Boko Haram’s story begins with a preacher named
Mohammed Marwa, born in 1927. At about age
eighteen, he moved to Kano, in what is today northern
Nigeria, and began a career as a preacher. His
sermons were extreme and often bizarre. He raged
against Western culture and its popularity in Nigeria
so virulently that he became known as Maitatsine,
meaning “The one who damns.” He declared that
reading any book other than the Koran was sinful and
a sign of paganism. This included a prohibition on
reading the Hadiths or Sunnah, the doctrinal
equivalent of a Catholic Priest telling parishioners not
to read the works of St. Augustine because they do not
appear in the Bible. Near the end of his life, he came
dangerously close to declaring that he, not
Muhammad, was Allah’s true prophet.
At first, Maitatsine was ignored by Nigeria’s political
leaders, but as his sermons became increasingly
antigovernment in the late 1970s, the government
cracked down. The crackdown culminated in an
uprising in 1980, where Maitatsine’s followers in
Kano began rioting against the government. The city
descended into what scholar Elizabeth Isichei
described as “virtually civil war.” The death toll from
the 1982 riots and subsequent military crackdown was
over 4,000 and Maitatsine himself was among those
killed.
His movement, however, lived on. Maitatsine’s
followers rose up against the government again in
1982 in Bulumkutu and 3,300 people were killed.
Two years later, Maitatsine’s followers rose up around
Gongola State in violence that killed nearly 1,000
people. Hundreds more were killed a year later in a
rising in Bauchi State.
From independence, Nigeria had experienced strife
along ethnic and religious lines, but this tension had
been the result of different communities fighting over
resources and power. In the north, the majority of the
population is made of Muslims of the Hausa and
Fulani ethnic groups. In the south, the population is
predominantly made up of Christians belonging to the
Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups. The fact that the
country is nearly evenly divided between Christians
and Muslims, and this division closely corresponds to
the country’s ethnic and linguistic divisions has been a
recipe for political turmoil. But religious
fundamentalism has not been a defining characteristic
of this strife. Maitatsine’s movement was a sign that
the dynamic was changing, and the Islamic
fundamentalism that was becoming more prominent in
the Middle East in the 1970s was also finding a home
in Nigeria.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Sharia
was the law of the land in northern Nigeria. Judges
were still the qadis, learned Islamic scholars who sat
as Islamic jurists and applied religious law, of
traditional Islamic practice. When Nigeria began its
transition to independence in 1960, Sharia law was
almost entirely done away with as part of the
Settlement of 1960. Under the Settlement of 1960,
Nigerian Muslims traded away the right to impose
Sharia law across the board in exchange for
concessions in other areas as independent Nigeria
began drafting its first constitution. Sharia now only
applied in matters of personal or family relations in the
north. Most Muslim leaders were supportive of the
settlement, believing that discarding Sharia was
essential to progress towards modernity.
Muslim opinion began to turn in the 1970s, around the
time Maitatsine’s movement was gaining support. As
Philip Ostien and Sati Fwatshak wrote in their book on
the Sharia in Nigeria, “…by the mid-1980s the idea
that Muslim consent to the Settlement of 1960 had
been a terrible mistake… was widespread and firmly
entrenched in the North.”
In 1999, the growing opposition to the Settlement of
1960 manifested itself in an active effort to impose
Sharia law in the northern states. Nigeria adopted a
new Federal Constitution that year as it made its fourth
attempt since independence to emerge from military
dictatorship and build a durable democracy. The
Constitution of 1999 opened the door to the
imposition of Sharia by granting significant power to
Nigeria’s states and creating a system of appellate
courts to hear appeals from Sharia trial courts. In the
coming years, the northern states would take the
opportunity to impose Sharia law over their territory.
Today, nine of the twelve northern states are under
full Sharia law and the other three are under Sharia
law for civil, but not criminal, matters.
The growth in support for Sharia and for abandoning
the secular aims of the drafters of the Settlement of
1960 has transformed northern Nigeria. Nigeria was
always a divided country plagued by weak
governance and ethnic cleavages, but today, the north
and south are like two different countries entirely.