117 Paul E. Lovejoy Jihād in West Africa Is the Coming Together

Book Reviews 117 Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihād in West Africa During the Age of Revolutions, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2016, xix + 396 pp., US$90.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0821422410. Jihād in West Africa is the coming together of a lifetime of work on various aspects of West Africa and African diasporas in the Americas. Lovejoy began as an economic historian, detailing respectively the trade of Kola nuts in Hausa- land and the production and trade of salt in the central bilād al-sūdān. Per- haps because of the central role that enslaved labour played in both of these industries and their intersection with the wider Atlantic world, Lovejoy devel- oped a long-lasting interest in documenting and exploring various aspects of the slave economy on both sides of the Atlantic. He now focuses increasingly on autobiographical records of the enslaved in the Americas, tracing those— predominantly Muslim—Africans who documented their experiences of and responses to slavery. In this publication, Paul Lovejoy weaves together the strands of his diverse inquiries into a single compelling narrative. This narrative conceives of two interconnected “Atlantic worlds”—West Africa and the colonies of the Americas—which exhibit remarkable historical parallels. In sum, while nineteenth century Europe and the Americas witnessed an “age of revolutions”, a concept popularized by historian Eric Hobsbawm, in West Africa a parallel series of revolutionary events was occurring. Muslim scholar-warriors across the bilād al-sūdān militated for a jihad of the sword to radically reform society along the lines of Islamic orthodoxy.The jihads led to the collapse of longstand- ing African kingdoms, political elites and societal structures and the formation of new African Muslim states. The largest and longest-lasting was the state of Sokoto, known today as the Sokoto Caliphate. The jihads, argues Lovejoy, were in part a response to the encroachment of the Atlantic slave trade into the bilād al-sūdān, stoking fears about the enslave- ment of Muslims and the expansion of the Christian powers. With the success of the jihads, the new political elite imposed strict laws forbidding the sale of slaves to European merchants, leading to the disruption and rerouting of the trans-Atlantic slave trade away from this part of Africa. Just as the Ameri- cas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a “second slavery”, in West Africa a parallel intensification of enslaved labour was taking place. While strictly limiting the trade of slaves with Europe and the Ameri- cas, jihadist states such as Sokoto had a huge domestically enslaved population labouring in a plantation system which—according to Lovejoy—rivalled that of the southern United States, Cuba and Brazil in size and scope. Meanwhile, West African Muslims who were unfortunate enough to be shipped across the Atlantic as captives had a disproportionate influence on slave societies from Journal of Global Slavery © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/2405836X-00401007 118 Book Reviews Louisiana to Cuba. Nowhere was this felt more than in Bahia, Brazil. There, a significant proportion of slaves had come from Oyo, Hausaland and Bornu, areas directly affected by the jihad movements. In 1835, the leaders of the Malês revolt overtly tied their movement to a shared Muslim consciousness, and their armed resistance had several elements in common with the jihads of West Africa. With such a bold vision as this, there are, without a doubt, aspects of Love- joy’s work which invite closer scrutiny. For one, the trope of an iniquitous ruler selling Muslims into slavery was current in West Africa well before the expansion of the Atlantic trade. It was among the accusations that ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maghīlī levelled against the erstwhile ruler of Songhai, Sonni Ali, in order to justify Askiya Muhammad’s usurpation of power in 1492. The leaders of the Sokoto jihad applied these same accusations to the Hausa kings, at times even quoting verbatim from al-Maghīlī’s work on fifteenth century Gao when seem- ingly describing Hausaland of the nineteenth century. This leads to the ques- tion as to whether all of what the West African jihad leaders had to say about slavery was down to the advance of the European slave trade on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It could also be interpreted as an established strategy of dele- gitimizing rulers—who in many cases, let us not forget, believed themselves adherents of Islam—by the scandalous accusation that they were selling free- born Muslims to infidels. As the title of his book suggests, Lovejoy places the doctrine of jihad at the centre of the reformist movements of nineteenth centuryWest Africa.Yet incit- ing jihad was only one factor among many strategies pursued by the Muslim leaders of that period to enact swift and revolutionary social change. Mahdism and the claiming of spiritual insight, or kashf, through Sufi practice were others, as was the role of genealogies and prophecy. Further, while Lovejoy highlights that the jihad leaders had a shared desire to purify the Islamic faith, they were not necessarily united in how this could best be achieved. Far from a united triumvirate providing “unbroken leader- ship”, the Fodiawa clashed bitterly about the precise form that their new state should take, and who should lead it.What is more, once the new jihadist leaders had established their authority, they often retreated from more literal interpre- tations of Islamic law, especially when it came to relations with non-Muslims. This in turn left them vulnerable to new jihad movements, as was the case with al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal’s defeat of Ahmadu III, ruler of the Caliphate of Hamdal- lahi. Yet far from casting doubts on Lovejoy’s vision, such considerations suggest that his work will no doubt engage and enliven debate among a new genera- tion of scholars. Jihād in West Africa is a hugely compelling book, prompting Journal of Global Slavery 4 (2019) 109–123.

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