Alongside peaceful Muslim colonization there was a parallel tradition of military campaigns to establish Muslim states and convert pagan populations to Islam. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, with the Almoravid movement as a shadowy precedent, jihads burst out from Mauritania to Chad. The jihads were led by Muslim scholars and teachers, the religious leaders of trading and agricultural communities, itinerant preachers, and their student followers. They were supported by the Fulbe, the Hausa, the Mande, the Wolof, and the Tuareg peoples: nomadic pastoralists, ʿulamaʾ, Sufi disciples, and slaves. As Muslim teachers articulated the hardships of ordinary people, they both radicalized Islamic teaching and mobilized popular support.

The jihads took their immediate inspiration from the militant reformers of the fifteenth century such as al-Maghili (d. c. 1503–06). In the fifteenth century, al-Maghili had denounced the corrupt and un-Islamic practices of West African Muslim states. He condemned illegal taxation and the seizure of private property and denounced pagan ceremonial practices and “venal” mallams (religious scholars) who served rulers without adequate knowledge of Arabic or Islam. Al-Maghili called for the implementation of Muslim law by a strong and committed Muslim ruler and introduced into West Africa the concept of the mujaddid, the renewer of Islam. The pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina also brought West African scholars into contact with reformist Sufi circles, and perhaps with the radical views of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia.