Boko Haram. Brandon Kendhammer

and were highly sought-after as guest lecturers. Adam was invited to preach numerous times in a private mosque sponsored by a prominent Salafi-aligned businessman in Maiduguri named Alhaji Mohammed Ndimi. It was here that he likely first encountered Mohammed Yusuf—often described as his “student,” although the full scope of their relationship is not entirely clear. In the last years of his life, Adam’s most famous public lectures were biting criticisms of Yusuf, who had become well-known for using Salafi theology to reject all engagement with Nigeria’s democratic government and its institutions. Adam was assassinated in April 2007 by attackers still unknown but now widely thought to be Yusuf’s followers.

      The Nigerian Salafi community has long grappled with its relationship with violence. Historically, Nigerian Salafis have rejected calls for violent jihad, even as they have frequently invoked the Shehu’s legacy and occasionally offered tacit support for projihadist rhetoric following the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet rumors and unevenly sourced reports have also suggested that by the late 1990s or early 2000s, supporters of Salafi-jihadist ideology were circulating within the underbelly of the Nigerian Salafi community, linking locals with the rhetoric (and perhaps the resources) of global jihadist networks. Whatever the case, Mohammed Yusuf’s rise to prominence as a popular, charismatic voice for jihad in Nigeria helped bring these questions to the forefront.

       2

       The Evolution of a Movement

       Who Was Mohammed Yusuf?

      For such an important figure, our knowledge of Mohammed Yusuf’s life is remarkably sketchy. Biographical information, especially about his youth and early career, is limited. And since a surprisingly large amount of what we do know comes from his opponents, it is hard to separate the truth from accusations made to discredit him. Many of the most common claims about Yusuf’s journey from small-time cleric to leading extremist can be traced to just a handful of original sources of uncertain reliability, and there are some things we will never know.

      Most agree that Yusuf was born in 1970 in Girgir, a small village in western Yobe State. Religious dissent was the family business. His father was a small-time cleric with a reputation for challenging local religious authorities, and at least one leading Boko Haram critic, a Salafi preacher named Sheikh Muhammad Auwal Albani Zaria, has alleged that his death in 1980 was part of the Maitatisine uprising in Kano. After his father died, Yusuf came under the care of a family friend, the Maiduguri-based businessman named Alhaji Baba Fugu Mohammed. Fugu saw to his young ward’s Qur’anic education, although he seems not to have pressed him to attend state-run schools or even (reputedly) to learn to speak English fluently.

      By the early 1990s, Yusuf had become a mallam in his own right, preaching in the town of Potiskum. Around 1995, he joined a local Salafi group in Maiduguri founded by a cleric named Abubakar Lawan. When Lawan left to study at IUM, Yusuf took over as one of the group’s leaders. By 2000, he was a popular religious figure in Maiduguri, appearing regularly at the Ndimi Mosque in the company of a group of young Salafis—including students at the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID, as it is known locally)—who had grown disenchanted with Nigerian society and politics.

      Over the next few years, Yusuf was a star on the rise. He came to the attention of the Ahlussunnah network and seems to have served for a time as Sheikh Ja’afar Adam’s local representative. Along the way, his message evolved in more confrontational directions. As British journalist Andrew Walker has documented, UNIMAID in those days was an institution in flux. These were the waning years of the Sani Abacha dictatorship, and Nigeria was an international pariah. The children of elites found it difficult to gain admission to prestigious international universities, and UNIMAID saw an uptick in wealthy and well-connected students. This influx had a profound impact on campus culture, which many “ordinary” students saw as dominated by ostentatious displays of wealth and booze, dancing, and gambling. Just as with the barracks of the colonial era, locals perceived UNIMAID as a space where elites and cultural outsiders could flout the norms of Muslim society, free from consequence.¹ Some of the most critical students were drawn to Salafi activism, which offered a ready-made story about the relationship between elite corruption and moral decay.

      Encouraged by these new connections, Yusuf’s preaching took on a newly combative tone toward “Western” educational influence and Nigeria’s new civilian government. Sometime in 2001 or 2002, he left (or was barred from) the Ndimi Mosque, taking with him a small but growing collection of followers, including future “Taliban” stalwart Aminu “Tashen-Ilimi” (a pseudonym that translates roughly to “Growing Knowledge”). Their new mosque, named for Ibn Taymiyya, occupied a plot of land leased by Baba Fugu Mohammed in the “low-cost” Anguwan Doki neighborhood. It would remain there until 2009, when it was destroyed in the confrontation that cost Yusuf his life.

       The Shari’ah Revolution