Faeelin
Banned
One thing that concerns me: this is delightful, but was there any sort of Islamic jurisprudence along these lines in India or the Ottoman Empire?
Mmm. Like all the help Tata Steel got in OTL?
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
One thing that concerns me: this is delightful, but was there any sort of Islamic jurisprudence along these lines in India or the Ottoman Empire?
Mmm. Like all the help Tata Steel got in OTL?
By the time the Ottomans had any meaningful industrialization, they already had a civil code, so the sharia courts weren't in charge of labor relations. Before that time, most non-agricultural labor was controlled by craft guilds which did do many of the things for their members that the Sokoto qadis are mandating in the ATL. There was also some fairly progressive 19th-century legislation on mining (the main industry of the time), including safety regulations and a form of workers' compensation for on-the-job injuries. If you're interested, there's an article on Turkish labor law here (University of Illinois Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal) that has some discussion of the Ottoman period.
About India, I have no idea - I suspect that the civil code also predated industrialization there, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
Anyway, I figure that the Sokoto jurisprudence came out the way it did for three reasons. First, the country began industrializing without a civil code, leaving the qadis to adjudicate labor disputes on a clean slate, and with law being the conservative institution it is, their natural tendency was to apply traditional guild-based norms and hold that industrialists must treat workers as if they were journeymen. Second, Sokoto at the time was a state with revolution in the air and a government broadly sympathetic toward workers - hell, many of them had been slaves in the not-too-distant past - and the revolutionary atmosphere influenced both the workers' willingness to sue for their rights and the qadis' attitude toward their claims. Third, most of the industrialists didn't come from the traditional ruling class and thus weren't part of a group that the judges would be inclined to favor. I don't think the jurisprudence here is too much of a stretch under those conditions, given that the foundational principles had been floating around in non-industrial contexts for centuries.
First, thanks for pointing me to this company - its story, and the story of the family that founded it, is fascinating. (Among other things, I hadn't realized that Indians who moved to the UK could be elected to parliament - that opens up several possibilities for this timeline.)
Anyway, although Tata didn't get much financial help, it seems that Lord George Hamilton helped clear the way for licensing and mining concessions, which is a far cry from places like Kenya where Africans couldn't get coffee licenses until the 1950s. This may be what the Malê will experience under the more progressive colonial administrations - even if they're not always helped to succeed, they'll be allowed to succeed.
And thus set the stage for the Second Sokoto Republic...unless I'm misreading this.
It also very well could lead the way to indigenous Socialism.
IOTL the initial Revolutionary Leftist ideology in most (though not all*) of Africa was based on or very much influenced by the Soviets while 'African Socialism', while trying to become more indigenous was and is to a good extent not really that African, however the labor law beginnings aside, the development of actual indigenous leftism over along period would be very interesting, and, if a Cold Waresque situation develops (that is with Capitalism vs. Socialism/Communism) I could see their ultimately being three different variants of Socialism competing with each other.
*The French Communist Party was very active in the Colonies from the beginning of the 19th century onwards and as such the Socialism and Communism practiced/advocated in many parts of Françafrique was more influenced and closer to West European Leftism than it was to Soviet Communism.
David Marsden, The Colonial Century: Britain’s Strange Career in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1990)
… With the supply-side attack on the Atlantic slave trade having succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, the Royal Navy shifted its energies eastward. By early 1852, the Atlantic anti-slavery squadron had been reduced by more than two thirds, leaving a modest force which patrolled the coasts to prevent any revival of the slave traffic, and the bulk of its strength had been moved to the Indian Ocean. Its goals there were fourfold: enforce British supremacy on the seas, protect the trade routes to India, stamp out piracy and suppress the east African slave trade. All those roads led to one destination: Zanzibar.
Since 1840, when Sultan Seyyid Said bin Sultan relocated there from Muscat, Zanzibar had been the capital of the Omani sultanate, and it was as busy and polyglot a marketplace as had ever existed on the Swahili coast. The island city was the meeting-place of Arab, Persian, Indian and European merchants as well as Africans from both the coastal region and the interior, and its products were ivory, spices and slaves.
Zanzibar and its coastal hinterland had been a slave-trading entrepôt from time immemorial - the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea described it as a source of “slaves of the better sort,” and the Persian and Arab traders had included it among their ports of call since pre-Islamic times. By the ninth century, the term “Zanj,” denoting what would become the Swahili coast, was practically synonymous with “slave” in the Mesopotamian argot, and little had changed in the nineteenth.
Britain’s efforts to end the Zanzibari slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century were, to say the least, half-hearted. In 1822, the Omani governor agreed to the “Moresby treaty” under which Zanzibar would refrain from selling slaves to Christians - evidently Moresby had somewhat less zeal to stamp out Muslim vices - and, since both the Christians and Muslims of the region were as hypocritical as Moresby, even that was widely ignored. The spice trade and the presence of a large Indian merchant community gave Britain an interest in the region, and Colonel Atkins Hamerton had served as full-time consul since the capital was moved from Oman proper, but neither he nor the overstretched Aden naval station could do much to thwart the thriving traffic in human beings.
That began to change when the Atlantic squadron, both dedicated to and experienced in anti-slavery work, began arriving in strength to reinforce Aden. By 1853, the Royal Navy had begun to enforce the Moresby treaty vigorously - causing no small amount of consternation to the Portuguese traders in Mozambique - and British diplomats put intense pressure on the Sultan to ban the slave trade altogether and allow basing rights in Zanzibar itself. No doubt these matters would have come to a head eventually, but the death of Seyyid Said in 1856 brought them there in a hurry.
Thuwaini bin Said
The sultan died leaving several sons and no clear successor. The third son, Thuwaini bin Said, was his favorite, but the sixth son, Majid, had the advantage of being in possession of Zanzibar and commanding the loyalty of the local garrison. Yet another offspring, Barghash, pressed his own claim, and was rumored to have taken French money in order to do so in style.
Barghash made the first move, spreading largesse liberally among the Zanzibari officers and inciting a mutiny in the garrison. Unfortunately, the French exchequer didn’t run far enough to suborn a majority of the senior officers, so after a day or two of confused fighting, the mutiny was put down and Barghash fled to Zanj. In the meantime, however, Thuwaini had assembled a much larger force from the Omani regiments and had put to sea to fight his brother.
The Royal Navy intercepted him a day out of Zanzibar with an offer he couldn’t refuse. He would be allowed to land, and his troops would be housed in a cantonment outside the city, but he and Majid would not be permitted to fight; instead, Consul Hamerton would arbitrate the succession.
Had Thuwaini received this offer on land, he would no doubt have greeted it with derisive laughter; the nearest British land forces of any size were in India, and in that year of 1857, their attention was on other matters. At sea, however, the balance of power was exactly the opposite, and he knew that if he declined mediation, the Royal Navy would send him to the bottom in short order. After only slight deliberation, he agreed.
In the event, it was a fortunate decision for him. Both brothers approached Hamerton with proposals that would, they hoped, sweeten the deal from the British standpoint. Majid proposed that the sultanate be split, with him receiving Zanzibar and Thuwaini receiving Oman, and promised that British and Indian merchants would receive license to trade in the interior as well as exemption from port duties. Thuwaini simply offered Britain what it had been asking of his father for the past several years: complete abolition of the slave trade, basing rights for the Royal Navy in Zanzibar and the mainland ports, and the right to arrest and try slave traders caught in Omani waters. This was an offer that his brother - who was neck-deep in the slave trade himself - could not make with any credibility, and it was one that Hamerton would have a hard time rejecting without having to answer difficult questions from his superiors.
On October 23, 1857, the consul announced his ruling: Thuwaini would be sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, while Majid - and Barghesh, when he was captured on the mainland the following year - received well-appointed palaces in Bombay as consolation prizes. Less consoling to Majid, no doubt, was the cartoon that appeared in Punch soon after, showing Hamerton, dressed as King Solomon, snatching a naked black baby (labeled “Zanzibar”) away from a bearded Arab in women’s clothes who hovered over it with an axe.
Thuwaini now had to deliver on his commitments, which was a task easier said than done. The garrison in Zanzibar was small, his hold over much of the Swahili coast was tenuous, and the interior was a lawless realm where warlords raided for slaves, made shifting alliances with local chieftains, and invested their profits in spice plantations and private armies. Also, the Portuguese concessionaires in Mozambique, who had been booted from much of East Africa by the Omanis during the seventeenth century and didn’t care to repeat the experience, were themselves pushing into the interior and attempting to sway its petty kings to their side. To have any hope of combating the inland slave trade, Thuwaini would have to bring these warlords to heel, and there seemed little hope of that with the forces he had at his disposal.
The ways in which Thuwaini sought to multiply his forces would profoundly change the entire Omani realm. He began by moving several drafts of troops from Oman proper to the Swahili coast, where they would be trained by British officers and shaped into the core of his new model army. To secure their loyalty, he promised all of them - even the common soldiers - land-grants in either Oman or east Africa on the completion of their enlistments. The majority would marry African women and choose to settle locally, and the failure of many young men to return to Oman would cement its position as a conservative backwater and decisively shift the center of dynamism and growth to Zanzibar.
But even this modernized army was hardly sufficient to patrol tens of thousands of square miles of difficult inland country, and Thuwaini was forced to seek help from the Swahili vassal kings along the coast. In return for their help in subduing the interior, the sultan offered them rich estates on which they could cultivate coffee, spices, cotton or cocoa. By the early 1860s, much of inland Tanganyika consisted of feudal estates of varying sizes held by Swahili kings and merchants, Omani soldiers and nobles, European officers and the more compliant of the inland chiefs.
Such a setup was practically guaranteed to leak like a sieve, and it did. While many of the officers and feudal landholders lived up to their obligations, others did not, and in them, Thuwaini had effectively replaced pirates with privateers. Several of the largest slave-traders in the Omani empire were precisely those charged with ending that trade, and it need hardly be said that the whites were no better in that regard than the others; of the four men hanged for slave trading at Zanzibar between 1857 and 1862, two were European.
Thuwaini, faced with such open disobedience among his vassals, resolved to knit his Omani army and the Swahili federate troops into a single modernized military force. To accomplish this, he accepted increasing amounts of British aid; British officers became more and more prominent in his army (sometimes even commanding troops in the field) and the British consul took charge of training the district officers and civil servants who would administer the interior lands. The inland was well on its way to becoming that oddest of political entities: the empire within the British Empire, Anglo-Omani Tanganyika.
Tippu Tip
One of those who would play a starring role in creating this entity, and ultimately ruling it, first came to prominence during that time. This was Tippu Tip, a man whose life has been dramatized in such films as Blind Sultan and who may be among the few swashbuckling figures of the nineteenth century who actually lived up to billing. Born Hamad bin Mu’ammad al-Murghabi in 1837, the son of an Omani mother and a father from a prominent African merchant family, Tippu Tip was left blind by an illness in his youth, but like Enrico Dandolo, he refused to let that stop him from becoming a leader of men. He was a caravan-master when he was still in his teens, bearing gifts from his father to the inland kings and bringing home shipments of ivory. At twenty-one, he became a colonel in the Sultan’s army - a post eagerly sought for him by his father in order to bring influence to the trading house, and one that the Sultan granted him despite his blindness due to his family’s ability to raise and equip troops - and was assigned to command a regiment, with a British major seconded to him as aide-de-camp and training officer. Unlike many of the more conservative Omanis, Tippu Tip eagerly absorbed all he could learn of modern tactics and - especially - modern logistics. In the 1860s, he would get many chances to test his newfound learning in battle…
… With the supply-side attack on the Atlantic slave trade having succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, the Royal Navy shifted its energies eastward. By early 1852, the Atlantic anti-slavery squadron had been reduced by more than two thirds, leaving a modest force which patrolled the coasts to prevent any revival of the slave traffic, and the bulk of its strength had been moved to the Indian Ocean. Its goals there were fourfold: enforce British supremacy on the seas, protect the trade routes to India, stamp out piracy and suppress the east African slave trade. All those roads led to one destination: Zanzibar.
Since 1840, when Sultan Seyyid Said bin Sultan relocated there from Muscat, Zanzibar had been the capital of the Omani sultanate, and it was as busy and polyglot a marketplace as had ever existed on the Swahili coast. The island city was the meeting-place of Arab, Persian, Indian and European merchants as well as Africans from both the coastal region and the interior, and its products were ivory, spices and slaves.
Zanzibar and its coastal hinterland had been a slave-trading entrepôt from time immemorial - the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea described it as a source of “slaves of the better sort,” and the Persian and Arab traders had included it among their ports of call since pre-Islamic times. By the ninth century, the term “Zanj,” denoting what would become the Swahili coast, was practically synonymous with “slave” in the Mesopotamian argot, and little had changed in the nineteenth.
Britain’s efforts to end the Zanzibari slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century were, to say the least, half-hearted. In 1822, the Omani governor agreed to the “Moresby treaty” under which Zanzibar would refrain from selling slaves to Christians - evidently Moresby had somewhat less zeal to stamp out Muslim vices - and, since both the Christians and Muslims of the region were as hypocritical as Moresby, even that was widely ignored. The spice trade and the presence of a large Indian merchant community gave Britain an interest in the region, and Colonel Atkins Hamerton had served as full-time consul since the capital was moved from Oman proper, but neither he nor the overstretched Aden naval station could do much to thwart the thriving traffic in human beings.
That began to change when the Atlantic squadron, both dedicated to and experienced in anti-slavery work, began arriving in strength to reinforce Aden. By 1853, the Royal Navy had begun to enforce the Moresby treaty vigorously - causing no small amount of consternation to the Portuguese traders in Mozambique - and British diplomats put intense pressure on the Sultan to ban the slave trade altogether and allow basing rights in Zanzibar itself. No doubt these matters would have come to a head eventually, but the death of Seyyid Said in 1856 brought them there in a hurry.
Thuwaini bin Said
The sultan died leaving several sons and no clear successor. The third son, Thuwaini bin Said, was his favorite, but the sixth son, Majid, had the advantage of being in possession of Zanzibar and commanding the loyalty of the local garrison. Yet another offspring, Barghash, pressed his own claim, and was rumored to have taken French money in order to do so in style.
Barghash made the first move, spreading largesse liberally among the Zanzibari officers and inciting a mutiny in the garrison. Unfortunately, the French exchequer didn’t run far enough to suborn a majority of the senior officers, so after a day or two of confused fighting, the mutiny was put down and Barghash fled to Zanj. In the meantime, however, Thuwaini had assembled a much larger force from the Omani regiments and had put to sea to fight his brother.
The Royal Navy intercepted him a day out of Zanzibar with an offer he couldn’t refuse. He would be allowed to land, and his troops would be housed in a cantonment outside the city, but he and Majid would not be permitted to fight; instead, Consul Hamerton would arbitrate the succession.
Had Thuwaini received this offer on land, he would no doubt have greeted it with derisive laughter; the nearest British land forces of any size were in India, and in that year of 1857, their attention was on other matters. At sea, however, the balance of power was exactly the opposite, and he knew that if he declined mediation, the Royal Navy would send him to the bottom in short order. After only slight deliberation, he agreed.
In the event, it was a fortunate decision for him. Both brothers approached Hamerton with proposals that would, they hoped, sweeten the deal from the British standpoint. Majid proposed that the sultanate be split, with him receiving Zanzibar and Thuwaini receiving Oman, and promised that British and Indian merchants would receive license to trade in the interior as well as exemption from port duties. Thuwaini simply offered Britain what it had been asking of his father for the past several years: complete abolition of the slave trade, basing rights for the Royal Navy in Zanzibar and the mainland ports, and the right to arrest and try slave traders caught in Omani waters. This was an offer that his brother - who was neck-deep in the slave trade himself - could not make with any credibility, and it was one that Hamerton would have a hard time rejecting without having to answer difficult questions from his superiors.
On October 23, 1857, the consul announced his ruling: Thuwaini would be sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, while Majid - and Barghesh, when he was captured on the mainland the following year - received well-appointed palaces in Bombay as consolation prizes. Less consoling to Majid, no doubt, was the cartoon that appeared in Punch soon after, showing Hamerton, dressed as King Solomon, snatching a naked black baby (labeled “Zanzibar”) away from a bearded Arab in women’s clothes who hovered over it with an axe.
Thuwaini now had to deliver on his commitments, which was a task easier said than done. The garrison in Zanzibar was small, his hold over much of the Swahili coast was tenuous, and the interior was a lawless realm where warlords raided for slaves, made shifting alliances with local chieftains, and invested their profits in spice plantations and private armies. Also, the Portuguese concessionaires in Mozambique, who had been booted from much of East Africa by the Omanis during the seventeenth century and didn’t care to repeat the experience, were themselves pushing into the interior and attempting to sway its petty kings to their side. To have any hope of combating the inland slave trade, Thuwaini would have to bring these warlords to heel, and there seemed little hope of that with the forces he had at his disposal.
The ways in which Thuwaini sought to multiply his forces would profoundly change the entire Omani realm. He began by moving several drafts of troops from Oman proper to the Swahili coast, where they would be trained by British officers and shaped into the core of his new model army. To secure their loyalty, he promised all of them - even the common soldiers - land-grants in either Oman or east Africa on the completion of their enlistments. The majority would marry African women and choose to settle locally, and the failure of many young men to return to Oman would cement its position as a conservative backwater and decisively shift the center of dynamism and growth to Zanzibar.
But even this modernized army was hardly sufficient to patrol tens of thousands of square miles of difficult inland country, and Thuwaini was forced to seek help from the Swahili vassal kings along the coast. In return for their help in subduing the interior, the sultan offered them rich estates on which they could cultivate coffee, spices, cotton or cocoa. By the early 1860s, much of inland Tanganyika consisted of feudal estates of varying sizes held by Swahili kings and merchants, Omani soldiers and nobles, European officers and the more compliant of the inland chiefs.
Such a setup was practically guaranteed to leak like a sieve, and it did. While many of the officers and feudal landholders lived up to their obligations, others did not, and in them, Thuwaini had effectively replaced pirates with privateers. Several of the largest slave-traders in the Omani empire were precisely those charged with ending that trade, and it need hardly be said that the whites were no better in that regard than the others; of the four men hanged for slave trading at Zanzibar between 1857 and 1862, two were European.
Thuwaini, faced with such open disobedience among his vassals, resolved to knit his Omani army and the Swahili federate troops into a single modernized military force. To accomplish this, he accepted increasing amounts of British aid; British officers became more and more prominent in his army (sometimes even commanding troops in the field) and the British consul took charge of training the district officers and civil servants who would administer the interior lands. The inland was well on its way to becoming that oddest of political entities: the empire within the British Empire, Anglo-Omani Tanganyika.
Tippu Tip
One of those who would play a starring role in creating this entity, and ultimately ruling it, first came to prominence during that time. This was Tippu Tip, a man whose life has been dramatized in such films as Blind Sultan and who may be among the few swashbuckling figures of the nineteenth century who actually lived up to billing. Born Hamad bin Mu’ammad al-Murghabi in 1837, the son of an Omani mother and a father from a prominent African merchant family, Tippu Tip was left blind by an illness in his youth, but like Enrico Dandolo, he refused to let that stop him from becoming a leader of men. He was a caravan-master when he was still in his teens, bearing gifts from his father to the inland kings and bringing home shipments of ivory. At twenty-one, he became a colonel in the Sultan’s army - a post eagerly sought for him by his father in order to bring influence to the trading house, and one that the Sultan granted him despite his blindness due to his family’s ability to raise and equip troops - and was assigned to command a regiment, with a British major seconded to him as aide-de-camp and training officer. Unlike many of the more conservative Omanis, Tippu Tip eagerly absorbed all he could learn of modern tactics and - especially - modern logistics. In the 1860s, he would get many chances to test his newfound learning in battle…
Maybe, maybe...
The left in Africa will definitely be more diverse in this timeline, and there will be an indigenous left which will draw from Islam and local history as well as European thinkers. Of course, the influence will go both ways - the African left will, in time, be influential elsewhere in the Muslim world and in Europe, and will bring some Afro-Islamic notions of government and society into Western politics.
