that since then, the study of Islamic Africa has become a major theme of historical research and analysis, but unfortunately that analysis has often been ignored in the historiography of the Americas. The extensive research that has been undertaken in the past generation has radically transformed our understanding of African history, especially those areas where Islam was predominant. Moreover, with access to the huge libraries of Timbuktu and many other centers, the amount of available documentation has mushroomed, with the result that the study of Islamic West Africa will continue to be subjected to revision and further analysis. Islamic Africa, specifically including sub-Saharan Africa, has come into its own, even without the attention that radical Islam in the form of al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other manifestations of contemporary jihād has generated. Despite the recognition that the Islamic presence is substantial, the history of Islam in West Africa has not entered the mainstream of historical analysis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the silence of historians on West Africa during the age of revolutions, which is seen as focused on Europe and the Atlantic world to the exclusion of Africa and Asia.

There is a long tradition of jihād in the history of the Islamic world, beginning with the initial jihād led by the Prophet Muhammad. Subsequent jihāds of later eras referred back to the founding of Islam and favored strategies and ways of legitimization with reference to the original jihād. The power of this tradition was realized in West Africa, beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century and becoming manifest in the eighteenth century with the establishment of Fuuta Bundu in the 1690s, Fuuta Jalon in 1727–28 and especially after 1776, and Fuuta Toro in 1775 and most especially in the nineteenth century with the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804, the reform of Borno after 1810, and the establishment of Hamdullahi in Masina in the middle Niger basin in 1817. It can be said that by 1835 West Africa had come under the dominance of jihād regimes that would then be expanded further with the launch of the regime established by al-Hājj ‘Umar (map 1.1). As an ideology, a military strategy of conquest, and an intellectual reformation, the jihād movement shaped West Africa and laid the foundation for the conversion of the majority of people in West Africa who were not already Muslims to Islam.

Not only was the region of West Africa transformed, but the influence of the movement that materialized in West Africa eventually reached as far east as the Nilotic Sudan, where the Mahdist state was established after 1884. The Mahdist movement in turn reverberated back westward, challenging the continued legitimacy of the Sokoto Caliphate, Borno, and other Muslim states that had been founded or reformulated as a result of jihād. The incursions of the Mahdist leader, Rābiḥ ibn Faḍl Allāh, into the Lake Chad basin and his conquest of Borno in 1893 threatened the stability of the Sokoto Caliphate as Hayatu, a direct descendant of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, rallied to Mahdism and claimed legitimacy as the leader of the Mahdist cause there. Mahdist resistance to the colonial occupation in the Sokoto Caliphate in the early twentieth century proved particularly threatening until the Mahdists were crushed at Satiru, near Sokoto, in 1906.⁹ Hence the tradition of jihād that began with the Prophet Muhammad intensified first in West Africa, and its influence was spread through migration and propagation of the ṣūfī message of the Qādiriyya. In turn, the Qādiriyya presaged the Tījāniyya movement of al-Ḥājj ‘Umar and the Mahdiyya of the Nile and its subsequent offshoots to the west as far as Lake Chad and beyond.

MAP 1.1. The Jihād States in the Atlantic World, 1850.

Source: Henry B. Lovejoy, African Diaspora Maps.

Many Muslim jurists have characterized jihād as an obligation of all believers. As ʿUthmān dan Fodio established in his Bayān wujūb al hijra ʿalā ’l-ʿibād (The exposition of obligation of emigration upon the servants of God), based on references to the interpretations of earlier Muslim scholars, jihād was defined as an effort to confront impure acts or objects of disapprobation through the use of the heart, the tongue, the hands, and military action. John Ralph Willis has characterized these four manifestations of jihād as follows:

The jihād of the heart was directed against the flesh, called by the Sufis the “carnal soul.” It was to be accomplished by fighting temptation through purification of the soul. The jihād of the tongue and hands was undertaken in fulfilment of the Qurʾānic injunction to command the good and forbid the bad. And the jihād of the sword was concerned exclusively with combating unbelievers and enemies of the faith by open warfare.¹⁰

The reflections of ʿUthmān dan Fodio in his commitment to jihād were based on these distinctions. He was preoccupied with the personal purification of the soul and with prescriptions that upheld good behavior and condemned what was considered to be immoral. His call for jihād fi sabīl Allāh (jihād in the path of Allah) through military confrontation and conquest was a last resort, not the sole aim of his dedication to Islam. Moreover, his commitment was based initially on withdrawal and the avoidance of confrontation, which in the classic interpretation of Islam was the hijra, in imitation of the Prophet’s withdrawal from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. As Willis has explained, “Turning one’s mind from evil and things temporal was hijra of the heart. Withdrawal of verbal or physical support for actions forbidden by Qurʾān, Sunna, or Ijma’ realized hijra of the tongue and hands.” The Sunna refers to the social and legal customs and practices of the Muslim community, while Ijma’ is the consensus of the Muslim community, especially jurists, on religious issues. Finally, jihād of the sword only followed after Muslims removed themselves from the world of unbelievers and those who would harm Islam, explicitly because of the threat against their survival as a community. As is clear, the doctrines of jihād were revivalist, calling for a return to the customs and actions of the Prophet and rejecting reforms and changes that deviated from the original traditions of Islam.

