Senegal river in the context of "Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal"

The Fula (or Fulani) jihads (Arabic: جهاد الفولا), also called the Fulani revolution were a series of jihads that occurred across West Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries, led largely by the Muslim Fula people. The jihads and the jihad states came to an end with European colonization.

The earliest Fulbe polity was established in Bundu in 1690. The first armed uprising took place in Futa Jallon in 1725, when Fula pastoralists, assisted by Muslim traders, rose against the indigenous chiefdoms. By 1750, the Fula had established the Imamate of Futa Jallon and placed the region under sharia law. Their success inspired the Toucouleurs on the banks of the lower Senegal to establish their own state, the Imamate of Futa Toro, through a series of wars between 1769 and 1776. In the early 19th century, the jihad movement spread eastward to the Hausa states. The revolutionary Usman dan Fodio, through a series of jihads begun in 1804, created the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state in West Africa at that time. An aggressively expansionist polity, it severely weakened the old Bornu Kingdom.

The Char Bouba war (variously transliterated as Sharr Bubba, Shar Buba), also known as the Mauritanian Thirty Years' War or the Marabout War, took place between 1644 and 1674 in the tribal areas of what is today Mauritania and Western Sahara as well as in the Senegal river valley. It was fought between the Sanhadja Berber tribes and Muslim populations in the river valley, led by Lamtuna Imam Nasr ad-Din, on one hand; and the Maqil Arab immigrant tribes, foremost of which was the Beni Hassan, as well as the traditional aristocracies of the Wolof states on the other, supported by the French.

The war was led by Sidi Ibrahim Al Aroussi, son of the famous Cheikh Sidi Ahmed Al Aroussi (died in 1593, near to Smara, in Western Sahara). Al Aroussi, with his two sons Shanan Al Aroussi and Sidi Tounsi Al Aroussi, led a powerful force of the Hassani tribe, the Aroussi Army, to conquer the Berber Imarat in current Mauritania and gain access to Bilad as-Sudan ("the Land of the Blacks", in Senegal and Mali).