When Islam crossed the desert and found its way in the ninth and tenth centuries into the Sudan, the Fulahs were the very first to become converts to the new religion. Their temperament, their higher intellectual development, made them more quickly susceptible to the new influences, and hence it was that while as yet the great mass of the aborigines were still infidel, the Fulahs with one voice were proclaiming their belief in Allah and His Prophet. Persecution, as in the case of other religions, had only the result of burning the tenets of Islam deeper into their souls, causing their faith to shine with a clearer and more spiritual light to the edification and instruction of the surrounding idolaters. In the Western Sudan, where they enjoyed, or came to enjoy, an independent existence, Islam spread among the Fulahs with special rapidity; and with the fall of Songhay and the crippling of the influence of Timbuktu, they became the chief propagators of Mohammedanism and the great encouragers of learning by means of mosques and schools--rarely by the power of fire and the sword. Not only did they and their co-religionists of neighbouring tribes, the Mandingoes and the Jolofs, thus spread a knowledge of the One God--they at the same time did an equally noble work in arraying themselves against the rapidly advancing flood of gin which Christian Europe was pouring into their country. With that traffic they would have nothing to do, and unlike so many of our Christian merchants, no consideration of profit would tempt them to a compromise between their conscience and the lust for gain. Meanwhile the Fulahs of the kingdoms of the interior had much to do to hold their own among their Pagan masters. Their position was most galling to a race which knew themselves infinitely superior to those whom they were obliged to own as masters--more bitter still that they, the inheritors of the promises, should be ruled by idolaters and men whose portion was Gehenna. Broken up as they were into little groups scattered over an enormous area, what could they do? The answer to that question was speedily forthcoming. They had, as we have shown, the necessary bond of union and the inspiring spiritual force to make them fight as one man for a common end. They only needed the leader to utilise this force and bring it into action. Such a man is never wanting when the times demand him, and he in this case was forthcoming in the person of Othman, the Imam or religious sheik of the Fulah of Gober, the northern of the Haussa States. Under the influence of this sheik the Fulah of that region were roused to a state of religious fervour such as they had never known before. His fiery eloquence touched their excitable and imaginative nature as he brought home to them the shame of their semi-enslaved position. The fires of discontent were thus set smouldering, and required but a little more fanning to cause them to blaze into the flames of rebellion.