I would have thought the state of commercial and industrial law in India would be a horrid and confusing mishmash by the mid 19th centuries, given the slow and sporadic expansion of British control and the various different Princely States sitting alongside the various British jurisdictions (and of course, London).
You may be right, but I would still think the complexity would be there as many of these other entities still existed post Mutiny
There's still the overland slave route from southern Sudan, northern Uganda, Orientale and the eastern Central African Republic up the Nile to Egypt, which will be the scene of a good deal of conflict during the next couple of decades. By this time in OTL, though, the Ottoman Empire was already moving fitfully toward abolition of slavery, so the suppression of the Indian Ocean trade and eventually the Nile trade will simply accelerate already-existing processes. It will change the fortunes of several merchant families and cities, but other factors will be more important to Ottoman modernization.
It's not as complex as you might think, given that (a) the great majority of princely states were tiny and had no industry or trade to speak of; and (b) even in the larger ones (except for Travancore and to a lesser extent Mysore), meaningful industrialization didn't take place until well into the twentieth century. The early industrialization was concentrated in the areas under direct rule, and would all have been under a single law - I'm still not sure what that law was, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't have involved sharia courts by that time.
Incidentally, this will be one of the key differences between OTL British India and this timeline's British West Africa - the "princely states" of Africa will push the pace of industrialization and self-government rather than lagging behind, which means that the colonial authorities will often be reacting to developments outside their direct control. Many of the colonial administrators will work with the princely leaders to retard democratization (as they did in India, see p. 2126 col. 2-3), but they won't always be in a position to do so, and the greater economic modernization will increase the pressure for political modernization. The legislatures of the African princely states won't be gifts from the monarch to the people as they were in India. The events in the African protectorates might come full circle and lead to changes in the way the Indian states are administered - it would certainly affect the dynamic between the princely states and the Raj, and might affect the early democratization and modernization programs of states like Travancore, Mysore and Baroda. Probably not Hyderabad, but that's a special case for several reasons.
The article mentions an ATL movie about him called Blind Sultan, but that doesn't tell us what he was sultan of, how he got to be one, or indeed whether his status as sultan was literal or metaphorical.
I can tell you that he'll be loyal to Zanzibar, and that he'll be loyal to the ruling house unless they do something to break that loyalty.
Here. You can get the original for only $3400.
Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… Those who hoped that Amilcar Said’s seizure of power in Sokoto would herald a return of the “old days” were destined for disappointment. True, Said had disagreed with some of Paulo Abacar’s reforms and was uncomfortable with the pace of others, but his views were conservative rather than reactionary. He was a Malê and an ex-slave who had served willingly in the Republic’s government and been loyal to Abacar during the latter’s life, and concurred with the basic Abacarist program of modernization and opposition to slavery. He was also a better politician than Abacar had ever been, and recognized that the twelve years of the Republic had worked profound changes on society and that any attempt to turn back the clock to 1839 would invite massive resistance.
The charter that Said’s handpicked commission promulgated during the seventh month of his tenure as comandante was a case in point. Rather than returning to absolutism, it provided for an elected legislature with considerable control over the budget and the right to impeach the comandante and his ministers. The courts and civil service were made uniform throughout the state. Individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary punishment, were set in law for the first time rather than simply being assumed as they had been under Abacar.
Nevertheless, this charter represented a clear retreat from Abacar’s principles of populist government. Voters were subject to a property qualification that effectively restricted the franchise to industrialists, wealthy merchants and large landowners (although, in order to placate constituencies that were influential but not rich, Said retained Abacar’s practice of reserving some seats for the Islamic schools and the army, and added new seats for traditional royal families). The parliament could not initiate legislation on non-financial matters, but could only consider bills proposed by the government; it could pass a resolution requesting the comandante to propose a bill, but such resolutions were non-binding. The assembly-field was entirely cut out of politics, and most of the fields were turned into sculpted parks or city markets within a short time after the charter was announced.
Individual rights, too, were no longer considered “natural rights” as they had been under Abacar; instead, they were granted by law and could be limited by law. The rights of Sokoto’s citizens were only those specified in the charter; others, such as public assembly, could be and were banned. And as the qadis’ courts were increasingly filled by Said-appointed judges, they took a broad interpretation of the government’s right to punish sedition and to restrict speech in the interest of public safety. By the late 1850s, Sokoto was a state in which liberals and reactionaries alike were free to criticize the government but unable to mount any effective opposition.
This state of affairs was resented by many, especially among the urban workers and the small merchants. Many others, however, supported Said, welcoming a return to normalcy after the years of social change, political turmoil and messianic warfare. The rural smallholders and herdsmen, secured in their property rights by Said’s charter, were a backbone of his regime, and even in the cities, stable government and return to economic growth kept dissent to a manageable level.
Said also drew support from the Djerma people of Dosso, where his marriage to the king’s daughter made him prince and royal heir. The Dosso region would not be fully incorporated into Sokoto for two decades, but it supplied an increasing number of troops for Said’s army. The bulk of the Djerma also adopted Islam during the 1850s, and Said was able to ensure that they were taught the faith by imams sympathetic to his style of moderate Abacarism; as such, they tended to support him in any dispute with the more established theological schools of Sokoto proper. Said also dispatched Islamic teachers to the petty Bariba kingdoms of Borgu; although these had limited success, they helped to cement friendly relations with the neighboring states. By the time Said died in 1859, leaving his son to abandon the comandante pretense and assume the title of emir, he was as securely in power as Usman dan Fodio himself had been.
The later 1850s were also a time of consolidation for Adamawa and Ilorin. Adamawa had expanded his borders tremendously between 1841 and 1852 under its founder Modibbo Adama and his canny successor Lawalu, but Lawalu realized that any further expansion would overextend the state and threaten his modernization program. After 1853, he shifted his focus toward demarcating Adamawa’s borders and negotiating peace treaties with his neighbors. The first such accord was reached with the Wukari federation, a loose Jukun-dominated state that had coalesced in the 1840s in response to the upheaval in the Sahel; in answer to those who criticized him for making peace with a non-Muslim nation, Lawalu pointed to the clauses of the treaty which committed Wukari to protect its Muslim minority, allow disputes between Muslims to be settled according to sharia law, and open the borders to Adamawa’s merchants.
Emir Lawalu also negotiated, on behalf of both Adamawa and the sultanate of Atikuwa [1], a treaty with the Nupe kingdom, which had been briefly conquered during the Fulani jihad but had broken away during the chaos of the Malê invasion. He hoped, by establishing cordial relations, to promote the spread of Islam in the Nupe countryside - only the cities had been fully Islamized - and to use the Nupe as a buffer against the growing commercial power of Ilorin. Both of these goals would meet with only limited success, but by making peace with the Nupe and the petty chieftains of the Benue basin, he was able to give full attention to his domestic reforms and increase the opportunities for profitable trade.
