LITMIR.BIZ

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      Nor did the challenges end after the Shehu’s death in 1817. Bello’s election as caliph triggered a massive internal feud among some of the Shehu’s oldest supporters, many of whom saw his quick move to consolidate power (and control over the spoils of war) as violating the collectivist spirit of the jihad. In response, Bello’s forces waged a “second jihad” against these domestic enemies, one more markedly more violent and punitive than the original. Sokoto’s rulers never ceased to face criticism that they were failing to live up to the Shehu’s standards—criticism that they often met with yet more military campaigns against fellow believers.

      With the caliphate’s conquest by British forces in 1903, the issue of religious dissent gained new stakes. The British officially promised noninterference with Islam (a policy that they repeatedly violated), but prominent Muslim scholars organized violent resistance, assassinating colonial officials and staging small-scale uprisings. Others proposed hijra to Mecca. Following his defeat, Caliph Attahiru I (the Shehu’s great-grandson) attempted the journey, gathering tens of thousands of followers along a winding road toward the east. Pursued by British forces, they were slaughtered near the village of Burmi in present-day Gombe State.

      Those who stayed faced a barrage of movements declaring the arrival of the Mahdi to wipe out the British invaders. The most threatening was headquartered in the village of Satiru, just southwest of Sokoto. Led by a blind preacher named Saybu dan Makafo, the Satiru community included thousands of runaway slaves from Sokoto’s plantation economy. On March 10, 1906, they faced off in a battle pitting 573 colonial riflemen and 3,000 Sokoto soldiers on the British side against 2,000 men armed with little more than farm implements. The result, which British officials called a “signal and overwhelming victory,” was closer to a bloodbath.⁹

      Even as Satiru marked the end of violent resistance, intellectuals warned of colonialism’s impact on the moral fabric of society. Mallam Zum’atu al-Fallati, a Kano-born scholar who spent his life preaching across colonial West Africa, composed a series of poems in the 1940s and 1950s that attributed the region’s growing spiritual malaise to the policies of British Christian rule. Mallam Zum’atu focused much of his ire on the “barracks” (in Hausa, bariki) established across the region to house British administrative and military authorities, which eventually became spaces where people excluded from “polite” Muslim society congregated. For Mallam Zum’atu, the barracks were symbolic spaces where the moral rules of Islam did not apply, a visible symptom of colonialism’s consequences.¹⁰ Today many “good” Muslims still see police and military installations as places where drinking, gambling, and prostitution flourish under the neglectful eye of political authorities.

      Mallam Zum’atu also pointed to new Western-style schools (the first opened in Kano in 1908) as another pernicious influence. As linguist Paul Newman notes, the name “Boko Haram” reflects a local hundred-year-old debate about the moral status of secular education. Although many of the region’s leading families embraced Western-style education for their children, the newly built schools were often regarded with deep suspicion by religious leaders and commoners. While it is hard to tell from their contemporary reputation as little more than victims of poverty and child abuse, historically the almajirai were regarded as future productive members of society, training not only for their own moral edification but also to take on important and even prestigious roles as jurisprudents and educators. One estimate suggests that in the early twentieth century there were as many as twenty-five thousand Qur’anic schools educating almajirai in literacy in the ajami script in which both Arabic and the local languages of Hausa and Fulfulde (the language of the Fulani) were written.

      With the advent of British-run schools and their adoption of English and a romanized script, tens of thousands of almajirai were effectively rendered officially illiterate. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many families impacted by this shift dismissed these new schools as boko, a word that conveyed the idea of fraud, inauthenticity, and deception. The term karatun boko (literally “writing of deception”) eventually came to denote all Western-style education. While today millions of Nigerian Muslims attend these schools, popular skepticism about their value runs deep.¹¹

      After World War II, the advent of democratic elections reenergized Muslim dissenters, who focused their criticism on the remnants of the caliphate’s ruling class (the masu sarauta, or “titleholding class”) and the political party—the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC)—they supported. The NPC’s leader, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (captain of the bodyguard) of Sokoto and great-great-grandson of the Shehu, was a masterful politician who played heavily on his family heritage by flying Dan Fodio’s banner at rallies and distributing posters of his auspicious family tree. But for critics such as the firebrand religious scholar and socialist Aminu Kano and his Northern Elements Progressive Congress (NEPU), the continued dominance of the masu sarauta had nothing to do with their piety. As Kano and his supporters saw it, whereas the Shehu had sought to stamp out autocratic government, Bello and his allies had used their heritage to monopolize power and maintain their privilege. But while NEPU’s criticism gained them supporters, the NPC’s control of the regional government gave it the ability to silence and marginalize their critics. In one particularly ignoble turn, the waziri (chief advisor to the emir) of Zazzau, one of the region’s leading Islamic jurists, helped British authorities craft a 1954 memo providing legal justification for targeting NEPU members who spoke out publicly against the dominance of the masu sarauta with shari’ah prohibitions against slander and “insulting behavior.” Not surprisingly, the NPC successfully used these advantages to win at the polls and prevent more substantial reforms.

      The 1966 coup that ended Nigeria’s first democratic experiment also triggered the secession of the country’s Eastern Region as the “Republic of Biafra” and a bloody civil war from 1967 to 1970. The first half-decade of independence had already deepened ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria, and the war brought these tensions to a head. Postwar reconciliation efforts attempted to ensure that power and access to government revenues and resources (expanded greatly during the 1970s as a result of massive spikes in international oil prices) would be shared equally across ethnic and religious communities. Yet sectarian conflict worsened, fueled by the expansion of evangelical Christian and Salafi Islamic movements that brokered few opportunities for ecumenical compromise.

      Older forms of dissent also flourished. The most important was the massive outbreak of violence that took place in Kano—the north’s largest city—in December 1980. It was led by Mohammed Marwa, known locally as Maitatsine (He Who Curses), a native of northern Cameroon who had come to Nigeria in the early 1960s. Despite having been arrested, imprisoned, and even deported several times over the intervening decades, Marwa built up a sizeable local following. His teachings were esoteric and seen by many as blasphemous, driven by his belief that he was a prophet unto himself. Echoing Mallam Zum’atu in spirit (if not in the specifics), he taught the rejection of Western influence, technology, and education.

      Marwa’s message held special appeal to the almajirai, who had fallen on hard times. Historically, they had supported their studies by a combination of begging and labor in fields such as construction, market portering, and cloth dying. But as oil money flooded into Kano, traditional mud-brick construction was replaced by steel and concrete, porters by cars, and the dye pits by commercial textile mills. Meanwhile, many affluent locals came to regard the scruffy almajirai as eyesores. Marwa capitalized on these transformations, preaching loudly against the conspicuous consumption of Kano’s elites.

      Overtures from the state government to tone down Maitatsine’s rhetoric failed, and, by the end of 1980, authorities were threatening to tear down his compound. On December 18, four highly armed police units were attacked by men wielding little more than homemade weaponry. The military was called in, an entire neighborhood razed, and more than four thousand declared dead. (Unofficial tallies put the number closer to ten thousand.) Marwa was killed in police custody, and an official inquiry praised the security forces’ actions. Over the next five years, sect members staged at least a half-dozen uprisings, including several in territories later terrorized by Boko Haram. Each was put down by the full might of the military.

      What lessons can we draw from this violent legacy? To be clear, armed struggle is hardly the only way northern Nigerian

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