An understanding of the jihād movement during the age of revolutions is relevant to contemporary politics in West Africa, particularly the uprising in northern Mali and southern Algeria in 2012–13 and the reign of terror in Nigeria perpetrated by Boko Haram since 2002. However the long tradition of jihād is assessed, its impact in terms of consolidating Islamic governance continues to this day, including efforts at the establishment of Sharīʿa jurisdiction in northern Nigeria and the inclusion of all countries in West Africa in the Islamic fold of nations today, even if there are many Christians in Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone, as well as Muslims. The spread of the al-Qaeda movement in Mali and southern Algeria and the role of Boko Haram in Niger and Nigeria demonstrate the continued power of jihād. But there is a fundamental difference between the nature of jihād as discussed in this book and the contemporary manifestation of jihād by Islamists associated with Boko Haram. Whereas the jihād of the past was associated with the ṣūfī brotherhoods, particularly the Qādiriyya, the contemporary movement is salafi, which is associated with literal, strict, and puritanical approaches to Islam and is in line with the anti-ṣūfī tradition of Wahhābism. This history can be recognized as a major theme in historical change in West Africa since the eighteenth century, when radical, Islamic forms of government, society, and law evolved as a parallel movement to the age of revolution in Europe and the Americas of Hobsbawm and Genovese.

Islam in West Africa and the Context of Jihād

One of the reasons that Africa is usually not included in a conceptualization of the Atlantic world arises from a failure to appreciate the long history of Islam in Africa, other than the region along the shores of the Mediterranean and the desert oases of the northern Sahara. A false division is thereby thrust on Africa that sees the Sahara Desert as a divide between the Mediterranean and “black” Africa, as is forcefully argued by Ann McDougall, among others. According to McDougall, the people who inhabited the Sahara might identify with communities south of the Sahara, in North Africa, or in the Sahara itself.¹¹ I have argued elsewhere that the “desert-side economy” was characterized by the flow of people between the Sahara and the savanna, as well as trade into and across the Sahara.¹² In the Muslim context, the region south of the Sahara was identified as the Bilād al-Sūdān, the land of the blacks, but it was long recognized that the major states of the region, from Ghana in the eleventh century to Mali in the fourteenth century to Songhay in the sixteenth century, were Muslim states, as confirmed by the allegiance of the ruling aristocracies of these states to Islam. Kanem, in the Lake Chad region, and its successor state of Borno were identified with Islam; its ruling dynasty, the Sayfawa, was recognized as Muslim for a thousand years until its final demise in the nineteenth century during the era of jihād. The Senegal River valley was solidly Muslim from the eleventh century, while the Hausa states between the Niger River and Lake Chad were Muslim by the thirteenth century, if not earlier. Paulo F. de Moraes Farias has documented the long-standing interactions across the Sahara from Andalusia in what is now Spain to the Niger River valley, as reflected in Arabic texts, archaeological artifacts, and inscriptions on tombstones.¹³ Even the so-called non-Muslim Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, located between the Niger and the Senegal Rivers, have been mistakenly associated with “paganism” because the ruling elites were warriors who violated many of the precepts of Islam, but many Muslims, especially merchants, resided there, and to some extent the term “Bambara” was used conveniently to justify the enslavement of people from these states, whether or not they were Muslims.

The antiquity of Islam in West Africa and its persuasive influence are not in question, therefore, which raises a number of issues of interpretation and misinterpretation that are sometimes to be found in the scholarship of historians who are not specialists in West Africa and even more frequently in public discourse that treats Islam as if it were a recent introduction. One false conception relates to the idea of conversion: that somehow the people there converted to Islam at various times when in fact people had been Muslims for generations. When this mistake is applied to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, it takes on a peculiar meaning, as if Islam were a new introduction, although the Gambia River societies had been associated with the broader Muslim world since the incorporation of the valley into the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century.¹⁴ It is true that people did convert to Islam during this period, but the way in which conversion is often used as a descriptive term suggests that Islam was a foreign, alien religion of recent intrusion. Nothing could be further from the historical context, however. When the reference to conversion is made, moreover, there is usually no documented proof that individuals actually became Muslims through conversion. References to contemporary European accounts that assess the religion of local societies at the time have to be treated with caution. There certainly were people along the Atlantic coast who were not Muslim, but the identification of people and places as “Mandingo,” Jolof/Wolof, and other ethnic labels almost always implied some kind of association with Islam.

