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Boko Haram in Retrospect

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John Azumah
a
Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA, USA
Published online: 24 Nov 2014.
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Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2015
Vol. 26, No. 1, 33–52, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2014.967930
Boko Haram in Retrospect

John Azumah*
Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA, USA

(Received 29 July 2014; accepted 9 September 2014)
This article looks at the development of the Nigerian Islamic militant group Boko Haram from
an historical perspective and attempts to locate Boko Haram within an historical pattern of
dissent and factionalism in Northern Nigerian Islam. It argues that the nineteenth-century
jihadist legacy of Uthman dan Fodio, and its rejection of things non-Islamic, accusations of
bidʿa and muwālāt and the invocation of takfīr, continues to appeal to the present-day
generation of Muslims. Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, who viewed himself as a reformer in the
tradition of dan Fodio, and his Wahhabi-inspired anti-Sufi views, and the activism of the
Izala movement, which is an outgrowth of Gumi’s religious and ideological views, have
perpetuated the separatist tradition. From limited reliable data, the article goes on to
construct the rise of Boko Haram (itself an outgrowth of the Izala movement) and its
ideology from within the ranks of the Salafi-Wahhabi trends in Northern Nigeria, arguing
that Boko Haram, with its militancy against things non-Islamic, is firmly rooted and best
explained within the broader Northern Nigerian context of Islamic factionalism and
absolutism fostered by a romanticized jihadist legacy and disillusionment arising from failed
experiments with Salafi-Wahhabi idealism.
Keywords: Boko Haram; Nigeria; Izala; dan Fodio; Sokoto; Abubakar Gumi; secularism;
jihadist; Wahhabi; Abubakar Shekau; Muhammad Yusuf; Ahlus Sunna
Introduction
The militant Islamic group, popularly known as “Boko Haram,”1 has been grabbing the headlines
with brutal attacks on the Nigerian security forces, villages, churches, mosques, markets and
schools, as well as the murder of prominent Muslim clerics in north-eastern Nigeria. The
group gained international notoriety with the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls on April 14,
2014, at Chibok, a small town in Borno State. But who are they, what is their origin and what
do they really stand for? Unraveling the mystery of Boko Haram is difficult because details
about the origins of the group are not altogether clear at this point in time. This situation has
been made more difficult by various factors, including the climate of fear and hysteria the
attacks have created within Nigeria and the nature of politics in Nigeria and the subregion,
which generates and feeds on rumors and conspiracy theories.
Commenting on the conspiracy theories in Nigeria surrounding Boko Haram, James Verini, a
journalist with National Geographic and the New Yorker, states:
Almost no Nigerian I spoke with believes Boko Haram is just Boko Haram. Some claim it’s the
creation of Wahhabis from the Gulf states; others, of “the West.” Still others believe Boko Haram
is backed by northern politicians vying for power; or by southern politicians who want to
destabilize the north; or by people in President Jonathan’s party who want to unseat him; or by
Jonathan himself, in an effort to cancel elections in the north; or, if not by him, by the people
*Email: azumahJ@ctsnet.edu
© 2014 University of Birmingham

34 J. Azumah
around him. In fact, Jonathan apparently believes the last. In a moment of unbuttoned paranoia at a
church service last year he said, “Some [Boko Haram] are in the executive arm of government,
some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even
in the judiciary.” Some are also in the armed forces, the police, and other security agencies. (Verini
2013)
The shock of Boko Haram attacks and fear of the group have paralyzed the population in parts of
north-eastern Nigeria, from ordinary citizens to politicians, the security forces, local journalists,
religious leaders and scholars. Many people in Northern Nigeria are afraid even to speak the name
“Boko Haram.” The fractured nature of Northern Nigerian Islam, which has several splinter
reformist and radical groups, has compounded the problem. However, Murray Last, a leading
specialist on Islam in Nigeria, has put his finger on something very important: “The Boko
Haram incident follow[s] a pattern that goes back at least 200 years in Northern Nigeria, and
has a logic to it” (2009, 11). Like many other observers, Last goes on rather simplistically to
blame the rise of the group on the high levels of unemployment, poverty and corruption in
Nigeria.
This article will attempt to locate Boko Haram within what Last calls “the pattern of dissent”
and endemic factionalism within the historical context of Northern Nigerian Islam. It will explore
the nineteenth-century jihadist legacy, the influence of Abubakar Mahmud Gumi and the Izala
movement as contributory factors to factionalism that gave rise to Boko Haram. It will then
strive, within the limits of the available reliable data, to construct the rise of Boko Haram from
within the ranks of the Salafi-Wahhabi trends in Northern Nigeria and will finally examine the
aims of Boko Haram within the broader context of British colonial attitudes toward Islam and
the traditional ʿulamāʾ and the broader Muslim attitude toward things non-Islamic, and how all
these have contributed to forming the pattern within which Boko Haram’s aims and activism
should be understood.
Nigeria’s jihadist-reformist backdrop

