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Contradictions in Creating a Jihadi Capital: Sokoto in the Nineteenth Century and Its Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2013

Murray Last
Murray Last*
Affiliation:
Murray Last is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and was a professor of history (1978–80) at Bayero University. His Ph.D. in 1964 was the first to be awarded by a Nigerian university (University College Ibadan). He is the author of The Sokoto Caliphate (Longmans Green, 1967) and the editor (with G. L. Chavunduka) of The Professionalisation of African Medicine (Manchester University Press, 1986), and he has also published more than a hundred scholarly works on African history and anthropology. He was the editor of Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute from 1986 to 2001. E-mail: m.last@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract:

The Sokoto caliphate in nineteenth-century northern Nigeria was an astonishing episode in the history of Africa: a huge, prosperous polity that created unity where none had existed before. Yet today its history is underexplored, sometimes ignored or even disparaged, both within Nigeria and in Europe and the U.S. Yet that history is extraordinary. Sokoto town was, and still is, an anomaly within Hausaland; built speedily on a “green-field” site as both a trading and a political center for the caliphate, it is a site of pilgrimage that to this day remains a rural town with no monumental buildings or fine edifices. As a by-product of a religious movement (jihad), Sokoto thus represents many of the dilemmas that faced and still face radically reforming Islamic groups if they expand rapidly and go to war. Thus Sokoto history remains deeply significant for modern Nigeria.

Résumé:

Le califat de Sokoto dans le nord du Nigeria au dix-neuvième siècle fut un épisode étonnant dans l’histoire de l’Afrique: un régime politique impressionnant et prospère qui créa une forme d’unité là où il n’y en avait pas auparavant. Cependant, son histoire est laissée à l’abandon aujourd’hui, parfois ignorée ou même décriée, à la fois au Nigeria et en Europe ou encore aux États-Unis. Cependant, l’histoire de ce califat est extraordinaire. La ville de Sokoto était, et est toujours, une anomalie dans l’enceinte du Hausaland ; construite en hâte sur un site “vert” pour servir de centre économique et politique au califat, c’est aujourd’hui un lieu de pèlerinage qui reste intact à ce jour, sans monuments ni architecture notable. En tant que produit dérivé du mouvement religieux du Jihad, Sokoto représente ainsi bien des dilemmes propres aux groupes islamiques en radicale transformation s’ils se répandent rapidement et partent en croisade. Ainsi, l’histoire de Sokoto reste profondément significative pour le Nigeria d’aujourd’hui.

Keywords

SokotocaliphatejihadIslamNorthern NigeriaSufi
Type
ARTICLES
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , September 2013 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2013 

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