Shykh Uthman Ibn Fodio and the Revival
of Islam in Hausaland - 4

[Preamble]   [The Milieu ]   [Birth, Studies & Career ]    [The Phase of Teaching and Public Da'awah ]   [Phase of Organising and Planning ]   [Phase of Hijra and Jihad ]   [Phase of Victory and Establishment of Caliphate ]   [Shaykh Uthman's Contribution & Ideas ]  [Impact of the Shaykh Beyond the Sokoto Caliphate ]  [Concluding Remarks ]  The Phase of Teaching and Public Da’wah The response Shaykh Uthman received to his public preaching must have encouraged him to continue and expand it beyond his home town to other parts of his state of Gobir. He soon found it necessary to go beyond his own state to the neighbouring states starting from Zamfara where he spent some five years, for as he said, he discovered several pockets of people who had not infact accepted Islam yet. Shaykh Uthman was to remain, for some 19 years, as an itinerant scholar always on the move. Where ever he went he stayed long enough to establish a community and always left behind some of his students and disciples to continue his job. It wasn’t all teaching, however, as he had to be writing at the same time not only to produce the texts to be studied in the various circle he was creating but he had to reply to numerous questions and issues which his da’wah was raising and reply critics who were busy trying to stop this rising wave of awareness that was clearly out to sweep the status quo. Hectic as this job no doubt was, Shaykh Uthman was able to combine it with his own pursuit of learning visiting one renown scholar after the another. So many were these teachers that when they eventually settled down many year later and tried to write down some biographical notes on their teachers, which turned out to be a whole book itself, they could not quite remember all, in the words of the author, "I cannot now number all the shaikhs .... so many that I cannot count them." Where ever he went and where ever his works reached he attracted a following as Abdullahi reported, "Some of the people from the surrounding countries came to him, and entered his community which had become famous through him."This is not to suggest that the Shaykh found it easy, far from it, it appeared to have been quite a trying and challenge period, as these lines from a poem Abdullahi composed during this period suggests: "Oh send on my behalf to my tribe a letter, To which men or honest women may pay attention, To their scholar, or seeker after knowledge, desiring To make manifest the religion of God, giving good advice therein. I say to him: Rise up, and call to religion with a call Which the common people shall answer, or the great lords; And do not fear, in making manifest the religion of Muhammad The words of one who hates, whom fools imitate. And do not fear to be accused of lying; nor the disavowal of the apostate; Nor the mockery of the ignorant man gone astray While the truth is as the morning; Nor the backbiting of a slanderer; nor the rancour of one who bears a grudge, Who is helped by one who relies upon (evil) customs. None can destroy what the Hands of God has built. None can overthrow the order of God if it comes." These verses summarised what several pages of prose had explained. One can glean the strength of their conviction and the degree of their determination. Their immediate objective was to disseminate the knowledge of the religion clearly and widely. They were motivated by the consciousness of their responsibility and sustained by their strong belief that God was on their side. They faced an array of obstacles, starting from their peers who thought that they were crazy to contemplate a change in the rotten society they were born into, then their contemporary scholars who were eager to find faults in what they did and called them all sorts of names, and ultimately the rulers of Hausaland who realised that the success of this movement was going to be at the expense of their cherished thrones. These obstacles, formidable as some of them were, did not, however, dissuade them from their path. For they new that it was a well trodden path, the path of the prophets of old. In line with his immediate objective of educating the wider public, most of Shaykh Uthman’s preaching focused on the basic issues of proper understanding of tauhid, correct performance of the routine acts of worship, Islamic standards of behaviour and emphasis on the Sunnah as opposed to the bid’ah which due largely to the prevailing ignorance had infested numerous acts of worship and behaviour. He also explained the general meaning of the Sharia and encouraged his audience to appreciate the need for ‘amr bi al-ma’ruf wa al-nahy an al-munkar (commanding the right and forbidding the wrong). He wrote numerous books on these subjects during this period, like, Usul al-Din, Iman, Islam, Ihsan, Hidayat al-Tullab etc. But since a substantial part of his audience were not literate, Shaykh Uthman also composed poems in local languages carrying essentially the same messages in simpler but poetic form and therefore easy to understand and remember. Apt in their expressions, passionate in their appeal, melodious in their tune, these poems took Hausa society by the storm, pervading the streets, market places and farms and invading homes, schools and courts. They soon rose to the top of the chart of the time and remained at the top for decades, replacing the vain and vulgar songs that had formed a significant part of the Hausa-Fulani Jahiliyya. To the men when at work and to the women while