Fulani War

The Fulani War was fought from 1804 to 1808 in what is now northern Nigeria, when the Fulani Islamic scholar Usman dan Fodio led a jihad against the Hausa kingdom of Gobir and its neighboring Hausa states after his exile from Gobir by King Yunfa. Dan Fodio's forces, drawing on widespread Fulani and Hausa Muslim discontent with what he criticized as the Hausa rulers' corruption and incomplete adherence to Islamic law, steadily conquered one Hausa kingdom after another over four years of campaigning. The war ended in 1808 with the capture of Gobir itself and the death of Yunfa, and out of the conquered territory dan Fodio founded the Sokoto Caliphate, which he ruled as its first caliph and which grew into one of the largest and most influential states in nineteenth-century Africa. The jihad's success also directly inspired a wave of later West African jihadist movements founded by other Fulani religious leaders in the decades that followed.