During times of strain, these “quiet” conflicts can spark flames. Nigeria’s religious riots often begin with some small grievance (accusations of a Christian market trader in a Muslim community defiling a Qur’an, confrontations between Muslim and Christian university organizations over access to a campus space) and evolve into mass violence over a few days. Then, the flames die down into embers, ready for re-ignition at the next provocation. But when the powers that be are faced with sustained criticism and organized dissent, the historical lesson is that, more often than not, they will summon the military force and political will to put down their opposition, even if the civilian cost is alarming.
In the long run, this is a high-risk strategy. Since the end of its civil war—a watershed moment in the Nigerian state’s history of violence, with a million or more civilian casualties—these small flare-ups have become more common, driven by massive underlying shifts in the region’s economic and social circumstances. Rapid urbanization, rising inequality, a dearth of meaningful employment opportunities for youth, and even the breakdown of older systems of social surveillance that allowed local authorities to keep a handle on the presence of “strangers” in tight-knit neighborhoods all help create an atmosphere of uncertainty and even fear in many Nigerian communities. These fears, and the violence they have justified, have laid much of the groundwork for Boko Haram’s emergence.
Nigerian Salafism, a Short History
If a long history of state violence is one important piece of Boko Haram’s origin story, it is fair to say that ideas and ideologies matter too. Even among those who seek a social revolution in the name of Islam, only a small subset ever justifies violence in the name of its faith. Still, the rise of Salafi theology across northern Nigeria since the 1950s and 1960s plays an important part in our story.
Earlier we defined Salafism as a movement to purify Muslim societies by adopting, as literally as possible, the beliefs and practices of the Prophet and his early community. More broadly, Salafism is a style of argument about religious truth and how we know it that emphasizes the importance of engaging directly with the “core” texts of Islamic revelation and a handful of influential theologians. It is also a claim to certainty. Salafi Muslims believe that by definition, theirs is the pure, authentic version of the faith and that they have the sources to prove it.
Intellectually, Salafism dates back to at least as early as the fourteenth-century Damascene theologian Ibn Taymiyya, who called for eliminating what he saw as the accumulated mistakes, errors, and heresies that had accumulated in Islamic theology in the generations following the Prophet’s death. These concerns were revived by the Wahhabist movement, founded in the mid-eighteenth century by the Arabian cleric Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s emphasis on the absolute Oneness of God (tawhid) and the dangers of bid’a led him to declare that Muslims who failed to share his commitments were unbelievers. Still, most scholars agree that contemporary Salafism is a fundamentally twentieth-century movement, profoundly shaped by the massive social and intellectual upheavals of colonization and decolonization.
But while most Salafis are deeply conservative, they are hardly defenders of the status quo. Even as they look to the past for theological inspiration, what modern Salafism proposes is revolutionary, in the sense that achieving its goals requires rewriting the social order. Analyses that dismiss Mohammed Yusuf’s rejection of “Western” education and science or the barbaric violence of groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram as “medieval” tend to miss the point that the very idea of attempting to systematically engineer a utopian society—even if the inspiration is an ancient religious text—is decidedly modernist.
In Nigeria, Salafism’s rise coincided with efforts by the British colonial government to invest in new institutions and opportunities for Islamic higher education. Under the policy of indirect rule, British authorities maintained a system of Islamic courts across northern Nigeria and required trained Muslim judges to staff them. In order to “improve” and standardize their educations, these authorities created a series of training colleges in the 1930s and 1940s designed to teach Islamic jurisprudence in a routinized, systematic way, emphasizing Arabic literacy, direct contact with canonical legal texts, and standardized syllabi and testing. They also created opportunities for study abroad in the Arab world, where young Nigerian scholars could be exposed to globalizing trends in Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Graduates of these programs became leaders in the growing movement to revitalize the role of Islam in public life following independence.
The most influential was Sheikh Abubakar Gumi. A graduate of Kano’s British-founded School for Arabic Studies and recipient of a scholarship for advanced training in Sudan, Gumi had a state-funded religious education that prepared him for a career as a judge and educator, but he soon became known as a gadfly, quick to criticize local religious and political authorities. In 1955, he was named head of the Northern Nigerian delegation during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, a position that brought him into contact with his future political patron, Sardauna Ahmadu Bello. With Bello’s backing, he rose through the judicial ranks, eventually becoming the senior judge of the entire Northern Nigerian shari’ah court system. By the early 1970s, Gumi was arguably the most prominent Muslim intellectual in Nigeria, writing best-selling religious tracts that outlined an increasingly Salafi worldview and appearing regularly on national radio to offer tafsir (interpretation of holy texts).
In 1978, Gumi’s followers founded Jama’atu Izalat al-Bid’ah wa Iqamat al Sunna (the Society for the Removal of Innovation and the Restoration of Tradition), or Izala for short. Izala attracted a broad following among the middle class, entrepreneurs, women, and youth. A substantial part of its appeal was its condemnation of “traditional” celebrations such as weddings, the costs of which often exceeded the income of all but the wealthiest members of society. Another was its promotion of women’s education, which it saw as a key to expanding piety. Adopting a politically “activist” orientation, Izala also positioned itself as arguably the leading voice for Muslim interests in Nigeria.
Izala’s monopoly on Salafi discourse in Nigeria was short-lived. By the mid-1980s, the organization had split around leadership, finances, and doctrine, pitting one faction based in the city of Jos against another in the former Northern region capital of Kaduna. These divisions were amplified by a generational fissure, as a new cohort of Salafi intellectuals returned from educational institutions abroad, particularly the Islamic University of Medina (IUM). Members of this informal network, many of whom eventually settled in Kano, were less committed to anti-Sufism and more to the notion of promoting Salafism independent of any particular movement or institution. Eventually, they took on the name Ahlussunnah (Ahl al-Sunna, or “people of the Prophet’s teachings”), while their members moved into key leadership positions in state-based religious institutions and mosques.
By the late 1990s, Ahlussunnah’s most visible face was an IUM graduate named Ja’afar Mahmoud Adam, a charismatic scholar whose media savvy made him a natural successor to Gumi’s popularity. Adam was a highly sought-after preacher, and videos of his tafsir remain hot sellers. He was also a reluctant but effective political advocate, serving as a member of the committee to review Kano State’s draft shari’ah legal code in the early 2000s and advocating for Salafis to participate in politics lest the country’s new democracy fail to represent Muslim interests. Adam’s involvement in political affairs was less overt than that of Gumi, who often engaged in explicitly partisan activism. Yet he and other like-minded Salafis were important electoral players in the 2007 Kano State elections, throwing their weight against the incumbent governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, whom they