J A A S. Boko Haram: Religious Radicalism and Insurrection in Northern Nigeria. William Hansen American University Nigeria, Nigeria.

Transcription

1 615594JAS / Journal of Asian and African StudiesHansen research-article2015 Article J A A S Boko Haram: Religious Radicalism and Insurrection in Northern Nigeria Journal of Asian and African Studies 2017, Vol. 52(4) The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: journals.sagepub.com/home/jas William Hansen American University Nigeria, Nigeria Abstract This article is interested in shedding light on why a phenomenon such as Boko Haram came into existence and why it poses a threat to the very existence of the Nigerian state. The Boko Haram phenomenon, I argue, can only be understood as a reaction to more than a half century of corruption, venality, poverty, and abuse by the state predator class. My argument is that Boko Haram is the entirely logical consequence of more than five decades of the post-colonial Nigerian state ruled by a parasitic predator class that is itself a by-product of the colonial state. Keywords Boko Haram, Nigeria, Salafism, radical Islam, northern Nigeria Introduction The insurrection in northeastern Nigeria known globally as Boko Haram has a complicated and multidimensional history. For the most part non-violent until just five years ago, the little violence Boko Haram did engage in was defensive or retaliatory against the security forces. This includes the initial uprising and declaration of jihad in summer 2009, itself a response to repeated instances of harassment by the state authorities including killing, wounding, and indefinite detentions. Only the following year, under new leadership, did the group begin offensive actions. In less than 15 years it has morphed from a small, militant fundamentalist group, whose primary activity was trenchant, polemical attacks directed at the Nigerian state and the extant Muslim political power structure, to a large-scale insurgency that often seems to revel in its indiscriminate, gratuitous violence. The conventional way to understand Boko Haram is to label them barbarians attacking the very foundations of civilization. The proper response: CRUSH them with superior force. This is the position taken by the Nigerian state and the parasitic predator class that runs it as well as by the international mainstream. This article, however, takes a very different point of view. Here Boko Haram becomes far more than simply a manifestation of Corresponding author: William Hansen, American University Nigeria, Lamido Zubairu Way, Yola, PMB 2250, Nigeria. billhansen@aun.edu.ng

2 552 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) human evil deserving only extermination. It becomes, instead, a socio-political problem that can only be resolved by addressing its causes. This exact point was made in 2014 by Larry Diamond, noted specialist in African democratic practice. Diamond had been in Nigeria during an earlier manifestation of militant Islam rising against widespread venality and social injustice: the so-called Maitatsine from 1980 to These were centered in Kano but occurred across an area bounded roughly by the cities of Kano, Maiduguri, Yola, and Kaduna: the same northeastern quadrant in which the Boko Haram insurgency has flared. Diamond wrote: [When in Nigeria in 1983, I felt] the North was going to erupt again into some kind of violent insurrection, mobilizing the symbols and rhetoric of radical Islam, if there was not progress toward development, social justice (Diamond, 2014). If the current, multinational offensive against Boko Haram were to be successful in eliminating its leadership and military capacity, in lieu of substantive political, economic, and social reforms especially poverty alleviation, history will inevitably repeat itself with yet another religiously based uprising. This article is interested in shedding light on why a phenomenon such as Boko Haram came into existence and why it poses a threat to the very existence of the Nigerian state. Such an approach is neither an attempt to justify nor to mitigate the undoubted misery visited upon the people of the northeast. Crimes against humanity have unquestionably been committed and should be investigated, prosecuted and punished. One is obligated to point out, however, that similar crimes have been committed by agents of the Nigerian state and should be punished as well (Amnesty International, April, June 2015). The Boko Haram phenomenon, I argue, can only be understood as a reaction to more than a half century of corruption, venality, poverty, and abuse by the state predator class. An evolving phenomenon, to deny the Boko Haram s widespread popularity, especially prior to the state murder in 2009 of its charismatic leader, Muhammad Yusuf, would be a grave error. 1 My argument is that Boko Haram is the entirely logical consequence of more than five decades of the post-colonial Nigerian state ruled by a parasitic predator class that is itself a by-product of the colonial state and an always cruel and uneven transition from a pre-capitalist peasant society to what Paul Lubeck has called semi-industrial capitalism ; that is, the peculiar form that has developed with the north s incorporation into the global capitalist market over the last century. Lubeck was here also discussing Nigeria s militant Maitatsine of the early 1980s but one might note his observation: Just as in Europe during a historically analogous period, displaced vagabonds became attracted to militant religious movements in order to regain the material and social security of a lost moral economy (Lubeck, 1985: 385). It is hard to deny the bankruptcy of Nigeria s idiosyncratic version of secular democracy, the squandering of the promised benefits of independence, liberal democracy, capitalism, and development and their failure to reach any more than a miniscule portion of the Nigerian people. Maiduguri, the epicenter of Boko Haram, seems at first glance an urban megalopolis with a population approaching two million. Nevertheless, Boko Haram is far more a product of the continuing destruction of Lubeck s peasant-based lost moral economy. Both Muhammad Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau have their roots in the rural Yobe state, immediately to the west. Northern Nigeria still lives according to the rhythms of an agrarian, pre-bourgeois society. Most still have deep connections to their ancestral village. Goats, chickens, sheep, and cattle wander the streets and alleys of most northern cities, swollen by rural immigrants escaping the collapse of the rural economy; the very conditions that breed what Eric Hobsbawm labeled social banditry (Hobsbawm, 2000). These cities are intimately connected to their rural hinterlands. Life s important events marriages and, especially, funerals take place in the ancestral home village, where the soil itself is sacred, despite the fact that one may never have actually lived there. The underlying theme of his argument, which concentrated, primarily, on the late developing areas of Mediterranean Europe in the

