Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement

Thurston (Salafism in Nigeria), visiting assistant professor of African history at Georgetown University, combines narrative and analysis to make a balanced and persuasive case that the causes of Boko Haram’s rise in Nigeria have been oversimplified. The group is best understood, he argues, not as a project of global jihadists or a response to economic inequality but as “the outcome of dynamic, locally grounded interactions between religion and politics.” Boko Haram’s policies and decisions are flexible and adapt to external events: religious impulse, economic malaise, political dysfunction. These interactions began in the 1970s with a religious question: what did it mean to be Muslim in a Nigeria shaken to its foundations by civil war? A popular answer was provided by Salafist preachers, whose vision of Islam as providing a comprehensive, official, legal framework for public life was shared to some degree by almost three-fourths of Nigeria’s Muslims. The resulting confrontation with a secular state was exacerbated by the Muslim North’s growing sense of exclusion from the country’s economic development. An abortive uprising in 2009 led to “clandestine regrouping, and then... terrorism and guerilla warfare”; by 2011 anti-Christian and antisecular rhetoric had sharpened into “hardline religious exclusivism,” and by 2013 northern Nigeria was in an enduring state of war. Thurston ends by considering “soft measures” best suited to resolve the crisis. This is a superb, comprehensively researched study of a complex and challenging movement. (Dec.)