Another misconception that has to be confronted in understanding the importance of Islam in the West African savannah and the Sahel relates to the extent of urbanization that was characteristic of the region well before the emergence of jihād as a factor in the late seventeenth century and certainly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the medieval empires and continuing through the fall of Songhay in the last decade of the sixteenth century, West Africa was heavily urbanized, although by modern standards the size of towns and cities was small. This urbanization was identified frequently with city walls that were constructed for defensive purposes and with public spaces associated with mosques and city markets. The governments of these urban spaces built palaces, as well as overseeing the maintenance of mosques, markets, and defensive walls. These towns and cities were connected through long-distance trade, commercial networks that were Muslim, and locations of craft production, especially cotton textiles, leather goods, and ironware. Well before the spread of the jihād movement, these centers were closely associated with Islam and Muslims who had migrated from elsewhere but had settled to pursue economic opportunities. Wherever there was an indigenous, non-Muslim society, the urban centers were usually divided into twin cities, one that housed the local community and the other that was home to Muslims and the center of trade and craft production. As Paulo Farias has emphasized, the separation between Muslims and non-Muslims that was realized through distinct urban quarters spatially separated from each other was more than symbolic. Muslims honored a tradition that tolerated non-Islamic practices and religious worship but specifically avoided syncretism and insisted on orthodoxy with respect to the basic tenets of Islam.¹⁵

The Muslim networks were tied together through commercial interaction and also education and religious study that were common features of Muslim society not only in West Africa but throughout the Islamic world. Travel and distant learning were valued in the Muslim context because of the emphasis on pilgrimage and the obligation to visit the holy places of Mecca and Medina if possible. The glorification of this tradition was symbolized in West Africa by the legendary pilgrimage of the Malian emperor Mansa Mūsā, whose famed visit to Egypt and the Holy Lands is remembered because of the vast quantities of West African gold that he took with him. Similarly, the coup d’état that brought Askia Muhammad Ture to the throne of Songhay in 1493 was sanctified through his pilgrimage to Mecca as a step in the imposition of Muslim government and adherence to Islamic law. Study abroad (taghrīb) was encouraged as a means of acquiring an education and also promoted connections among Muslims, sustained orthodoxy, and linked communities.¹⁶

The Islamic sciences flourished in West Africa for many centuries before the advent of the jihād movement.¹⁷ This can be seen with respect to historical scholarship, which flourished in such places as Timbuktu and is displayed in such histories as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī’s Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān (History of the Sudan) (ca. 1655) and Taʾrīkh al-fattāsh fī akhbār al-buldān wa ’l-juyūsh wa-akābir al-nās (The chronicle of the researcher into the history of the countries, the armies, and the principal personalities), attributed to Maḥmūd Kaʿtī (d. AH 1 Muḥarram 1002; 27 September 1593) and continued after his death, with the surviving version ending in AH 1074 (1654–55 CE).¹⁸ The legal tradition was historical in orientation because of the practice of citing previous fatwa in issuing opinions on contemporary legal questions. The intellectual tradition of quoting the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth privileged historically documented chains of authority in the construction of arguments and establishing legitimacy. Among Muslims there was the scholarly tradition of isnād, which traced an individual’s 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 direct conquest of the Senegal River valley occurred only after 1854. The British blockade of the West African coast after 1808 may have shaken the coastal states of Africa, but it had virtually no impact in the interior other than to reinforce the goals of the Islamic jihād movement in isolating Africa from the Atlantic world of slavery without undermining slavery itself. In southern Africa the Great Trek of the Boers after 1834 was a response to British policies of abolishing slavery and efforts to govern an unwilling settler population, not conquest. Although Genovese recognized the importance of Muslim resistance to slavery and the Malês uprising in Bahia in 1835, he did not notice a similar uprising among the Muslim Yoruba in the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1831–32 at virtually the same time or the connections between Yoruba resistance in Cuba in the 1830s and events in West Africa arising from the jihād movement.²⁹

The arguments in this book are directed at Eric Hobsbawm and Eugene Genovese largely in symbolic fashion, not because they neglected the scholarship of the jihād movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which they did, but because their enormous contributions to an understanding of the age of revolutions have achieved a level of orthodoxy that overshadows the wealth of scholarship on a missing component of that era. The scholarship on the age of revolutions has evolved greatly since Hobsbawm and Genovese published their pioneering works half a century ago. Among the many studies that have broadened the conception of the Atlantic world to include Africa, one can highlight the various biographical studies, such as James Sweet’s account of Domingoes Álvares, African healing, and the intellectual history of the Atlantic world and Walter Hawthorne’s examination of the links between the upper Guinea coast and northeastern Brazil, which serve as models for a transatlantic perspective.³⁰ Most especially, Jane Landers offers new insights on the shaping of an Atlantic world that attempts to integrate the West African backgrounds of people who were associated with the development of an Atlantic-wide “creole” society. As Landers has argued, biographical accounts provide “a prism through which to examine the active participation of Africans and their descendants in the age of Atlantic revolutions.”³¹ Landers demonstrates that such stories “make possible a more complex understanding of the traditional narratives and popular views of the Age of Revolutions, and demonstrate their active political and philosophical engagement in the most important events of their day.”³² Following the approach of these scholars, this study also relies heavily on biographical accounts.

