Historical Fiction His smile could quell a mob or raise an army. The charismatic Usman dan Fodio was a holy man whom the Sultan of Gobir (today’s Nigeria) brought into his kingdom in order to make the people more religious. Bringing a religious person too close to your life can be like taking the snake lying on the fence and putting it in your pocket. At least that’s how it turned out to be in the case of Yunfa, the Sultan of Gobir. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had just brought out their Romantic Manifesto, The Lyrical Ballads , ushering a poetic revolution in England. The bloodcurdling violence of the French Revolution had given birth to a whole series of reforms implemented by Napoleon. In Africa, Allah was beginning to bring light in quite another way. “There is no God but Allah,” Usman’s voice reverberated in the streets and highways. “All ways are impure except those shown by Allah.” Usman denounced the ways of the ordinary people as evil.
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