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A Nigerian Origin Story

Boko Haram’s origins are shadowy and poorly understood. Even after nearly a decade in the limelight, most of its leaders—dead and alive—remain ciphers. The record of its creation and consolidation is filled with speculation, pseudonyms, and peripheral characters, and even credible sources differ on the specifics. But for all intents and purposes, the crisis of Boko Haram began in 2003 in the village of Kanama, in rural Yobe State just south of Nigeria’s long border with Niger.

Here a small group of Muslims (estimates range from about fifty to several hundred) angry about the sinfulness of Nigerian society attempted to withdraw from it. Their haphazard collection of tents and mudbrick houses were objects of bemusement to locals, who referred to them as the “Hijra Group” in reference to the hijra, the flight of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. They called themselves Al-Sunna Wal Jamma (People of the Prophet’s Example), a name that highlighted their relationship with Salafism, a global Islamic ideology that seeks to “purify” the faith by returning to the example of the Prophet (the sunnah) and the earliest Muslim community. Although Salafi movements are often seen as products of the Arab world, Nigerian Salafi preachers and organizations are among the most influential in Africa.

Globally, Salafis are divided about how their religious values ought to relate to the political world. Some use politics to establish their vision of a good society, while others (the so-called quietists) focus on promoting personal piety and religious education. Still others—a minority but a vocal one—see modern governments as beyond reform, justifying violent struggle against them. Initially, the very nature of the Hijra Group’s action—physical and symbolic retreat from Nigerian society—seemed to put it among the quietists. But the speed with which it turned to violence suggests that its members were divided over how to achieve their goals.

The Hijra Group’s actions were undoubtedly influenced by grievances it shared with many Nigerian Muslims. In 1999, following the inauguration of Nigeria’s first elected government in a generation, a handful of politicians in the northwestern state of Zamfara announced their intention to implement a strict version of shari’ah (Islamic law) in criminal law, with the goal of restoring it to the status it held prior to colonial rule. The subsequent outpouring of popular support turned the “shari’ah issue” into a movement, and between 1999 and 2003, twelve states enacted shari’ah-inspired legislation and policies that were met with high hopes by Muslim citizens.

A minority of Muslims clearly hoped that Zamfara’s proposal would be the first step in moving the country toward an Islamic theocracy. This possibility was also on the minds of Nigeria’s 85 million Christians (the country has a roughly equal proportion of Muslims and Christians), and the two religious communities clashed repeatedly over the next decade. For most Muslims, however, shari’ah’s popularity was rooted in the hope it might force Nigeria’s notoriously corrupt political class to address their demands for economic development, social justice, and political rights. Yet, whether because the benefits rarely materialized or because punishments for the wealthy and well-connected never seemed to equal those imposed on the poor and vulnerable, public opinion on shari’ah quickly soured. This letdown was especially crushing for the Salafi activists who had set aside their discomfort with formal politics in the hope of influencing the process. For them, shari’ah’s failure was an outright betrayal.

In Kanama, the Hijra Group and local citizens lived alongside each other peacefully for months. Locals reported that members occasionally took on farm labor jobs to earn money, but mostly they kept to themselves. Things unraveled in late 2003 when the group’s use of a fishing pond came to the attention of a local chief, whose request for an access fee was met with anger. Tempers rose, and the police got involved. On December 20, several members were arrested, and others were beaten and harassed. There is confusion about what happened next. Some point to provocations by local authorities, others to threats by group members against the local government chairman and the district head, the ranking local agents of the Nigerian state. On December 24, the group stormed a nearby police barracks and overpowered its defenses, killing at least one policeman and coming away with a cache of arms. From there, it raided the town of Geidam, gathered more guns, and prepared for war. By early January 2004, it had made its way overland 250 kilometers to the Yobe State capital of Damaturu, all the while engaged in a series of running battles with the police. Here it was dispersed but only after sacking yet more police stations and reloading its armory.

Over the next few days, police and military forces ramped up operations that claimed dozens of perpetrator deaths and arrests. There were also indications of the conflict’s mounting social costs, as ten thousand people fled their homes and farms during the fighting. It was also around this time that the name “Nigerian Taliban” appeared as the group’s “official” moniker. Some journalists claimed that they had seen fighters flying a Taliban flag, while others referenced a shadowy leader nicknamed “Mullah Omar” after the Afghan jihadist. However tenuous, the “Taliban” narrative grabbed the public’s imagination, driving the first global media coverage of the violence and kicking the interest of international intelligence agencies into high gear.

