Conclusion

Summary

Abdulkadiri dan Tafa … read Ḍiyāʾ al-sulṭān to the people saying: ‘the Sultan must have such and such characteristics’, challenging [Amīr al-muʾminīn Atiku] and pointing at him.

– Al-Ḥājj Saʿīd, Taqāyīd mimmā waṣala ilaynā, Paris (BnF) Arabe 5422, f. 8b.

Between 1804 and 1837 the Fodiawa rose from rebels fighting to overturn the political order to rulers seeking to enforce obedience across a vast territorial empire. Throughout this period, they engaged with Islam’s fluid set of discursive traditions to justify and excuse their evolving ideas on authority and legitimacy in a steady stream of Arabic texts. But far from being a united ‘triumvirate’, the Fodiawa soon came to disagree about what the aims of the jihadist movement should be, and about where authority in a Muslim society should ultimately lie. This book has followed numerous ‘questions and disagreements’ between the Fodiawa themselves as well as their contemporaries from the Sahelian knowledge elite. In so doing, it offers a deeper understanding of how the new Muslim states of the nineteenth-century Sahel gained legitimacy, and the key role Arabic texts played in the process. In this concluding section, it would be apposite to briefly follow these discourses of (de)legitimation onwards in time and reflect on the changing function of Arabic texts – specifically, why the death of Muhammad Bello in 1837 marked an abrupt bust to a thirty-year literary boom.

Usman dan Fodio, Abdullahi and Muhammad Bello were some of the most prolific writers in a century during which West African rulers and scholars expressed their views on statecraft in an unprecedented wealth of Arabic texts. In comparison, Amīr al-muʾminīn Atiku and Khalilu, Emir of Gwandu (the successors of Bello and Abdullahi, respectively) left behind only a handful of writings. Gidado dan Layma and his descendants, the hereditary wazirs of Sokoto, concentrated most of their literary efforts on retelling the lives of the Fodiawa and continuing to refine the official narrative of Sokoto’s early history. Dan Layma’s wife, Nana Asmau, daughter of Usman and a prolific poet, was a notable exception to this trend towards purely derivative works.

Al-Ḥājj Saʿīd’s anecdote in the epigraph of this concluding chapter demonstrates an important point.