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.
2
The Evolution of a Movement
Who Was Mohammed Yusuf?
For such an important figure, our knowledge of Mohammed Yusuf’s life is remarkably sketchy. Biographical information, especially about his youth and early career, is limited. And since a surprisingly large amount of what we do know comes from his opponents, it is hard to separate the truth from accusations made to discredit him. Many of the most common claims about Yusuf’s journey from small-time cleric to leading extremist can be traced to just a handful of original sources of uncertain reliability, and there are some things we will never know.
Most agree that Yusuf was born in 1970 in Girgir, a small village in western Yobe State. Religious dissent was the family business. His father was a small-time cleric with a reputation for challenging local religious authorities, and at least one leading Boko Haram critic, a Salafi preacher named Sheikh Muhammad Auwal Albani Zaria, has alleged that his death in 1980 was part of the Maitatisine uprising in Kano. After his father died, Yusuf came under the care of a family friend, the Maiduguri-based businessman named Alhaji Baba Fugu Mohammed. Fugu saw to his young ward’s Qur’anic education, although he seems not to have pressed him to attend state-run schools or even (reputedly) to learn to speak English fluently.
By the early 1990s, Yusuf had become a mallam in his own right, preaching in the town of Potiskum. Around 1995, he joined a local Salafi group in Maiduguri founded by a cleric named Abubakar Lawan. When Lawan left to study at IUM, Yusuf took over as one of the group’s leaders. By 2000, he was a popular religious figure in Maiduguri, appearing regularly at the Ndimi Mosque in the company of a group of young Salafis—including students at the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID, as it is known locally)—who had grown disenchanted with Nigerian society and politics.
Over the next few years, Yusuf was a star on the rise. He came to the attention of the Ahlussunnah network and seems to have served for a time as Sheikh Ja’afar Adam’s local representative. Along the way, his message evolved in more confrontational directions. As British journalist Andrew Walker has documented, UNIMAID in those days was an institution in flux. These were the waning years of the Sani Abacha dictatorship, and Nigeria was an international pariah. The children of elites found it difficult to gain admission to prestigious international universities, and UNIMAID saw an uptick in wealthy and well-connected students. This influx had a profound impact on campus culture, which many “ordinary” students saw as dominated by ostentatious displays of wealth and booze, dancing, and gambling. Just as with the barracks of the colonial era, locals perceived UNIMAID as a space where elites and cultural outsiders could flout the norms of Muslim society, free from consequence.1 Some of the most critical students were drawn