3 Hansen th century, is the transition from agrarian to modern, industrial society has always caused disruption and resistance, including violence. Violence is not foreign to the social bandit despite his attempt to portray himself as an avenger a man who only attacks those who have offended him or his people of whom he was so recently a part: They are heroes not in spite of the fear and horror their actions inspire, but in some ways because of them. They are not so much men who right wrongs, but avengers Their appeal is not that of the agents of justice revenge and retaliation are inseparable from justice in societies where blood calls for blood but of men who prove that even the poor and the weak can be terrible. (Hobsbawm, 2000: 63, 64) A more apt description of Boko Haram does not exist. Muhammad Yusuf understood the venality and bankruptcy of the ruling class and articulated the very real concerns of large sections of the people. To dismiss them, merely, as demonic, religious fanatics is to miss the point entirely. What s Boko? What s Haram? Boko Haram first burst into the broader Nigerian public consciousness in mid-summer 2009 when there was a series of pitched battles between them and the security forces (collectively the Joint Task Force [JTF]) in several northeastern cities. Prior to that they were known primarily to the Muslim community in Maiduguri and surrounding areas for their unrelenting criticisms of the current government and of Western influences they insisted were contaminating and subverting Islam and obstructing justice. There has long been a vocal element in Nigerian Islam resisting most things Western, especially education. The Fulani aristocracy, from the onset of the colonial period, strongly opposed the spread of modern education as they felt it would threaten their continued hegemony as, indeed, it has (Kukah and Falola, 1996: 41). In a 2006 visit to Maiduguri to investigate the so-called Danish cartoon riots, interviews with local religious figures heard no mention of something called Boko Haram. 2 There was mention of a Nigerian Taliban who had earlier made a hijra to a remote area in neighboring Yobe state in order to escape the decadence of modern society (Walker, 2012: 3). The hijra to escape injustice and un-islamic practices is a venerable tradition in Nigerian Islam. Sheikh Usman dan Fodio himself fled from Degel to Dugu in the far northwest in February 1804 from where he launched his jihad (Kukah and Falola, 1996: 34) Throughout the 19th century there were frequent individual and group hijras, mostly in an easterly direction toward the modern Sudan and often in search of the expected Mahdi (Guided One) (Hunwick et al., 1997; Lovejoy and Hogendorn, 1990). It is widely accepted that the group now called Boko Haram was earlier referred to in street vernacular as the Nigerian Taliban. There is no evidence that this was ever their name for themselves, although they may have taken pride in such an appellation. The group only became widely referred to as Boko Haram in the aftermath of those initial clashes in 2009 (Muhammad, 2014: 13, 14; Murtatda, 2013; Salkida, 2014). Boko Haram s organizational structure is located somewhere between unknown and opaque. Like Al-Qaida, which may or may not have inspired it, Boko Haram seems to have created something of a franchise operation in which its various units operate, for the most part, independently of each other. It is likely there is no single Boko Haram, but more a collection of associated groups whose components are amorphous and shifting in terms of agendas, tactics, and leadership as well as in relationship to each other. There are references to a blurred leadership since the murder of Muhammad Yusuf. This includes simple criminal outfits who claim to be Boko Haram. Outlawry and social banditry are seen in hard times in transitional societies all over the world. In modern Nigeria it is a way of life. The security structures of the Nigerian state seem to have been singularly

4 554 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) unable to penetrate any of these groups. As former President Jonathan ruefully acknowledged, Boko Haram has done a better job of penetrating the military, the police, the security forces and even the upper levels of the government itself (Mark, 2014; Premium Times, January 8, 2014), A US State Department online mailing referred to Boko Haram as a loosely organized group of factions. 3 That same month a ranking American military officer acknowledged Boko Haram s disparate nature by saying that whenever US intelligence personnel tried to make contact with the group they could find no one who spoke for it as a whole, only for their particular faction. 4 Amnesty International, in a very brief discussion, says the organizational structure is highly de-centralized with most units operating independently (Amnesty International, April 2015: 15). A good example of this diffuse organizational form is illustrated by two events early in In both cases the initial pattern was similar: nearby units of the Nigerian military suddenly disappeared in the hours before the attacks as if they had been warned of the impending events. In Buni Yadi in Yobe state, a boarding school was attacked in late February by a Boko Haram unit. Thirty sleeping young boys were executed and the girls told to go home and get married (BBC February 6, 2014). Seven weeks later in Chibok in southern Borno state, nearly 300 young women were kidnapped. Boko Haram announced the girls would be sold into slavery, used as cooks or married off to militants (New York Times, May 5, 2014; Guardian, UK, May 6, 2014). There were multiple similar kidnappings, especially of women but in much smaller numbers, throughout 2014 to It seems unlikely the same group would attack one school, kill all the boys and send the girls home to get married and a few weeks later kidnap several hundred girls to sell them as wives, slaves, and cooks. In these cases, as with virtually all violence that occurs anywhere in the north, the blame is immediately placed on an undifferentiated enemy usually termed suspected Boko Haram militants. 