The first wave of attacks ended shortly after Damaturu. A month later, the police produced a man named Sheikh Muhiddeen Abdullahi, who was announced as the group’s mastermind and primary funder. Abdullahi was Sudanese and had worked in Nigeria as a representative of Al Muntada, an international Islamic charity based in London with ties to Saudi donors and a history of rumored (but mostly unsubstantiated) connections to terrorist groups. Subsequent inquiries found scant evidence of any direct involvement but some that Al Muntada had sponsored mosques in which Hijra Group (and later Boko Haram) members preached. While security forces followed up Abdullahi’s arrest with a declaration of victory, he was never tried and was later quietly released.

In September 2004, the “Taliban” reemerged near Bama and Gwoza in Borno State on the Cameroon border. Once again, they targeted police stations and were pursued by federal forces who announced inflated death counts following a series of indecisive engagements. By this time, authorities had also identified one of the group’s main leaders, a man named Muhammad Ali (sometimes Alli), a former student at the Islamic University of Khartoum and a Maiduguri native. In 2014, the International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a bombshell report that linked Ali to Osama bin Laden, whose February 2003 audio message had declared Nigeria to be one of the most “qualified regions for liberation” by jihad.¹ Based on interviews with alleged Boko Haram participants (and later confirmed in its broad strokes by correspondence recovered by US forces during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden), the ICG claimed that in 2002 Ali returned to Nigeria with $3 million from bin Laden’s organization as “seed money” to establish an al-Qaeda cell.

Among the recipients of this funding, the ICG suggested, was a local Salafi cleric named Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf was well known for both his preaching and his relationship with Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmoud Adam, arguably the most prominent Salafi thinker in Nigeria at the time. Yusuf was not at Kanama during the conflict, and his personal connections to those who were remain a matter of speculation. We do know that he preached at the Alhaji Mohammed Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri, where Ali and some of the other Hijra Group members worshipped. Eventually some former members of the “Taliban” fell back into Yusuf’s orbit, part of a new movement eventually known as the Yusufiyya.²

Ali was most likely killed during or shortly after the events at Kanama. The remaining members scattered during an October 2004 artillery barrage on their hideouts along the Cameroon border, and after that little was heard of them. Local authorities were eager for the story to die down, and state security agencies alternated between taking credit for “crushing” the group and avoiding any explanation of how they had allowed it to emerge in the first place. For the moment, peace returned.

What Boko Haram Is—and Is Not

With Boko Haram rated in 2015 by the Global Terrorism Index as the world’s deadliest terrorist organization, there has been no shortage of explanations for its bloody success. Three are especially important. First, as part of a region—the Sahel—considered one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, northern Nigeria has poverty and weak governance that, many argue, make it especially susceptible to extremist violence. Second, security analysts and policymakers immersed in the global war on terror tend to see the group’s rise through a global lens, with special attention to its connections (some shadowy, others more public) to groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), to which a portion of the group first pledged allegiance in March 2015. Third, local Nigerian conspiracy theories about Boko Haram’s under-the-table sponsorship by politicians and military men have circulated for years, part of an effort to place the group’s actions within accepted local notions of how Nigerian politics “works” and who wields “real” power.

What is the truth? Research on the causes of violent extremism finds that simple stories rarely capture the complexities behind how terrorist organizations emerge, recruit, and operate. Take poverty, for example. If poverty were a key driver of violence, Nigeria would be a likely candidate. In 2012, Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that over 60 percent of its citizens lived on less than a dollar a day. And despite more than $600 billion in oil revenue since 1960, many Nigerians lack access to basic social services and infrastructure, such as a steady supply of electricity, safe roads, and effective law enforcement. In the northeast, the story is even bleaker. There the poverty rate was upward of 75 percent before the conflict, and no one is certain how much worse it has gotten. Primary school attendance rates are half those in the rest of the country, and so are average incomes. Childhood vaccination rates hover around 10 percent, and nearly a quarter of children suffered from symptoms of chronic malnutrition even before the conflict. It is not surprising that many domestic and international observers identity the region’s economic circumstances as a key source of Boko Haram’s strength.

The most visible symbol of these challenges are the ten million children—the almajirai—sent away from home to study in informal schools where they memorize the Qur’an and learn the basics of Islamic theology. Although almajirai are technically the responsibility of their parents and teachers, many live in the most extreme poverty. And, indeed, many leading Nigerian public figures, most famously Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, have argued that the almajirai are especially vulnerable to radicalization.