Joseph Kenny (2001, 9), a leading Roman Catholic specialist on Islam in Nigeria, has observed that
“Northern [Nigerian] Islam has been firmly reformist and separatist with regards to anything non-
Islamic.” Boko Haram is symptomatic of the reformist and separatist character of Northern
Nigerian Islam. Broadly speaking, Boko Haram’s agenda has four key features: opposition to
Western education (or rather aspects of it); opposition to the modern nation-state of Nigeria; the
desire to establish an Islamic caliphate; and the use of violence (militant jihad) to effect change.
The most revered figure and charismatic exemplar in Nigerian Islam is Uthman dan Fodio
(d. 1817), a nineteenth-century jihadist-reformist who led a Fulani insurgency against the Hausa
rulers of his day because the latter were deemed not to be Islamic enough. Against a backdrop of
mounting tension with the local ruler of Gobir, dan Fodio and his community withdrew to
Gudu, a distant border village to the west of Gobir, from where he launched his jihad in
1804. He accused the Hausa ruling class of bidʿa (heretical innovation), declared takfīr2
(accusing fellow Muslims of unbelief), which was seen as deserving death, and condemned
the system they presided over as un-Islamic.3 Adherents of traditional religions were declared
“enemies of God” by virtue of their “unbelief” and communities were decimated by pillage
and enslavement. He also accused the Muslim elite of his time of muwālāt (friendly relations
with unbelievers) and of failing to carry out jihad (Azumah 2001, 68ff.).
The jihad dan Fodio unleashed, and the massive enslavement of indigenous populations, led
to the emergence of one of the largest slave societies of modern times (Lovejoy and Hogendorn
1993). The aggressive conversion campaigns continued in the Middle Belt of Nigeria well into the
1950s, with the British colonial authorities turning a blind eye (Rasmussen 1990, 41–42). Dan
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 35
Fodio’s jihad led to the founding of a theocracy, the Sokoto Caliphate, thereby indelibly engraving
his name in the annals of Nigerian and African Islam and the psyche of nearly every Nigerian (and
African) Muslim. Dan Fodio, who before the jihad enjoyed the patronage of the Gobir ruling
class, was apparently radicalized by the teachings of a North African Berber jurist-theologian,
Abd al-Karim al-Maghili (d. 1505), whose teaching on muwālāt led to a pogrom of Jews in
North Africa in the fifteenth century (Azumah 2001, 70–71).
Dan Fodio’s jihad was strongly opposed by leading Muslim clerics of the old Islamic empire
of Bornu and condemned by Islamic scholars of Yandoto in modern Zamfara state. The town,
whose scholars were traditionally reputed for their high level of Islamic learning, was
ransacked by the jihadists and many of the scholars were killed. The jihadists’ main
ideological and scholarly interlocutor was one Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanimi (d. 1837), a
highly respected Islamic scholar of nineteenth-century Bornu, which successfully resisted the
jihad and, for a long time, remained an oasis of peace in north-eastern Nigeria. The
interlocutors exchanged scholarly correspondence on the Islamic basis for the jihad, with al-
Kanimi arguing that the jihad had no Islamic justification, particularly condemning the killing
of fellow Muslims.
In their scholarship on the history of Islam in Nigeria, leading British scholars (including
H. F. C. Smith, Murray Last and Mervyn Hiskett [1994]) in the 1960s and 1970s sided with
the jihadists, presented them as “reformers” and standard bearers of normative Islam and made
the works of the jihadists widely available and accessible through translations from Arabic and
Hausa into English. Muslim opponents of the jihadists were painted as “venal” and “corrupt”
scholars. Most Western scholars took a dim view of the non-ideological and nonviolent
Islamic tradition the jihadists sought to reform, dismissing it as “mixed Islam,” “African
Islam,” “black Islam,” etc. The dominant and most influential narrative that has emerged in
post-colonial Nigeria is a monolithic reconstruction of dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate: he
is seen as a great reformer who inaugurated 100 years of good, progressive Islamic government.
Last (1967, 235) claims that “throughout the [nineteenth] century, the ideals, and to a large
extent the practice, of Sokoto did not change. This was achieved because the Caliph and his
court upheld the traditions of the Shaikh.” Ibrahim Sulaiman (1984, 10) takes this claim
further with a rhetorical question: “We can ask the historians: has [sic] there ever been more
successful, more integrated, more disciplined states and governments in Africa, and on our
own very soil [Nigeria], than the Islamic states and the Islamic governments?” The problem
with these claims, however, is that they are based on the histories of the victors, whose ideals
and apologia are taken as evidence of good governance. A contemporary Fulani proverb bears
witness to the degenerative effect of nineteenth-century jihadist rule: “The cleric [tyeerno]
begets a chief [lamido], the chief begets an infidel (kefero).”
So disappointing was the translation of jihadist ideals into good governance that, a few years
after the jihad was launched, Abdullahi dan Fodio, the chief jihadist ideologue and brother of
Uthman dan Fodio, became disillusioned and briefly abandoned the cause. He launched a
scathing attack on his fellow jihadists:
When my (sincere) friends died, our goals were lost, I was left behind in the midst of liars who claimed
that which they did not do, pursued their whims, and chased rapacity in preference to what was
obligatory on them … devouring [people’s wealth], self-gratification, booty and bribery, enjoyment
of lutes, flutes and the beating of drums. They have also sold free persons into slavery in the
market; some of them appear as judges but are wolves in the garb of foxes. (Abdullahi 1984, 23)
At the turn of the twentieth century, European observers recount the tyranny and judicial abuses in
the emirates of Northern Nigeria, tempered only by the weakness or moderation of individual
rulers. Some write about alkalis (local Muslim judges) being either disregarded by local rulers,
overruled by emirs, “or worse still subjected to the authority of the emir’s favorite slaves, who
36 J. Azumah
decreed to their enemies inhuman punishments of their own invention” (Azumah 2001, 106). The
jihadist theocratic rule of the nineteenth century was therefore anything but “a golden era.” Most
of the Western scholars whose works unwittingly romanticized the jihadist legacy had ties to the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and King’s College, London. Some of them
taught for many years in Nigeria and “directly influenced” policy in Northern Nigeria, while
most of the Western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim elite who influenced policy in
independent Nigeria in the political, judicial and educational spheres were SOAS graduates
(Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 71–74; Thurston 2014, 76–78).
In a near mea culpa in a 1993 preface to the second edition of The Sword of Truth, Hiskett
admitted that his work fell short of “true objectivity,” that “the brutality and intolerance” of
militant jihad, especially that of nineteenth-century West Africa, “has been veiled by an
assumption of moral righteousness … that leaves no place for an approach from the point of
view of the victims” (1994, viii). Instructively, Hiskett laments that “the absolutism of the
jihadists has been in no way diminished by the passage of time” and that aspirations for the
establishment of dan Fodio’s model by such influential Muslim scholars as Ibrahim Sulaiman,
Shehu Umar Abdullahi and Abubakar Gumi continued to enjoy “widespread support.”4 In
Hiskett’s view, “the underlying attitude of Muslims to what is not (at least in their view)
‘Islam’ seems not to have changed.” He then goes on to observe that “such inflexibility is,
perhaps, the greatest problem facing a democratic and pluralist Nigeria; and indeed, at the
global level, it may be among the most intractable problems that face the non-Muslim world
today” (Hiskett 1994, xii–xv).
Abubakar Gumi, Izala and the culture of factionalism

