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Southern Saharan Scholarship and the Bilad Al-Sudan1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

C. C. Stewart
C. C. Stewart
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

By way of drawing attention to a neglected theme in West African history this article focuses upon southern Saharan society and the intellectual tradition of its scholarly (zawiya and insilimen) lineages. It is argued that societies of the southern Sahara have remarkably similar social, political and economic organizations and that the zawiya/insilimen scholars were therefore the product of comparable political and economic milieus. One result of this was that these scholars, at least by the late eighteenth century, seem to have evolved similar patterns of scholarship which emphasized two highly functional Islamic sciences, jurisprudence and mysticism. It is suggested that this intellectual tradition was shared with other scholars in the desert-edge economic region, and that as a result there existed a basic unity in the intellectual traditions of many western and central Sudanese Islamic communities which is distorted by distinctions between ‘militant’ and ‘quietist’ traditions of legal reform in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

2 For a recent example see the map of ‘ethnic groups’ in the authoritative volume edited by Ajayi, J. F. A. and Crowder, Michael (eds.), History of West Africa, i (London, 1971), 16–17Google Scholar. This map is somewhat improved upon by Willis's, J. R. map in the same volume (p. 442)Google Scholar, but in a chapter in which ‘Berbers and Arab settlements’ (p. 463)Google Scholar suffice to introduce populations adjacent to the Niger Bend.

3 See re–assessments of this important aspect of Sahelian history by Lovejoy, P. and Biers, S., ‘The Desert-Edge Economy’Google Scholar (forthcoming in the International Journal of African Historical Studies) and Curtin, P. D., Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975).Google Scholar

4 See Norris, H. T., ‘Znaga Islam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Bulletin of SOAS, xxxii (1969), 496–526Google Scholar; ‘Abd-al-'Aziz, Batran, ‘Abd-Allah, ‘Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti and the recrudescence of Islam in the Western Sahara and the Middle Niger (c. 1750–1811)’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1971)Google Scholar; and Stewart, C. C. with Stewart, E. K., Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (Oxford, 1973), 58–61.Google Scholar

5 Emphasis is laid here on the functional interrelationship of social organization and a tradition of Islamic scholarship at a given point in time: hence the use of an ‘ethnographic present’ in much of the following. The late eighteenth/early nineteenth century has been chosen as this period is the the earliest in which this pattern can be easily traced. Although reference will be made to indications that it predated this time, its historical development must be the subject of further research. This is currently under way by Mr I. A. U. Musa of the Department of History, A.B.U., Zaria.

6 Ethnographic literature from which the following discussion is drawn includes: Jean, C., Let Touareg du Sud-Est de l'Air (Paris, 1909)Google Scholar; Le Commandant Frèrejean, ‘La Région des Idouaich: Essai historique sommaire, fiscal et politique sur les tribus de la Mauritanie orientale’ (Archives, République Islamique de Mauritanie, E/2/7, 1911)Google Scholar; Marty, P., Etudes sur l'Islam et les tribus du Soudan (3 vols., Paris, 1921)Google Scholar; id., Etudes sur l'Islam et les tribus maures: Les Brakna (Paris, 1921)Google Scholar; Rodd, F. R., People of the Veil (London, 1926)Google Scholar; Urvoy, Y., Histoire des Populations du Soudan Central (Paris, 1936)Google Scholar; Nicolas, F., Tamesna, Les Ioullemmeden de l'est (Paris 1950)Google Scholar; Nicolaisen, J., Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Toureg (Copenhagen, 1963)Google Scholar; id., Structures Politiques et Sociales des Touareg de l'Air et de l'Ahaggar (IFAN/CNRS, Niamey, n.d. [1963?]); Stewart, , Islam and Social Order.Google Scholar

7 In Shinqit these are the ‘Arabs’ (frequently ‘Hassanis’ who trace descent from one Hassan of the Banu Ma'qil) whose arrival in the Western Sahara from southern Morocco is dated from the end of the fourteenth century. Further east the nobles (known as the Imajegan tribes) reckon the descent of their dominant lineages to the Azger (Kel Innek) and Ahaggaren (Kel Gres) in ancient times and Ahl Kel Suk (Kel Owi) more recently, in the seventeenth century. The tortuous unravelling of foundation myths and migration legends for these groups will not be attempted here, although the social charters by which these groups reckon their relationships with other peoples in their regions will be discussed below. For discussion of the origins of Shinqiti ‘warriors’ see Marty, , Brakna 1–19Google Scholar; the origins of the Ahir, Kel (people of Ahir) are discussed in Rodd, 330–416.Google Scholar

