Hamahullah bin Muhammad bin Umar

Shaykhna Ahmad Hamahullah bin Muhammad bin Umar (c. 1883 – 16 January 1943), known as Cheikh Hamallah and as the Marabout or Sharif of Nioro, was a Malian Sufi shaykh of the Tijaniyyah. He was the first disciple of the Tijani reformer Sidi Mohamed Lakhdar and succeeded him at the head of the branch distinguished by its "eleven grains" recitation; the movement that took his name, the Hamallayya or Hamawiyya, spread among Wolof traders and servile-caste Muslims in Mali and Mauritania in the 1920s. ^{1 2} The French colonial administration deported him repeatedly — to Mauritania in 1925, then to Côte d'Ivoire, and finally to France in 1942 — and he died in exile at Montluçon in 1943, his death kept secret from his followers until the Liberation. ²

His birth year is genuinely unsettled in the sources: the French article's lead gives about 1883 and its biography section 1881, the English article's lead gives 1882 while its category and its Wikidata item give 1886. The record follows c. 1883 and marks the date debated. ^{2 3 1 4}

He was born at Kamba Sagho, near Niamyna on the Niger in present-day Mali, the son of Mohamedou Ould Seydna Oumar, a Moorish scholar of the Ahel Mohammad Sidi Chérif tribe of Tichitt in Mauritania who had settled at Kamba for trade, and of Assa Diallo, a Fulani woman of Mali. About 1885 his father moved the family to Nioro, the old capital of Kaarta, to be nearer his relatives in the Mauritanian Hodh. In 1895 the father entrusted Hamahoullah and his younger brother Baba el-Kébir to their cousin, the teacher Mohamedou Ould Chérif, who took them to Tichitt to begin the Arabic alphabet; the boys then passed to their uncle Mohamedou Ould Bouyé Ahmed, called Deh, who taught them the Qur'an. The French article recounts that the boy's memory was already prodigious — one hearing of a verse sufficed him to recite it without error — and that the surrounding camps began to speak of an extraordinary child. ²

The Tijaniyya reached Nioro in its reformed, "eleven grains" form through Shaykh Sidi Mohamed Lakhdar, whom Shaykh Sidi Tahar of Tlemcen, a close companion of the order's founder Ahmad Tijani, had charged with extending the tariqa in West Africa; the French article adds that the project may originally have been encouraged by the Algerian colonial administration, which wanted a pro-French Tijani branch to counter the Umariyya descended from Umar Tall. Lakhdar arrived at Nioro in 1903 and promoted the recitation of the prayer Jawharat al-Kamal eleven times, where the Umariyya recited it twelve times — a small ritual difference, already tolerated among Maghrebi Tijanis, that crystallised into the split between the two branches, the "onze grains" and the "douze grains". ²

Hamahullah attached himself to Lakhdar: the English article calls him Lakhdar's first disciple, and the French article tells the traditional story of a Friday in 1902 when Lakhdar showed him a written word of eleven letters and Hamahoullah answered with another word of the same esoteric sense and the same numerical value, eleven being the sacred number of the branch. On Lakhdar's death — the English article dates it to 1909 at Nioro — Hamahullah succeeded him at the head of the branch, and under him the movement spread in the 1920s, first among the Wolof traders of Nioro and then among servile-caste Muslims in Mauritania and Mali. ^{1 2}

Hamallah lived in Sufi reclusion and never left his zawiya, receiving no social visits from disciples; the gifts that poured in he gave away again on a large scale, and colonial administrators who knew him testified to a generosity that made the poor never knock at his door in vain. Amadou Hampaté Bâ wrote that what compelled admiration in the Sharif was not sanctity or miracles but his masculine courage, his grip and his imperturbable composure. An administrative inspector's report of 3 December 1917, quoted in the French article, describes a closed, silent man who would not be drawn into declarations of loyalty, and concludes that he was to be watched very closely, though discreetly. ²

His popularity drew opposition, notably from Fah ould Cheikh el-Mehdi, a violently anti-Sufi figure alarmed at the mass rallying of the Laghlal to the eleven-grains Tijānism; from 1923 the rivalries produced repeated clashes, Fah attacked Hamallah in a series of poem-invectives, and Fah was himself deported to the Trarza in 1924 for his part in the brawls. The events deepened the administration's suspicion of Hamallah. ²

After clashes in Nioro between the eleven-grains and twelve-grains parties, the authorities sentenced Hamahoullah in 1925 to ten years' deportation to Mederdra in the Mauritanian Trarza, and then to Côte d'Ivoire; he was allowed to return only in 1936. In August 1940 his son Baba led a vendetta against the Tinouajiou group of the Nioro and Assaba circles, and the administration answered with a wide repression of the Hamawiyya: the Vichy governor Boisson had the shaykh arrested on 19 June 1941 and flown to Dakar and then, on 21 June, to Algeria. Two of his sons, Baba and Sidi Ahmed, were shot on 11 November 1941 together with 31 Moorish leaders and notables, and hundreds of disciples were arrested and deported to the camps of Ansongo, Bourem and Kidal. ²

In 1942 Hamallah was deported again, this time to France, and interned at Évaux-les-Bains in the Creuse with hundreds of thousands of other administrative internees. His health collapsed suddenly in the autumn of 1942; hospitalised at Montluçon, he died there, apparently of heart disease, on 16 January 1943, and was buried hastily in the common ground reserved for the indigent. Fearing the reaction of his followers in the Sahel, the colonial authorities kept his death secret until the Liberation. ² The English article, more briefly, records that he was exiled from Nioro in 1933 to Mauritania, then to Côte d'Ivoire and finally France, and that the movement survived his death in exile and, though made illegal in French West Africa, continued especially among the rural poor. ¹

One of his sons, Mohamedou ould Hamallah, known as Bouyé Haïdara, succeeded him at the head of the Hamawiyya. A mole of the port of Dakar bears Cheikh Hamallah's name. ² The English article names Tierno Bokar Salif Tall in Mali and Yacouba Sylla among his most prominent disciples, and describes the movement as a small but prosperous religious faction across contemporary West Africa. ¹ In this museum, his faith is recorded as Sufi on the documented basis of his Tijani discipleship: the English article calls him the first disciple of a Tijaniyyah reformer and the leader of its movement, and the French article calls him the founder of a branch of the Tijani Sufi brotherhood and narrates his succession to Lakhdar. No source read names a legal school (madhhab) for him. ^{1 2}

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