But although this relationship might seem obvious, a growing body of research casts a skeptical light on a simple or straightforward relationship between poverty and terrorism. Not only are the poorest countries around the world not especially likely to suffer from terrorist attacks, but individuals in extreme poverty are not particularly likely to join or even support terrorist groups. Indeed, a surprisingly high proportion of the members of groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have university and postgraduate educations, particularly in fields such as engineering and medicine. Reports in the aftermath of the Hijra Group’s wild ride suggested that some of its members hailed from the wealthiest families in the region.

These findings line up with what we know about Boko Haram’s efforts to recruit supporters and fighters. From its earliest days, the group has marketed itself as a friend to the poor, targeting young men and families in need of welfare assistance and even extending small business loans to youths willing to aid the cause. Yet researchers who have spoken with former members have found that those who took Boko Haram up on its offers often saw themselves as economically equal to or even better off than their friends and neighbors who resisted.³ In Nigeria as elsewhere, the poorest of the poor do not have a monopoly on feelings of disenfranchisement or a lack of opportunity.

These findings also hold up in the case of the almajirai. The anthropologist Hannah Hoechner has found that for many Muslims, becoming an almajiri is less a choice of poverty and desperation than it might seem. Hoechner’s interviews with with almajirai and their parents find that many of the families who send their children to these schools distrust Western-style, governmentrun education—and for good reason, given its poor quality.⁴ What limited face-to-face information we have from former fighters confirms that while some almajirai have joined Boko Haram, they make up a small percentage of the group’s membership.⁵ The idea of a radicalization pipeline running directly from Qur’anic schools into Boko Haram’s clutches is a myth.

There are similar problems with the “international influences” story. To be sure, transnational Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have clearly attempted to both influence and take credit for Boko Haram’s rise. Aside from bin Laden’s 2003 declaration that Nigeria was ripe for jihad and the alleged seed money he provided to Mohammed Ali, documents recovered from the al-Qaeda chief’s compound in 2011 suggest that Boko Haram’s leadership had reached out to him as early as 2009. By the early 2010s, US and Nigerian intelligence reports suggest that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was providing tangible support, particularly in the form of training members who traveled to camps in AQIM-occupied territory during the 2012–13 crisis in northern Mali. Soon after, both Boko Haram and Ansaru, an AQIM-affiliated Boko Haram offshoot, ramped up efforts to kidnap and ransom Westerners, one of AQIM’s signature tactics. Similarly, many observers have noted a marked change in the style of Boko Haram’s videos following its allegiance with ISIS, suggesting that ISIS’s media affairs personnel had pushed it to adopt their “house style.”

Although international influences have indeed shaped Boko Haram, this line of argument also tends to disguise the fact that Boko Haram’s goals and actions are mostly shaped by local conditions. Indeed, the group has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to attack the weaknesses of local police and military forces and shift in the face of their strengths. For example, the group followed reports of low troop morale and mutiny in military barracks in the spring of 2014 with an aggressive offensive to take and hold territory, while in the face of an international troop “surge” in spring 2015 it shifted back to terrorism, launching a suicide campaign that used an unprecedented number of women and girls as bombers.

It is also misleading to assume that Boko Haram’s evolution must have required major outside guidance. For one, it overstates the technical difficulties involved. As we will discuss in more detail later, Yusuf, Shekau, and others in the group’s leadership did try to seek out contact with al-Qaeda in the group’s early years. However, there is little evidence that these efforts translated into much direct assistance.

What is much clearer is that the group has consistently benefited from the extraordinary mismanagement that has ravaged the Nigerian security services. Indeed, senior military and defense officials stand accused of misappropriating more than $5.5 billion allocated to the fight against Boko Haram in the mid-2010s and failing to prevent the widespread abuse of civilians in military custody. Both have played a key role in Boko Haram’s success. For another, it also neglects the fact that many of Boko Haram’s most effective tactics, especially its large-scale kidnappings of women and girls and their subsequent deployment as bombers, are clearly not borrowed from the al-Qaeda/ISIS playbook. And although by 2016, military setbacks in ISIS’s core Syrian and Iraqi holdings and internal politics within Boko Haram’s leadership had driven some members of both groups into closer collaboration (particularly on matters of theology), evidence of direct military cooperation remains elusive.

