Page 79 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

898 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

in leather goods and weaving, for example, while Zazzau rulers and those who received an Islamic education into
specialized in the slave trade. In addition, they drew on a vast Islamic trading network and gave them a language
the wealth of their rural areas, which produced millet, used in the network, Arabic. The Islamic connection
sorghum, sugarcane, and cotton. Cattle were also plen- strengthened ties with North Africa that already existed
tiful. However, their prosperity put them under steady through trade (the Hausa states were a southern termi-
stress from Songhai and Kanem-Borno, their neighbors nus of the trans-Sahara trade route).These ties were also
to the west and east.The Hausa States paid tribute to the supported by pilgrimages to Mecca.
latter empire, and, in turn, fought with their other neigh- At about the same time that Islam fully penetrated the
bors, conducting slave raids and open warfare with the ruling class, Fulani pastoralists came to Hausaland. Mus-
Jukun and Yoruba states. lim Fulani, who had adopted Islam in the area now known
as Senegal, settled in Hausa cities in the thirteenth cen-
Islam and the Hausa States tury and began to intermarry with Hausa.These Hausa-
Although Islam was known in the Hausa states by the Fulani became an educated religious elite, crucial to Hausa
eleventh century, tradition credits its introduction to an rulers because of their knowledge of government, law,
Islamic missionary who came from Bornu in the fifteenth and education.
century.The elite accepted the new religion first, practic-
ing it while continuing to adhere to older religious tra- Later History
ditions. Islam offered the elite a means for organizing an In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a
efficient state and promoting education. It also tied the loose alliance of the seven Hausa states, based on the
Hausa language and common customs as well as the
modified Islam practiced by the ruling class.The ruler of
each state, the emir or sarki, collected taxes from the var-
0 400 mi
ious guilds within the state. These commercial guilds
HAUSA 0 400 km
STATES Algeria were self-regulating and loyal to the emir, who offered
Libya them protection.The guilds’ members were commoners,
both men and women depending upon the craft. Slaves
maintained the cities’ walls and grew the food.
Mali
Niger From the early sixteenth century, the Bornu state in
the Lake Chad basin area grew increasingly powerful; it
brought the Hausa states under its control, and they
Chad
Burkina Hausa
Faso States remained subject to Bornu through the eighteenth cen-
Benin tury.Then at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Bornu’s
Nigeria
control was overthrown when the Fulani religious leader
Ghana Central African Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817) waged jihad among
Republic
Togo Cameroon the Hausa states, seeking to convert the common peo-
Atlantic Equatorial ple to Islam and to purify the practice of the faith among
Ocean Guinea the elite. Usman dan Fodio’s Sokoto caliphate, estab-
N lished around 1808, included the Hausa states, who
Sao Tome
and Principe
remained part of Sokoto until Sokoto was defeated by
the British in 1903.The high levels of education, accom-
plishments in crafts and trade, and civil organization
that characterized the Hausa states left a lasting legacy,