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
