Usman dan Fodio

Usman dan Fodio (in Arabic, Uthman ibn Fudi; known in Hausa as the Shehu, "the shaykh") was a Fulani Islamic scholar, jurist of the Maliki school of law, and Sufi of the Qadiriyya order (a tariqa, or devotional brotherhood). He was born in 1754 at Maratta in the Hausa kingdom of Gobir, in what is now northern Nigeria, into the Toronkawa (Torodbe), a scholarly Fulani clan whose tradition traced its origins to Futa Toro in Senegal.

He studied the Qur'an with his father and then read fiqh (jurisprudence) and hadith with relatives and regional teachers, traveling for a time to the Saharan town of Agades to study under Jibril ibn Umar, through whom he entered the Qadiriyya. By his early twenties he was teaching and preaching reform in and around Degel.

Rising tension with the rulers of Gobir led, in 1804, to his hijra (emigration) from Degel to Gudu, where his followers proclaimed him commander. The ensuing jihad (1804–1808) overthrew the Hausa states and produced the Sokoto Caliphate, a large Muslim state. Usman left active warfare to his son Muhammad Bello and brother Abdullahi, returning to scholarship; he lived at Sifawa and later at Sokoto, where he died in 1817. He is remembered as a prolific writer and a tajdid (renewal) reformer, though historians debate how far his movement was religious, political, or ethnic.