After dan Fodio in the nineteenth century, Abubakar Mahmud Gumi (d. 1992) is arguably the one
individual whose scholarship and activism have profoundly impacted the trajectory of Northern
Nigerian Islam in the last century. Dan Fodio himself was an initiate of the Qadiriyya Sufi order,
and after his death the Qadiriyya was adopted as the official order of the Caliphate. The
dominance of the Qadiriyya was to be seriously challenged by the introduction of the
Tijaniyya Sufi order during the first half of the nineteenth century, popularized in the mid-
twentieth century by the charismatic Shaykh Ibrahim Niass (d. 1975). These two Sufi orders
regularly accused each other of bidʿa and got embroiled in doctrinal and liturgical
controversies, some of which led to intra-Muslim violence in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In
an attempt to unite Muslims to face the challenges in an independent Nigeria, Jamāʿat Nas.r al-
Islām (JNI) or the Society for the Victory of Islam was established in 1962 as an umbrella
national organization for Nigerian Muslims.
Under the political leadership of Ahmadu Bello (d. 1966), the first premier of the Northern
Region, a kind of truce was reached between the Sufi orders through the JNI. This situation
was to change for the worse after the death of Bello in the 1966 coup and the rise of
Abubakar Gumi, religious advisor to Bello and subsequently Grand Mufti of Nigeria. From the
1940s, Gumi held himself up as a reformer of Islam in the tradition of dan Fodio and spoke of
“the golden period of the Sokoto Caliphate” (Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 3). He challenged local
imams on the practice of ritual ablution before prayers, criticized the sultan for accepting non-
Islamic titles conferred on him by the British colonial government and accused the emirs of
bringing “back to life all the corrupt practices against which Sheikh dan Fodio went to war
with the former Hausa rulers” (108). The support of colonial officials played a key part in
shielding and raising Gumi’s profile over the years.
On the eve of independence in 1960, Gumi was appointed Deputy Grand Khadi, an
appointment he described as a “momentous change in my life” (Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 74).
A couple of years later, he assumed the office of Grand Khadi. After the death of Bello in 1966,
Gumi rose to prominence with his public anti-Sufi campaigns. He categorically stated that “there
is no mysticism in Islam,” accused the two main Sufi orders of heretical innovations and declared
takfīr, especially against the Tijanis (135). He labeled Sufi practitioners mushrikūn (polytheists)
and declared in a public sermon in April 1977 that “anyone who recited the salat al-fatih, one of
the central prayers of the Tijanis, should be regarded as an unbeliever and could therefore be
legally killed” (Loimeier 1997b, 298).
Gumi had close connections with Saudi scholars and notables and became the main agent for
Salafi-Wahhabi thought in Nigeria; he won the King Faisal International Award “for services to
Islam” in 1987. His anti-Sufi sermons led to violent clashes between his followers and Sufi
sympathizers, including stabbings during prayers in mosques and the killing of prominent
opponents (Quadri 1985, 100–101). The two Sufi orders closed ranks, and leading Sufi ʿulamāʾ
responded in kind to Gumi’s attacks (Umar 1993, 160ff.). He also led the campaign to declare
the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement a heretical sect, and attacked the newly introduced Shi’a
Islamic movement in Nigeria, under the leadership of Ibrahim al-Zakzaky. Gumi’s political
agendas and views played a significant role in polarizing Christian–Muslim relations in
Nigeria as he consistently hyped up and exploited Muslim fears of Christian domination.
After the 1966 coup, Gumi ruled against the express desire of Ahmadu Bello to be buried
alongside his great-grandfather; he decreed that Bello was “a martyr who had been killed in
the cause of the religion” by Igbo Christians and should be buried at the site of his death. He
called upon the plotters of the coup “to admit their hatred against Islam as the real motive for
their action” (Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 113, 123). As far as Gumi was concerned, the battle lines
were clear, between Northern and Southern Nigerians, and between Muslim and Christian
Nigerians. In 1987, Gumi advised Muslims not to join any party headed by a non-Muslim, and
that if Christians refused to accept Muslim leadership, “then we have to divide the country”
(Loimeier 1997a, 171).
Gumi’s ideological and doctrinal views inspired the Muslim Students Society (MSS) and the
founding of the Jamāʿat Izālat al-Bidʿa wa-Iqāmat al-Sunna (Society for Removal of Heretical
Innovation and Reestablishment of the Traditions of the Prophet) by one of his students,
Ismaila Idris, in 1978, with Gumi as its spiritual and ideological head (Amara 2011, 157). The
“Yan Izala,” as the movement came to be known, provided Gumi with the much needed
organizational backing for his religio-political activism. Many have accused him of
reintroducing the language of takfīr and muwālāt into Nigerian Islamic discourse and blamed
intra-Muslim tensions in the 1970s and 1980s on the activities of Izala (Umar 1993, 154ff.;
Loimeier 1997b, 295). It must also be pointed out that Gumi’s fight against Sufism was part of
a larger struggle between members of the Western-educated elite such as Gumi himself and the
traditional ʿulamāʾ.
Commenting on the divisiveness of Izala activities, Umar, a leading Nigerian Muslim
intellectual, highlights the issue of praying in separate mosques:
Another factor which has sustained the conflict is the separation of mosques, with Izala and the Sufi
orders each maintaining their own mosques. The mosque has historically been a forum for the
communal manifestation of Islam through which identity, solidarity and social cohesion were
constantly enhanced. However, Izala insists that it has become imperative to establish separate
mosques in Nigeria today because of fundamental doctrinal differences … The logical consequence
of this position is that Izala members cannot accept that followers of the Sufi orders should lead
them in prayer … separating mosques has been one of the sources of friction which has continued
to keep tension high, attracting criticism against Izala even from non-Sufis. (Umar 1993, 174)
The escalation of attacks between Sufis and the Yan Izala in 1979–1980 coincided with the
Iranian Revolution and the introduction of Shi’a Islamic thought into Nigeria through the
38 J. Azumah
teaching and activities of Shaykh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, first through the MSS and later through his
Islamic Movement in Nigeria. Other leading ideologues such as Ibrahim Sulaiman rose from the
ranks of the MSS. Sulaiman, who has been president of the MSS, along with a good proportion of
MSS members became disillusioned with Gumi and Izala propaganda, which was dividing
Muslim society. They chose to concentrate their attacks on colonialism, secularism and
Christians. If Gumi was the arch anti-Sufi campaigner, Sulaiman became the chief anti-
Christian propagandist. Sulaiman believed the prescription for the malaise of Nigerian society
lay in dan Fodio’s theocratic model (1986). He accused his fellow Western-trained Muslim
elite of being
afflicted with a fatal disease implanted in them by colonialism. This disease has two major symptoms:
the pathological fear of the cross, and the passionate love for the dross of earthly life. The cross
bestrides the psyche of the Muslim elite like a colossus. They shiver and quake at the very
mention of the cross, and to appease this powerful god, everything is being sacrificed. (Sulaiman,
quoted in Loimeier 1997a, 367)
Sulaiman, a lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria for a number of years, had a huge
influence on the MSS through his publications. The MSS became embroiled in open conflicts
with Christians, first at Ahmadu Bello University in 1978 and then in the devastating
Kafanchan riots of 1987, which started between MSS and Christian students at the Kafanchan
Advanced Teachers Training College (Christelow 1987, 237–244). Much attention has focused
on poor, wandering Qur’an students, who are easily recruited during violent encounters. What
is less talked about is the fact that more well-to-do young people on college and university
campuses in Nigeria have become radicalized in their religious views. In fact, some of the
bloodiest confrontations between Christians and Muslims during what one observer (Boer
2003) described as “Nigeria’s decades of blood,” that is, from the early 1980s to the early
2000s, were mostly (not always) instigated by MSS and the Yan Izala. The 1979 constitutional
debate on the Federal Shari’a Court of Appeal, and the uncompromising stance taken by
southern Christians, exacerbated the situation.
It was against this backdrop of factionalism and violent clashes in the late 1970s and 1980s
that the movement led by Muhammad Marwa (d. 1980), known locally as “Maitatsine” (literally,
the one who damns), emerged in Kano with his strong anti-Western and anti-modernity rhetoric
(denouncing the use of watches, radios, bicycles and cars) and the ensuing bloody confrontation
with security forces that claimed thousands of lives in the 1980s. Writing on the prevailing socio-
religious and economic conditions and changing lifestyles of Kano from precolonial times to the
1970s, Barkindo points out the broader historical context of the Maitatsine movement:
The Maitatsine phenomenon, it appears to me, is the continuation of a debate which started among the
‘ulama and members of the ruling elite on the eve of the British conquest. There were those who opted
for the total rejection of European rule [and way of life]; they called for jihad and, in case of defeat, a
hijra or mass migration to a land where they could practice their Islam without hindrance. Those who
held this view included the Caliph of Sokoto himself, Attahiru Ahmadu and the Emir of Kano, Alu
b. Abdullahi … Maitatsine enjoyed a limited success partly because many of the people who did not
actually join him agreed with the content of his preaching: but they disagreed with his methods.
(Barkindo 1993, 98)
Leading Muslim figures of the day had no doubt that Gumi and Izala’s aggressive and divisive
propaganda created the environment that gave rise to the Maitatsine (Loimeier 1997b, 297).
Peter Pham, Director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, correctly
identifies a pattern for Maitatsine’s ideas within the wider context of Northern Nigeria in the
1980s:
as eccentric as Maitatsine’s beliefs were, the modus operandi of the Yan Tatsine did not differ
significantly from those of followers of other mallams, for example, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi’s
Jamaat Izalat al-Bida wa Iqamat al-Sunna (“the Society for the Eradication of Evil Innovation and the
Establishment of the Sunna”), also known as “Yan Izala,” who reject the secular underpinnings of
Nigerian democracy and agitate for the establishment of an Islamic state. Yan Izala alumni, in
particular, have gone on to found other radical movements, which are active in Nigeria today. In fact,
the doctrinal orthodoxy of these groups gives them far greater appeal among the masses than the
bizarre Yan Tatsine creed could ever hope to achieve. Furthermore, theologically orthodox radicals
have the advantage of tapping into a historical legacy of violent jihad in the region. (Pham 2006)
Pham is right that the Maitatsine teaching and activities fitted into the broader pattern of dissent
and activities of the Yan Izala and Salafi groups founded by Izala alumni. The similarities between
Maitatsine’s views and modus operandi and those of Boko Haram are more than coincidental.
Maitatsine, like Boko Haram, established a separate community, had a particular dislike for the
police and started a campaign of violence after their leader was killed in a police raid (Lubeck
1987, 97–105). It is also noteworthy that the north-eastern part of Nigeria, where Boko Haram
emerged in the early 2000s, is the area where most of Maitatsine’s fighters/followers sought
sanctuary after the violent crackdown in the 1980s.
The Salafi-Ahlus Sunna groups in contemporary Northern Nigeria were nearly all founded by
second-generation Izala alumni, and graduates of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia. Upon
their return, most founded splinter reformist organizations out of disillusionment with the
trajectory of the movement under the leadership of the first generation and a quest to carve out
their own spheres of influence. According to Dalhah Abubakar Abdullah, an Izala leader in
Lagos, virtually every contemporary Salafi-Ahlus Sunna follower was previously associated
with Izala. He relayed the following to Amara in an interview:
As you know and as I told you, the people of Nigeria like leadership. Everybody who belongs to
Salafiyya now was an Izala before. He wants to have a specific name different from Izala and he
calls his followers to recognize him as a leader. I don’t know how we can differentiate between the
Izala and the Salafiyya. (2011, 232)
Ja’far Mahmoud Adam (d. 2007) is one such Izala alumnus and Medina graduate who became a
prominent Salafi-Ahlus Sunna leader in Northern Nigeria, and who, in turn, was the teacher of
Muhammad Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram (Brigaglia 2012, 36–38).
One can safely conclude, therefore, that the Yan Izala created the environment for the rise of
Maitatsine in the 1980s just as Ahlus Sunna did for Boko Haram in the early 2000s. Izala is now
split into two main factions (and subgroups), Gumi loyalists headquartered in Kaduna, and Idris
loyalists in Jos, and between the older and younger generations. And it is fair to say that there is no
love lost between many of these groups. And as we shall demonstrate shortly, Boko Haram itself
has fractured since the death of its founder in 2009. It is within this context of a fluid web of
radical reformist factions and preachers, and the all too familiar violent jostling for power and
control, that we now turn to construct the rise of Boko Haram.
The making of Boko Haram