In Ilorin - which had become the dominant partner in its federation with Jebba - the consolidation was more social and economic than political. Ilorin’s parliament, elected by universal suffrage, was dominated by the liberal Abacarist faction, and it had no interest in military expansion. It was, however, the most urbanized and industrially developed of the successor states, and attracted increasing labor immigration from the surrounding countryside. These had begun to lose their traditional ethnic identities and assimilate into a mixed culture with prominent Afro-Brazilian elements. By 1860, the term “Malê” was losing its association with the original Brazilian freedmen and starting to take on the meaning it would acquire in the later nineteenth century, defined by practice of Abacarist Islam, adoption of Afro-Brazilian cultural trappings, and speaking the Fulfulde-Yoruba-Portuguese patois that would become known as “Sudanic.” And many of Ilorin’s merchants, Malê and otherwise, were looking outward and establishing offices in Lagos and the Niger delta ports, which accelerated the adoption of the Roman alphabet and the flow of ideas from abroad.
in Atikuwa, of course, consolidation was a much more difficult process, as the sultan had little control over most of its urban centers and faced an open rebellion from the radical regime in Gusau. The radicals were virtually bankrupt and suffering from severe labor shortages, to which they responded with increasing fanaticism and militancy. By mid-1853, Gusau had begun to conduct raids against the farmland of central Atikuwa, justifying these incursions as jihad against a reactionary sultan although in practice they were little more than piracy. The sultan, who was still assembling an army from his vassal cities and the rural Fulani clan-chiefs, was at first able to respond with little more than patrols and counter-raids. In 1854, he was finally able to move against Gusau in force and drive the raiders out of the countryside, but was unable to breach the city walls.
The privations of siege and internal dissension would eventually do what the sultan’s army could not. Gusau was now cut off from much of its agricultural hinterland, and food shortages caused many to desert the city. Those who remained were the most fanatic among the fanatics, and the government took increasingly extreme positions on both political and religious practice. The end came in early 1856, when the chief minister decreed that God was the personification of reason, and that he had been inspired to create a “new Islam of liberty and science” in the mode of the French Revolutionary civic cult. The world would never learn what the tenets of this new Islam were, because this announcement was too much even for most of the radicals, and for three weeks, the city was aflame with factional fighting. The chief minister was killed in battle on the twentieth day, but his partisans fought on, and the sultan’s forces were able to force an entry against the divided and demoralized defenders. The sultan was finally in control of his realm, but the refugees from Gusau, many of whom went to ground in other vassal cities, would continue to cause trouble for years to come.
And even in the other successor states, the peace of the 1850s was the calm before the storm. Adamawa’s peace overtures to the north had proven far less successful than those to the south: the Damagaram sultanate at Zinder was friendly, but the Gobir state that had coalesced at Maradi still dreamed of regaining its lost homeland, and negotiations with Bornu bogged down over return of the lands conquered by Usman dan Fodio. Although there was no immediate threat of war, there was also no peace, and tensions between the two countries lent urgency to the modernization of Emir Lawalu’s military.
Domestically, unrest continued to increase among urban workers - and the jaji teachers’ corps, still controlled by Nana Asma’u in Ilorin, continued to spread Abacarist ideas among the villagers. It may seem strange to modern eyes that the rulers of Sokoto and Adamawa didn’t yet consider the jajis a threat, but they hadn’t adopted twentieth-century notions of education as inherently political, and the jajis’ teaching focused on women, who were not considered politically significant. For the time being, they happily accepted the benefit of an educated labor force that they didn’t have to pay for, without recognizing the degree to which the jajis were spreading democratic and populist ideology among the next generation…
*******
Ismet Yücel, Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
Umar of Bornu
… If the force that shaped the Sahel in the 1840s was the advent of Abacarism, it would be Belloism that would shape the areas north and east in the 1850s and beyond. The beginnings of the Belloist communities in Bornu were, to be sure, inauspicious; the last mai, or traditional king, condemned them as heretical for their semi-monastic living patterns, and they suffered both persecution from the royal court and cross-border raids from Ouaddai. Several of these villages were massacred, and others, who had found favor with provincial lords, became refugees several times over as their feudal protectors’ fortunes changed.
Things improved markedly, however, after the mai was overthrown in 1846 and Umar ibn Muhammad al-Amin took sole power as shehu. Umar had studied with Ali bin Bello before the latter’s flight to Mecca, and had found merit in many of his ideas. In 1847, he rescinded the mai’s decrees against Belloism and confirmed the land tenure of the Belloist communes throughout the country.
Umar also found the Belloists useful for his modernization program, which he enacted in response to the reforms in Adamawa and Sokoto to the south. His aim was to bring the fractious feudal lords to heel and create a centralized state which could stand against both Ouaddai and Adamawa and regain the lands lost during the Fulani jihad. To that end, he instituted conscription, giving each village and town a quota of soldiers who would be drafted for ten years’ service. Upon completion of their enlistment, these soldiers would receive lands and tax privileges; Umar hoped, in this way, to replace the feudalists with a class of smallholders loyal to him.
The shehu recognized that the Belloists, who were pacifist, would not be part of this army. However, the Belloist communities had become local centers of learning, and many parents from the surrounding villages sent their children to the communes for basic education. Umar regularized this system, exempting the Belloists from ordinary taxes in return for them teaching literacy, mathematics and the basic sciences without charge. He intended to recruit administrators from the children who the communes educated, and also to improve the quality of his military officers.
Some of the Belloists, strictly interpreting their master’s injunction to withdraw from the political realm, resisted co-option by the state - especially in a role that involved training future soldiers - and a few even went so far as to migrate beyond its borders. The majority, however, had responded to the years of persecution by developing a doctrine of self-defense. Although they still opposed aggressive war, and refused to serve in the military, they accepted the right of villages and nations to defend themselves from attack. These took a more pragmatic approach toward the shehu’s reforms, hoping that by educating his future ministers and civil servants, they could move the state toward a more pacific policy.
Ironically, the Belloists were also to become part of Bornu’s eastern defenses. Umar encouraged communes to form in the provinces near the Ouaddai border, and these villages - which were defended by stout thorn fences, palisades and trenches in the hope of avoiding the need to fight - became strongpoints to which neighboring villagers would rally in time of invasion. More than one Belloist headman would become a reluctant hero in the border warfare to come…
Riyad Pasha
… In the meantime, Ali bin Bello himself had settled in Mecca, preaching his doctrines to all who would listen. While many regarded them as strange and unorthodox, a few were attracted by the idea of self-sufficient contemplative communities that held their property in common and practiced communal work and prayer. One of those who listened with interest was Mustafa Riyad, a young Circassian in the Egyptian civil service who made the hajj in 1858. His interest, however, was not in forming or joining a Belloist commune himself, but in considering how Bello’s thought might impact the ideal state.
