ʿUthmān b. Fūdī’s Sirāj al-Ikhwān

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Fulani Muslim intellectual, ʿUthmān b. Fūdī (d. 1817), and his jamāʿa (community) launched a series of jihads in Hausaland (a region approximately corresponding to present-day northern Nigeria and southern Niger) and its surrounding areas. As a result of their movement, a huge state—commonly called the Sokoto Caliphate—was established, with ʿUthmān at its pinnacle. As a political ruler and Muslim intellectual, ʿUthmān wrote many Arabic works to declare the legitimacy of his jihad and governance within the purview of Islamic law. Sirāj al-ikhwān fī ahamm mā yuḥtāju ilay-hi fī hādhā al-zamān (The lamp of brethren regarding the most significant thing needed in this era), written in 1811, is one of those writings. Although ʿUthmān quoted numerous passages in it from various works written by preceding scholars, most of those quotations are from Ajwiba ʿan asʾila al-amīr Askiyā al-ḥājj Muḥammad (Replies to questions from the emir Askiya al-Ḥājj Muḥammad) written by a Maliki jurist from Tlemcen, Muḥammad al-Maghīlī (d. c. 1505). It is well known that al-Maghīlī’s religious and juristic views substantially influenced ʿUthmān’s philosophy. ʿUthmān’s long and numerous citations from Ajwiba in Sirāj prove this. However, such influence does not mean that ʿUthmān blindly followed his predecessor’s views. Rather, through selective quotations and manipulative interpretations in Sirāj, ʿUthmān reorganized al-Maghīlī’s arguments to vindicate his own religious and political activities in the Sokoto Caliphate. In the present paper, referring to ten manuscripts and one published work, I have edited this significant writing, Sirāj. Considering ʿUthmān’s complicated way of utilizing al-Maghīlī’s words, we can regard this writing as an interesting example revealing how a West African Muslim reorganized religious and political knowledge received from the intellectual sphere of the Muslim world outside sub-Saharan Africa.