The
headlines do not lie. There is an ongoing war between Nigeria and Boko Haram,
an ultraviolent jihadist group seeking to establish its own version of an
Islamic state. What the headlines frequently fail to capture is the other
dimension of the same conflict – an ongoing battle to define Islam in Nigeria.
This is an invisible conflict largely unreported by the media and unexplored by
pundits.
Long
before its outrages earned it transnational infamy, Boko Haram was killing mostly
Muslim ward heads and community leaders in Northeastern Nigeria, and it has made
a special point of murdering opposing Islamic clerics. Since then, Boko Haram
has bombed churches and killed Christians; it has also killed emirs, imams,
agents of the state and civilians. Like all jihadist groups, it claims the
right to solely define what Islam is. As
Reza Aslan has observed, “Jihadism is a puritanical movement in the sense that
its members consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims
are impostors or apostates who must repent of their hypocrisy or be abandoned
to their fate.”
In
2004, Boko Haram’s leader Mohammed Yusuf established the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque
in Maiduguri, an ominously named separate centre for his then fledgling sect. Ibn
Taymiyyah was a 13th century Islamic theologian, revered in Jihadist
circles, who famously broke with the traditional view that the leader of an
Islamic state, whether a caliph, a sultan or an imam, is divinely-ordained and
must therefore be obeyed regardless of his deeds. Ibn Taymiyyah argued that if
a Muslim leader failed to uphold Islamic principles then he was not really a
Muslim but an unbeliever and his rule was invalid. Rebellion against such an
impious ruler was a religious duty. Indeed, he declared that any Muslim who was
willing to abide by the rule of an infidel was also an infidel. By choosing
this name for his mosque, Yusuf served notice to the Northern Muslim ruling
class which he saw as apostate.
Boko
Haram’s attack on the Kano Central Mosque in late November which claimed over a
hundred lives was a significant signpost. It was clearly a response to the call
by the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, to communities to arm and defend
themselves against the insurgents. Since his ascension to the throne, his vocal
opposition to Boko Haram and his emergence as an advocate of popular resistance
against the insurgents has placed him in their crosshairs.
In
parts of the northeast, most notably Maiduguri, citizen-led self-defence and
vigilante units have been instrumental to repelling Boko Haram. The key to
militarily defeating the group lies in strategic cooperation between the Nigerian
military and such local self-defence groups. Popular resistance may throttle
the insurgents in the same way that Iraq’s Sunni awakening defeated al Qaeda in
2008.
Sanusi
embodies everything that Boko Haram reviles; an Islamic scholar yet also a yan boko (western-educated) former
banker, urbane, learned and savvy in the ways of the West and the East,
dangerously comfortable with pluralism and unjustifiably cosy with infidels. In
the extremists’ eyes, he has drunk too deeply from the fountains of Western
decadence and his acumen as an intellectual in the Western and Eastern sense
compounded by his authority as an Emir, makes him symbolic of the sort of
apostate mongrelism that the group seeks to eradicate. In the Emir, the insurgents’
dastardly thesis has located an antithesis. In a recent video, Boko Haram threatened
to kill him. The battle lines could not be any clearer.
Kano
was once an ancient cosmopolitan terminal on the trans-Saharan trade route
making it a cultural and commercial confluence of sub-Saharan, Sahelian and
Maghrebian influences and migrations. For centuries, Kano has retained this
pluralistic character until recent decades. From the mid 1980s onwards, Kano became
identified with a violent prejudice. Chronic eruptions of sectarian violence
were seared into its reputation. Extremism rose against a background of
deindustrialization, urban poverty and economic collapse with opportunistic
politicians cynically playing the religious card.
In
a 2004 lecture in Kano, Sanusi lamented the “creeping parochialism in Kano”
which contradicted its “accommodating and cosmopolitan character” and its
traditional demonstration of “the best Islamic values of tolerance, of
diversity and hospitality to guests and travellers.” He identified lack of
education as a key factor in Kano’s, and by extension, Northern Nigeria’s,
decline and urged his audience to “fight against parochialism and retrieve our
Nigerian identity, and realize that a narrow mind closes off opportunities to
excellence.” Sanusi has since signaled his willingness to spearhead this fight
as Emir.
Boko
Haram is violently opposed to nation-states, national boundaries, democracy,
pluralism, western education and civic diversity – all concepts that are
affirmed by Nigeria. Thus, the current conflict is also about what sort of
Islam will prevail in Northern Nigeria. Will it be progressive and tolerant? Will
its future be written in the ink of scholars or the blood of martyrs? Will it
overcome the residual distrust of Western education and empower millions of
Muslims to be productive citizens and yet remain true their faith? Or will Boko
Haram’s nihilistic atavism prevail?
It
is important to highlight this invisible conflict, to support leaders like the
Emir of Kano, to encourage mainstream Muslims in their ideological struggle for
hearts and minds. The federal government should promote and protect moderate
clerics who are at the frontlines of this battle of ideas. We must also condemn
the sort of Islamophobic paranoia and bigotry in non-Muslim circles which
inadvertently strengthen Boko Haram. In the contest between moderation and
extremism, we should be vigorously backing the former.
(Images sourced from www.osundefender.com and www. nigerreporters.com)
