Some time after the year 1854, Al-Ḥājj Saʿīd – a prominent scholar from the region of Masina – completed his history of Sokoto. Sokoto was the largest state to emerge from a series of self-proclaimed jihad movements in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sahel. The leaders of the jihad movements were Muslim scholars and teachers, many of whom identified themselves as Torobbe, a clan of the Fulani, one of the ethnocultural groups of Sub-Saharan Africa. The success of these wars marked an abrupt severance of a politico-religious hegemony that had persisted in the region for many centuries, replacing it with a new form of statecraft explicitly tied to Islamic traditions of governance.

The history of Sokoto had begun some fifty years previously and some 800 miles to the east, in Hausaland. At that time, power lay with the sarakai, the hereditary rulers of the Hausa bakwai [the seven Hausa kingdoms]. Each sarki presided over a large and complex court, which included Muslim scholars. While undoubtedly reliant on various other forms of patronage, the sarakai also claimed authority as Muslim rulers. Usman dan Fodio, a scholar and teacher from the Hausa kingdom of Gobir, began to challenge this authority. Assisted by his younger brother, Abdullahi, and later by his son, Muhammad Bello, the Fodiawa (as this book refers to these three individuals collectively) began to militate for a jihad of the sword against the sarakai.

The jihad, which began in 1804, destroyed the Hausa kingdoms, precipitated the fall of the ancient Sayfawa dynasty of Bornu, and led to the collapse of the empire of Oyo. The regional flag-bearers of the conflict became emirs of the territories they had captured, although they pledged their loyalty to Usman as Amīr al-muʾminīn. In 1811, Muhammad Bello began building the town of Sokoto as a capital city for this evolving state, although it came to rely rather more on established production centres such as Kano (worked by plantation slave labour) for its economic power. Meanwhile, Abdullahi attempted to foster the ideals of the jihad – as well as Fulani hegemony – in his Emirate of Gwandu. After Usman’s death in 1817, both he and Bello claimed that they should become Amīr al-muʾminīn, while several emirates wavered in their loyalty to this state-building project.