How a fanatical militant group grew to terrorize Africa’s most-populated country.
Boko Haram appeared in the
consciousness of most Westerners for the first time in April of this
year. But the group is not a new arrival on the scene. It has been a
growing force in Nigeria for over a decade and has deep roots in the
country’s social development going back even further. Its rise is not an
accident and signals the emergence of a dangerous, militant religious
movement that threatens Nigeria’s survival as a nation-state.
Boko Haram’s story begins with a preacher named Mohammed Marwa, born
in 1927. At about age eighteen, he moved to Kano, in what is today
northern Nigeria, and began a career as a preacher. His sermons were
extreme and often bizarre. He raged against Western culture and its
popularity in Nigeria so virulently that he became known as Maitatsine,
meaning “The one who damns.” He declared that reading any book other
than the Koran was sinful and a sign of paganism. This included a
prohibition on reading the Hadiths or Sunnah, the doctrinal equivalent
of a Catholic Priest telling parishioners not to read the works of St.
Augustine because they do not appear in the Bible. Near the end of his
life, he came dangerously close to declaring that he, not Muhammad, was
Allah’s true prophet.
At first, Maitatsine was ignored by Nigeria’s political leaders, but
as his sermons became increasingly antigovernment in the late 1970s, the
government cracked down. The crackdown culminated in an uprising in
1980, where Maitatsine’s followers in Kano began rioting against the
government. The city descended into what scholar Elizabeth Isichei
described as “virtually civil war.” The death toll from the 1982 riots
and subsequent military crackdown was over 4,000 and Maitatsine himself
was among those killed.
His movement, however, lived on. Maitatsine’s followers rose up
against the government again in 1982 in Bulumkutu and 3,300 people were
killed. Two years later, Maitatsine’s followers rose up around Gongola
State in violence that killed nearly 1,000 people. Hundreds more were
killed a year later in a rising in Bauchi State.
From independence, Nigeria had experienced strife along ethnic and
religious lines, but this tension had been the result of different
communities fighting over resources and power. In the north, the
majority of the population is made of Muslims of the Hausa and Fulani
ethnic groups. In the south, the population is predominantly made up of
Christians belonging to the Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups. The fact that
the country is nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims,
and this division closely corresponds to the country’s ethnic and
linguistic divisions has been a recipe for political turmoil. But
religious fundamentalism has not been a defining characteristic of this
strife. Maitatsine’s movement was a sign that the dynamic was changing,
and the Islamic fundamentalism that was becoming more prominent in the
Middle East in the 1970s was also finding a home in Nigeria.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Sharia was the law of the land in northern Nigeria. Judges were still the
qadis,
learned Islamic scholars who sat as Islamic jurists and applied
religious law, of traditional Islamic practice. When Nigeria began its
transition to independence in 1960, Sharia law was almost entirely done
away with as part of the Settlement of 1960.
Under the Settlement of 1960, Nigerian Muslims traded away the right to
impose Sharia law across the board in exchange for concessions in other
areas as independent Nigeria began drafting its first constitution.
Sharia now only applied in matters of personal or family relations in
the north. Most Muslim leaders were supportive of the settlement,
believing that discarding Sharia was essential to progress towards
modernity.
Muslim opinion began to turn in the 1970s, around the time
Maitatsine’s movement was gaining support. As Philip Ostien and Sati
Fwatshak wrote in their book on the Sharia in Nigeria, “…by the
mid-1980s the idea that Muslim consent to the Settlement of 1960 had
been a terrible mistake… was widespread and firmly entrenched in the
North.”
In 1999, the growing opposition to the Settlement of 1960 manifested
itself in an active effort to impose Sharia law in the northern states.
