The areas of Hausaland, Bornu, and other regions of central Bilād al-Sūdān that comprise today's Nigeria have experienced successive waves of Islamization, Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad. Since the advent of European colonial conquest in the twentieth century, contemporary Muslim reformers have often presented themselves as heirs of the eighteenth-century revivalist movements that waged jihad and established theocratic states across West Africa. Through powerful expressions of mourning, emotional articulation of grief over the violent destruction of the Islamic caliphate in 1903, and nostalgic reckoning with the haunting memories of the profound sense of cultural, moral, and religious loss to a new colonial order, the leaders of contemporary movements of Islamic reform underpin their ideas with the campaign to 'restore' Islamic civilization to its pristine form, implement the sharīʿa without secular inhibitions, and replace colonial and post-colonial nation-states with defunct African Islamic empire-states.

Besides the numerical interval between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the religious thinkers that led the movements of Islamic reform and jihad interacted and contended with distinctive intellectual genealogies and socio-political contexts. Yet, the old reformers and new dissidents separated across the gulf of time wrestled and engaged with similar ideational repertoires —in particular ideas about what constitutes al-ʿaqāʾid al-ṣaḥīḥa (authentic Islamic creeds), takfīr (excommunication), al-walāʾ wa al-barāʾ (loyalty and disavowal), al-aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyyah (theory of government), tajdīd (Islamic reform), jihad and istirqāq (slavery). This dissertation asks two essential questions: what doctrinal exegesis, discursive traditions, and textual hermeneutics did the old reformers and new dissidents offer in their engagement with the ideas that have informed reformist debates? What are the continuities and changes in the history of ideas that have shaped the longue durée of Islamic thought, reform, and jihad?

This dissertation provides a window into the common and divergent methodologies of wide-ranging groups of reformers claiming the mantle of reform and jihad, but it does so by rejecting the historiographical binary of a reformist past, either disentangled from the present or tethered teleologically to it. Previous studies have often focused either on specific intellectual figures or religious movements, sometimes as a stand-alone study or as part of a more comprehensive historical scholarship. Instead, this dissertation provides an analytical intervention that illuminates the canonical ideations that Islamic reformers and dissidents in Nigeria have debated, contested, and appropriated to legitimize their projects of reform. Throughout the six chapters of this dissertation, I tracked and investigated how the ideas that informed reformist debates and agendas ebbed, flowed, and changed in the longue durée.

This study offers important scholarly contributions to Islamic studies, African studies, intellectual history, history of religion, political theory, and textual anthropology. First, as Nigeria is currently in the throes of a persistent religious rebellion hinged upon the emotive rhetoric of a lost caliphate, this study sheds important light on the poorly understood historical background of these present tensions. Second, the study provides the language and analytical template to understand the thought processes, textual practices, discursive traditions, and doctrinal interpretations of those who claim the mantle of reform and jihad. Third, this study also demonstrates the extent to which new dissidents seek legitimacy through invocations of the intellectual heritage of African Muslims' practices and thoughts passed down by previous reformist and clerical orders. Lastly, and most importantly, this study challenges the normative scholarly view that Muslim reformers and dissidents in Nigeria and the broader Sahel are solely inspired and shaped by Middle Eastern theological and ideological currents. Instead, this study unearths the local roots of religious discontent and the different layers of ‘glocal’ theological hybridization that characterized the several waves of rebellion, dissent, and jihad in Nigeria from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.