8 The majority of tribes in this social class are known as zenagha units in Shinqit, , lahmaGoogle Scholar tribes in eastern Mauritania and imghad in Ahir. Their descent is generally traced from figures or lineages whose residence in the Sahara pre-dated the coming of their temporal overlords and some of them are regarded as being of noble status. The most celebrated of these politically subordinate nobles are the zawiya or insilimen lineages or tribes, sometimes called ‘holy tribes’ or ‘scholarly lineages’, which will be discussed in detail below.

9 Nicolaisen, , Structures politiques, 30.Google Scholar

10 These societies explain this social and political hierarchy in elaborately detailed ‘models’ which have been recorded from within (al-Shinqiti, Ahmad, al-Wasīṭ fī tarājim udubā’ Shinqīṭ (Cairo, 1961) 478 ffGoogle Scholar) and from without the southern Sahara societies (Hamet, I., Chroniques de la Mauritanie Sénégalaise Nacer Eddine (Paris, 1911) 45 ff)Google Scholar; Rodd, , ‘Organisation and Government’, 129–153Google Scholar; Nicola, 188–191. Reference below to this model therefore refers to the societies’ own perception of their political and social hierarchy. The parallels between this class system and the social hierarchies of other desert-fringe communities such as the Wolof and Hausa societies deserve attention by both economic and political historians of the Sahelian region.

11 See Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 14Google Scholar. In spite of the significance Shurr Bubba has taken on in Shinqiti tradition its effects appear to have been felt only locally in the south west of modern-day Mauritania; for reference to one ‘spin-off’ of it in the Hodh see Norris, H.T., ‘Znaga Islam’, 520, n. 36Google Scholar, quoted from the Walata Chronicle.

12 See ibid, and, for a classification of the Idaw ‘Aish as ‘warriors’, Ahmad al-Shinqiti, 479. The Idaw ‘Aish represent an autochthonous tribe that ‘became Arab’ by virtue of its dominance of Tagant and the western Hodh in the aftermath of Shurr Bubba. The Berabish, part of whom claim descent from Hassan, have a similar legend to the Shurr Bubba story but in reverse. The ‘Hassani’ Awlad ‘Abd al-Rahman of the Berabish were overcome by more recent immigrants (Awlad Amar) who trace descent from a holy man said to have come to the southern Sahara in the early seventeenth century and who imposed their rule over the Awlad ‘Abd al-Rahman in the second half of the seventeenth century. (Marty, , Soudan, 1, 186–9Google Scholar, drawing upon a ‘Tarikh des Berabich’).

13 For a discussion of the dating of the Kel Owi arrival in the politics of Ahir see Rodd, op. cit. 382–92. Jean (p. 92) follows the Agades Chronicle in dating the departure of the Kel Gres from Ahir as taking place between 1653 and 1687. None of these confrontations between recent arrivals and residents in Ahir, as Shinqit, ought to be accepted as neatly demarcated events but rather as population shifts that are reckoned back to precise battles in oral literature.

14 On the Iullemmeden (Ulemiden/Aulimmeden) division from the Kel Tadmekket and their arrival in the Middle Niger region see Urvoy, 81 and Rodd, 387; the common origins of the Kel Tadmekket and Iforgas is noted in ibid. 355, and the eighteenth-century placement of the Iullemmeden, Tadmekket and (Adrar) Iforgas may be surmised to be a result of these events. A major problem in dealing with the placement of individual units in the precolonial era of modern-day Niger is the dislocation caused by the Khoussan ‘rebellion’ in 1917 which affected the greater part of southern Niger. On the Kel Antassar legends of origin and establishment on the Middle Niger in the late seventeenth century see Marty, , Soudan, 1, 258Google Scholar, and for the Kunta, whose importance dates from the early eighteenth century, ibid. 136 ff, and Batran, ‘Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti’.