Nigeria adopted a new Federal Constitution that year as it made its
fourth attempt since independence to emerge from military dictatorship
and build a durable democracy. The Constitution of 1999 opened the door
to the imposition of Sharia by granting significant power to Nigeria’s
states and creating a system of appellate courts to hear appeals from
Sharia trial courts. In the coming years, the northern states would take
the opportunity to impose Sharia law over their territory. Today, nine
of the twelve northern states are under full Sharia law and the other
three are under Sharia law for civil, but not criminal, matters.
The growth in support for Sharia and for abandoning the secular aims
of the drafters of the Settlement of 1960 has transformed northern
Nigeria. Nigeria was always a divided country plagued by weak governance
and ethnic cleavages, but today, the north and south are like two
different countries entirely. It is in this context, with religious
fervor growing in the Muslim north and manifesting itself in violent
uprisings like Maitatsine’s, that Boko Haram was born.
Boko Haram was founded in 2002
by a group of Islamic clerics in Borno, Nigeria. Its founder, Mohammed
Yusuf, was a dedicated fundamentalist, whose thinking was heavily
influenced by Wahhabi theology. They wanted to turn Nigeria into a truly
Islamic state by imposing Sharia law throughout the country, including
imposing it on the Christian south.
In the beginning, Boko Haram was radical, but not yet violent. That
changed in 2009, when Boko Haram members decided they were going to
refuse to obey—of all things—a law requiring motorcycle riders to wear
helmets on the grounds that it was somehow un-Islamic. The arrest of
several members sparked a riot where Boko Haram had its first large
clash with Nigerian police in riots that left a staggering 800 people
dead.
Mohammed Yusuf was detained by Nigerian security forces and
interrogated. His questioners taunted him for owning computers after he
had spent years denouncing Western learning and science. After his
interrogation, he was executed without trial in what the government
described as a “gun battle.”
In the wake of the 2009 riots, Boko Haram turned horribly violent.
Its new leader, Abubakar Shekau is an unyielding proponent of using
terrorist tactics to advance his radical agenda and he has plugged Boko
Haram into an international network of terrorist organizations, such as
Al Qaeda. Over the last two years, Boko Haram has received training from
Al Qaeda operatives on how to use explosives and execute mass casualty
terrorist attacks. The growing connection between Boko Haram and Al
Qaeda is alarming to observers of the region who fear that Boko Haram
will begin striking outside Nigeria.
With
each passing year since 2009, Boko Haram has become more violent. As an
example of their increasingly senseless violence, Boko Haram has begun
terrorizing motorists in the north and has used chainsaws to behead
truck drivers who pass through areas where Boko Haram is strong. The aim
appears to be to bring the economy in these areas to a halt by making
it too dangerous to ship goods.
To finance its operations, Boko Haram has begun robbing banks,
stealing enough cash to buy heavy weapons. They supplement this income
with acts of piracy off the Nigerian coast and by smuggling drugs. Last
year, for the first time, Boko Haram could afford to buy artillery
pieces. They used these heavy weapons to begin launching attacks on
military bases and police stations. Nigerian soldiers often flee from
guarding checkpoints when Boko Haram fighters approach. When Nigeria’s
president offered amnesty to all members of Boko Haram if they lay down
their weapons, Boko Haram’s leaders responded by rejecting the deal and
instead offering government leaders amnesty if they surrendered to Boko
Haram.
As Boko Haram grows stronger, it becomes increasingly clear the
Nigerian state cannot control the Boko Haram insurgency. Western media
coverage of Africa often leaves the viewer with the impression that
political violence in Africa is random, as if Nigeria had been hit by an
earthquake and not a militant insurgency. But Boko Haram is not a
random event. Its emergence is a direct result of rising fundamentalism
in the country. The threat it poses to the region today has existed for
decades. Unfortunately, it has taken the kidnapping of nearly 300
schoolgirls to get outsiders to take notice.
This is just our humble observation, this write up is just to educate and not condemn anyone.
Ibas
hails from Cross River State. He enlisted into the Nigerian Defence
Academy as a member of the 26th Regular Course in 1979 and was
commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant in 1983.