The historiography of slavery during the age of revolutions has recognized influences emanating from Africa in shaping slave society in the Americas, although this was not a concern of Hobsbawm, whose age of revolutions focused on social and economic change in Europe and the Americas in a way that had little room for influences originating in Africa. Yoruba influence in particular is a feature of the African diaspora that emerged in the nineteenth century, particularly in Cuba and Brazil, but also in Sierra Leone and Trinidad because of the extension of British abolitionist policies to those states. Although Genovese’s insight into the importance of St. Domingue as a turning point from rebellion as a form of resistance to one of revolution fits neatly into Hobsbawm’s paradigm, Genovese’s understanding of African influences was seriously flawed. There can be no argument about the importance of both scholars in understanding revolutionary change or the importance of St. Domingue in that process, but their contributions ignored the Atlantic world of Africa.³³ Despite the limitations that can be identified, both Hobsbawm and Genovese can be credited with influencing the study of slave resistance as a part of the age of revolutions, and here my intention is to place jihād in West Africa in this context.

My aim, therefore, is to extend the discussion of the age of revolutions beyond Hobsbawm’s identification of a twofold industrial and political transformation and Genovese’s recognition of the St. Domingue uprising as a turning point from rebellion to revolution to ask how Africa fitted into their paradigms. The consolidation of a field of research that focuses on the Atlantic, especially the black Atlantic, has neglected issues of how the regions of Africa that interacted with the Atlantic world helped shape developments. Although we recognize the development of ethnic-based “nations” in the Americas and distinguish between African-born populations and creole/mulatto/mestizo societies that variously emerged in Brazil, the Caribbean, mainland Hispanic America, and North America, there has been a neglect of how the processes of change that were unleashed by the expansion of slavery in the Americas altered the course of history in Africa. The challenge of this book goes beyond Hobsbawm and Genovese to address the field of Atlantic studies. My intention is to elaborate on the contributions of Paul Gilroy, Ira Berlin, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Jane Landers, and others in understanding how the emergence of a “black Atlantic” was shaped by influences from the deep African interior.³⁴ Similarly, a transnational and global perspective suggests modifications of the approach of Bernard Bailyn and David Brion Davis in examining European and European settler control of the Atlantic world.³⁵ Although scholars studying Atlantic history recognize that the overwhelming number of people who crossed the Atlantic before the middle of the nineteenth century came from Africa, not Europe, and that this demography had a significant impact, especially as a contributing factor in slave resistance, sense of community, and commercial interaction, the connection with historical developments in Africa deserves fuller attention. A focus on the black Atlantic has to address why parts of Africa, at least Muslim areas, were able to retain a degree of autonomy.

Central to the argument of this book and my dialogue with Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars who analyze the age of revolutions without reference to Islamic West Africa is that the age of jihād has been largely overlooked. I suggest that locating jihād in the interpretation of the age of revolutions and the Atlantic world challenges our understanding of the modern era and provides a corrective that parallels a recognition of Haiti’s place in that analysis. The jihād movement shaped the slave trade from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century and reveals the importance of Islam in explaining the supply of slaves, a crucial insight with profound implications for our understanding of the trade, the origins of Africans sent to the Americas, and ethnicity in the Americas. I maintain that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The main problem is that both Hobsbawm and Genovese, and much of the scholarship since they set the direction of research, shaped a model for the modern world that provides a European focus on the history of the Western world, despite the opposition of many scholars to such a Eurocentric perspective. The question to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of the history of the Atlantic world during this period.

Of course, the chronological framework of the age of revolutions shifts from scholar to scholar; Hobsbawm emphasized the years 1789–1848, while Wim Klooster begins the period earlier with “civil war” in the British Empire and the independence of the United States. The Age of Revolution of David Brion Davis begins in 1770 and ends in 1823. Jane Landers associates the age of revolutions with resistance to slavery from the second half of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Whether or not the era is considered to have begun in the 1770s and to have ended with the American Civil War of the 1860s depends on the focus of analysis, but the general idea of an “age of revolutions” has become Atlantic-wide in its orientation.³⁶ For Landers, the age of revolutions is more concerned with the international quest for liberty coming from slaves and free blacks than with nationalist discourse, and hence her analysis ends in 1850, while Manuel Barcia ends his study in 1844.³⁷ The jihād movement fits into this chronology regardless of whether the period is thought to begin in the 1770s or 1789 and end in 1848 or the 1860s. During this era virtually the whole of the interior of West Africa from Senegambia to Lake Chad came under the rule of jihād states that swept away the preexisting political structures, with quite significantly different results that help expand the concept of the Atlantic world to include West Africa.