15 On Sa'adian control over Touat, an oasis complex which had direct economic repercussions in the southern Sahara, see Martin, A. G. P., Quatre siècles d'histoire Marocaine (Paris, 1923) 55–65Google Scholar; material relating to the Arma Pashalik after Songhay's collapse is nicely summarized by Willis, (in Ajayi and Crowder, 443–52)Google Scholar; possible political effects of drought in central Sudanese history are discussed by Lovejoy and Biers (‘The Desert-Edge Economy’) and a ‘famine’ in Touat is mentioned in Martin, 54, for the year 1659. The hypothesis that the quantity and quality of paper may have effected our pre-eighteenth-century documentation of Saharan history lies in the dramatic technological advances in paper manufacture during the first quarter of the nineteenth century which may have been reflected in an increased quantity of papers available in Western Africa: see Hunter, D., Papermaking: The History and Techniques of an Ancient Craft (London, 1957)Google Scholar, e.g. for the use of bleach beginning in the late eighteenth century which made possible the use of non-white rags but which also, until refined, produced inferior paper with a short life-span.

16 Examples abound: the Kunta-Tajakanat, Ida Belhassan-Idaw ‘Ali and Awlad Ibiri-Djedjeba conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are mentioned in Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 96Google Scholar; Kel Antassar-Kunta conflicts in the early nineteenth century appear in Marty, , Soudan, 1, 263Google Scholar. By contrast conflicts between zawiya groups and ‘warriors’ were rare.

17 On ‘warriors’ crossing over see Stewart, C. C., ‘A new document concerning the origins of the N'tishait and the Awlad Ibiri,’ Bull. IFAN, xxxi, B. no. 1 (1969), 309–19Google Scholar. Norris, H. T. (‘Znaga Islam’, 498)Google Scholar points up the subordinate role of some zawiya tribes prior to Shurr Bubba. A further note that should be made here on the ‘maraboutic’ tribes is that within the larger units, such as the Iforgas and Kunta, there existed some quite ‘un-holy’ lineages whose livelihood by pillage was quite as famous as their cousins’ piety. Rodd (p. 291) observes this with respect to the Kel T'intaghoda insilimen, and Azaouad, Hodh and Tagant history features Kunta raiders with as much regularity as any single Hassani group.

18 Interviews with Shinqiti (Awlad Ibiri and Awlad Daimani) scholars about their counterparts in Mali and Niger, and with Iforgas and Kunta scholars about contemporary Shinqiti scholars and libraries.

19 See note 3 above.

20 As above, qualification needs to be placed against dichotomies such as this which contrast the ‘warrior’ raiding and protection-money economy with the zawiya/insilimen or subordinate class pastoral and commercial economy. But evidence from southern Mauritania in the early nineteenth century seems to support this general division in economic bases (Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 54–8, 109–11, 118–9)Google Scholar, as does Nicolaisen's data which lead him to the conclusion that the class system in Ahir and Ahaggar represents economic occupation in part (Structures politiques, 53–4, 80)Google Scholar. He also finds this reflected in the distinctions between goat and camel herding and the caravan commerce of former days being transacted by slaves. Another indication of this comes from the social charters such as that of the Berabish, where a holy man-merchant is said to have been the first of the Awlad Amar to come to the southern Sahara where he founded Araouan (Marty, , Soudan, 1, 186).Google Scholar

21 For a twentieth-century assessment of Kunta economic activities between Touat and the Niger Bend see Genevière, J., ‘Les Kountas et leurs activitiés commerciales’, Bull. IFAN, xii (1950), IIII–27Google Scholar; on possible political ramifications of early nineteenth-century Kunta commercial interests, see Stewart, C. C. ‘Frontier disputes and Problems of Legitimation: Sokoto–Masina Relations’Google Scholar (forthcoming), where it is argued that Kunta commercial interests on the Niger bend and along the Saramoyo-Doré trade route played an important role in the foreign relations of the caliphates of Hamdullahi and Sokoto.