Third, debates within Nigeria about the “real” causes of Boko Haram reflect broader tensions around the balance of national power that have dominated Nigerian politics since before independence. Since the 1999 transition, Nigeria’s political stability has depended on an informal agreement that presidential power would “rotate” between the Christian-majority south and the Muslim-majority north. Following the unexpected death in 2010 of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a northern Muslim who had not yet completed the first of his two allowable terms, Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, an evangelical Christian from the southern Niger Delta region, became president. Jonathan’s campaign (and eventual victory) for his own term in 2011 was deeply controversial, with Muslim leaders pressuring him to step aside in favor of another Muslim. But despite the fact that Boko Haram had emerged before the public eye under Yar’Adua’s watch in 2009, its campaign of violence provided ample fodder for conspiracy theorists to cast its activities in terms of Jonathan’s presidency and the “marginalization” of northern Nigeria.

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 arguments remain a powerful challenge to any Muslim ruler in the region attempting to enforce his own orthodoxy.

Nor did the challenges end after the Shehu’s death in 1817. Bello’s election as caliph triggered a massive internal feud among some of the Shehu’s oldest supporters, many of whom saw his quick move to consolidate power (and control over the spoils of war) as violating the collectivist spirit of the jihad. In response, Bello’s forces waged a “second jihad” against these domestic enemies, one more markedly more violent and punitive than the original. Sokoto’s rulers never ceased to face criticism that they were failing to live up to the Shehu’s standards—criticism that they often met with yet more military campaigns against fellow believers.

With the caliphate’s conquest by British forces in 1903, the issue of religious dissent gained new stakes. The British officially promised noninterference with Islam (a policy that they repeatedly violated), but prominent Muslim scholars organized violent resistance, assassinating colonial officials and staging small-scale uprisings. Others proposed hijra to Mecca. Following his defeat, Caliph Attahiru I (the Shehu’s great-grandson) attempted the journey, gathering tens of thousands of followers along a winding road toward the east. Pursued by British forces, they were slaughtered near the village of Burmi in present-day Gombe State.

Those who stayed faced a barrage of movements declaring the arrival of the Mahdi to wipe out the British invaders. The most threatening was headquartered in the village of Satiru, just southwest of Sokoto. Led by a blind preacher named Saybu dan Makafo, the Satiru community included thousands of runaway slaves from Sokoto’s plantation economy. On March 10, 1906, they faced off in a battle pitting 573 colonial riflemen and 3,000 Sokoto soldiers on the British side against 2,000 men armed with little more than farm implements. The result, which British officials called a “signal and overwhelming victory,” was closer to a bloodbath.⁹

Even as Satiru marked the end of violent resistance, intellectuals warned of colonialism’s impact on the moral fabric of society. Mallam Zum’atu al-Fallati, a Kano-born scholar who spent his life preaching across colonial West Africa, composed a series of poems in the 1940s and 1950s that attributed the region’s growing spiritual malaise to the policies of British Christian rule. Mallam Zum’atu focused much of his ire on the “barracks” (in Hausa, bariki) established across the region to house British administrative and military authorities, which eventually became spaces where people excluded from “polite” Muslim society congregated. For Mallam Zum’atu, the barracks were symbolic spaces where the moral rules of Islam did not apply, a visible symptom of colonialism’s consequences.¹⁰ Today many “good” Muslims still see police and military installations as places where drinking, gambling, and prostitution flourish under the neglectful eye of political authorities.

Mallam Zum’atu also pointed to new Western-style schools (the first opened in Kano in 1908) as another pernicious influence. As linguist Paul Newman notes, the name “Boko Haram” reflects a local hundred-year-old debate about the moral status of secular education. Although many of the region’s leading families embraced Western-style education for their children, the newly built schools were often regarded with deep suspicion by religious leaders and commoners. While it is hard to tell from their contemporary reputation as little more than victims of poverty and child abuse, historically the almajirai were regarded as future productive members of society, training not only for their own moral edification but also to take on important and even prestigious roles as jurisprudents and educators. One estimate suggests that in the early twentieth century there were as many as twenty-five thousand Qur’anic schools educating almajirai in literacy in the ajami script in which both Arabic and the local languages of Hausa and Fulfulde (the language of the Fulani) were written.