5 One suspects that various parties, having witnessed the international outcry regarding the Chibok girls, might well have decided to go into the business of group kidnapping. Because any of these gangs would be completely local, made up entirely of desperately poor young men all of whom would certainly know each other, penetrating such organizations would be next to impossible. Rather than understanding Boko Haram as an organization as such, I would rather see it as a disparate, perhaps rogue element in a broader movement that has long had an ideological foothold in Nigerian Islam; a movement associated with purification, salafism, jihad, and a general struggle against what is perceived as widespread social injustice perpetrated by the political/religious ruling class. In this sense that which is called Boko Haram is a coalition of shifting, changing, amorphous groups of individuals who move in and out of relationships with one another engaging, at various times, in religious proselytizing, violent jihad, mercenary contracting, common criminal activities, and political thuggery in the employ of mainstream politicians. These actions are commonly justified and understood as being morally legitimated by their own idiosyncratic, indeed fanatic, interpretation of Islam. What s in a name? The phrase boko haram is normally rendered as Western education is forbidden. The word boko in common, everyday Hausaphone parlance certainly carries the understanding of school or education. However, the word also includes the sense of modern and secular, so it is far more than merely a geographical designation. When used by Hausa speakers, whether Muslim or Christian, this sense is included in the meaning of Western. Effectively, all education that is not religious is modern-secular-western; that is to say, boko. 6 Neither is Christian education, also imported from the West during the colonial period, referred to as boko. The Hausa word for the Latin alphabet is boko, meaning written Hausa can appear in both boko (Latin) or ajami (Arabic script) (Awde, 1996: 452). Clearly, not all Muslims believe that modern,

5 Hansen 555 secular education is haram. Some think the entire notion ridiculous while others think only those components that are seen to contradict the Qur an should be so considered. Nevertheless, there has long been a significant element of Nigerian Islamic culture that has rejected most things they see as connected to the West and to modernity from Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, and Darwinian biology to democracy itself. Were such people (Muhammad Yusuf seems to have insisted the earth was flat and that water did not evaporate) more familiar with Islamic history they would, perhaps, have a different view of modern science. The historical fact that, long before Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin, the cutting edge of modern science and education was in the Islamic world is ignored (Regep, 2007). The word haram, Arabic in origin, refers to that which is forbidden. 7 Haram is so commonly used by Hausophones that few realize it is a loan word. For example, the Hausa word for the monotheistic Abrahamic God is Allah and appears as such in the first sentence of a Hausa Christian s Bible: A cikin farko Allah ya halici sama da kasa/in the beginning God created heaven and earth. The word boko is sometimes explained both in the popular press and in some academic writing as being a corruption of the English word book. This is emphatically not the case and the two words have nothing more in common than that they share, in the Latin script, the same four letters (Newman, 2014). The Hausa words, respectively, for book and education are littafi and karatu. Boko is a Hausa word that, originally, had nothing to do with a geographical designation (western) or even education. The word itself can be understood as conveying the meaning of something that is false, duplicitous, a lie, an illusion, inauthentic (Newman, 2014). For example, in traditional Hausa weddings there was an amaryar boko: a false bride. On the night of the wedding the bride would move from her father s house to that of her new husband. She would be accompanied on this journey by females from her own extended family with her head and face covered. To confuse onlookers, protect privacy and, sometimes, shock the bridegroom, a much older veiled woman would take the place of the bride. The real bride, also accompanied by a female retinue, would go by another surreptitious route. Prior to the British Imperium, the word boko had nothing to do with education, a meaning it took on only after the British arrived and modern, secular schools established. Shortly after the British conquered the Sokoto Caliphate (1903), they began establishing schools and publishing documents, books, letters, laws, and regulations in Hausa but using the Latin script. Prior to this time Hausa had been written using ajami. Certain members of the Islamic clerical class, not being able to read the new script and fearful that the conquerors were trying to convert young Muslims to Christianity and inculcate them with false or incorrect information, began referring to this type of education as boko; that is to say false. An additional motivation, of course, was that they feared diminished power and influence as their previous monopoly of literate knowledge was being challenged. Denouncing this new dispensation as boko (false, a lie, fraudulent) was a logical response (Aliyu Musa, 2014; Mohammed, 2010: 48, 50). A falsely educated person was ilimin boko. During the 20th century, in common discourse, the word boko morphed from being merely a mark of contumely to a synonym for modern, secular education as in Zan tafi makarantar boko (I am going to school) (Aliyu Musa, 2014). Boko Haram calls itself Jama atu Ahlis-Sunnah Lidda awati Wal Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet s Teachings and Jihad) or, more recently, Islamic State-West African Province. There are different explanations as to how the group came to be called Boko Haram. Elements of both are likely true. Here it was a street name given by local people to the group of mainly younger men the Yusufiyya (followers of Yusuf) who would congregate in a particular gritty Maiduguri neighborhood near the railroad tracks and attend prayers at their own Ibn Tamayyah Mosque. Yusuf would constantly preach against the dangers to Islam presented by modern education and cultural values. People began to call them boko haram. It should be remembered that at various times

