Jihad in West Africa is a complex phenomenon, initially expressed in a series of reform movements in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries and culminating in the creation of a number of Islamic states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These progressive revolutions impacted a region stretching from present-day Senegal and Gambia in the east to Cameroon in the west. Although there had been African Muslims in the region since the eleventh century, their connections and allegiances to th…