Most of these theories focus on finding Boko Haram’s political and military “sponsors,” revolving around the idea that Boko Haram was either a product of the Muslim community’s hatred of Jonathan or of Jonathan’s own secret scheme to discredit his opponents. Given the stakes, it is easy to imagine that some members of Nigeria’s political class have tried to sponsor or co-opt Boko Haram. Yet most accusations, such as the arrest of Borno senator Mohammed Ali Ndume in 2011 on accusations that he had been providing secret support to the group, turn out to have clear political motivations (Ndume had fallen out politically with the state governor) but little evidence. And as a number of Nigerian and international negotiating teams have discovered, governmental agency in-fighting and Boko Haram’s own internal fragmentation are just as good an explanation for the failure of so many efforts to bargain with the group as the shadowy interference of political actors.
The truth is that from the very beginning, Yusuf and his followers were deeply involved in local politics. Members of his community were courted as political muscle and appointees and even rewarded financially in exchange for their support. For example, then Borno State gubernatorial candidate Ali Modu Sheriff not only reportedly recruited members of Yusuf’s group as thugs during his 2003 election campaign but also sought out Yusuf’s personal endorsement. Yet when these relationships soured, they fed disillusionment and resentment.
Where should we be looking to better understand Boko Haram? According to the Global Terrorism Index project, 92 percent of the world’s terrorist attacks since 1989 have occurred in countries where the government is a major sponsor of violence against vulnerable communities.6 Many Nigerians would surely contest the notion that northern Muslims are “vulnerable” when they have frequently held the country’s highest political offices. However, it is possible to see the government’s response to the Hijra Group and later Boko Haram as part of a disturbing and long-standing pattern of violence and repression against movements that seek, even quietly, to challenge the moral legitimacy of the powers that be.
A second factor is the role of religious ideology, particularly Salafi Islam. The question of when and how religious extremism leads to violence is a thorny one, and even good-faith efforts to “understand today’s terrorists” can end up reducing complex debates to simplistic conclusions. Both globally and in Nigeria, the vast majority of Salafi-influenced Muslims reject violent struggle as the best path to achieving their goals. Yet even moderate Salafi doctrine often seems intolerant of alternative interpretations. It is impossible to understand Boko Haram’s emergence without understanding a bit about the history of Nigerian Salafism and equally impossible to trace Boko Haram’s integration into a system of “global jihad” without understanding the ideology behind it.
The Legacy of Islamic Dissent in Nigeria
The events of 2003–4 in Yobe and Borno followed a pattern that is immediately familiar to students of Islam in West Africa. For more than two hundred years, communities of Muslim dissidents inspired to preach religious revival and combat political injustice have been at the center of some of the most transformative social revolutions in African history. The most famous is the Sokoto Caliphate, founded in 1808–9 following Shehu7 Usman dan Fodio’s jihad against the local Hausa states. Today the caliphate’s hereditary rulers—the sultan of Sokoto and the emirs of northern cities such as Kano, Zaria, and Bauchi—are both symbols of the region’s Islamic heritage and important figures in their own right. The Shehu’s jihad and its legacy loom large over the contemporary political and religious terrain, a powerful reminder of how a community of principled dissidents can transform society.
The Shehu’s career has important parallels with the men who founded Boko Haram. Like many of them, the Shehu spent much of his youth in the region’s vast religious educational system. The ideology he developed, which both predates modern Salafism yet shares with it a number of key concerns, was based around the problem of bid’a (usually translated as “innovation”) in spiritual life. Bid’a is more than just an arcane theological issue. It represents the idea that as societies depart—even in small ways—from literal adherence to the Qur’an and the sunnah, they lose their morality and sense of justice. For the Shehu, there was no better evidence of the problem of bid’a than life in the kingdom of Gobir, the most powerful state in what is now northwestern Nigeria.
Gobir’s ruling elite had been Muslims for generations. But to the Shehu, they were apostates who flouted the laws of Allah, forced their subjects to pay heavy, un-Islamic taxes, and refused to enforce shari’ah. In 1794, he set off on his own hijra with a small group of followers. His new community, based in Degel (southwest of modern-day Sokoto), seemed to have little interest in fighting. Indeed, as historian Murray Last observes, it was rare in those days for religious revivalists to take up arms, and their students were more likely to wield sticks than swords in self-defense.8 It was around this time that the Shehu began to see himself as a mujaddid, a once-in-a-generation reformer who paves the way for the arrival of the Mahdi, a redeemer who ushers in the end-time. This millenarian streak was an important part of the Shehu’s popular appeal, and although the Mahdi never appeared, the idea that the end-time might be just over the horizon often reoccurs during moments of social crisis in Muslim-majority West Africa.
For another decade, the Shehu criticized Gobir’s elite from a cautious distance, while they responded by banning his followers from wearing the veil and turban and even taking members of his family as hostages. After years of skirmishes and increasingly violent attacks on his followers, he declared his jihad in 1804, and, four years later, his army marched into Gobir’s capital of Alkalawa as conquerors. By 1812, his flag-bearers had conquered the bulk of contemporary northern Nigeria, laying the groundwork for the Sokoto Caliphate, a state intended to govern in strict accordance with shari’ah.
The Shehu’s movement provides many Nigerian Muslims with a clear model for how to create a just Islamic society. But where he succeeded in establishing a new political and religious order, most who have followed in his footsteps have not. Indeed, just as the Shehu struggled for a decade to build a movement in the face of a seemingly endless cycle of co-optation, confrontation, and repression, most Islamic dissenters across the region find themselves targeted by state authorities as dangerous threats to the status quo, threats to be nipped in the bud before they become revolutions. Speaking about his own strategy to combat another small community of Islamic dissenters known as Maitatsine some 170 years later, Nigerian military dictator (and future elected president) General Muhammadu Buhari said simply, “I flew into Adamawa [site of a major attack in 1984] as head of state, and that was the last you heard of Maitatsine.” The fact that the operations he authorized—aerial bombardment, mortar fire, and high explosives against populated areas—destroyed thousands of homes and displaced thirty thousand civilians went conspicuously unacknowledged. Repression and violence have often thwarted the ambitions of Islamic dissent movements in northern Nigeria, but they have rarely killed them completely.
Another example of this pattern is the caliphate’s conduct against its Muslim opponents. From its founding, critical voices feared that along with success might come political corruption and religious backsliding. Indeed, even the Shehu and his brother Abdullahi dan Fodio expressed doubts about whether their new system could live up to its idealism. Yet, despite these misgivings, the caliphate’s leaders insisted on the fundamental rightness of their religious mission, going so far as to threaten other Muslims who challenged their monopolization of “true” Islam with military annihilation. This insistence was evident in the famous correspondence between the Shehu, his son Muhammad Bello, and Muhammad al-Kanami, a scholar and military commander of the Bornu Empire, situated to the caliphate’s east in the Lake Chad Basin (and including much of Boko Haram’s contemporary heartland). Facing pressure to join the jihad or be attacked by the Shehu’s allies, al-Kanami drew on Bornu’s eight-hundred-year history as a Muslim nation and his own scholarly prowess to challenge their claims that his empire had slipped away from true Islam and that the Shehu and his followers possessed universal religious authority over the region’s Muslims. Although it was al-Kanami’s military success that eventually beat back Sokoto, his