6 556 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) this same shifting group of acolytes had also been called the Nigerian Taliban. The name Boko Haram stuck and the media picked it up in the aftermath of the 2009 uprising. A variation on this is that the media first attached the label to the followers of Muhammad Yusuf. According to several reliable witnesses, Yusuf, by all accounts an extremely charismatic leader, would point to the corrupt Muslim political leadership, referring to their Western education, their lavish homes, behemoth automobiles, and practice of stealing millions of naira with impunity, and say: To idan dai wannan ne boko, to boko haramun ne? (If this is education then education is a sin [forbidden]?) (Aliyu Musa, 2014). In this variation the media quoted Yusuf as preaching that this sort of boko (education) that allowed the rich and powerful to abuse, exploit, and steal from the poor, a sort of education that had not benefitted the common man, was forbidden. From this the people picked up the phrase and began applying it to Yusuf and his followers as a group. Jihad and Radical Islam in Northern Nigeria John Paden writes regarding Nigerian religiosity by international standards [is] extremely high in both the Muslim and Christian communities. Secularism is a minority perspective in a country that explicitly regards itself as multi-religious (Paden, 2005: 4). Religious militancy in political garb is not confined to Islamic Nigeria. The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) is far more a political than a religious organization especially under its current head, the rabidly Islamophobic Protestant Ayo Oritsejafor. 8 In Nigeria, politics and religion are inseparable phenomena. Rather than being sui generis, of new and recent provenance, Boko Haram is merely the latest manifestation of a recurring phenomenon that has at least two centuries of history in the Islamic tradition of the region. Islam first entered the territory of today s Nigeria in the 10th century ce in the area surrounding Lake Chad manifested as the Kanem-Bornu Empire and including what is today Nigeria s Borno state. By the 14th century, Islam began to replace traditional religions among the urban, ruling elites of the Hausa city-states further west (Levtzion, 1994; Trimingham, 1962). Islam in these areas was often combined with earlier traditional cultural and religious practices. In the 16th century, Fulani herders from the Senegambia began moving into the region bringing with them a different and less syncretic form of Islam. By the middle of the 18th century, for a variety of political, religious, and socio-economic reasons, protests against the rulers of the various city-states began to emerge especially among, but not confined to, the Fulani community, both sedentary and nomadic. From this milieu emerged the figure of Usman dan Fodio, a prominent religious scholar and preacher. Failing to achieve reform through suasion, Shaykh Usman declared a jihad in Mass support, especially among the poor, the slaves, and the dispossessed, many of whom were not Fulani, flocked to his banner. One after another, the Hausa city-states capitulated and the vast Sokoto Caliphate, stretching from the eastern part of today s Burkina Faso and southwestern Niger, across northern Nigeria to the borders of the Kanuri-speaking Kanem-Bornu, as far south as the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers, to northern and northwestern Cameroon, was established (Last, 1967). Kukah and Falola have referred to Usman s jihad as a far-reaching social revolution that transformed Islam from an elite ruling class religion into a mass, state belief system based on shari a law. An entirely new society was promised, a society governed in accordance with Allah s law, in which justice would prevail (Kukah and Falola, 1996: 29, 30, 32). Notwithstanding the fact that Usman s revolution failed miserably in creating such an environment, it did establish a precedent and the promise of a divinely imposed system of justice became part of common culture. It became legitimate to refer to and even denounce corrupt and oppressive Muslim rulers who allow injustice to prevail, as non-muslims, pagans, kafirai. In such a way violent jihad as a means of overthrowing prevailing authority was legitimated. According to Paden

7 Hansen 557 this practice of declaring others to be non-muslims (takfir) began in the 1970s to be extended by some to anyone outside of their particular group (Paden, 2005: 57). Mahdism has long held a significant place in Sudanic Africa, especially Fulani-ruled Nigeria. The mahdist tradition in Islamic eschatology varies but, in short, it is the belief that Allah will send a Mahdi (Guided One) some years before Judgment Day: a sort of Islamic Second Coming. He will be the successor to the Prophet and will vanquish evil, right wrongs, and create a regime of justice. The most famous case of a Mahdi is that of Muhammad Ahmed in the then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan whose forces defeated the British at the Battle of Khartoum in 1884 and established a state that lasted until 1898 (Holt, 1970). Mahdism, as an idea, was recurrent in northern Nigeria throughout the 19th century in the days of the Sokoto Caliphate and into the British era, as there has long been a close connection between Islamic northern Nigeria and today s Sudan. Paden notes than an estimated one-quarter of the population of contemporary Sudan/South Sudan has its origins in Nigeria (Paden, 2005: 255 n5) Mostly these mahdist radicals claimed to be preparing the way for the coming Mahdi. Among the most prominent of the followers of Muhammad Ahmed was one Faki Muhamamad al-dadari originally from Sokoto who moved to Darfur on a hijra in the 1860s in search of the Mahdi. Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, the Sudanese Mahdi s successor, appears to have been from a Sudanese family of Nigerian Fulani origin. Hayatu bin Said, originally from Sokoto, was Muhammad Ahmed s representative in the Central Sudan (Hunwick et al., 1997: 88 96). Hayatu, the great grandson of Usman dan Fodio, was the father of yet another militant mahdist, Said ibn Hayatu. Said had as a protégé in the late 1940s Abubakar Gummi. Gummi eventually married the elder man s daughter and later became the Grand Qadi of Northern Nigeria (Kaduna) as well as the intellectual and spiritual mentor of the fundamentalist, salafist Izala movement until his death in Although he later broke with Izala, Boko Haram s Muhammad Yusuf was, in his early phase, associated with the group (Harnischfeger, 2014: 46; Loimeier, 2012: 148; Muhammad, 2014: 6; Murtada, 2013: 6). There were outbreaks of mahdist-inspired uprisings throughout the 19th century, during the colonial period into the 1930s and beyond (Kukah and Falola, 1996: 198, 214 n11; Lovejoy and Hogedorn, 1990: 219). All had an emphatic class basis radical clerics, disgruntled peasants and fugitive slaves and were directed not only against the British colonial regime but also toward the Caliphal authorities. As Paul Lovejoy has pointed out, slavery was the economic backbone of the Caliphate during the period between Shaykh Usman and the British occupation. Slaves, by the very nature of slavery, tend to become disgruntled (Lovejoy, 2005). 9 Revolutionary mahdism was part of the Islamic tradition. It challenged established authority and demanded social transformation. Mahdism, as an oppositional movement, thus, cemented the alliance between the colonial government and the Fulani aristocracy who looked to the former to act as a buffer between themselves and the discontented underclass (Lovejoy and Hogendorn, 1990: ). This radical tradition associated with the militant variant of political Islam hardly subsided with independence and the expulsion of the colonial masters. In the 1970s, in addition to the mainstream Muslim political-religious groups such as Jamu-atu Nasril Islam (JNI) and the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), there emerged numerous radical and militant Islamist-type organizations; for example, the Muslim Students Society, the Muslim Brothers, the Shia a of Ibrahim Zakzaky, and the anti-sufi Jama atul Izalatul Bida ah Wa ikhamatul Sunnah (Society against Innovation and in Favor of Tradition) commonly known as Izala and associated with Abubakar Gummi. All these groups reflected a more or less militant and what Paden calls a back to the basics approach (Paden, 2005: ch. 3). In December 1980 riots broke out in Kano, primarily among Muslims and associated with an itinerant preacher of Cameroonian origin named Muhammed Marwa, better known as the Maitatsine (he who curses) (Hickey, 1983; Hiskett, 1987; Isichei, 1987; Kastfelt, 1989; Lubeck,

8 558 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) 1985). The response of the Nigerian state was ferocious. Nearly 5,000 people were killed in the state s attack including the Maitatsine himself. Sporadic uprisings continued into the mid-1980s in places like Maiduguri, Bauchi, Yola, and Gombe. According to Elizabeth Isichei, every one of these incidents was initially provoked by the authorities who then proceeded to use the Maitatsine willingness to defend themselves to engage in a massacre (Hickey, 1983: 253; Isichei, 1987: 197). This often appeared to be the case as well with regard to Boko Haram up to and including the events of summer 2009 in which Muhammad Yusuf was murdered. This, of course, cannot be said of many of the incidents that have occurred since Boko Haram launched its counter-offensive in September 2010 after having been crushed the year before. Suffice it to say, the insurgencies associated with Maitatsine, like Boko Haram today and stretching from Usman dan Fodio s initial jihad in the 19th century, have had as their social base, the disinherited, the abused, the impoverished; in short, the wretched of the earth. Unable and unwilling to do anything about the country s mass structural deprivation, the policy of the Nigerian state appears to be to destroy those who begin to develop a mass following that has the potential to threaten the status, wealth, and prerogatives of the ruling predator class. Often that state-sponsored destruction is preceded by repeated attempts to provoke and goad the opposition into armed resistance which is then used as an excuse to unleash the full weight of the armed forces. Shari a and Politics in Northern Nigeria The political attraction of an Islam-based system of justice, morality, ethics, and governance shari a to Nigeria s Muslims, especially the middle and lower classes, is palpable. So much so that it has periodically erupted into serious political crises, most notably during the Constituent Assembly debates preparing for the Second Republic in the late 1970s as Nigeria was returning to democracy after more than a decade of military rule. Riots broke out in Kaduna in 2000 and again in 2002 and afterwards when shari a was adopted by more than a dozen northern state legislatures to exist in tandem with Nigeria s quasi-secular legal system (Kendhammer, 2013; Kukah, 1993: ; Paden, 2005: ). That these laws, passed nearly 15 years ago, were additional instances of the cynical manipulation of religious symbols by unscrupulous Nigerian politicians should not distract one from understanding the widespread attraction for the general population of a real implementation of shari a. The convenient shorthand version during public discussions of Boko Haram s demands is to articulate one or another variant of They want to establish a shari a state in northern Nigeria. By all accounts this is accurate. Usually absent is any serious understanding of what is meant by that term: shari a state. It goes without saying that how a shari a state should be defined and implemented is determined by the nature of political power and theological interpretation in any particular time or place. For most non-muslims and, one suspects, some Muslims as well, shari a is understood as merely a draconian criminal code prescribing merciless punishments such as public floggings, chopping off hands as punishment for theft, and stoning women for adultery, thus feeding into rampant Islamophobia. 