This chapter provides a history of the rise of Islam in west Africa, in particular to Hausaland, which is today’s Northern Nigeria. The chapter then concentrates on the Sokoto Jihad and subsequent caliphate led by Uthman Dan Fodio. The chapter traces his intellectual history, highlighting his engagement with the Arabian peninsula and championing of unifying the Hausaland region under the textual regimen of the Maliki school of Islamic law. The second layer of the sunnaic paradigm, the role the Sokoto jihad plays in contemporary northern Nigerian idealizations of an ideal Islamic society, is explained. Idealization of scholars and hudud punishments are shown to be reinscribed into Nigeria’s present moment as a source of authentication of the 1999 sharia experiment.
Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa - Ousmane Oumar Kane