Certain aspects of Belloism made it counterintuitive as a state ideology. A nation could only become pacifist if all its neighbors did, and political disengagement was no way to run a government (although Riyad reflected, more cynically, that political quietism and communal work might be a good ideology to instill in peasants). Nevertheless, the principles of peace and community were good ones, and they might perhaps be adapted. A state could abjure expansion by conquest and reject war as a method of diplomatic policy while still retaining a military force to defend against attacks or imminent threats; religion might be made free of political entanglement by guaranteeing freedom of worship; and the property and resources of the state might be held as a public trust. All this, Riyad realized, was something that would need refining, and it wasn’t quite Belloism as envisioned by its founder, but it was a state in which a Belloist might not feel like a stranger, and to him, it seemed closer to what God intended than the status quo.
He would still be thinking about these matters some years later when he became a minister in the cabinet of Ismail Pasha...
__________
[1] In earlier updates, Atikuwa has been referred to as the Sultanate of Zamfara. Ridwan Asher has convinced me offline that Zamfara is an inappropriate name and that it would more likely have been named after its first ruler, Ahmad bin Atiku. The capital city founded by the sultan, referred to in previous updates as “Zamfara City,” will be called Atikuwa City henceforward, and is in the approximate location of Dutsin-Ma in OTL Katsina State.
… Those who hoped that Amilcar Said’s seizure of power in Sokoto would herald a return of the “old days” were destined for disappointment. True, Said had disagreed with some of Paulo Abacar’s reforms and was uncomfortable with the pace of others, but his views were conservative rather than reactionary. He was a Malê and an ex-slave who had served willingly in the Republic’s government and been loyal to Abacar during the latter’s life, and concurred with the basic Abacarist program of modernization and opposition to slavery. He was also a better politician than Abacar had ever been, and recognized that the twelve years of the Republic had worked profound changes on society and that any attempt to turn back the clock to 1839 would invite massive resistance.
The charter that Said’s handpicked commission promulgated during the seventh month of his tenure as comandante was a case in point. Rather than returning to absolutism, it provided for an elected legislature with considerable control over the budget and the right to impeach the comandante and his ministers. The courts and civil service were made uniform throughout the state. Individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary punishment, were set in law for the first time rather than simply being assumed as they had been under Abacar.
Nevertheless, this charter represented a clear retreat from Abacar’s principles of populist government. Voters were subject to a property qualification that effectively restricted the franchise to industrialists, wealthy merchants and large landowners (although, in order to placate constituencies that were influential but not rich, Said retained Abacar’s practice of reserving some seats for the Islamic schools and the army, and added new seats for traditional royal families). The parliament could not initiate legislation on non-financial matters, but could only consider bills proposed by the government; it could pass a resolution requesting the comandante to propose a bill, but such resolutions were non-binding. The assembly-field was entirely cut out of politics, and most of the fields were turned into sculpted parks or city markets within a short time after the charter was announced.
Individual rights, too, were no longer considered “natural rights” as they had been under Abacar; instead, they were granted by law and could be limited by law. The rights of Sokoto’s citizens were only those specified in the charter; others, such as public assembly, could be and were banned. And as the qadis’ courts were increasingly filled by Said-appointed judges, they took a broad interpretation of the government’s right to punish sedition and to restrict speech in the interest of public safety. By the late 1850s, Sokoto was a state in which liberals and reactionaries alike were free to criticize the government but unable to mount any effective opposition.
This state of affairs was resented by many, especially among the urban workers and the small merchants. Many others, however, supported Said, welcoming a return to normalcy after the years of social change, political turmoil and messianic warfare. The rural smallholders and herdsmen, secured in their property rights by Said’s charter, were a backbone of his regime, and even in the cities, stable government and return to economic growth kept dissent to a manageable level.
Said also drew support from the Djerma people of Dosso, where his marriage to the king’s daughter made him prince and royal heir. The Dosso region would not be fully incorporated into Sokoto for two decades, but it supplied an increasing number of troops for Said’s army. The bulk of the Djerma also adopted Islam during the 1850s, and Said was able to ensure that they were taught the faith by imams sympathetic to his style of moderate Abacarism; as such, they tended to support him in any dispute with the more established theological schools of Sokoto proper. Said also dispatched Islamic teachers to the petty Bariba kingdoms of Borgu; although these had limited success, they helped to cement friendly relations with the neighboring states. By the time Said died in 1859, leaving his son to abandon the comandante pretense and assume the title of emir, he was as securely in power as Usman dan Fodio himself had been.
The later 1850s were also a time of consolidation for Adamawa and Ilorin. Adamawa had expanded his borders tremendously between 1841 and 1852 under its founder Modibbo Adama and his canny successor Lawalu, but Lawalu realized that any further expansion would overextend the state and threaten his modernization program. After 1853, he shifted his focus toward demarcating Adamawa’s borders and negotiating peace treaties with his neighbors. The first such accord was reached with the Wukari federation, a loose Jukun-dominated state that had coalesced in the 1840s in response to the upheaval in the Sahel; in answer to those who criticized him for making peace with a non-Muslim nation, Lawalu pointed to the clauses of the treaty which committed Wukari to protect its Muslim minority, allow disputes between Muslims to be settled according to sharia law, and open the borders to Adamawa’s merchants.
Emir Lawalu also negotiated, on behalf of both Adamawa and the sultanate of Atikuwa [1], a treaty with the Nupe kingdom, which had been briefly conquered during the Fulani jihad but had broken away during the chaos of the Malê invasion. He hoped, by establishing cordial relations, to promote the spread of Islam in the Nupe countryside - only the cities had been fully Islamized - and to use the Nupe as a buffer against the growing commercial power of Ilorin. Both of these goals would meet with only limited success, but by making peace with the Nupe and the petty chieftains of the Benue basin, he was able to give full attention to his domestic reforms and increase the opportunities for profitable trade.
In Ilorin - which had become the dominant partner in its federation with Jebba - the consolidation was more social and economic than political. Ilorin’s parliament, elected by universal suffrage, was dominated by the liberal Abacarist faction, and it had no interest in military expansion. It was, however, the most urbanized and industrially developed of the successor states, and attracted increasing labor immigration from the surrounding countryside. These had begun to lose their traditional ethnic identities and assimilate into a mixed culture with prominent Afro-Brazilian elements. By 1860, the term “Malê” was losing its association with the original Brazilian freedmen and starting to take on the meaning it would acquire in the later nineteenth century, defined by practice of Abacarist Islam, adoption of Afro-Brazilian cultural trappings, and speaking the Fulfulde-Yoruba-Portuguese patois that would become known as “Sudanic.” And many of Ilorin’s merchants, Malê and otherwise, were looking outward and establishing offices in Lagos and the Niger delta ports, which accelerated the adoption of the Roman alphabet and the flow of ideas from abroad.
in Atikuwa, of course, consolidation was a much more difficult process, as the sultan had little control over most of its urban centers and faced an open rebellion from the radical regime in Gusau. The radicals were virtually bankrupt and suffering from severe labor shortages, to which they responded with increasing fanaticism and militancy. By mid-1853, Gusau had begun to conduct raids against the farmland of central Atikuwa, justifying these incursions as jihad against a reactionary sultan although in practice they were little more than piracy. The sultan, who was still assembling an army from his vassal cities and the rural Fulani clan-chiefs, was at first able to respond with little more than patrols and counter-raids. In 1854, he was finally able to move against Gusau in force and drive the raiders out of the countryside, but was unable to breach the city walls.