The origins of Boko Haram go back to the mid-1990s in a youth group at the Alhaji Muhammadu
Ndimi mosque (an Ahlus Sunna mosque) in Maiduguri. The group was under the leadership of
one Mallam Lawal. Muhammad Yusuf assumed the leadership after Lawal left to study in
Saudi Arabia. Yusuf also had some leadership roles with Izala and the Jamāʿat ul-Tadjīd Islām
(Association for the Renewal of Islam; JTI) in the mid-1990s. Toward the late 1990s to early
2000, he was a student-follower of Ja’far Adam, the Ahlus Sunna leader based in Kano. For
some time, Yusuf was considered a potential successor to Ja’far and from about 1999 to 2002,
he was the accredited representative of Ahlus Sunna in Maiduguri, delivering sermons and
lectures on local television and radio.
40 J. Azumah
In 2002, one Muhammad Alli, a leading member of the youth group at the Alhaji Ndimi
mosque under Yusuf’s leadership, declared Maiduguri city and the Islamic establishment to be
intolerably and irredeemably corrupt. Alli called for a hijra (a withdrawal along the lines of
dan Fodio’s withdrawal to Gudu in 1804). While not opposing the hijra in principle, Yusuf
apparently did not endorse the idea. So a small faction of the youth withdrew with Alli from
Maiduguri to a village called Kanamma, in Yobe State, near the border with Niger, where they
set up a separatist community run on strict Islamic principles. Alli called for a return to a life
under “true” Islamic law, with the aim of creating a more perfect Islamic society away from
the corrupt establishment (Walker 2012, 3).
In the meantime, Yusuf, the youth leader at the Ndimi mosque, apparently fell out with his
Ahlus Sunna teacher and mentor, Ja’far Adam, who regularly visited and led prayers at the
Ndimi mosque from his base in Kano. Around 2002, with support from local political figures
and businessmen, Yusuf began a process of withdrawal from the Ndimi mosque to establish
his own community around a new compound. The compound included a mosque, which was
named Ibn Taymiyya Masjid, after the seventh/thirteenth-century Islamist jurist-theologian and
universally acclaimed father of modern radical Islamism, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328). By
naming the mosque after Ibn Taymiyya, Yusuf was seeking to bypass the Ahlus Sunna
leadership in Nigeria and their Wahhabi forebears in Saudi Arabia, and to anchor his group to
the fountainhead of Islamism.
In December 2003, following a community dispute, Muhammad Alli’s group, known by this
time as the “Nigerian Taliban,” got into a conflict with the local police. This confrontation led to
the group’s base being surrounded by the security forces on December 31, 2003, into January 1,
2004. The siege ended in a shootout and most of the group’s members were killed, including Alli
himself. The few survivors returned to Maiduguri, where some reintegrated into Yusuf’s group.
Many observers tend to confuse this smaller splinter group with the larger Boko Haram.
The experience of the “Nigerian Taliban” at the hands of the security forces must have
deepened Yusuf’s resentment of the security forces and squashed any lingering hopes of
working with the Islamic establishment in Maiduguri and Borno State. Yusuf formally
launched his own separatist community around the Ibn Taymiyya Masjid not too long after the
killing of Muhammad Alli. At this point, the group’s official name was Ahlus sunna wa-al-
jamāʾa wa-al-hijra (People of prophetic practice and withdrawal). Local people referred to the
group as the “Yusufiyya” or followers of Yusuf. According to Ahmad Salkida, the only
Nigerian journalist known to have had direct access to Yusuf:
It was in Ibn Taimiyya Masjid that the late Yusuf, together with his hard-line top lieutenant, Abubakar
Shekau alias “Darul Tauhid,” began to build an imaginary state within a state. Together they set up
Laginas (departments). They had a cabinet, the Shura, the Hisbah, the brigade of guards, a military
wing, a large farm, an effective micro finance scheme, and the late Yusuf played the role of a
judge in settling disputes. Each state had an Amir (leader) including Amirs in Chad and Niger that
gave accounts of their stewardship to Yusuf directly. (Salkida 2009)
The group continued to consolidate and to articulate their views and stances publicly on pertinent
issues.
In a 2006 press release signed by the sect’s shura (consultative council), they stated that Islam permits
them to subsist under a modern [state] like Nigeria but has explicitly prohibited them from joining or
supporting the governments in so far as their systems, structures and institutions contain elements
contradictory to core Islamic principles and beliefs. (Salkida 2009)
In other words, the group was now openly operating on the doctrine of being in Nigeria but not of
the modern Nigerian state and its institutions. At this point, Yusuf was now in open confrontation
with his former Ahlus Sunna teacher and mentor, Ja’far Adam. The two engaged in polemical
exchanges, with Adam rejecting Yusuf’s stance against participation in Western education and
service in government institutions. In a famous quip, Adam is reported to have told Yusuf that if
Muslims boycotted Western education and government service, “pagan policemen will kill and
injure Muslims, and when they are taken to hospitals, pagan doctors and nurses will attend to
them” (Anonymous 2012, 135).
Yusuf accused Yan Izala-Ahlus Sunna leaders of being government agents and ʿulamāʾ of
America, while Adam accused Yusuf and his group of being Kharijites. It was during the
height of these exchanges that Ja’far Adam was gunned down during early morning prayers in
his mosque in Kano on April 13, 2007. His murder was initially shrouded in secrecy, but it is
now openly acknowledged that Yusuf ordered the murder of his former teacher and mentor
(Brigaglia 2012, 41).
Yusuf continued to organize what many observers refer to as “a state within a state” in the full
glare of the authorities and with the active support of some leading state officials and
businessmen. Yusuf praised al-Qaeda leaders in his sermons as the only true flag-bearers of
Islam. The group grew
to the point where it had many ‘state-like’ functions, such as providing welfare handouts, job training,
jobs in the mini-industries, resources for the rest of the community, and a ‘moral police’ along the
same lines as the Hisbah religious police in Kano. (Walker 2012, 9)
Then, in July 2009, following a confrontation with police, members of the group now popularly
known as “Boko Haram”5 engaged security forces in running battles in which ordinary civilians
and religious leaders became fair game to both sides. The group’s compound and mosque in
Maiduguri were razed to the ground and Yusuf himself was captured by the military and
handed over to the police, who, by all accounts, executed him, his father-in-law and a former
commissioner of religious affairs of Borno State, Buji Foi. Yusuf and his group met the same
violent fate as Muhammad Alli and his “Nigerian Taliban” in 2004 and Muhammad Marwa
and his Maitatsine movement back in 1980.
After Yusuf’s death, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) issued a statement of
condolence and offered to give Nigerian Muslims training and weapons to fight Christians in
Nigeria. The statement read in part: “We are ready to train your people in weapons, and give
you whatever support we can in men, arms and munitions to enable you to defend our people
in Nigeria” (Reuters 2010). Yusuf’s second-in-command, Abubakar Shekau, was shot and
captured but later released from prison either as a result of mistaken identity or through the
intervention of some powerful and well-connected political and religious figures. Several
members of Boko Haram escaped into neighboring Niger and Cameroun. Some proceeded to
Algeria, where they obtained training in militant camps (Zenn 2014, 24).
There seems to have been a power struggle within Boko Haram after Yusuf’s death between
Shekau, the second-in-command, and Mamman Nur, the third-in-command. Shekau eventually
won over his more theologically trained and regionally connected rival, mainly because of his
Kanuri ethnic origins; Nur is of Cameroonian origin. The cracks deepened over the
indiscriminate killing of Muslim civilians and, in July 2011, a new group calling itself the
Yusufiyya Islamic Movement (YIM) distributed flyers in Borno, distancing themselves from
the “evil” Boko Haram and proposing reconciliation with the government. In the meantime,
“Shekau’s reported favoritism of ethnic Kanuris of Borno also may have driven Hausa, non-
Nigerians and other non-Kanuris to ally with Nur,” leading to the formation of yet another
group, Ansaru in 2012. Ansaru released flyers in Kano in January 2012 announcing its “public
formation,” claiming to be a “humane” alternative to Boko Haram, and targeting government
institutions and Christians in “self-defense” (Zenn 2014, 25–26).
Meanwhile, from mid-2010, members of Boko Haram regrouped in Maiduguri, under
Shakau’s leadership, with a new name: jamāʿat ahl al-sunna li-al-daʿwa wa-al-jihād ʿala
42 J. Azumah
minhaj al-salaf (the community of the people of the Sunna for the cause [of Islam] and jihad
according to the methods of the Salaf [The Salaf are first three generations of Muslims]).
Commenting on the change of name, Roman Loimeier observes that the group’s position
evolved “from advocating emigration to advocating jihad, jihad being defined as an armed
struggle against the enemies of Islam” (2012, 152). This time, Boko Haram appeared not as a
small-scale religiously militant “sect” suspected of illegal activities, but as a well-organized
underground cartel engaged in terrorist activities (Brigaglia 2012, 36).
If Yusuf had a crush on al-Qaeda, his deputies certainly consummated the marriage. “Shekau
pledged loyalty to ‘the amir of al-Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb,’ Usama bin Ladin, Ayman al-
Zawahiri and the ‘Islamic States’ in Iraq and Somalia, declaring ‘Oh America, jihad has just
begun’” (Zenn 2014, 24). Boko Haram and Ansaru have both developed a particular hatred for
Christians and Christianity that was hardly noticeable in Yusuf’s sermons and lectures, which
may be partly explained by their ideological and operational connections with AQIM. Shekau
makes his hatred for Christians and Christianity clear in one of his YouTube ramblings:
We know what is happening in this world, it is a jihad war against Christians and Christianity. It is a
war against western education, democracy and constitution. We have not started, next time we are
going to Abuja; we are going to refinery and towns of Christians. You don’t know me. I have no
problem with Jonathan. This is what I know from the Qur’an. It is war against Christians and
democracy and their constitution. Allah says we should finish them when we get them. (Shekau 2014)
Since 2010, Boko Haram has succeeded in subjecting north-eastern Nigeria to a campaign of
terror apparently to avenge the killing of their founder. The attacks escalated after 2011 into
full-scale suicide bombings and unprecedented levels of sexual violence against women,
including mass abductions. In August 2014, the group announced the establishment of a
caliphate around the town of Gwoza in Borno State near the border with Cameroun. Mamman
Nur’s faction of Ansaru operates in the north-western part of Nigeria, targeting security forces
and kidnapping foreigners for ransom and was responsible for the attacks on the police and
UN headquarters in Abuja in June and August 2011, respectively.
“Boko Haram”: the name and the mission