22 The most famous of these was the escale des Darmankours (later Richard Toll) named after the Idaw al-Hajj zawiya tribe who were nearly synonymous with the Senegal River gum trade from the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth century. Judging from the gum trade by the Awlad Ibiri zawiya tribe, which was carried on at Podor, the particular escale for individual tribes tended to be one adjacent to their riverain (Chememma) agricultural lands (see Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 120–1Google Scholar, and Marty, , Brakna, annexe xix).Google Scholar

23 On Tichitt see Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 34Google Scholar; on Walata, see Marty, , Soudan iii, 321 ffGoogle Scholar; on Araouan, see ibid. 1, 238 ff; on Timbuctu, see ibid. 45; and on Agades, see Rodd, 290.

24 Although there is evidence from the early colonial period of Sarakolé ‘mayors’ of a number of southern Mauritanian towns (Boutilimit, Aleg, Méderdra, etc.) further research needs to be carried out to determine the extent and antiquity of this pattern. Marty mentions the dialect of Walata as being a corrupted Sarakolé and that the quarter of the town which provided qadis, imams and other such officials was settled by the oldest inhabitants (the mehajib) (Marty, , Soudan, III, 324, 330)Google Scholar; similarly he reports the Arabized Songhay spoken at Araouan (ibid. 1, 239). The governors of Timbuctu and Gao in the eighteenth century were drawn from the indigenized and sedentary Arma/Songhay populations of the Niger Bend, and this pattern is again confirmed in the custom of selecting the sultan of Agades from sedentary, non-noble stock who maintained close ties with lands to the south (see J. O. Hunwick's summary of accounts on the establishment of the Sultanate of Agades, in Ajayi, and Crowder, , History of West Africa, 1, 219)Google Scholar. Rodd (p. 106) describes the sultan's vizir and his economic duties in supervising the salt caravans to Bilma and collecting duties; significantly, this official had a Hausa title, Sariki n'Turawa.

25 Ahmad al-Shinqiti, 532.

26 For an early nineteenth-century example of this see Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 58 ff.Google Scholar

27 On the role of the Sultan of Agades as an arbitrator for Ahir societies see Rodd, 107; insilimen activities in this regard are less well documented although their role in ‘civil’ law and arbitration of such important issues as inheritance has been described by F. Nicola, 189, 210 ff, and H. Lhote implies that at times of stress (such as the French occupation) the insilimen have played important leadership roles (Les Touaregs du Hoggar (Paris, 1955), 197).Google Scholar

28 Awlad Daimani fame rests largely upon the activities of Nasr al-Din, the seventeenth-century leader of the zawiya tribes against the Hassanis; the political status of the Awlad Ibiri can be traced to the career of Shaikh Sidiyya al-Kabir (1775-1868)Google Scholar; the Tajakanat are remembered for a long tradition of challenge to Arabs arriving from the north; Kunta fame is traced chiefly to the career of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1812)Google Scholar; and Ait Awari prestige lies in Muhammad al-Jailani's career in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This brings to light another important correction that should be noted in the society's own perception of a neat hierarchy of political and social classes. Through their economic and arbitration activities some of these zawiya/insilimen lineages came to hold a degree of political power that rivaled the ‘temporal’ leaders of their area for the duration of the careers of especially active shaikhs. This was not understood by many early observers who merely documented the society's model without questioning its functional validity or who assumed that aberrations from the model were the result of particularly weak ‘warriors’. Rodd, for instance, reports: ‘with an effete monarch and lazy Anastafidet [head of the Kel Owi] at Agades, the most important men in Air today [in 1926] are Insilimen…’ (p. 290), and Nicola speaks of the infringement of the custom of separation of powers between temporal and religious groups in the phenomena of the ‘marabouts-chefs’, which are described as a product of French rule (p. 191, 208–9). Bourrel, Compare M. writing in 1860 about the structural weakness of Hassani authority in Shinqit (‘Voyage dans le pays des Maures Brakana’, Revue maritime et coloniale, 11 (1861), 524).Google Scholar

29 This is best documented by the biographies of eighty-seven scholars from the zawiya tribes reported by al-Shinqiti, Ahmad, al-Wasīţ (1–183)Google Scholar, and for the area between Walata and the Niger Bend by approximately 200 biographies that appear in al-Bartili, , Fath al-shakur fī ma'rifat a'yan ‘ulamā’ al-TakrurGoogle Scholar (where well over half of the easily identifiable nisbas (nicknames) indicate scholars from such tribes as the Laghlal, Tajakanat, Tashumsha/Awlad Daiman, Kunta, etc., i.e. men identified as being from non-urban areas). For a listing of these biographies see Hunwick, J. O., Research Bulletin of the Centre of Arabic Documentation, 1, 1 (1964), 23 ff)Google Scholar. Unfortunately, we are not so well informed about the scholars and scholarship of Ahir as we are for Shinqit and the Azaouad, although the activities of the Ait Awari in the late eighteenth and early nine teenth centuries seem to fit into the pattern of western Saharan scholars.

