Usman dan Fodio

Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817), known across Nigeria as the Shehu, was a Fulani scholar of Gobir in Hausaland who founded the Sokoto Caliphate and ruled as its first caliph. A Sufi of the Qadiriyya order and a jurist of the Maliki school, he wrote more than a hundred books on the Islamic sciences, and the movement he led reshaped the religious and political map of West Africa. ¹

He was born on 15 December 1754 at Maratta, in the Hausa state of Gobir, into the Toronkawa clan of Fulani scholars, and moved with his family as a small child to Degel. His father Muhammad Fodio, from whom the name dan Fodio — "son of the learned one" — derives, was his first teacher, and his mother Hauwa came from a line of literary scholars. ¹

He travelled from teacher to teacher in the traditional way, and the decisive influence of his youth was Jibril ibn Umar of Agadez, who admitted him to the Qadiri and other Sufi orders. ² From about 1774 he combined study with itinerant preaching across Kebbi, Gobir and Zamfara, denouncing the Hausa rulers' taxation, enslavement and mixing of Islam with practices he held unlawful, and insisting on the observance of the Maliki fiqh in personal observance and in commercial and criminal law. ¹

In the 1790s, visions of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani confirmed his place in the Qadiriyya's spiritual lineage; he taught his own wird, or litany, and became head of his Qadiriyya brotherhood. ¹

At Degel he built a self-governing community of his followers, and won concessions for it from Sultan Bawa of Gobir; under Bawa's successors the toleration collapsed, Sultan Nafata forbade anyone but the Shehu to preach, and Sultan Yunfa attempted his life. In February 1804 he made the hijra to Gudu, where his followers elected him imam and Commander of the Faithful, and the jihad against the Hausa kings began. ^{2 1}

He did not campaign in person; he appointed commanders, handled diplomacy and wrote the movement's justifications, among them the Bayan wujub al-hijra of 1806. Alkalawa, the Gobir capital, fell in October 1808, and by 1812 the caliphate's administration was divided between his son Muhammad Bello in the east and his brother Abdullahi in the west, while Usman returned to teaching and writing. ¹

He wrote hundreds of works on Islamic sciences — creed, Maliki jurisprudence, hadith criticism, poetry and Islamic spirituality — the majority in Arabic, and about 480 poems in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa. His writings addressed the duties of rulers, the role of scholars and the concept of the mujaddid, the renewer of the faith, and they are still widely read and quoted in northern Nigeria. ¹

Two independent sources name his affiliations for the man himself. The Arabic article calls him Maliki in school and Ash'ari in creed, a Sufi on the Qadiri path; the English article records his insistence on Maliki fiqh and his initiation into the Qadiriyya, whose brotherhood he came to head. ^{3 1 2}

In 1815 he moved to Sokoto, where Bello had built him a house, and he died there on 20 April 1817, at the age of 62. His son Muhammad Bello succeeded him as Commander of the Faithful and second caliph, and his brother Abdullahi governed the western emirates from Gwandu. ¹

His closest associates were his younger brother Abdullahi dan Fodio, one of his first pupils, and his son Muhammad Bello, both distinguished teachers and writers. Several of his daughters, among them Nana Asma'u, became scholars and writers in their turn. ^{2 1}