It is true that “Boko Haram” literally means “Western education is forbidden (or sinful),” (boko
being a Hausa word meaning “fake” [see below for further explanation] and h.arām being Arabic
for “forbidden”), and Boko Haram is opposed to aspects of Western education on the basis that it
is sinful or religiously forbidden. However, as alluded to previously, the group rejects the name
“Boko Haram” for itself. In a YouTube video, Shekau insists, “I am not Boko Haram, I am
jama‘at ahl al-sunna li-l-dawa wa-l-jihad. I don’t care what you call me, you are all in
trouble” (2014). Commenting on the name “Boko Haram,” Andrea Brigaglia makes the
following insightful observation:
The popularity of the nickname Boko Haram in the national and international press might be
explained by two different reasons. For the northern Muslims, especially those ideologically close
to Izala and Ahlus Sunna, the label transforms the radical group into an exotic eccentricity and
hides its embarrassing connection to the leadership of a well-established Salafi organization in the
country. For the southern Nigerian Christian press on the contrary, as well as for the global
Western media, the nickname Boko Haram magically captures all the stereotypes that have daily
currency in Islamophobic discourses: at the same time obscurantist, primitive and ferocious, Boko
Haram embodies all the prejudices associated with the supposed “essence” of Islam. (Brigaglia
2012, 37–38)
The term Boko is a Hausa word meaning sham, fake, counterfeit and inauthentic, which came to
be applied to secular-Western education within Northern Nigerian society. The stigmatization of
secular education as counterfeit therefore has a long and deep history in Northern Nigeria.
Reiterating this point, Matthew Kukah, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, notes:
In traditional Hausa society, there was the concept of what was known during marriage ceremonies as,
Amarya Boko. Amarya itself means a bride. As the tradition goes, during a traditional wedding, hiding
the bride from public view was an important part of the ceremony. It was often common for a
procession to be led by an Amarya boko (a fake bride) who would be dressed as the real bride but
merely to serve as a decoy. The excitement arose from getting the crowd to follow the fake bride
while the surprise appearance of the real bride would be the climax of the ceremony! (Kukah 2014)
Muhammad S. Umar recalls a Hausa song popular in Northern Nigeria that stigmatizes Western-
secular education:
Yan makarantar boko (pupils of the public schools); Ga karatu ba sala (do have knowledge, but do
not observe prayers); Sai yawan zagin Mallam (And often insult teachers)
This song charges that Western education undermines basic Islamic/religious tenets, and instills
indiscipline and disrespect for authority. In other words, knowledge without religious and social
values is worthless. Umar goes on to cite another well-known Hausa song, which warns of the
consequences of acquiring such worthless knowledge:
Elementare mantan Allah (pupils of Elementary school forget about God); In kun mutu ba ruwanmu
(So when you die we have nothing to do with you)
With such a strong popular stigma and aversion to Western-secular education, “very few Muslim
parents allowed their children to receive western education, on account of which they became a
distinct elite, yan boko” (Umar 2002, 86). Kukah argues that
just as white Christian missionaries used the words pagan and witchcraft interchangeably to refer to
African beliefs and culture, the coinage of the word Boko was meant to convey the same contempt for
the new but strange and suspicious education by the white people within the Muslim community.
(Kukah 2014)
Brigaglia is, therefore, right that “an attitude of contempt, scorn or mistrust toward Western
culture and education had been common in Muslim Northern Nigerian society since the
colonial time” (2012, 37). Boko captures this spirit of the general Northern Nigerian Muslim
attitude of suspicion and scorn for Western education, a suspicion that was ironically shared by
British colonial authorities if not inadvertently fostered by colonial educational policies
(Thurston 2014).
The educational policy of British colonial rulers in Northern Nigeria back in the early
twentieth century exhibits internal ambivalence on the part of the colonial authorities. First,
they were distrustful of the missionaries and banned mission activities including missionary
education in Northern Nigeria, ostensibly to win Muslim confidence in secular education. The
authorities were also distrustful of Western-educated African elites because they were deemed
to be “ambivalent or even hostile to [local] tradition.” It is worth pointing out, though, that the
colonial authorities had other reasons for distrusting missionary education and Western-
educated Africans, namely that products of missionary schools and many educated Africans
were viewed as too politicized and a danger to the colonial project.
The colonial authorities were concerned, on the one hand, about Muslim conservatism and
radicalism and, on the other, about the fact that a full-scale secular education could undermine
traditional Islamic values and religiosity. A report by T. H. Baldwin, principal of Katsina
College in the early 1930s, described local Muslim judges (Khadis) as “old fashioned and
unadaptable” and the Islamic law they studied as “antiquated, unable to cope with changing
conditions.” He noted that, in the rural areas, teachers were viewed as “new-fangled while the
old mallams aloof or hostile, still have the ears of the people.” He also implied that secular-
44 J. Azumah
Western education by itself was incapable of instilling a grounded and rounded worldview in
Muslim students. For Baldwin, the way forward was to
educate a number of natives who have, so to speak, a foot in both camps [Western and Islamic]. The
Sudanese Sheikhs at present in Nigeria are the type that I have in mind. Here are men who are quite
clearly responsive to [Western] ideas and yet “sane” men, solidly grounded in their native tradition,
carrying the prestige which learning in that tradition confers. (Thurston 2014, 68)
In their bid to raise a corps of “progressive” Muslim elite and technocrats for the colonial project,
the British initiated a two-track education system, that is, the Arabic and English medium schools.
Many future northern politicians, such as Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (first prime minister of
independent Nigeria [1960–66]) and Ahmadu Bello (first premier of the Northern Region of
Nigeria [1954–66]), were products of the English medium track. From 1934 to 62, Sudanese
were brought in to teach in the Arabic medium schools and scholarships were provided for
elect students to study in Sudan, some of whom proceeded to study at SOAS. Abubakar Gumi
of the Izala movement was among the first batch of the Arabic track students who benefited
from these scholarships to study in Sudan. Between 1954 and 1966, the colonial and Northern
Nigerian regional authorities sent more than 80 young men to study in Arab universities and at
SOAS (Thurston 2014, 63). As the population became increasingly discontented with colonial
rule and the failed policies of the ruling Muslim elite in the north, so the resentment of the
Western-educated Muslim elite mounted.
Muslim leaders who had been opposed to colonial rule all along seized the opportunity to
openly attack Western education as corrupting. In the 1950s, Western-educated politicians
recruited high-profile poets to combat these perceptions by composing poems extolling the
necessity and “Islamicity” of secular-Western education (Umar 2002, 88–98). At the time of
independence, modern secular education had gained only a tenuous foothold in Northern
Nigeria, while the traditional system operated relatively unabated. For Western-educated elites
such as Gumi, it was critical to champion what were then known as Islamiyya schools, where
Islamic subjects were taught alongside subjects such as mathematics, English and science, as
well as offering religious education to adults, including women. Izala championed Islamiyya
schools in independent Nigeria as a double-edged sword for fighting what they saw as Sufi
obscurantism and superstition and a corrupting secular educational system. Despite its
exemplary track record in promoting Islamiyya education, “[o]n the first page of the journal
‘al-Burhān’ (the Proof) edited by the Izala headquarters in Jos we read the sentence ‘al-ʿaqīda