10 It is these images that the Western press tends to emphasize when dealing with Muslim societies in general and, especially, with revolutionary jihadi groups like Boko Haram. This is a complete misunderstanding of the totality of shari a. Not simply a criminal code, shari a refers to the entire moral-ethical structure of Islam. Shari a refers to The Path or The Way to salvation. Shari a encapsulates a Muslim s understanding of Allah s will: the demand placed by the Divine on every individual human being. This is no different from similar concepts within Christianity. It was not all that long ago that the institutional Christian church insisted upon the use of state power to enforce its moral code as well. Promising to establish shari a as the guiding

9 Hansen 559 principle of governance is not a promise to stone an adulteress, but to establish a system of truth, justice, and respect for human rights and dignity as, of course, those concepts are understood by those doing the implementing (Crane, 2014). Determining the exactitude of the Divine s will has always been a contentious issue in any religious tradition. Especially in the monotheistic Abrahamic tradition this has long been the case. Heresies, apostasies, and blasphemies would seem essential to this tradition. The point here is not to defend the multiple ways in which those who happen to have power at any particular moment including Boko Haram understand, implement, and, indeed, abuse shari a, but to explain the attraction of shari a and its promise of justice to an oppressed, impoverished, and abused population. Shari a as a means of implementing a system of justice and equity would seem admirable; as a system of rigid, inflexible rules that infringe on human rights, not so. As has been shown above, the precedent for a shari a state has a long history in the north. Usman dan Fodio s Caliphate mobilized the poor and dispossessed for the specific purpose of establishing a regime of justice embodied in a shari a-ruled social formation. The fact that this regime of justice ultimately proved ephemeral does not lessen its attraction for those who desire such governance (Kukah and Falola, 1996: 37). Brandon Kendhammer has shown that Nigerian Muslims who support the implementation of shari a law do so because they see it as a way to establish good government, create jobs, and make for better economic conditions for the disadvantaged. He finds support for shari a strongest among the middle and lower classes who support what he calls economic communitarian politics: emphasizing the shared common good, a peculiarly Muslim Nigerian version of social democracy (Kendhammer, 2013: 5, 6, 30). The transition from the verities and certainties of an agrarian society based on customary laws and rules to a merciless market economy has universally produced those who want to resist such a transition: people who long for the lost moral economy of the traditional world from which they come, folk who take up arms in an attempt to turn back the inexorable tide of history. The fact that the image of a state governed according to Allah s law may never have actually existed does not detract from its allure. Boko Haram and other militant groups have seized the opportunity and partially occupied the space created by the failure of the predator state class actually to implement a just, democratic regime. They have instead used shari a to manipulate politics for their own personal benefit. Boko Haram here is being consistent. They want to overthrow the state not, as with an earlier generation, ask the same state class that created this utterly indefensible condition to be those entrusted with implementing the new, moral, and just dispensation (Kendhammer, 2013: 27 30). Religious Zealotry to Armed Insurrection: The Metamorphosis of Boko Haram The history of Boko Haram as a specific organization is contested territory (Roelofs, 2014: 114). Some claim a starting date in the mid-1990s. However, the date most commonly cited is 2002/2003 when it was, allegedly, founded by its late leader, Muhammad Yusuf. A variation on these has to do with the shadowy figure of Muhammad Alli (also Ali/Lawan/Lawal and/or Abubakar Lawal/ Lawan) who is said in some places to have founded the group in the mid-1990s and elsewhere in the early 2000s (Adesoji, 2010: 99; Chouin et al., 2014: 237; Mohammed, 2010: 40; Muhammad, 2014: 10; Onuoha, 2014: 159; Salkida, 2014; Serrano and Pieri, 2014: 198). It seems the elusive Alli was once a mentor to Yusuf, a radicalizing influence who seems to have led the aforementioned hijra to Kanama in 2003 that was eventually broken up by the authorities. 11 Whether this represented a split between the two men is uncertain. However, as suggested above, the notion of embarking on a hijra to escape oppression, injustice, and un-islamic practices is a venerable

