1770s–1810: (Uthman dan Fodio and the 1804 Jihad — The Fulani Scholar Who Began Preaching in Gobir in the 1770s, Condemned Illegal Taxation and Polytheism, P…

1770s–1810: (Uthman dan Fodio and the 1804 Jihad — The Fulani Scholar Who Began Preaching in Gobir in the 1770s, Condemned Illegal Taxation and Polytheism, Performed the Hijra, Launched Jihad in 1804, Seized Most Hausa States by 1810, and Created the Sokoto Caliphate as the Single Largest Polity in Nineteenth-Century West Africa): By the beginning of the nineteenth century, networks of Muslim clerics aspiring to purified Islam had emerged across the West African savannah. Uthman dan Fodio (1754–1817), from a Fulani family steeped in Islamic learning, began preaching in the state of Gobir in the 1770s. Central to his message was the need to enforce the sharia, and his criticisms of governing elites who were Muslim in name only became ever more trenchant. A dedicated community formed around him, and his reputation spread across Hausaland — many believed him to be the Mahdi, though he tended to play this down. He condemned the authorities for illegal taxation, condoning polytheism, enslaving Muslims, and infidel social practices. Official persecution intensified, and Uthman ultimately left Gobir — performing the hijra — and jihad erupted in 1804. By 1810, most Hausa states including Katsina, Kano, and Gobir had been seized, and the jihad reached as far east as Nupe and south of Lake Chad, as far south as Yoruba territory. Within a few years, a new empire across much of present-day northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon had been created — the Sokoto Caliphate, the single largest polity in nineteenth-century West Africa, surviving into the colonial period. Uthman retired to monasticism while his brother Abdullahi and son Muhammad Bello carried the revolution further, invading Ilorin and pushing Islam deep into Yoruba territory. The caliphate was organized into emirates, governed through Islamic administration, its legal system maintained by Muslim judges, its taxation based on Islamic practice, and an enormous population of enslaved infidels underpinning the economy.