Perspectives on History

What was common in West Africa was the Islamic context, not the identification as Hausa, Yoruba, Mandingo, Juula, Fulbe, and so on. I contend that ethnicity was an extension of political identity, and its meaning has to be deconstructed. Ethnic labeling was transferred to the Americas, often buttressed with identification with a common language, like Yoruba, Igbo, Kimbundu, or Kikongo. In the context of the jihād movement in West Africa, Fulfulde and Arabic were the primary languages of the religious and political elite, but Hausa and Mandinke were dominant over wide regions and were closely associated with trade. Hence these languages and their corresponding labeling in the Americas as Hausa or Mandinga/Mandingo reflected African backgrounds that need to be tied more closely to our understanding of Atlantic history. The role of Fulbe clerics was particularly important in spreading jihād ideology (plate 2). These distinctions were important in Bahia and helped shape resistance. In other words, if the Bahia uprising is to be considered within an Atlantic perspective during the age of revolutions, it has to be seen in the context of events in West Africa. To a great extent the transatlantic dimension is missing this perspective, particularly with reference to the jihād states of those portions of the interior known as the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān. By the eighteenth century “Bilād al-Sūdān,” the Arabic term for “land of the blacks,” had come to designate the savanna and Sahel regions bordering the southern Sahara and specifically identified the Islamic states that dominated this region. Indeed, in some sources from the nineteenth century, the term “Soudan” is the name used for the Sokoto Caliphate, as distinct from Borno, for example.

The presence of enslaved Muslims in the Americas is well established, although the connection or lack thereof with the jihād movement depended on a number of factors that reveal the intersection between the jihād movement and the age of revolutions and the major transformations in slave resistance in the Americas. The experiences of Muslims in Bahia, where Yoruba became the common language of the Muslim community, even though that community also included other Muslims who were not Yoruba in origin, helps us understand the age of jihād. As I examine in this book, there are many accounts of individuals whose lives relate to the jihād movement, including Richard Pierpoint, who was enslaved in Fuuta Bundu and fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence and then with Canadian troops who repulsed the American invasion of the Niagara Peninsula in the War of 1812. Similarly, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, enslaved in 1777 near Fuuta Jalon, subsequently led a Muslim community in Jamaica until his death in 1845, while Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was enslaved near Djougou in the year of Kabā’s death and, after being in Brazil for two years (1845–47), was able to escape in New York; Baquaqua subsequently wanted to head a Baptist mission to Africa, but this never happened. Finally, Muhammed ʿAlī Saʿīd, who was enslaved in Borno in 1851, when Baquaqua was at Central College in upstate New York, traveled through the Ottoman Empire and then to Europe, the Caribbean, and North America before joining the Union army in 1863, although he had never been enslaved in the United States. All were Muslims, and their stories help connect the worlds of revolution and jihād.

The problem is one of perspective. A consideration of slave resistance and revolution in the Atlantic world has tended to focus on the Americas and Europe without attempting to understand what was happening in Africa. The “age of revolutions” as a concept and a chronological period of history owes a great debt to Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars. The chronicle of historical change from the last decades of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century has been isolated as a phase in the history of slavery and specifically its demise that was associated with revolutionary change in western Europe. As we are all aware, the abolition movement in Britain, the French Revolution, the uprising in St. Domingue, the independence of Haiti, and slave resistance from the United States to Brazil figure prominently in our understanding of this period of history and its interface with the emerging Industrial Revolution and the constitutional restrictions or outright elimination of monarchal rule in western Europe. Consequently, this book is a dialogue with Hobsbawm and Genovese, and by extension with the dominant literature on slavery and resistance in the Americas, Atlantic studies, and comparative history.

My dialogue with these scholars and the trend in historiography that derives from their inspiration, especially the emergence of Atlantic studies and the “black Atlantic” paradigm, concentrates on the events in Africa that occurred during the period of the age of revolutions and how these events in Africa might or might not have helped shape the patterns of change in the Americas that led to the destruction of slavery as the dominant institution there. How are we to conceptualize African history and the origins of people from Africa who were involved in the revolutionary events of the Americas? I contend that influences emanating from Africa and specifically the jihād movement in West Africa had a profound impact on the shaping of revolutionary forces in the Americas. The jihād movement clearly helped shape events in Bahia, specifically the Malês uprising of 1835, and also the consolidation of Yoruba influence in Cuba. Implicitly, I am raising questions about the scope of the age of revolutions and revolutionary action among enslaved populations in the Americas, and I am challenging Atlantic studies to broaden the conception of the Atlantic world to include events in Atlantic Africa and its interior. Hobsbawm’s interest in the transformation of government in the age of revolutions, with the challenge to despotic monarchy and the emergence of more democratic regimes, might lead us to a consideration of how the jihād movement transformed government in West Africa at the same time. In parallel with the changing nature of slave resistance in the Americas and the emergence of a “second slavery” in the Americas in the nineteenth century, moreover, the jihād movement resulted in a great increase in the number of slaves in West Africa that can be placed alongside the increase in slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.