al-Salafiyya khayr mina al- Shahāda al-ʿilmiyya’, meaning The Salafiyya path is better than
any academic certificate” (Amara 2011, 235).
Abubakar Gumi, himself a product of Western education, taught about the conspiratorial and
destructive nature of the education system bequeathed by the British colonialists, who he said
built schools to teach destructive western culture and they began by teaching the children of the
idolatrous infidels whose fathers walked the land naked, unaware of what morals, manly virtue and
humanity might be. They placed them in sensitive government positions and they came to lord it
over the Muslims whose brains had fallen asleep amid fantasies of superstition. (Gumi, quoted in
Hiskett 1994, xix)
A diatribe at once against Western education, southern Christians (the children of idolatrous
infidels) and an ignorant and unsuspecting Muslim populace! A leading Nigerian Muslim
scholar, who chose to write anonymously, traces the origins of Boko Haram as being “partly
from the long-standing negative attitudes toward Western education among the Muslims of
Northern Nigeria, and partly from Salafi-Wahabbi trends in Nigeria originating from the
preaching career of al-Shaykh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi.” He goes on to quote a
contemporary of Yusuf, one Mallam Sulaiman, and leader of Darul Islam in Northern
Nigeria, saying they do not send their children to English medium schools because “we believe
what obtains in such schools is haram” (Anonymous 2012, 120). Yusuf is, therefore, right in
declaring:
The system of modern education that the Europeans brought to Nigeria contradicts Islamic faith. I am
not the first to say so for earlier scholars like Ibn Taymiyya [sic] as well as modern scholars of Islam
have also said so. (Yusuf, quoted in Anonymous 2012, 126)
When it comes to Boko Haram’s actual position on Western education, the picture is more
nuanced than is portrayed in the media and popular discourse. It has been noted that
in his recorded sermons and lectures addressed to his followers, Yusuf condemns Western education
and working with government without any reservations, but he adds nuance and subtlety when he
defends his views in the context of debating with or responding to his opponents. (Anonymous
2012, 123)
Salkida (2009) corroborates this view:
From my interaction with him, he never said boko is haram plainly. In fact, the name Boko Haram
came to being during the crisis. What he always said was, as long as anything that contradicts the
teachings of Islam (in his own view) exists in the educational system then it is haram to go to that
school unless such things cease to exist. As members of the sect realised, they cannot ensure such
change, especially in a secular state like ours; they withdrew from schools completely. But I am
aware that the late Yusuf had plans to set up a school, a hospital and a market in the future to
complement the sect’s micro finance scheme and other Laginas.
It was not the study of such disciplines as biology, chemistry, physics and geography that Yusuf
rejected, but rather aspects that he claimed contradicted the Qur’an and Sunna. Hence, he rejected
the idea that the earth is spherical because “it contradicts the clear text (nass) of the Qur’an,”
which he does not cite. He cites a Hadith that divides non-Islamic knowledge into three
categories: knowledge that conforms to the Qur’an and Sunna; knowledge that neither
conforms to nor contradicts the Qur’an and Sunna and knowledge that contradicts the Qur’an
and Sunna. The first two are h.alāl (permissible), while the third is h.arām (forbidden).
However, he went on to condemn the public school system as h.arām because it taught boys
and girls in the same classrooms (Anonymous 2012, 124).
Muhammad Auwal Albani, a leading Ahlus Sunna scholar in Northern Nigeria who knew
Yusuf very well, alleges that the latter “blindly” absorbed his anti-secular education and anti-
government views from Algerian militant camps:
Yusuf had listened to some leaders of the Algerian Islamists insurgency pronounce a fatwa that
prohibited the militants to attend schools and to work for the government. Besides having been
rejected by the vast majority of Algerian scholars, the fatwa was rooted in the specific experience
of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s between the military government and the armed Islamist
cells operating from the mountains. (Brigaglia 2012, 37)6
While this specific allegation should be treated with caution as it comes from an Ahlus Sunna
source and they have every reason to distance themselves from Boko Haram, it is very clear
from Yusuf’s sermons and lectures that he drew inspiration from Algerian Islamists (Zenn n.d.,
105–106). On the subject of modern secular education, Yusuf’s views were clearly shaped by
a book written in Arabic by a prominent Saudi Wahhabi scholar, Bakr bin ʿAbdullah Abu
Zayd (d. 2008), Al-madāris al-ʿālamiyya al-ajnabiyya al-istiʿmāriyya: tārīkhuhā wa
makhāt.iruhā (Global, foreign, colonialist schools: their history and dangers; 2000). In this
book, which Yusuf translated into Hausa, Abu Zayd depicts modern secular education as a
“camouflaged conspiracy” introduced into Islamic societies by Europeans to corrupt pure
Islamic morals with Western liberal norms, to replace proper gender roles with permissive
sexual mores and to undermine Muslim personal and communal identities built on Salafi
46 J. Azumah
notions of piety and righteousness (Anonymous 2012, 123). Echoing these views, Yusuf taunts
his detractors:
Anyone who reads history, except a fool, knows that the Europeans handed over secular education to
the missionaries. The missionaries incorporated into the curriculum of Western education the belief
systems and values of Christianity. But we have said again and again that every Christian teaching
regarding God and the universe is completely and fundamentally different from Islamic revelation.
In fact it is not Islam and has nothing to with Islam. (Zenn n.d., 102)
Yusuf banned participation in sports and being a fan because it could lead a Muslim to develop
affection for non-Muslim sports stars (muwālāt). He also rejected the secular nature of the
Nigerian state and government as based on kufr, unbelief. He invoked the classical Islamic
teaching about t.āghūt (rulers who rebel against God and impose their rebellion upon others)
on the basis of qur’anic texts such as Q 2.257, 4.51 and 4.60 and contended that it was
obligatory for Muslims to embark on civil disobedience against such a government, shun its
services and institutions, remove it from power by force, if need be, and replace it with an
Islamic government. Yusuf repeatedly referred to the Algerian experience in his sermons, and
said in 2009:
In Algeria, they tried to introduce democracy. But when they realized democracy was anti-Islam and
anti-God, they came back to the way of Shari’a. They formed an Islamic Jihadist group that was
initially made up of more than 50,000 people. But when the group refused to follow the way of
Shari’a, the way of Allah, their numbers declined drastically. (Yusuf, quoted in Zenn n.d., 106)
For his part, Shekau declared:
I am against government of the people by the people. I am for government of the people by Allah. I
will not worship what you are worshipping, you are worshipping democracy and because of that you
are tracing to kill us. (2014)
Shekau denounces the present sultan of Sokoto, the spiritual head of Nigerian Muslims, and calls
for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate modeled after the ancient Bornu Empire, which
covered present-day north-eastern Nigeria, parts of Niger, Cameroun, Chad, Sudan and Libya.
But, again Yusuf and his successors are neither the first nor alone in condemning secular
governance in Nigeria as a symbol of kufr. In the words of Abubakar Gumi:
The roots of our instability lie deep in the concept of secularism … by divorcing our government from
God we are at once encouraging selfishness and unfounded ambitions. The current system does not
acknowledge God, which is why we lack direction … I have made several appeals before for a
government founded on religion. Man is not a mindless animal whose only object in life is to eat,
mate, sleep and die. Secularism, therefore, as the policy of operating government outside God’s
control, is alien to civilized human existence. We cannot expect to succeed in our affairs without
abiding by the wishes of God, in spirit and in form. (Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 127)
