After dan Fodio, authority was shared: his son Muhammad Bello ruled from the new capital, Sokoto, as caliph (sarkin musulmi), while his brother Abdullahi governed the western half from Gwandu. The territory was divided into emirates, each led by an emir who owed allegiance to Sokoto. Salamone counts fifteen emirates in the end.
The old Hausa dynasties were replaced, but not erased. Two defeated houses founded successor states in exile (Abuja and Maradi), and a third Hausa state arose at Argungu. The new Fulani rulers who settled in the towns became “Hausaized”: they took Hausa wives, spoke Hausa and adopted court customs. This blending is the root of the modern term Hausa-Fulani.
The caliphate was one of the largest states in 19th-century Africa. It depended heavily on enslaved labour on estates and in households, and historians such as Paul Lovejoy have argued that slavery expanded sharply within it. The nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate is thus both a monument of Islamic scholarship and a slave-holding state.
| Emphasis | Reading of the jihad | Who stresses it |
|---|---|---|
| Reform | A movement to purify religion and give justice to the poor and to Muslims | Sokoto tradition; many Muslim historians |
| Conquest | A takeover of the Hausa states by a Fulani elite that kept the structures of the old courts | Many outside observers; some Hausa activists today |
| Mixed | Both: a religious cause that also served political and economic interests | Most professional historians |
Sources for this article
- Last 1967, whole book
- Lovejoy 1983, chapters on the Sokoto Caliphate
- Salamone 2010, ch. 1, pp. 1–2