10 560 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) tradition in Nigerian Islam. The Kanama effort was a rejection of the decadence of Nigerian society and an attempt to create a self-contained religious community run according to their understanding of shari a and uninfluenced by the external world. Such is, of course, not unknown in other religious traditions. The rejection of external society as decadent and corrupt is the original basis of Western monasticism, as it is with similar movements from Owenite utopias in the 1820s to hippie communes in the 1960s. Such outspoken rejection is not easily tolerated by the Nigerian state. Faced with such opposition, the pattern has long been to subject the dissidents to incessant harassment detentions, beatings, arrests, etc. until the victims strike back, at which point the miscreants are subjected to the brute force of state power and destroyed (Murtada, 2013: 4 6). In the aftermath of Kanama, Alli fades from sight while the remnants of the experiment made their way back to Maiduguri and reintegrated into the growing circle of Yusufiyya. Yusuf himself moved around northern Nigeria and then spent a more than a year in a self-imposed exile in Saudi in order to avoid detention by the authorities before coming back to Nigeria in a negotiated return (Mohammed, 2010: ch. 6; Murtada, 2013: 6,7; Reinert and Garcon, 2014: 238). For Yusuf, the national government and the Borno state government of Governor Ali Modu Sheriff were irredeemably corrupt. Arguably, one could also go so far as to say that Boko Haram, as we know it, was not formed until 2010 under Abubakar Shekau in the aftermath of Yusuf s summary execution; that is, a successor group to the Yusufiyya. As John Campbell has pointed out, Boko Haram was, for the most part, a non-violent, albeit militant, religious grouping prior to Yusuf s death (Campbell, 2015). This subsequent period has witnessed the actual violent insurgency, a period in which Boko Haram has often seized the initiative instead of merely responding to security force aggression. After all, it is only in the period since mid-2009 and Shekau s ascendency that the group came to be widely known to as Boko Haram (Murtada, 2013: 4; Salkida, 2015). With the radical change in its organizational form, its tactics, targets and policies, one could argue that an altogether new organization has emerged, an organization far more violent and ruthless than its predecessor, albeit one deeply influenced by the history of its leading members and the highly volatile and politicized atmosphere in which it was incubated. Kyari Muhammad has proposed a three-phase historical outline for Boko Haram. The first was that which led up to and included the Kanama hijra and the repeated clashes with the Nigerian security forces in 2003/2004. This was followed by what he calls the da wah phase: a period of proselytizing, preaching, retrenchment and recruitment in which Yusuf and his followers refined their ideology, theology and practice. This period ended with the events of 2009 and Yusuf s death. Following these came the latest phase a tenacious, extremely violent and often ruthlessly brutal full-scale insurgency (Muhammad, 2014: 9, 10). Rather than looking for a specific date to mark the founding of that which is referred to as Boko Haram, it seems more productive to understand it as part of a generalized movement whose origins go back to the beginnings of the Caliphate early in the 19th century. Arguably, its theological roots go as far back as the 13th century and Ahmed ibn Taimiyyah after whom Muhammad Yusuf named his mosque in Maiduguri. Ibn Taimiyyah, whose thinking also influenced the founders of Saudi Wahabism, articulated a particularly potent brand of takfir, the declaration that others are apostates, no longer Muslims and, therefore, legitimate targets, avoiding the prohibition against attacking other Muslims. In various forms there has been a radical element within Nigerian Islam which, when it deemed such justified, resorted to violent forms of resistance, including jihad. This tradition erupted in opposition to the Hausa rulers of the 18th century; against the Caliphal successors to Sheikh Usman dan Fodio in the 19th century in the form of mahdism; as resistance to the imposition of colonial rule; in the post-independence period, in opposition to the venality of the postcolonial predatory state class. Paden has referred to a back to the basics movement begun in the

11 Hansen s, explicitly a rejection of current Islamic practice, that was manifested in various ways: Abubakar Gummi s Izala, Ibrahim Zakzaki s Islamic Movement ( Shi ites ), the Muslim Students Society, the Muslim Brothers, etc. All reflected a turning away from the secular state to find solace and a solution in radical forms of a purified religious practice. These were the consequences of the broad disillusion and disaffection with the broken promises of independence and the predations of the post-colonial ruling class. The 1980s witnessed a significant increase in violence and death most emphatically involving the uprisings, collectively referred to as the Maitatsine Riots. They erupted at the end of 1980 in Kano and periodically reappeared across the northeast in Yola, Gombe, Bauchi, and Maiduguri until as late as 1986 when there seems to have been a cessation as the last remnants of the Maitatsine were stamped out by the security forces (Hickey, 1984; Hiskett, 1987; Isichei, 1987; Kastfelt, 1989; Lubeck, 1985). In addition to the Maitatsine events there were multiple examples of violent episodes connected sometimes directly to religion and inter-religious conflicts, sometimes to issues having to do with indigeneity and disputes concerning the original ownership of the land and consequent political rights, sometimes having to do with intra-religious disputes in which Muslims were in direct conflict with other Muslims (Kukah and Falola, 1996; Paden, 2005). Born in a small village in rural Yobe state in 1970, Muhammad Yusuf would have come of age during these very violent years. In his youth Yusuf had been an almajiri, as had his successor, Abubakar Shekau. Almajirai (pl) are boys as young as five and as old as 17 primarily from impoverished rural families whose parents apprentice them to a mallam (religious teacher) normally in a larger town where they undergo a traditional Islamic education which consists, generally, of committing the Qur an to rote memory. They support themselves, and often their teachers as well, through begging. The condition in which these youngsters live is, for the most part, appalling and they are often brutally exploited by their mallams (Aghedo and Eke, 2013; Awefeso et al., 2005; Hoechner, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2010). Despite undocumented assertions to the contrary, there is no evidence that Yusuf would ever have been anything more than a part of the crowd with regard to the Maitatisine which was extinguished by 1986 when he was still only 16. On the other hand, he could not have been but aware of and influenced by them and by the Nigerian state s heavy-handed and bloody repression of the dissidents whose greatest sins would seem to have been their stridently anti-government rhetoric combined with a willingness to defend themselves when being attacked by state authorities (Hickey, 1984: 253; Isichei, 1987: 197; Lubeck, 1985). 