in their kitchens, these poems seemed to evoke tempo and vitality. They eventually became to the ordinary men and women what books were to students and scholars. The favourable mass response of the public to the message of the Shaykh naturally sent shivers down the spines of both the ulama’ as well as the rulers of Hausaland who realised that their respective positions were at stake. The ulama’ stepped up their criticism of the Shaykh and did everything to undermine his mission. First they questioned the validity of the central pillar of his mission, ‘amr bi al ma’aruf wa al nahy an al munkar, arguing that in their circumstances it was neither desirable nor possible. In one of his responses the Shaykh retorted "I was told by one of the brothers that he heard one of them say: ‘forbidding evil in a land of evil is the real evil: And for this reason they don’t chide each other for committing evil. I take refuge with God the exalted; this is one of the characteristics of the Jews." The ulama’ then defended the numerous un-Islamic customs the Shaykh had been attacking, suggesting that, after all, the custom of a land is itself like Sunnah. The Shaykh argued that "this is falsehood and confusion according to the consensus of opinion (ijma’) because a custom should not be tolerated if it contradicts the Sunnah." Rather expectedly the ulama’ made a lot of fuss on the issue of women. Shaykh Uthman did not stop women from attending his preaching sessions, he in fact encouraged them. From the on set of his endeavour, Shaykh Uthman appeared to have been moved by the plight of women in Hausaland particularly the way they were denied basic education and exploited by society. He made this very clear in his criticism of the Ulama’, as he observed in one of his many works on the subject, " ....what many scholars (ulama’) of the Sudan do to their wives, their daughters and their slaves ... they leave them neglected like cattle without instructing them in what is obligatory upon them in connection with their creed, their ritual ablution, their fasting of Ramadan ... Nor do they instruct them on what is permissible (mubah) for them like buying, selling and similar things. Indeed they regard them as nothing but a pot which they use and when it breaks to pieces they throw away .... One wonders at this their custom of leaving their wives and daughters in the darkness of ignorance while at the same time they teach their students every morning and evening. Indeed the only motive in teaching their students is self-aggrandisement and nothing else" Turning to the women themselves the Shaykh encouraged them to seek for education and openly called upon them to rebel against what today can be called male chauvinism. " O’ Muslim women" the Shaykh calls, "do not listen to the words of those misguided men who tell you about the duty of obedience to your husbands but they do not tell you anything about obedience to God and His messenger" As for the attack that he encouraged the free mixing of men and women, not only did he teach the women proper Islamic dressing and how to conduct themselves decently in public, he questioned the sincerity of all those ulama’ making the accusation in the first place, saying, "People see their women attending illegally, marriage ceremonies, they also see them dancing and singing and inter mixing with men, moreover they observe them going out for ‘Id ceremonies in their full make-up, without denying them these. But when they see them going out in pursuit of learning they say this is reprehensible" On his struggle against these class of ulama’ who resisted these changes, supported bid’ah and justified the injustice and tyranny of the kings, what the Shaykh, borrowing from al-Maghili, calls Ulama’ al-Su (venal Scholars), the Shaykh wrote nearly fifty different works, as his son Muhammad Bello reported. He emerged victorious at the end and he became widely acknowledged as the leading scholar in Hausaland, despite his relatively young age. As a mark of honour and recognition of this position of leadership, the king of Gobir, the strongest of the Hausa kings of his time gathered, at ‘Id al-Adha, all the ulama’ giving them gifts, and Shaykh Uthman was given the lion’s share. All the ulama’ gladly accepted their gifts except Shaykh Uthman. He politely turned it down, asking, in its stead, something more valuable to him and the mission he had come to be identified with. He made five requests to the king: "1. To allow me to call people to God through out your country. 2. Not to stop or obstruct anybody responding to this call 3. To treat with respect any one with a turban and women decently dressed. 4. To free all political prisoners. 5. Not to burden the subjects with taxes." These demands, of course reveal a lot about the social and political situation of the time. But what interests us here is that the stature of Shaykh Uthman had reached a point when he (and perhaps he alone) could make such demands. It also suggests that the turban for men and the Islamic outfit for women had become a mark of the new consciousness that Shaykh Uthman’s da’wah had raised, a mark of belonging to the mission of the Shaykh. Perhaps more profoundly, this singular act, unprecedented, earned the Shaykh a higher station yet. For, while the rejection of the gift earned him respect of the king and independence from the establishment, the demands endeared him not only to his followers but also the ordinary people at large whose interest he identified with and stuck out his neck to protect.