Meanwhile their Haussa ruler, Bawa, was not blind to the dangerous ferment existing among them, and fearing the results, summoned Othman to his presence, and severely reprimanded him. This was sufficient for the proud and enthusiastic “Believer.” He left Bawa’s presence only to raise the standard of revolt—the sacred banner of Islam. The effect was electric. In response to his summons the Fulah at once gathered around him in an enthusiastic army.
But they were mostly shepherds—men of peace, unaccustomed to the use of arms; and they could not be at once transformed into successful warriors. Consequently at first they met with discomfiture and defeat in every encounter. Had they been fighting for themselves the movement would undoubtedly have collapsed at the first rude shock of arms. But happily for them they had a higher interest at heart. They fought for God and His Prophet, whose instruments they believed themselves to be. In such a warfare there could be no doubt in their minds as to whose would ultimately be the victory. With ever-growing zeal they returned to the charge, stimulated in their glorious crusade by their leader Othman’s religious songs and fiery words, which told them that theirs was a cause for which it was much to live and fight, but even more to die, if it should be God’s will.
Thus led and encouraged, the Fulah grew in experience of battle and the use of arms. The hordes of shepherds were gradually beaten into a disciplined army of warriors, and from defeat rose to victory.
Thus it was that Othman and his ever-victorious army burst forth from Gober on their irresistible career, filling the wild wastes of Central African heathendom with their cry of “None but the One God,” till the whole of the Western and Central Sudan, from Lake Chad to the Atlantic, acknowledged more or less temporarily the political supremacy of the Fulah. Yet it was no mere temporal power that Othman and his people sought to establish—theirs was a conquest for God. They acted but as His agents. Before them fetishism and all its degrading rites disappeared. No longer did the natives bow down to stocks and stones, but to Allah, the One God. Once more, as in the palmy days of Songhay and Bornu, schools and mosques sprang up throughout the land, and the Greatness, the Compassionateness, and the All-embracing Mercy of the Ruler of the Universe were taught to natives released from the foul blight of idolatry in its worst form.
In this work of releasing the Faithful from their bondage to heathen taskmasters, and bringing new light in a forcible fashion to the barbarous and breechless natives, the Fulah did not stop till from every village of the Central Sudan there was heard in the grey dawn of the tropic morning the stentorian voice of the negro Mueddin, announcing that prayer was better than sleep—bringing from out the faintly illumined houses the devout Moslems to humble their faces in the dust, and acknowledge their utter faith in and dependence on Allah.
No less thoroughly was the material welfare of the people cared for. “The laws of the Koran were in his (Othman’s) time strictly put in force, not only among the Fillahtah (Fulah), but the negroes and the Arabs; and the whole country, when not in a state of war, was so well regulated, that it was a common saying that a woman might travel with a casket of gold upon her head from one end of the Fillahtah dominions to the other.” So wrote Clapperton a few years after the death of Othman, as eye-witness of the wonderful revolution effected by the Fulah.
Unhappily the religious fervour of the remarkable leader speedily developed into religious mania, and ended in his death in 1817.
On the death of Othman, the huge empire he had raised was divided between his sons Bello and Abd Allahi. To the former was given Sokoto and all the east and south, while to the latter fell the western provinces along the Niger, with Gandu as capital. The countries to the west of the Niger, including Massina, became independent under Ahmed Lebbo, one of Othman’s lieutenants, who conquered that region immediately before the death of Othman.