12 In his twenties, Yusuf appears to have moved widely in the volatile politico-religious climate that was northeastern Nigeria. In so doing he became involved with the salafist Izala group and, especially, came under the influence of prominent Kano-based Izala cleric Sheikh Ja afar Adamu (Harnischfeger, 2014: 46). Along the way, his charisma and intelligence allowed Yusuf to develop a growing reputation as a radical, militant preacher and attract a group of followers who became personally some say fanatically loyal to him. Informally they were known as the Yusufiyya. During this period Yusuf would have come into contact with the aforementioned Muhammad Alli. The early years of the new millennium was also the time in which state-legislated shari a was being implemented across the entire region by various state governments. In the 2003 Borno state gubernatorial race, the incumbent, Mala Kashalla, was accused by a former ally, Ali Modu Sheriff, of being insufficiently militant in implementing shari a (Harnischfeger, 2014: 40). Were he elected, Modu Sheriff claimed, he would make sure all the citizens of Bornu benefitted from living under a just and properly Islamic shari a regime. This was one more example in a long series of examples in which Nigerian politicians, Muslim and Christian, shamelessly manipulate religious sentiments for their own personal aggrandizement. As suggested earlier, shari a represents a terrestrial kingdom of God, a moral-ethical way of life in which justice, equity, and well-being prevail; a theocracy, if you will,

12 562 Journal of Asian and African Studies 52(4) but a theocracy run by men according to Allah s will. This has potent political appeal in an area as suffused with religious passion, injustice, and inequality as is northern Nigeria. Candidate Sheriff recruited the militant, young preacher and his growing band of fervent, passionately loyal acolytes. Abdulrahman Dambazau, former Army Chief of Staff, has written: it is on record that the Bornu state government used the support base of the group to win elections based on an agreement to establish shari a law, an agreement the winner, Sheriff, reneged on, driving Yusuf and his militant followers into the opposition (Dambazau, 2013: 67). Sheriff also recruited a thuggish Maiduguri street gang known as ECOMOG into his campaign. 13 Politics in Nigeria is a blood sport. Resources and wealth flow from that essential source: political power. Capture of state power, or relatively easy and constant access to it, is of ultimate economic importance. In exchange for promises of a more consistent and thorough implementation of shari a, Yusuf threw his support and that of his large, youthful and dedicated following behind the opposition candidate, Ali Modu Sheriff (Harnischfeger, 2014: 39, 40; Muhammad, 2014; Onuoha, 2014; Reinert and Garcon, 2014). Sheriff won the election in large part because of his promises to implement a more thorough form of shari a. He also created a Borno state Department of Religious Affairs and appointed a wealthy Yusufiyya, Alhajji Buji Foi, as its first head. However, typical of Nigerian politicians who commonly hire youth gangs as campaign musclemen, Sheriff paid little attention to his promises after he had achieved office and, effectively, dumped the Yusufiyya and reneged regarding shari a. The consequence was the Yusufiyya denounced him as a traitor and Yusuf began to subject Modu Sheriff to vitriolic attacks in public sermons which were recorded on cassettes and circulated widely. Yusuf soon attracted a widespread following numbering, in some estimates, nearly one million. That same Ali Modu Sheriff would, six years later, turn on yet another erstwhile ally, call in the troops who led the attack on Boko Haram, capture Yusuf, Buji Foi, and Baba Fugu, Yusuf s father-in-law, and have them summarily executed (Harnischfeger, 2014: 40). Earlier Sheriff subjected Yusuf and the Yusufiyya to threats and harassment including attacks by the ECOMOG thugs (Onuoha, 2014: 166, 171, 172; Perouse, 2014: 148; Reinert and Garcon, 2014: 237). For the most part, however, Yusuf and his followers concentrated on da wah (Muhammad, 2014: 4; Murtada, 2013: 18). He did enter into increasingly heated debates with his former Izala teacher, Sheikh Ja afar Adamu. Izala did not make the same trenchant condemnations of modern, secular education (boko) as did the Yusufiyya nor did they castigate and eschew all contact with the Nigerian state and the extant political system (Harnischfeger, 2014: 46; Mohammed, 2010: ch. 6; Muhammad, 2014: 24; Perouse, 2014: 138, 140). Sheikh Ja afar was assassinated after Friday prayers at his mosque in Kano in Many blamed the killing on the followers of Yusuf but there were others said to have done it as well. No charges were ever brought (Loimeier, 2012: 148 n21; Murtada, 2013: 46; Walker, 2012: 4). 14 Most observers of Boko Haram have characterized the period between 2003 and 2009 as one of relative quietude with regard to the Yusufiyya. One suspects that the Nigerian state and its security apparatus, as well as the dominant Muslim political-religious class, viewed it differently. The state class was subjected to unremitting attacks as Yusuf proceeded to increase his following while creating something of a state within a state: a national shura council, regional leaders (amirs), a microloan scheme, plans for schools and hospitals, etc. (Mohammed, 2010; Murtada, 2013; Salkida, 2014). While Ahmed Salkida s claim that at the beginning of 2009 Muhammad Yusuf s group numbered about one million is probably an exaggeration, there should be no question that he enjoyed broad popular support (Salkida, 2014). There are tens of thousands, millions, in all parts of Nigerian society who are severely critical of the politico-economic status quo and articulate their concerns regularly. For the most part, however, they are ignored by the Big Men and their clientelist networks. Political grumbling is a national pastime but the various complaints are not heard by any more than a small circle of personal friends who are more or less fatalistic