Specifically, João José Reis has demonstrated the complex nature of the Muslim uprising in Bahia in 1835 in terms of the identification of participants along class lines (slave/free), on the basis of ethnicity (Yoruba, i.e., Nagô, Hausa, and so on), and according to religious divisions (Islam, oriṣa worship, and so on). Stuart Schwartz earlier drew attention to the various Hausa revolts and conspiracies in Bahia from 1807 onward.³⁸ Admittedly, Michael Gomez has recognized the importance of Islamic influence in the Americas. Moreover, Sylviane Diouf has examined resistance and revolution in the context of African influences on events in the Americas, but Gomez and Diouf do not base their works on the Sokoto Caliphate and its role in West Africa, which is the focus here.³⁹ It is my contention that these contributions fall short of placing the events of the Americas during the age of revolutions in the context of the jihād movement and specifically events that created the Sokoto Caliphate. In fact, Diouf contends that the conditions for jihād were not present in Bahia in the 1830s, an interpretation that Reis has accepted.⁴⁰ Similarly, Manuel Barcia has drawn attention to the presence of Muslims in Cuba as a result of the traffic from the Bight of Benin to Cuba and has correctly recognized the role of jihād in their enslavement and the enslavement of many non-Muslims as a result of the jihād. Barcia has identified fifteen revolts and conspiracies in Cuba between 1832 and 1844 that were associated with Yoruba who had been enslaved in the context of the jihād, although most of the participants, if not all, were not Muslims.⁴¹

The fact that Muslim slaves were common along the routes stretching through Yorubaland to Bahia by the early nineteenth century has prompted Humphrey Fisher to argue that the jihād erupted “precisely because Muslim slaves were arriving in Yorubaland and Bahia, torn from Hausaland and dar al-Islam. . . . The ​shock waves, flowing into Hausaland, helped ignite the jihād; then, flowing out again, spread that example.”⁴² Fisher’s conclusion is supported by the writings of Muhammad Bello and the analysis that the enslavement of Muslims was a major factor that prompted the outbreak of jihād in 1804. Although the role of Hausa and other Muslims in the uprising of 1835 is subject to different interpretations, my understanding of the Malês uprising places a heavy emphasis on the role of Islam as a unifying force. The uprising and, even more threatening, the possible appeal to the population outside Salvador rested on its appeal to Islam, in which Yoruba was used as the common language of communication because most Muslims were Yoruba or at least spoke the language. However, the historic importance of the Hausa cities and their mosques, such as the Gobarau Mosque in Katsina, has to be emphasized (plate 3). Individuals originally from Borno or one of the Hausa centers most certainly would have spoken Yoruba as well and in some contexts would have been identified as such. The odyssey of ʿAlī Eisami demonstrates this complexity. ʿAlī was from Borno, had been sold as a slave because he was captured in the jihād, and had been taken south through the Hausa towns, ending up in the capital of Oyo. On the outbreak of the Ilorin uprising in 1817, ʿAlī was sold south because it was feared that he would flee to the cause of Islam. Instead, ʿAlī became a Christian in Sierra Leone and took the name William Harding. Depending on context, ʿAlī would have been considered Yoruba if language was the determining factor, since he was fluent in Yoruba. Nonetheless, he was Kanuri by origin, was a Muslim, could also speak Hausa, and became a principal informant for Sigismund Koelle in his linguistic studies in Sierra Leone in the late 1840s.

Although Barcia has correctly noticed the presence of Muslims in Cuba, his study also shows that the number of Muslims was actually very small.⁴³ In Cuba people whom we now refer to as Yoruba were known as “Lucumí,” while in Brazil they were known as “Nagô.” In both cases their presence was closely associated with the jihād movement.⁴⁴ As Henry B. Lovejoy has demonstrated, those identified as Lucumí in Cuba very largely came from Oyo and its dependencies, and most were not Muslims, a profile that is the reverse of the demography of Bahia, where Muslims were heavily concentrated.⁴⁵ Lovejoy contends that there was a conscious attempt to reconstitute elements of the Oyo state in Cuba, including the promotion of Shango as the principal oriṣa in the Yoruba pantheon and the identification of Shango with Saint Barbara among the Catholic saints. Because of the timing of the Yoruba influx into Cuba, Oyo Yoruba were predominant in both rural and urban communities and therefore were involved in uprisings, conspiracies, and disturbances that have been associated with their presence in Cuba.⁴⁶ By comparison with Bahia, it seems that very few Muslims were sent to Cuba.⁴⁷ Although Atlantic merchants may have consciously directed enslaved Muslims and non-Muslims toward different destinations in the Americas, it also seems clear that the distribution reflected different migration patterns. Muslims were sent to Bahia in disproportionate numbers during the 1820s, while the overwhelming majority of arrivals in Cuba occurred in the 1830s, when relatively few enslaved Muslims left from Lagos. Oyo Yoruba emerged as dominant among the Yoruba population in Cuba, which was reflected in membership in religious brotherhoods (cabildo) and the importance of Shango as a deity of reverence. All the oriṣa, including Shango, were important in Bahia, too, but so was the concentration of Muslims. A comparison of Cuba and Bahia within the framework of black Atlantic history shows different forms of political and religious mobilization in response to slave society.

How does the question of slavery in the jihād movement in West Africa inform the comparison of resistance among the different European colonies in the Americas? What similarities and differences characterized revolt in St. Domingue in the 1790s, the establishment of the revolutionary state of Haiti in 1804, and the revolutionary movement of jihād in West Africa in the same years? How did the influences of these two movements affect subsequent events of resistance in the Americas and the consolidation of Islam in West Africa? When the history of West Africa and, by extension, of west central Africa and southeastern Africa is included in an analysis of the Atlantic world, the history of people of African descent assumes a more influential role in the history of the modern world. The demography of transatlantic migration and the influences emanating from Africa on modern culture, particularly music and art, are obvious examples.