30 For an assessment of library resources available to one group of jurists see Stewart, C. C., ‘A New Source on the Book Market in Morocco in 1830 and Islamic Scholarship in West Africa’ Hespéris-Tamuda, xi (1970), 209–50Google Scholar; the ‘checks’ this body of ‘ulamā’ kept on one another are illustrated by the al-Mukhtar al-Buna Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti controversy (al-Shinqiti, Ahmad, al-Wasīţ, 277–84Google Scholar, notes this in his biographical account of the Tajakanat scholar). More generally, the entire tradition of genealogical scholarship through and within which the social classes of Saharan society are reckoned attests a critical tradition of scholarship in Saharan, southernzawiya/insilimen thought.Google Scholar

31 The function of this combination of jurisprudence and mysticism is discussed in Stewart, , Islam and Social Order, 75–7.Google Scholar

32 See ibid. 33, for suggestions of this drawn from Shaikh Sidiyya's career; to document this to the satisfaction of some students of Islamic theology would be difficult at our present stage of research on the zawiya/insilimen scholars. The intellectual tradition which these sciences represent however does come through references to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century saints (walis) who are also noted as jurists in al-Sa‘di’s Tarikh al-Sudan (ed. and trans. Houdas, O., Paris, 1964)Google Scholar and the biographies in the Fath al-Shukur. The best documented example of this tradition of scholarship appears in the career of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (see Batran, A. A., ‘An introductory note on…Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti’, J. Hist. Soc. Nigeria, vi, 4 (1973), 347–52)Google Scholar, where mysticism is portrayed as the chief tool of the reformer (mujaddid). Indications are that this intellectual tradition was widespread in the southern Sahara by the late eighteenth century; on its origins we can only hypothesise at this time on the possible influence of a non-urban milieu upon the main stream of Islamic scholarship in the southern Sahara in the aftermath of the collapse of Songhay.

33 It might be argued that this intellectual tradition dominated by the Islamic sciences of fiqh and taşawwuf is not an especially precise one and, indeed, analyses need to be undertaken of the literature produced in the southern Sahara in the eighteenth-century which should help specify aspects of this tradition. Yet even at this general level we can contrast these emphases in southern Saharan scholarship with other eighteenth-century, non-urban intellectual traditions in the Islamic world such as the Wahhabis, the sharifian cults in North Africa or the use of 'amal in Moroccan jurisprudence. For a discussion of this jurisprudence/mysticism intellectual tradition as reflected in al-Hajj 'Umar's writings see Jah, O., ‘The relationship between the Sokoto Jihad and the Jihad of al-Hajj ‘Umar: A New Assessment’ (Sokoto Seminar paper, 1975, 6–7)Google Scholar, although I differ with Dr Jah in his emphasis upon the fundamentally unique nature of this combination of disciplines in al-Hajj ‘Umar’s thought. See also Batran, , ‘Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti’Google Scholar, chap, iv, ‘The Spiritual Path, the Awrād and the Ahzāb’.

34 For a general discussion of this dilemma in şūfī thought see Gibb, H. A. R., ‘Sufism’, in Studies on the Civilization oj Islam (London, 1962), 208–18Google Scholar. I am indebted to Dr Omar Jah's discussion of this issue for the summary statement on 'ilm al-batin and 'ilm al-zahir (‘The relationship…’, 6).Google Scholar

35 Confirmed in recent oral literature reported by Robinson, D., ‘Abdul Qadir and Shaykh Umar: A continuing tradition of Islamic leadership in Futo Toro’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, vi, 2 (1973), 294.Google Scholar

36 Last, Murray, The Sokoto Caliphate (London, 1967), 5–6Google Scholar; Hiskett, M., ‘An Islamic Tradition of Reform in the Western Sudan’, Bull. SOAS, xxv, 3 (1962), 589–591Google Scholar; and Last, D. M. and al-Hajj, M. A., ‘Attempts at defining a Muslim in 19th Century Hausaland and Borno’, J. Hist. Soc. Nigeria, iii, 2 (1965), 233Google Scholar. In connexion with Shehu Usuman's debt to Jibril it must be noted that Jibril was not, himself, of the Ait Awari, but that the Shehu should seek out a learned man among the Adar insilimen is, I think, significant.

