The dilemma of jihadi Shaikhs in Sokoto: from idealism to militarism – how ‘good’ is war?

The DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES SEMINAR
Leslie Social Sciences building LS 5.67,
30 July 2014 @ 1pm

Professor Murray Last
Emeritus Professor, Anthropology,
University College London

The dilemma of jihadi Shaikhs in Sokoto: from idealism to militarism – how ‘good’ is war?
Murray Last is Professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His PhD in 1964 was the first to be awarded by a Nigerian university (University College Ibadan). A world renowned specialist in the history and the anthropology of Africa, he has written on both the pre-colonial history of Muslim northern Nigeria and the ethnography of illness and healing. In 1967 he published The Sokoto Caliphate (recently published also in Hausa as Daular Sakkwato) and in 1986 he edited (with G.L. Chavunduka) The Professionalisation of African Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press for the International African Institute). In addition he has over a hundred publications on African history and anthropology. He was sole editor of the International African Institute’s journal AFRICA for 15 years (1986-2001).

ABSTRACT
In recent years, the fashion in history-writing has been to emphasise what good comes from war, and how much more peaceful we are these days (e.g Morris, 2014, Pinker2011; Gat 2006; cf. Elias 1939/1982). But rarely is African history considered (tho’ cf. Reid 2011). I wish here to look at the Sokoto Caliphate, Africa’s largest 19th century polity, where internal disputes arose, ca. 1806, over how shari’a-compliant should the jihad be. Unlike, say, Europe, however, deaths in Sokoto’s jihadi battles were relatively few but disruption was enormous – and it’s disruption that causes deaths? In today’s Nigeria there’s division over how to ‘rate’ the Sokoto Caliphate – an oppressive ‘empire’ or a force for a better Islam? Indeed, would the jihadi forces (before they won!) have been labelled “terrorists” by the Muslim governments then in power, in Gobir or Kano?