The privations of siege and internal dissension would eventually do what the sultan’s army could not. Gusau was now cut off from much of its agricultural hinterland, and food shortages caused many to desert the city. Those who remained were the most fanatic among the fanatics, and the government took increasingly extreme positions on both political and religious practice. The end came in early 1856, when the chief minister decreed that God was the personification of reason, and that he had been inspired to create a “new Islam of liberty and science” in the mode of the French Revolutionary civic cult. The world would never learn what the tenets of this new Islam were, because this announcement was too much even for most of the radicals, and for three weeks, the city was aflame with factional fighting. The chief minister was killed in battle on the twentieth day, but his partisans fought on, and the sultan’s forces were able to force an entry against the divided and demoralized defenders. The sultan was finally in control of his realm, but the refugees from Gusau, many of whom went to ground in other vassal cities, would continue to cause trouble for years to come.
And even in the other successor states, the peace of the 1850s was the calm before the storm. Adamawa’s peace overtures to the north had proven far less successful than those to the south: the Damagaram sultanate at Zinder was friendly, but the Gobir state that had coalesced at Maradi still dreamed of regaining its lost homeland, and negotiations with Bornu bogged down over return of the lands conquered by Usman dan Fodio. Although there was no immediate threat of war, there was also no peace, and tensions between the two countries lent urgency to the modernization of Emir Lawalu’s military.
Domestically, unrest continued to increase among urban workers - and the jaji teachers’ corps, still controlled by Nana Asma’u in Ilorin, continued to spread Abacarist ideas among the villagers. It may seem strange to modern eyes that the rulers of Sokoto and Adamawa didn’t yet consider the jajis a threat, but they hadn’t adopted twentieth-century notions of education as inherently political, and the jajis’ teaching focused on women, who were not considered politically significant. For the time being, they happily accepted the benefit of an educated labor force that they didn’t have to pay for, without recognizing the degree to which the jajis were spreading democratic and populist ideology among the next generation…
*******
Ismet Yücel, Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
Umar of Bornu
… If the force that shaped the Sahel in the 1840s was the advent of Abacarism, it would be Belloism that would shape the areas north and east in the 1850s and beyond. The beginnings of the Belloist communities in Bornu were, to be sure, inauspicious; the last mai, or traditional king, condemned them as heretical for their semi-monastic living patterns, and they suffered both persecution from the royal court and cross-border raids from Ouaddai. Several of these villages were massacred, and others, who had found favor with provincial lords, became refugees several times over as their feudal protectors’ fortunes changed.
Things improved markedly, however, after the mai was overthrown in 1846 and Umar ibn Muhammad al-Amin took sole power as shehu. Umar had studied with Ali bin Bello before the latter’s flight to Mecca, and had found merit in many of his ideas. In 1847, he rescinded the mai’s decrees against Belloism and confirmed the land tenure of the Belloist communes throughout the country.
Umar also found the Belloists useful for his modernization program, which he enacted in response to the reforms in Adamawa and Sokoto to the south. His aim was to bring the fractious feudal lords to heel and create a centralized state which could stand against both Ouaddai and Adamawa and regain the lands lost during the Fulani jihad. To that end, he instituted conscription, giving each village and town a quota of soldiers who would be drafted for ten years’ service. Upon completion of their enlistment, these soldiers would receive lands and tax privileges; Umar hoped, in this way, to replace the feudalists with a class of smallholders loyal to him.
The shehu recognized that the Belloists, who were pacifist, would not be part of this army. However, the Belloist communities had become local centers of learning, and many parents from the surrounding villages sent their children to the communes for basic education. Umar regularized this system, exempting the Belloists from ordinary taxes in return for them teaching literacy, mathematics and the basic sciences without charge. He intended to recruit administrators from the children who the communes educated, and also to improve the quality of his military officers.
Some of the Belloists, strictly interpreting their master’s injunction to withdraw from the political realm, resisted co-option by the state - especially in a role that involved training future soldiers - and a few even went so far as to migrate beyond its borders. The majority, however, had responded to the years of persecution by developing a doctrine of self-defense. Although they still opposed aggressive war, and refused to serve in the military, they accepted the right of villages and nations to defend themselves from attack. These took a more pragmatic approach toward the shehu’s reforms, hoping that by educating his future ministers and civil servants, they could move the state toward a more pacific policy.
Ironically, the Belloists were also to become part of Bornu’s eastern defenses. Umar encouraged communes to form in the provinces near the Ouaddai border, and these villages - which were defended by stout thorn fences, palisades and trenches in the hope of avoiding the need to fight - became strongpoints to which neighboring villagers would rally in time of invasion. More than one Belloist headman would become a reluctant hero in the border warfare to come…
Riyad Pasha
… In the meantime, Ali bin Bello himself had settled in Mecca, preaching his doctrines to all who would listen. While many regarded them as strange and unorthodox, a few were attracted by the idea of self-sufficient contemplative communities that held their property in common and practiced communal work and prayer. One of those who listened with interest was Mustafa Riyad, a young Circassian in the Egyptian civil service who made the hajj in 1858. His interest, however, was not in forming or joining a Belloist commune himself, but in considering how Bello’s thought might impact the ideal state.
Certain aspects of Belloism made it counterintuitive as a state ideology. A nation could only become pacifist if all its neighbors did, and political disengagement was no way to run a government (although Riyad reflected, more cynically, that political quietism and communal work might be a good ideology to instill in peasants). Nevertheless, the principles of peace and community were good ones, and they might perhaps be adapted. A state could abjure expansion by conquest and reject war as a method of diplomatic policy while still retaining a military force to defend against attacks or imminent threats; religion might be made free of political entanglement by guaranteeing freedom of worship; and the property and resources of the state might be held as a public trust. All this, Riyad realized, was something that would need refining, and it wasn’t quite Belloism as envisioned by its founder, but it was a state in which a Belloist might not feel like a stranger, and to him, it seemed closer to what God intended than the status quo.
He would still be thinking about these matters some years later when he became a minister in the cabinet of Ismail Pasha...
