Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement

Abstract

Perhaps the most important story in all of sub-Saharan African politics in the past two decades is how Nigeria, a country that ushered in the new millennium with broad popular optimism about its newly elected civilian, democratic government, would become by 2018 the site of more deaths from terrorism than any country in the world except Afghanistan and Iraq. Alex Thurston's Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement is as close to a definitive answer to this question as we are likely to get while the insurgency continues. Scholars of Salafi-jihadism should regard it as required reading. Moreover, given that discussions of Salafism and religiously inspired terrorism in West Africa (home to over 150 million Muslims) have been marginal to broader scholarly and policy debates about these issues in the West, Thurston's work should serve as a necessary addition, and indeed corrective, to some of the trends in these fields.For those who do not follow West African affairs, some context is in order. Although as of this writing, Boko Haram is less deadly now than at its high point of 2014–15 (when it loosely controlled a territory the size of Belgium), it continues to pose a major threat to the peace and stability of at least four countries sharing borders around the Lake Chad Basin (Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon). Even the most carefully collected data on the death toll resulting from the Boko Haram conflict (37,500 from June 2011 to June 2018)1 likely underestimates the size and scope of its impact. A recent UN report that put the current number of people displaced by the conflict at over 4 million paints a clearer picture.2 Despite the Nigerian government's repeated declarations of victory over Boko Haram, and predictions of a rapid return to peace and security in the Lake Chad Basin, the conflict remains far from over. While events may eventually overtake some of Thurston's analyses, it will stand as a clearly written and comprehensively sourced account of Boko Haram's origins, the local religious and political context from which its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, emerged, and the largely ineffective domestic, regional, and international response to its violence.Thus far, the conversation around Boko Haram in academic journals and books has been dominated by journalists and “terrorism studies” practitioners, with little input from scholars whose work in the region predates the crisis. Little of what is available addresses the group's theological and social origins with nuance and depth, and even less is grounded in a deep understanding of the Nigerian and West African regional political context from whence the group sprang. Thankfully, however, this state-of-the-field is changing rapidly, and Thurston's book represents one of the most important contributions to the field. In particular, it is the first serious analysis of the group written by a scholar of religion, and it does a great deal of important work dispelling many of the myths, confusions, and half-truths about the actual positions and arguments adopted by Boko Haram's early leadership.Here, Thurston is uniquely qualified, as he was one of the only foreign researchers already working on intra-Islamic debates and dynamics in northern Nigeria during the earliest days of the insurgency. His first book, Salafism in Nigeria, is the only English-language history of Salafism in West Africa that situates the rise of Salafi-jihadi groups like Boko Haram within the context of the rise of al-Qaʿida, as well as within the conflicts and debates roiling the local Salafi community in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, the government led an effort to implement a version of shariʿa in twelve of Nigeria's federal states.3 While most early research on Boko Haram more or less ignored the Salafi dimension entirely,4 Thurston carefully and persuasively tracks Muhammad Yusuf's evolution from a disaffected youth bouncing back and forth between various fringe communities of religious dissenters5 before eventually “cast[ing] his lot with the Salafi camp” in the late 1990s (39). Thurston's analyzes Yusuf and his less sophisticated and more violent successor Abubakar Shekau's engagement with the Salafi “canon” of key texts, and in particular Yusuf's effort to define himself publicly as a “mainstream” Salafi thinker (108) while selectively endorsing only those Salafi texts that led him to stake out a far more radical position than many of his peers on the permissibility of relations with the Nigerian state. This novel approach helps readers understand the transnational and local debates that shaped Yusuf's views.Thurston is similarly (and laudably) cautious in his analysis of Boko Haram's founding and its slide into violence in the late 2000s. Drawing on a combination of primary sources—including recordings and transcriptions of Yusuf's own preaching—and a deep knowledge of the local Nigerian religious and political scene, Thurston carefully picks his way through the various claims about Yusuf's involvement in the so-called Nigerian Taliban uprising in 2003, allegations of his involvement with al-Qaʿida-funded efforts to create jihadist cells in West Africa, and possible connections to other regional jihadi groups like and al-Qaʿida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). He acknowledges evidence that various representatives of AQIM and its predecessor, the Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat GSPC, had been in contact with people in “Boko Haram's orbit” (162) and that broader efforts by al-Qaʿida and others to promote jihad in northern Nigeria likely reached out to Yusuf's group. He also acknowledges that after Yusuf's assassination in 2009 during a massive uprising of his followers these efforts sped up, culminating in a promise to Shekau by AQIM leader Abu Zayd Droukdel to transfer 200,000 euros to Boko Haram. Some recent analyses read this evidence—some of it drawn from contemporary texts recovered in military operations, other parts from later narratives produced by al-Qaʿida and Islamic State–affiliated authors and disseminated through their propaganda channels—as definitive proof that Yusuf's