Murray Last was a historian and a medical anthropologist who primarily focuses on Northern-Nigeria. He is currently a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.^[1] He obtained his PhD from the University of Ibadan in 1964, becoming one of the first to receive a PhD from a Nigerian university.^[2][3] He was presented the doctorate degree by Nnamdi Azikiwe, the then President of Nigeria during the First Nigerian Republic.^[4]

Professor Last was best known as the foremost scholar of the Sokoto Caliphate. He first went to Sokoto in 1961 to study the ancient manuscripts in the libraries in headquarters of the defunct Caliphate founded by Sheikh Usman Danfodio. He was mentored and taught by the tenth Grand Vizier of Sokoto, Waziri Junaidu, who was a great scholar and poet. Under the Waziri, Murray Last became the first white man to gain full access to the long scholarly heritage of that intriguing era.^[5][6] It was the great historian, H. F. C. Smith, who suggested to Last to study the Viziers of Sokoto.^[5][3]

Until 1964, Usman dan Fodio's caliphate, Africa's largest pre-colonial state, was known as the Fulani Empire in the English-speaking world and in the French-speaking world called it l'empire peul. The decision to re-label the state was made by Nigerian historians, scholars and other intellectuals of the time as they felt it needed "a properly Islamic term for a properly Islamic state". However, the re-labeling was never official. It was Murray Last who chose "The Sokoto Caliphate" as the title of his history of the state and from then on Sokoto Caliphate became universally used.^[7]