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