Slavery was a factor in the jihād movement, specifically in regard to complaints that freeborn Muslims were being enslaved and that such enslavement was illegal under Islamic law and was condemned as a violation of the rights of Muslims. The concern was directed at protecting Muslims, not at opposing slavery, which became a core institution underpinning the society and economy of the Sokoto Caliphate as it expanded in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. Hence the revolutionary movement of jihād that swept West Africa in the period of the age of revolutions in Europe and the Atlantic world had a far different impact on the course of slavery, but nonetheless the revolutionary dimensions of the jihād were profound and require analysis of it as a parallel movement to the forces with which Hobsbawm and Genovese were concerned. The jihād movement served further to impose a level of autonomy on West Africa at the same time at which the incidence of slavery in the region expanded enormously, most especially in the central Bilād al-Sūdān and Oyo, from where many of the enslaved who went to Cuba and Brazil actually came. The interconnectedness and contradictions that emerged require fuller treatment than they have been given by most scholars who have examined slave resistance during the age of revolutions. Other topics of considerable importance include the debate within Muslim circles over the legitimacy of enslavement, as revealed in the diplomatic exchanges between Muhammad Bello and Muhammad al-Kānimī, the heads of state of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno, respectively, and the open warfare that erupted between these states in consequence of the failure to reach an acceptable accord over the course of jihād.⁴⁸ Similarly, the little-known diplomatic negotiations between Caliph Muhammad Bello, supreme ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate, and Captain Hugh Clapperton, the official representative of the British government, over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1820s bring into focus contradictions in understanding the age of revolutions.⁴⁹ Their discussions and resulting accord demonstrate that abolition has to be examined from broader perspectives than a British focus.

I contend that the relative importance of Islam as an inhibiting factor in the provision of slaves for the Americas is underestimated. Limitations arising from controlled efforts to isolate West Africa from slavery in the Americas related to Muslim prohibitions.⁵⁰ First, let us consider that the Muslim states of the region engaged in a conscious attempt within West Africa to establish autonomy. In this regard, there was a relatively clear break in patterns of trade, so that we can talk about at least two phases in the transatlantic migration. The first period was the period before around 1800, and the second was the nineteenth century. The jihād that resulted in the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804 effectively marked a break in the trade and politics of the deportation of slaves to the Americas between these two phases. Although there was involvement in the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades, the jihād movement undermined the deportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas from West Africa. Even so, there was a recognizable Muslim cohort both in the period before 1804 and after. The second period was also marked by the British campaign to abolish the slave trade after 1807, which initially attacked the trade of West Africa and thereby reinforced the political aims of the Muslim states of the interior to limit participation in the transatlantic slave trade, although unintentionally. The combined impact of Muslim jihād and British abolition reinforced a trend that pushed the slave trade from West Africa to west central Africa and Mozambique, the Bantu-speaking region from where approximately half of all Africans who went to the Americas trace their origins. After 1807, 1.9 million out of 2.78 million Africans came from the Bantu regions, amounting to 68 percent of total arrivals in the Americas, and if the Bight of Biafra is included, 80 percent of the forced migration after British abolition targeted Africans from regions where the jihād movement was not a factor.

The significance of where enslaved people came from has been recognized as an important factor in the slave trade, but analysis so far has not appreciated why Muslim regions were marginal and underrepresented despite their relative importance in Bahia and North America and their limited impact in Jamaica, Trinidad, and St. Domingue. I suggest that during the age of revolutions west central Africa and southeastern Africa were constituted as the principal regions of slave origin, while West Africa was transformed from within by changes that resulted in the consolidation of Islamic rule and were as effective as British abolition in removing the region from the transatlantic slave trade. The basic thrust of this argument is not new.⁵¹ However, the argument has either been misunderstood or largely ignored or both, and my aim here is to make the argument explicit.