__________
[1] In earlier updates, Atikuwa has been referred to as the Sultanate of Zamfara. Ridwan Asher has convinced me offline that Zamfara is an inappropriate name and that it would more likely have been named after its first ruler, Ahmad bin Atiku. The capital city founded by the sultan, referred to in previous updates as “Zamfara City,” will be called Atikuwa City henceforward, and is in the approximate location of Dutsin-Ma in OTL Katsina State.
Unholy Child of Doom !!
Skokie must see this !!
However, I wonder how did they get the idea from ? Was Jacobin proto-New Atheism really that famous that even Brazillian slaves knew about it ?
Skokie must see this !!
However, I wonder how did they get the idea from ? Was Jacobin proto-New Atheism really that famous that even Brazillian slaves knew about it ?
wolf_brother
Banned
Hopefully Belloism has enough of an impact on Isma'il that the disastrous war with the Ethiopians never takes place ITTL.
Speaking of which, what are the butterfly affects on Ethiopia? iirc the Ethiopian 'Empire' was highly fractious in this period, with plenty of in-fighting and civil wars, and many of the vassal kingdoms were actually Muslims (e.g. _). How might Belloism, or Abacarism, reinterpreted and conveyed through the medium of Islamic merchants and those who had traveled the hajj, affect Ethiopian history?
Beyond that even, what type of butterfly effects might we expect on the neighboring Somali sultanates? States with strong, centralized, rule through an effective civil bureaucracy and a vibrant merchant class, such as Majeerteen or Ajuuraan, would seem to be better breeding grounds for such reformist or revolutionary tenets than the more agrarian Ethiopian highlands or even the Sahel states.
Speaking of which, what are the butterfly affects on Ethiopia? iirc the Ethiopian 'Empire' was highly fractious in this period, with plenty of in-fighting and civil wars, and many of the vassal kingdoms were actually Muslims (e.g. _). How might Belloism, or Abacarism, reinterpreted and conveyed through the medium of Islamic merchants and those who had traveled the hajj, affect Ethiopian history?
Beyond that even, what type of butterfly effects might we expect on the neighboring Somali sultanates? States with strong, centralized, rule through an effective civil bureaucracy and a vibrant merchant class, such as Majeerteen or Ajuuraan, would seem to be better breeding grounds for such reformist or revolutionary tenets than the more agrarian Ethiopian highlands or even the Sahel states.
However, I wonder how did they get the idea from ? Was Jacobin proto-New Atheism really that famous that even Brazillian slaves knew about it ?
Yeah, I figured that part might catch your attention.
Anyway, the answer is no, Brazilian ex-slaves wouldn't have heard of the Cult of Reason. But these aren't Brazilian ex-slaves in 1840. These are indigenous radicals in 1856, who've been influenced by sixteen years of revolutionary ferment,several locally-written books which reference the French revolutions of both 1789 and 1848, and foreign texts that have filtered into the region. Abacar, of course, described the Jacobin cult as one of the excesses of the 1789 revolution and one of the things that must be avoided if the Rights of Man are to be implemented in a godly manner. But there's been a good deal of discussion in Gusau as to how much their revolution is, and should be, like the French and Haitian ones, and which aspects of each they should adopt.
The "Islamic Cult of Reason" won't take root any more than the Jacobin one did - as can be seen, it's too much even for most of the radicals. In fact, excesses like those in Gusau will damage the cause of radicalism (and even, by extension, mainstream Abacarism) in decades to come, and many future revolutionaries will see Gusau as a cautionary example of why they shouldn't mess with the people's religion. But there's going to be a remnant nihilistic streak running through certain strains of radical politics in the region, which may cause trouble when it's combined with industrial unrest and Marxism during the twentieth century. This will be the traditional European leftism that exists as a counterpoint to the dominant Islamic labor leftism described in previous updates - it will be very much a minority position, but it will be in the mix. If you read Yaacov Ro'i's Islam in the Soviet Union or (if you can get your hands on it) Ibrahim Maras' paper on 1920s-30s-era female qadi Mukhlisa Bubi, you'll have some idea of the ambivalence this movement will feel toward religion.
Stop reading my mind, dammit.
The absence of the Egyptian war, and probably of the British expedition of 1868 (which was pretty random, if you think about it) will definitely affect matters. Tewodros might last a few years longer without the British intervention, but he was too erratic to stay on top forever and he had no legitimate heir, so I'm guessing Yohannes IV would succeed him as in OTL. Without the Egyptian war, Yohannes will be in a stronger position, and may be able to pass the throne on to his nephew Mengesha - or then again, there may be a civil war between Mengesha and Menelik.
I'm not sure how much effect Belloist or Abacarist reformism would have on all this - as you say, many of the vassals were Muslim, but the serious contenders for the throne were all Christian. I expect that news of the reformist movements would filter down to the Islamic Oromo kingdoms, but I'll need to find out more about these kingdoms before I can say whether reformism might find fertile ground or what interpretations of it might take root.
(Interestingly enough, there was at least one Muslim vassal prince who converted to Christianity under Yohannes in order to stay a prince. If he still does so and is a reformist - or if some of the other Muslim officials who submitted to baptism under Yohannes hold reformist views - then there may be some effect on civil government, although probably not on Christianity as the Ethiopian church kept very tight control of doctrine.)
There are some interesting possibilities. A good deal may depend on whether Majeerteen has a succession crisis during the 1860s-70s as it did in OTL. If it stays united, it might be able to stand off both the Europeans and the Omani-Zanzibaris and to be influenced by one of the reformist movements (or to develop an indigenous one). Also, given the close historical connection between Somalia and Yemen, I'd expect some cross-fertilization with the Ottoman-controlled areas of northern Yemen and the clans of the Hadhramaut, and from there to the Hadhrami diaspora in India, East Africa and Indonesia.
Another very nice update, Jonathan.
Just one thing; is there any chance someone can do a map for this timeline? (Or, of course, several.) I'm starting to get a bit confused by the mishmash of states and characters, and had to go back to a couple of old updates to fully understand this one. I think a map might really clear it up for me.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Just one thing; is there any chance someone can do a map for this timeline? (Or, of course, several.) I'm starting to get a bit confused by the mishmash of states and characters, and had to go back to a couple of old updates to fully understand this one.
I think a map might really clear it up for me. Cheers,
Ganesha
Just one thing; is there any chance someone can do a map for this timeline? (Or, of course, several.) I'm starting to get a bit confused by the mishmash of states and characters, and had to go back to a couple of old updates to fully understand this one.
I was thinking the same thing, actually, but my graphics skills aren't really up to it, as can be seen from my attempt at an 1842 map earlier in the thread. If I hand-draw an 1858 map (or maybe three, comprising Nigeria, West Africa as a whole and East Africa), could someone execute it for me? Anyone who's willing can either reply here or PM.
EDIT (11:15 PM EDT): I've got a volunteer - thanks!
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Talk to EdT. He's a great mapmaker, and he does challenges all the time. I'm sure he'd love to help you out.
Cheers,
Ganesha