In a study of recorded lectures and sermons of Yusuf and Ja’far Adam, one observer states that
virtually every Salafi would agree that a non-Islamic government ought to be replaced with an Islamic
one, but the key difference is whether that should be done forcefully, even when the balance of power
is heavily in favor of the non-Islamic government.
He notes that for Adam, “all systems of government other than the prophetic khilafa were not
Islamic, and should not ordinarily command the allegiance of Muslims.” The difference
between Gumi, Yusuf and Adam, therefore, lies not in whether secular education and
democracy are acceptable to Muslims, but in the means by which these are to be replaced with
an Islamic system. Ja’far Adam invoked Islamic juridical principles of necessity (d.arūra) and
common good or collective interest (mas.lah.a) to question Yusuf’s seeming impatience and the
path of suicidal and genocidal violence.
Citing the examples of Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi, Adam
observed that they were not trained in Islamic education but employed their mastery of modern
secular education in the great struggle to defend Islam and Muslims against the aggression of
Western powers under the leadership of the United States … Adam contended that the first
imperative task was to uncover the evil implanted by the British colonialists and remove it by
working inside the government, a task that could not be accomplished without first acquiring
modern education. (Anonymous 2012, 132–134)
For Adam, and virtually all Salafists, the best strategy is to participate in the system in order to
overthrow it from within. The continuities notwithstanding, the atrocities of Boko Haram and
the eccentricity of Shekau have genuinely shocked Muslims across Nigeria, some of whom are
resorting to preposterous conspiracy theories that Boko Haram was created by the CIA for the
purpose of tarnishing the image of Islam! Several leading individual Muslim clerics and
organizations in Nigeria and around the Muslim world have nonetheless unequivocally and
publicly condemned Boko Haram’s ideology and atrocities. These include the Sultan of
Sokoto, Sa’adu Abubakar, who has described Boko Haram as “anti-Islamic” and “an
embarrassment to Islam” (Nairaland 2012). The coalition of Muslim clerics in Nigeria also
condemned the group and called upon it to disarm.
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has described Boko Haram as misguided and intent on
smearing the name of Islam, while Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi of Iran called
Boko Haram “savages who do not deserve to be called human beings.” (Huffington Post
2014). The Indonesian Ulama Council has condemned the group, while the Grand Imam of
Al-Azhar University maintains that “the actions by Boko Harām are pure terrorism, with no
relation to Islam” and criticizes them for using religion to justify their nefarious activities
which “completely contradict Islam and its principles of tolerance” (Voice of America 2014).
In 2013, AQIM came out to condemn targeting and killing students without mentioning Boko
Haram by name. Abu Mundhir al-Shniqiti, one of AQIM’s spiritual leaders, issued the
following fatwa:
Targeting schools to kill young students is impermissible, since they have not joined the ranks of the
apostate military yet … This will give the enemies of the religion and Western media the opportunity
to exploit these scenes to prove to Muslims that the mujahideen are far from Islam. These schools can
be combated by warning people against enrolling in them, punishing the families who send their sons
to them, and by destroying them when they are empty of the students. (Zenn n.d., 111)
It is very important to underline the fact that, according to their teaching, the Boko Haram
leadership regards nearly all the Muslim elite in Nigeria, both traditional and Western-
educated, as infidels and projects themselves as the true inheritors of the legacy of Uthman
dan Fodio. Mamman Nur blames Nigeria’s socio-economic and political woes on the fact that
Muslim leaders departed from dan Fodio’s ideals and opted for secular constitutional rule from
the West. He notes:
It was Shari’a law that was practiced in this country. Dan Fodio and other Islamic scholars carried out
the jihad and ensured that Quranic law was implemented … until our Muslim leaders accepted from
the Europeans the secular constitution. Since that time, Allah took away the comfort and peace
Muslims used to enjoy, and replaced it with suffering and poverty. (Nur, quoted in Zenn n.d., 112)
In other words, while the ideological and operational connections between Boko Haram and other
international jihadist groups are well established, the leadership is keen to stake their legitimacy
and draw inspiration from local jihadists model such as the Sokoto caliphate. The historical legacy
is, therefore, just as relevant and potent to groups such as Boko Haram as the inspiration and
support they draw from other militant groups and ideologues from different parts of the world.
Weak local, state and federal institutions, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the
poor, the general political climate in Nigeria that breeds and feeds on rumors and conspiracy
48 J. Azumah
theories, denials and the tendencies of state and federal officials to play down the scale of the
atrocities, incompetent and unprofessional security forces, and rampant corruption among and
collusion by the police and its attendant culture of impunity are all exploited by Boko Haram
for recruitment and operation. It is a well-established fact that the success and impact of
radical Islamists – Abd al-Wahhab in eighteenth-century Arabia, dan Fodio, Bin Laden,
Abubakar Gumi, Muhammad Yusuf, etc. – are partly due in its formative stages to the
patronage of local rulers, politicians and wealthy elites.7 All of the aforementioned serve as
fuel rather than root causes or even explanations for the rise of radical and militant groups.
These socio-political and economic factors provide fertile soil for the seeds of religious bigotry
and violence to take root and gain ground. Addressing these will definitely help drain the puss,
but will not necessarily deal with the causes of the infection.
Concluding thoughts
This attempt to examine Boko Haram in the historical context of Northern Nigeria has highlighted
the nineteenth-century jihad movement of dan Fodio and its widespread inspiration and
continuous appeal to Nigerian Muslims. It has noted that the absolutism of the jihadists and
their romanticized history was perpetuated by a generation of self-censored Western scholars,
and transmogrified by Muslim activists into religio-political programs. The received narrative
has two main features. First is the notion that the legalistic and jihadist tradition and its
constant orientation toward the Arab world are the true representation of normative Islam, and
therefore the only Muslim solution to Nigeria’s ills. Second is the notion that the less
ideological, less legalistic and nonviolent expression of Islam, which has for centuries sought
and continues to seek coexistence with other traditions, is heretical.
As demonstrated earlier, the narrative that atrocities committed by jihadi groups have nothing
to do with Islam is false, but so is the counter-narrative that the atrocities have everything to do
with Islam. Insofar as groups such as Boko Haram continue to pass off their atrocities as a jihad,
they have no legal leg to stand on in Islamic jurisprudence. In all Islamic legal texts, the
declaration of jihad is the preserve of a legitimate ruler/government. Similarly, the targeting
and killing of other Muslims on account of takfīr were uniformly repudiated in early Islam and
the Kharijites who espoused it were ruthlessly suppressed as terrorists. The targeted killing of
civilians, especially women and children, and attacks on places of worship such as churches
and mosques, are also proscribed in Islamic law. Thus, in Islamic history and political theory,
jihadi groups such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab and Boko Haram are all heretical terrorists.
And the same is true of the jihadists of the nineteenth century who took up arms against the
Muslim Hausa rulers of the time.
That scores of Muslim leaders around the world have spoken out to condemn and ostracize
Boko Haram is important in the short term. In the long term, however, Muslims need to
acknowledge and undertake a critical reassessment of the romanticized jihadist narrative. There