movement was directed or intimately shaped by these outside forces.However, by examining the internal dynamics of both Boko Haram and AQIM, Thurston convincingly argues that whatever contact the two may have made, there is little evidence to sustain the argument—advanced most notably by Jacob Zenn—that international assistance and influence meaningfully shaped Boko Haram's trajectory in the years leading up to the 2009 uprising and its aftermath.6 Relying heavily on primary sources, Thurston argues that internal politics within Boko Haram—in particular, clashes between “hardliners” and the “mainstream” Salafi community Yusuf sought to be a part of—played the most important role in shaping his thought on the advisability of jihad, while his (often violent) confrontations with the Nigerian state nurtured his sense of grievance and expectation of an inevitable clash with the authorities. And for Shekau's part, while the evidence clearly suggests he sought out and (to a certain extent) was successful at gaining greater international recognition, his ultimate failure to ally fully with al-Qaʿida and his subsequent move toward a limited partnership with the Islamic State in 2015 was rooted primarily in Shekau's own “uncontrollable” commitment to his own agenda, making him at best an unreliable partner (168). Thurston's case is further borne out by the group's repeated schisms in recent years and in the Islamic State's own rejection of his leadership on the basis of his enthusiastic support for takfirism and violence against Muslims.Yet another important strength of Thurston's work is that for a scholar of religion, he is remarkably effective as an analyst of political and military dynamics. In fact, one of the most useful aspects of the book is that it carefully and accurately situates the claims made by nearly every actor involved in the conflict—from Nigerian military spokesmen to the presidency, from Western diplomats to regional leaders and mercenaries, and of course the jihadists themselves—within their own set of interests in how the conflict is depicted. Rather than simply telling the story of Boko Haram's insurgency from a single perspective (critical or otherwise), Thurston successfully weaves all these different actors together into a narrative text that gives the reader the information they need to judge for themselves. That the judgments a careful reader is likely to make are not particularly kind toward the Nigerian state's policies directed at religious dissidents, its military-heavy counterinsurgency strategy, or the global “War on Terror” as led by the United States and France reflects, to my find, an accurate assessment of the state of play across the region.Nowhere is this book's argument clearer than in its conclusion, where Thurston takes the “conventional wisdom” about how to defeat Boko Haram to task for ignoring the political dimensions of the conflict. As Thurston rightly notes, the Nigerian state's reliance on a primarily military strategy for fighting the insurgency has simply fueled Boko Haram's commitment to sustaining the fight, hardening their religious and political positions and guaranteeing them at least some potential recruits from communities ravaged by violence and devoid of the kind of state services that can only be provided in a more secure environment: Throughout the crisis, Boko Haram has deployed a doctrine of religious exclusivism to claim legitimacy for its message. It has presented itself both as the victim of other actors' aggressions and as a righteous vanguard fighting for the purity of Islam. The interplay of doctrine and events means that there is no easy way out of the crisis. Boko Haram represents an ugly paradox: its ideas have limited appeal but significant staying power. The group can be crushed militarily, yet state violence fuels its narrative of victimhood. (301) In this light, Thurston argues, the usual prescription of the international community—military victory and investments in socioeconomic development in the war-ravaged region—is not only unlikely to be effective, but fundamentally misses the point that in Nigeria (as elsewhere) there is no solution to the insurgency and the circumstances that produced it that ignore politics. In earlier chapters, Thurston chronicles how Yusuf and his successors have drawn on a long legacy of violence involving Muslims—much of it carried out or exacerbated by state forces to justify their own actions. In the absence of a larger national conversation about how to address that legacy, the feelings of marginalization and victimhood that have driven these specific individuals' participation in the Boko Haram insurgency will remain even if the group's leadership is killed, its sources of weapons and financing are cut off, and some measure of security is restored to the region. Ultimately, Thurston offers little optimism that the key decision-makers will take these concerns seriously, and forecasts (correctly, so far) a continued insurgency capable of sustaining a low level of violence and a high degree of insecurity across the region for a very long time.If I were to identify any shortcomings to Thurston's book—and to do so in no way lessens my endorsement—it would be that even his own nearly comprehensive account of the religious, social, and political dimensions of the conflict remains incomplete. Although it is the best book of its kind currently available, Thurston's story is essentially one of elite actors—religious leaders and ideologues, militaries and government actors, and international organizations—with relatively little to say about those impacted by their actions. While the so-called Chibok abductees have been the face of this group internationally and in Nigeria, the sheer scope of the displaced and otherwise affected communities in the Lake Chad basin and across Nigeria requires a level of attention that even a reasonably comprehensive history of Boko Haram as a movement cannot provide. Hopefully, the next wave of research in this field will build on Thurston's accomplishments and devote significant attention to the experiences and challenges faced by those who have (and have not) survived the conflict, giving serious consideration to the impact that these experiences will have on the region at large.