With the advent of British-run schools and their adoption of English and a romanized script, tens of thousands of almajirai were effectively rendered officially illiterate. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many families impacted by this shift dismissed these new schools as boko, a word that conveyed the idea of fraud, inauthenticity, and deception. The term karatun boko (literally “writing of deception”) eventually came to denote all Western-style education. While today millions of Nigerian Muslims attend these schools, popular skepticism about their value runs deep.¹¹

After World War II, the advent of democratic elections reenergized Muslim dissenters, who focused their criticism on the remnants of the caliphate’s ruling class (the masu sarauta, or “titleholding class”) and the political party—the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC)—they supported. The NPC’s leader, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (captain of the bodyguard) of Sokoto and great-great-grandson of the Shehu, was a masterful politician who played heavily on his family heritage by flying Dan Fodio’s banner at rallies and distributing posters of his auspicious family tree. But for critics such as the firebrand religious scholar and socialist Aminu Kano and his Northern Elements Progressive Congress (NEPU), the continued dominance of the masu sarauta had nothing to do with their piety. As Kano and his supporters saw it, whereas the Shehu had sought to stamp out autocratic government, Bello and his allies had used their heritage to monopolize power and maintain their privilege. But while NEPU’s criticism gained them supporters, the NPC’s control of the regional government gave it the ability to silence and marginalize their critics. In one particularly ignoble turn, the waziri (chief advisor to the emir) of Zazzau, one of the region’s leading Islamic jurists, helped British authorities craft a 1954 memo providing legal justification for targeting NEPU members who spoke out publicly against the dominance of the masu sarauta with shari’ah prohibitions against slander and “insulting behavior.” Not surprisingly, the NPC successfully used these advantages to win at the polls and prevent more substantial reforms.

The 1966 coup that ended Nigeria’s first democratic experiment also triggered the secession of the country’s Eastern Region as the “Republic of Biafra” and a bloody civil war from 1967 to 1970. The first half-decade of independence had already deepened ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria, and the war brought these tensions to a head. Postwar reconciliation efforts attempted to ensure that power and access to government revenues and resources (expanded greatly during the 1970s as a result of massive spikes in international oil prices) would be shared equally across ethnic and religious communities. Yet sectarian conflict worsened, fueled by the expansion of evangelical Christian and Salafi Islamic movements that brokered few opportunities for ecumenical compromise.

Older forms of dissent also flourished. The most important was the massive outbreak of violence that took place in Kano—the north’s largest city—in December 1980. It was led by Mohammed Marwa, known locally as Maitatsine (He Who Curses), a native of northern Cameroon who had come to Nigeria in the early 1960s. Despite having been arrested, imprisoned, and even deported several times over the intervening decades, Marwa built up a sizeable local following. His teachings were esoteric and seen by many as blasphemous, driven by his belief that he was a prophet unto himself. Echoing Mallam Zum’atu in spirit (if not in the specifics), he taught the rejection of Western influence, technology, and education.

Marwa’s message held special appeal to the almajirai, who had fallen on hard times. Historically, they had supported their studies by a combination of begging and labor in fields such as construction, market portering, and cloth dying. But as oil money flooded into Kano, traditional mud-brick construction was replaced by steel and concrete, porters by cars, and the dye pits by commercial textile mills. Meanwhile, many affluent locals came to regard the scruffy almajirai as eyesores. Marwa capitalized on these transformations, preaching loudly against the conspicuous consumption of Kano’s elites.

Overtures from the state government to tone down Maitatsine’s rhetoric failed, and, by the end of 1980, authorities were threatening to tear down his compound. On December 18, four highly armed police units were attacked by men wielding little more than homemade weaponry. The military was called in, an entire neighborhood razed, and more than four thousand declared dead. (Unofficial tallies put the number closer to ten thousand.) Marwa was killed in police custody, and an official inquiry praised the security forces’ actions. Over the next five years, sect members staged at least a half-dozen uprisings, including several in territories later terrorized by Boko Haram. Each was put down by the full might of the military.

What lessons can we draw from this violent legacy? To be clear, armed struggle is hardly the only way northern Nigerian Muslims express their frustrations with the status quo. Signs of growing spiritual discontent are often subtle, embedded in quiet conversations or the sermons of dissident preachers such as Mohammed Yusuf. Even fashion choices (men’s trousers that end high above the ankle align the wearer with the Salafi movement, turbans and hijabs with globalized notions of Islamic piety) can send signals. In Nigeria, mosques are a particularly important site for emerging dissent, since weak governmental supervision allows nearly anyone with the money and influence to obtain a plot of land to sponsor a new one. Meanwhile, fights over who controls older, more influential mosques have frequently bubbled over into testy confrontations and even violence, pitting members of centuries-old Sufi brotherhoods against the newer Salafi movements, Salafis against each other, and nearly everyone else against Nigeria’s small and threatened Shi’a community.

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 accused using a public campaign for shari’ah for his own aggrandizement.

Members of Ahlussunnah—and Adam in particular—also built reputations as skillful theological debaters. Ahlussunnah preachers eagerly engaged in public arguments (often filmed and distributed on video CDs and DVDs) with opponents and critics 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.