is no gainsaying that to the Muslim rulers they overthrew and the traditional religious
communities that were decimated, the nineteenth-century jihadists were the Bin Ladens and
Abubakar Shekaus of their time. For politicians, wealthy individuals and religious leaders who
either turn a blind eye or even sympathize with and patronize jihadi groups in their formative
stages, Saudi Arabia’s experience with Wahhabism, which was adopted as the official creed
and exported worldwide, which then gave birth to and continues to feed al-Qaeda, the
Kingdom’s number one foe today, should serve as a wake-up call.
Similarly, in the Nigerian context, the teaching and influence of leading figures such as
Abubakar Gumi, Ibrahim Zakzaky, Ibrahim Sulaiman and Shehu Umar Abdullahi, as well as
activism by groups such as Izala and Ahlus Sunna have all contributed to birthing Boko
Haram, which has now turned its poisonous rhetoric and bombs on all, including the Muslim elite.
In the longer term, it is crucial to replace the prevailing culture and discourse by critically
reexamining such loaded terms as takfīr and muwālāt in a pluralistic context like Nigeria.
Similarly, there is the need, for instance, to marshal Islamic arguments in favor of the peaceful
tradition of Islam that African societies first fell in love with and which thrives in many parts
of the continent, including south-western Nigeria. Prof. Sanneh of Yale has done some
excellent work on the peaceful Jakhanke tradition, which predominates in large parts of West
Africa (1989). In the final analysis, however, Sunni Muslims in particular have to see Boko
Haram, first and foremost, as a Sunni Muslim problem and work at finding Islamic answers to
the challenges it poses.
When it comes to Boko Haram’s casus belli, that is, secularization, the question of the
negative effect of secularism on religiosity is a conversation that is long overdue within both
Muslim and Christian African circles. On the specific issue of modern secular education, we
alluded to the fact that the colonialists who introduced it to Nigeria seem to have entertained
similar fears. At the founding ceremony of Katsina College in 1921, Governor Hugh Clifford
cautioned that young Muslims
should be subjected to no influences which might tend to make them careless about the observances of
their religious duties, forgetful of the customs and traditions of their fellow countrymen or lacking in
the respect and courtesy which they owe to their parents, to all who occupy positions of authority and
to all old people. (Thurston 2014, 67)
Implicit in this concern is that, at least in the governor’s mind, there are “influences” in modern
secular education that could undermine religious, social and family values. The leading
sociologist Berger has defined secularization as that “process by which sectors of society and
culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” and adds that
“as there is a secularization of society and culture, so is there a secularization of
consciousness” at the individual level (1990, 107). Other sociologists have concluded from
extensive studies that there is a consistent trend toward a lower level of religiosity with
increases in secular educational levels (Argyle and Beit-Hallahmi 1975). Empirical data
definitely paint a more nuanced picture on the ground. Nevertheless, de-secularization groups
such as Boko Haram may be waking us up to a serious conversation about what it means to be
a citizen and a believer in a pluralistic nation-state governed by secular democracy.
In the meantime, absolutist claims that Salafism is the only alternative to secularism need to be
consistently challenged and their internal fallacies exposed. As we have shown earlier, the
received narrative of a successful and progressive jihadist rule in the nineteenth century at best
lacks objectivity and at worst is a complete whitewash (Azumah 2001, 100ff.). It is also
evident that colonial education policies, key sections of mainstream Western academia and
institutions such as King’s College and SOAS have unwittingly contributed to creating and
perpetuating this romanticized jihadist narrative, which many Islamists seek to turn into a
political program. It is clear that this received narrative, combined with influences from
universities in the Arab world, are major contributory factors to the radicalization of Islam in
Northern Nigeria. It is also instructive that the jihadist-reformist tradition in Nigeria is being
revived by Western-educated Muslims and rarely by the traditional ʿulamāʾ.
In the early 2000s, Izala and Ahlus Sunna leaders, including Muhammad Yusuf and Ja’far
Adam, were all at the forefront in agitating for widening the sphere of application of shari’a
within the judiciary in Northern Nigerian states. The abysmal failure of the shari’a
implementation project led to disillusionment within the ranks of the Izala and Ahlus Sunna
leadership. Ja’far himself resigned in disillusionment from his position on the board entrusted
with the implementation of Islamic morality in public life in Kano State. Disillusionment with
50 J. Azumah
the failure of shari’a implementation no doubt contributed to the rise of extremist groups such as
Boko Haram (Brigaglia 2012, 38). In other words, the Islamist prescription has been tried and it
failed, not only in Nigeria, but also in other parts of the Muslim world (Roy 1994). These facts
need to be part of the reconstruction of a critical narrative. And this, too, is a task best undertaken
by Muslim scholars themselves.
The rise of Boko Haram against the backdrop of 9/11 is also more than coincidental. In
January 2002, barely four months after the 9/11 attacks, the BBC reported “a massive increase
in the number of baby boys called Osama – after Bin Laden” in Northern Nigeria. The report
goes on to point out that in “one hospital in Kano, where there were celebrations after the 11
September attacks, seven out of 10 babies are said to be given the name Osama” (BBC 2002).
The ensuing attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and the “war on terror” all fed into an already
ideologically restive Nigerian context, providing fertile soil for anti-American and anti-Western
sentiments and any propaganda that a Western conspiracy was seeking to undermine Islam. In
this regard, Boko Haram has to be seen and tackled as part of the global jihadist franchise and
not a local Nigerian problem.
Notes
1. “Boko Haram” is not a name the group uses to self-identify. The origin and meaning of the name will be
explained later in the article.
2. Takfīr was a central strategy of the Kharijites in the first/seventh century, but was repudiated by the rest of
the Muslim community. The Kharijites of that time were the equivalent of today’s “terrorists.”
3. The charge of bidʿa in Islam is as grave as the charge of heresy in Christianity, which was followed by
excommunication and frequently by execution, especially during the medieval period.
4. Hiskett worked with Gumi, and on the eve of independence, wrote a reference for Gumi in which he
falsified Gumi’s date of birth to enhance the latter’s chances of appointment as Deputy Grand Khadi
of Nigeria (Gumi and Tsiga 1992, 71–74).
5. The circumstances in which, and exact time when, the name “Boko Haram” came to be applied to the
group are unclear. It is likely, however, that the name was used as a derogatory term for the group by
its opponents during the polemical exchanges between Yusuf and Ja’far (and others) in the mid-2000s.
6. Albani was ambushed and killed along with his wife and son by suspected Boko Haram operatives on
February 1, 2014.
7. Gumi enjoyed the support and protection of the colonial authorities in the 1940s and nearly all Nigerian
heads of state after independence. Some of these, including President Shagari, funded the reprinting of his
books. Even though the office of Grand Khadi was virtually defunct after 1966, Gumi continued to draw
the salary until 1985 when it was stopped by the Bukhari regime.
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Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations

Boko Haram in Retrospect

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Boko Haram in Retrospect

Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA, USA

© 2014 University of Birmingham

Nigeria’s jihadist-reformist backdrop

Abubakar Gumi, Izala and the culture of factionalism

The making of Boko Haram

“Boko Haram”: the name and the mission

not a local Nigerian problem.

issue) 7 (2): 23–29.

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