Quote from Quwamdeen Durojaiye on June 18, 2023, 4:53 pm

WHO IS USMAN DAN FODIO.

Usman dan Fodio, Usman also spelled Uthman or Usuman, Arabic ʿUthmān Ibn Fūdī, (born December 1754, Maratta, Gobir, Hausaland [now in Nigeria]—died 1817, Sokoto, Fulani empire), Fulani mystic, philosopher, who in a jihad (holy war) between 1804 and 1808, created a new Muslim state, the Fulani empire, in what is now northern Nigeria. He died in 1817 (aged 62) in Sokoto Nigeria

Usman was born in the Hausa state of Gobir, in what is now northwestern Nigeria. His father, Muhammad Fodiye, was a scholar from the Toronkawa clan, which had emigrated from Futa-Toro in Senegal about the 15th century. While he was still young, Usman moved south with his family to Degel, where he studied the Qurʾān with his father. Subsequently he moved on to other scholar relatives, traveling from teacher to teacher in the traditional way and reading extensively in the Islamic sciences.

About 1774–75 Usman began his active life as a teacher, and for the next 12 years he combined study with peripatetic teaching and preaching in Kebbi and Gobir, followed by a further five years in Zamfara. During this latter period, though committed in principle to avoiding the courts of kings, he visited Bawa, the sultan of Gobir, from whom he won important concessions for the local Muslim community (including his own freedom to propagate Islam); he also appears to have taught the future sultan Yunfa.

Throughout the 1780s and ’90s Usman’s reputation increased, as did the size and importance of the community that looked to him for religious and political leadership. Particularly closely associated with him were his younger brother, Abdullahi, who was one of his first pupils, and his son, Muhammad Bello, both distinguished teachers and writer.

During the 1790s, when Usman seems to have lived continuously at Degel, a division developed between his substantial community and the Gobir ruling dynasty. About 1797–98 Sultan Nafata, who was aware that Usman had permitted his community to be armed and who no doubt feared that it was acquiring the characteristics of a state within the state, reversed the liberal policy he had adopted toward him 10 years earlier and issued his historic proclamation forbidding any but the Shaykh, as Usman had come to be called, to preach, forbidding the conversion of sons from the religion of their fathers, and proscribing the use of turbans and veils.

Usman was the most important reforming leader of the western Sudan region in the early 19th century. Lastly, Usman’s importance lies in his activities as founder of a jamāʿa, or Islamic community, the Sokoto caliphate, which brought the Hausa states and some neighbouring territories under a single central administration for the first time in history.

In the 1790s Usman dan Fodio who lived in the northern Hausa state of Gobir (northeast of Sokoto) quarreled with its rulers. Accusing the Hausa kings of being little more than pagans, he encouraged the Hausa people to revolt. Joined both by Hausa commoners and by Fulani pastoralists alike, the jihad, or holy war, swept through Hausaland and, repulsed only by the eastern empire of Kanem-Bornu, engulfed Adamawa, Nupe, and Yorubaland to the south. After the invasion by the Fulani of the northern provinces of the Oyo, the emirate of Ilorin to the northeast became the base from which Islām was to spread among the Yoruba. Usman, who was more a scholar than a statesman, ceded the practical direction of the eastern part of the empire to his son Muḥammad Bello, who settled in Sokoto, and the western (with its capital at Gwandu) to his brother Abdullahi. All three continued the Fulani denunciation of Bornu. The empire reached its zenith under Muḥammad Bello, who, like Usman, administered it according to the principles of Muslim law. The decay of this system was to aid the establishment in the late 19th century of British rule over what was later to be known as Northern Nigeria.