Hijra on the Sudan Road (Ṭarīq Al-Sūdān)

CHAPTER 1 Hijra on the Sudan Road (Ṭarīq al-Sūdān)

Tripoli

Ghadames Cairo Aujila

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0 Km 500 0 Miles 500

Illustration 1 Map of Sudan Route, from ‘Permanent Pilgrims’, p. XIV, by C. Bawa Yamba.

West African Muslims responded in various ways to the colonial conquest of the region. Some groups collaborated while others resisted militarily in accor- dance with the Islamic obligation of jihād. When those who resisted lost the war, they either accommodated to the new circumstances or left the area, choosing not to live under the domination of non-Muslims. This latter group emigrated eastward to the two holy cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. Some traveled via the North African route, while others chose the Sudan Road. In so doing, they revived the Islamic tradition of hijra of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions from Mecca to Medina in 622. They were also acting in adherence to the Qurʾān, which prescribes the hijra and reminds Muslims that God’s earth is vast, and that they can move around; to claim that one is weak and unable to do so is unacceptable (Qurʾān 4:97). Another verse recalls that the security of anyone who comes to Mecca is guaranteed (Qurʾān 3:97). Since the Islamization of West Africa, people used to take the North African route to Mecca through Cairo. Then they, together with North Africans,

Egyptians, and some Sudanese, followed the maḥmal to Mecca and Medina.1 From the sixteenth century on, when the Moroccans conquered the Songhay Empire (now Mali), the West Africans began to take the so-called Sudan Road to Mecca. This route started in Mali (and present-day Mauritania) then led to Hausaland, Chad, and Darfur. From there, pilgrims continued either along the darb al-arbaʿīn (the ‘forty-day path,’ well-known in the oriental slave trade) to Cairo, or continued eastward to Jinayna, al-Obaid, Omdurman, and then Sawākīn, Port Sudan, or Masāwa. From there they took a ship or a dhow to Jedda and Yanbu. Although the Sudanese route to Mecca was used from the sixteenth century on, it was in the nineteenth century that it gained in significance. In 1893, when Aḥmadu b. Ḥāj ʿUmar Tall (the son and successor of Ḥāj ʿUmar) and his troops were defeated by French colonial forces, they undertook a hijra, which led them into Hausaland. There, they joined the army of al-Ṭahiru (1891– 1903; the grandson of ʿUthmān dan Fodio and sultan of northern Nigeria), and fought with him against the British colonial forces of Captain Lugard. After losing the decisive battle at Burmi in 1903, many Muslims involved in the cam- paign decided, under the leadership of Shaykh Alfā Hāshim, to emigrate. They moved further eastward to Sudan, Mecca, and Medina.2 Thousands of people made the trip with all their belongings, including their livestock. The British explorer Captain Boyd Alexander met some of these groups of Muslims during his expedition of 1905 and described the situation as follows:

The caravan Which now comes into my story had originally started from Timbucto, and, increasing its following as it went along from all countries on the way, now numbered seven hundred souls and one thousand heads of sheep and cattle . . . Its leaders were Hausa and Fulani Mallams . . . It was a wonderful organization, this slowly moving community, with its population of varied races and cattle and sheep and forming a column that stretched for miles along the way . . . Whole families were there,

1 Jacque Jomier, Le Mahmal et la caravane égyptienne des pèlerins de la Mecque (XIII–XX siè- cles) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1953). The maḥmal is a kind of wooden statue that was paraded through the streets of Cairo for three days each year during the period of the ḥajj; it was believed that people who touched it could gain baraka (divine grace). 2 On this battle and the emigration (hijra) to Sudan and Mecca and Medina, see David Robinson, “The Umarian Emigration of the Late Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1987): 245–270; G.J. Lethem “Report on a Journey from Bornu, Nigeria, to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Jeddah and Cairo” in G.J.F. Tomlinson and G.J. Lethem, History of Islamic Political Propaganda in Nigeria (London: Waterlow and Sons Limited, 1927), pp. 12–27.