Fulani Islamic scholar and reformer whose preaching against the Hausa city-states grew into the jihad of 1804 and produced the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state in nineteenth-century West Africa. A prolific writer in Arabic and Fulfulde, Dan Fodio argued that the Hausa kings practiced a corrupted Islam and that reform, when blocked, required armed struggle. He handed military authority to his brother and son and left a contested inheritance: a vast Muslim state and a rich written tradition on one side, conquest and enslavement — including of Muslims — on the other.
Shehu Usman dan Fodio spent most of his life as a wandering teacher in the savanna of what is now northern Nigeria, reading, writing, and arguing about how a Muslim should live. He carried books, not a sword, and he warned for years that the kings of the Hausa lands ruled badly and prayed wrongly. When one of those kings tried to silence him, his students and followers picked up arms. In 1804 the scholar became the leader of a holy war. Within a few years his movement had toppled the old Hausa dynasties and laid the foundation of an empire that would stretch across a thousand miles of West Africa. He presented himself first as a scholar and reformer, and he gave the fighting and the ruling to his brother and his son. What he wanted was a society governed by the book. The state he inspired outlived him by a century, and the argument over what he built has not ended.