37 Ba, A. H. and Daget, J., L'Empire Peul du Macina (Paris, 1962) 1, 114ffGoogle Scholar, and Fonds Brevie, I.F.A.N. (Dakar), MS. 17.

38 Abun-Nasr, J., The Tijaniyya (Oxford, 1965), 106Google Scholar and Jah, O., ‘The relationship…’, 2.Google Scholar

39 See Hiskett, M., The Sword of Truth (Oxford, 1973), 59–69Google Scholar for a recent assessment of the role of sufism in the Shehu's early studies that complements the better known literature on his legal training; Jah, O., ‘al-Hajj ‘Umar's Philosophy of Jihad and its Sufi Basis’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1974)Google Scholar also treats this theme of the interdependence of sufism and legal reform in al-Hajj ‘Umar’s thinking. On Ahmad Lebbu see Ba and Daget, 62 ff.

40 Marty, P., L'Islam en Guinée (Paris, 1921), 160–85Google Scholar; Suret-Canale, J., ‘Touba, Holy Place of Islam’, in Allen, C. H. and Johnson, R. W. (eds.) African Perspectives (Cambridge, 1970), 55–58.Google Scholar

41 Archives, République Islamique de Mauritanie, série, E, ‘Notice… sur le Cherif Fanta Madi’Google Scholar; and le Chatelier, A., L'Islam dans l'Afrique Occidentale (Paris, 1899), 162–3.Google Scholar

42 Wilks, I., ‘Abu Bakr al-Siddiq of Timbuctu’ in Curtin, P. D. (ed.), Africa Remembered (Madison, 1968), 152–63.Google Scholar

43 Wilks, I., ‘The Saghanughu and the spread of Maliki Law’, Research Bulletin of the Centre of Arabic Documentation, ii, 2 (1966), 11–17.Google Scholar

44 For examples in the Middle Volta region, see Levtzion, N., Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa (Oxford, 1968), 27Google Scholar on the origins of the Salaga market described from the Qissat Salagha Ta'rikh Ghunja; ibid. 27–8, on the ‘Arab factor’ in the rise of Jakpa's influence over Gonja; and ibid. 93 on the La'abansi ‘Arabs’ in early Dagomba history. This pattern of ‘Arab’ counsellors or factions in the social charters of diverse communities in the bilād al-sūdān is widespread, and although it cannot be tied directly into the activities of southern Saharan zawiya/insilimen lineages and the intellectual tradition they represent, such a hypothesis might be explored.

45 le Chatelier, A., L'Islam dans L'Afrique, 158Google Scholar seems to have initiated this ‘Qadiriyya determinism’ in the spread of Islam with a carefully qualified statement describing the influence of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti over Saharan peoples. Marty, P. (Soudan, 1, 27)Google Scholar extended the Kunta shaikh's impact throughout the Sudan, , and Trimingham, J. S. (A History of Islam in West Africa (Oxford, 1962), 156)Google Scholar declares that all the strains of the Qadiriyya in West African can be traced to Sidi al-Mukhtar. The most recent step in this escalation of Qadiriyya and Kunta activity appears in Curtin, , Senegambia, p. 54Google Scholar, where the Qadiriyya is said to have functioned as a ‘reformist order’ in the Sudan during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

46 See Jah, O., ‘The relationship…’, 5–11.Google Scholar

47 See Curtin, P. D., ‘Jihad in West Africa: early phases and interrelationships in Mauritania and Senegal’, J. Afr. Hist, xii (1971), 11–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where Trimingham's causal links are pushed back one state further to Shurr Bubba.

48 Curtin, , ‘Jihad in West Africa’, 14.Google Scholar