My challenge is methodological. I am identifying what can be termed “the methodology of the tabula rasa” or can also be called the “argument in empty space,” in which the scholarship of the “other” is overlooked, but its exclusion in the end has to be recognized as a particularly challenging inhibition to historical reconstruction.⁵² When much of the historiography and readily available source material that underpin historical change is not incorporated into historical analysis, as I am claiming here, it is possible to propose interpretations that are isolated and distorted through a limiting perspective. Much of the scholarship that is associated with “Atlantic studies,” including the attempt to understand slavery and resistance during the age of revolutions, falls into this trap. Although it may not be clear why certain knowledge is overlooked, whether from naïveté, ignorance, or design, we have to assess responsibility for such an approach that shortchanges innovation and hard work. We have to recognize that the aim of scholarship is to overcome the limitations of specific perspectives and to broaden interpretations to take into account new sources, innovative uses of new knowledge, and the inevitably widening circles of inclusion. A methodology of designed ignorance is prevalent in certain studies and historical approaches, in my opinion, and this is the case with an understanding of the jihād of West Africa. In Latin America, this approach of privileging some scholarship by subjecting that of others to silence and nonrecognition is sometimes referred to, informally, as the “methodology of the gringos,” in which North American scholars blitz local archives and subsequently claim to have made intellectual and scholarly breakthroughs that completely bypass the research of scholars in Latin America, especially if scholars write only in Portuguese or Spanish and hence conveniently can be ignored, or if it might require too much extra work and interaction to uncover what is often a wealth of research that has previously been completed or is currently under way. The same observation applies to scholars in Nigeria, such as Yusuf Bala Usman, H. Bobboyi, and A. M. Yakubu.⁵³ These scholars are often ignored in “western” scholarship. The same curtain of silence through nonrecognition is lowered on the intellectual contributions of scholars in Africa and indeed even on scholars who focus on Africa but who are not at universities in Africa. The avoidance of the rich documentation on the jihād movement is even more glaring than I am suggesting, since I have specifically not referred to many of the primary source materials that are readily available in published form, let alone the enormous amount of relevant material that is to be found in archives in Nigeria, Mali, Morocco, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is central to the argument of this book that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires a revolution in the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The question that has to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of history during this period.

Despite the increasingly detailed research on African cultural and social impact in the Americas, the focus on slave resistance and revolution still omits the important components of the period that derive from the African background of the enslaved. I am arguing that the historical trends in the consolidation of Islam in Africa favored the emergence of west central Africa as the dominant region of origins of enslaved Africans, even though it will seem to some scholars that West Africa was a major source of slaves. In fact, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African did come from West Africa, but relatively few came from the Muslim regions of the interior. There is an apparent contradiction, therefore, that has to be explained. Most of the deported enslaved population from West Africa came from near the coast, and hence the region as a whole was underrepresented as a source of slaves.

I contend that the regional origins of Africa have to be contextualized within Africa, just as the destination of slaves and the resulting slave societies in the Americas and within Africa have to be understood in the context of the specificities of the Americas and influences that originated in Europe, particularly western Europe, as well as the historical context of West Africa. The forces that were unleashed in Africa were global, shaped to various degrees by events outside Africa as well as regional and local conditions therein. Theoretically, in terms of demography, I contend, West Africa could have supplied all the slaves that went to the Americas during the age of revolutions, but this did not happen, even though many slaves did come from there. Moreover, just as events in the Americas reveal a struggle between resistance to slavery and efforts to sustain what some had thought a dying institution, events in Africa reflect the great expansion in slavery, not its demise, so that the focus on revolutionary change in relation to resistance to slavery has to take into account the destination of the enslaved population, whether that population remained in Africa or went to the Americas. The West African experience has a bearing on another important debate. Sociologist and historian Dale Tomich has suggested the concept of “second slavery,” in which slavery in the Americas was not a dying institution.⁵⁴ Rather, in Tomich’s view, slavery was increasing in the early nineteenth century thanks to a new political order imposed by the British after the fall of Napoleon. Hence the parallel to the great expansion of slavery as a result of the jihād in West Africa should be noted.

As Murray Last has suggested, the Sokoto jihād was analogous to the French Revolution and just as the French Revolution had a sweeping impact in Europe and the Americas, the Sokoto jihād had repercussions across West Africa as far as the Nile River.⁵⁵ Sokoto was preoccupied with spreading the jihād and providing the intellectual inspiration and tactical training for future jihād participants, many of whom came to Sokoto for training and education. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one such cleric, who joined the Tījāniyya brotherhood in Mecca when he was on pilgrimage and subsequently returned to sub-Saharan Africa via Borno and then settled in Sokoto as the leader of the Tījāniyya.⁵⁶ Hence, there was a strong tradition of such learned leadership. As the book market of the Sahel shows, scholars in the western Bilād al-Sūdān would have read some of Sokoto’s works just as the dan Fodios read Algerian and Songhai texts.⁵⁷ The book trade establishes clearly the intellectual background of the jihād movement, which involves a long written debate, just as the age of revolutions did in Europe and the Americas.

According to Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, at the time of the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate, west central Africa was already a dominant source of slaves for the Americas. This fact is crucial in recognizing the caliphate’s self-imposed withdrawal and failure to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, despite price incentives in the interior of West Africa that could have resulted in the supply of many more slaves than was the case. The relatively high rate of slave resistance near and onboard slave ships in the Senegambia ports in the eighteenth century may have had an influence on the reluctance of European slave ships to visit the area.⁵⁸ Such resistance reinforces the argument here with respect to the influence of Islam on commercial patterns. The consolidation of Islam, ironically, at first increased the number of enslaved West Africans sent to the Americas, especially to Bahia and Cuba. These conclusions confirm some of the arguments suggested in this book that the history of the diaspora has to start in Africa, not in the Americas, especially with regard to resistance and efforts to establish reconstituted social, religious, and cultural manifestations.