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
