Nigeria fights back against Boko Haram's radical Islam through the power of learning

In classrooms facing a sandy courtyard in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, Maska Road Islamic School teaches a creed that condemns the violent ideology of groups such as Boko Haram. But not everyone has got its message.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known as the “underwear bomber”, spent his youth in the school and ended up trying unsuccessfully to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear.

The school is steadfast in preaching tolerance to its pupils, and the Nigerian government is about to adopt this message in a new strategy for containing Boko Haram, which has killed thousands in a five-year campaign for an Islamic state.

“We teach them that what they are doing is a total misunderstanding of the Islamic religion, that Prophet Mohamed was compassionate, he even lived together with the non-Muslims in Medina,” said the headteacher Sulaiman Saiki. “We teach them tolerance.”

Abdulmutallab was radicalised in an al-Qa’ida camp in Yemen, but his case shows that even youths given a relatively liberal Muslim education can be seduced by radical Islam. This is something the new government programme is aiming to combat.

Koranic schools such as Maska Road will be a pillar of the strategy being launched in September to counter Boko Haram’s ideology. The aim is to win over the “hearts and minds” of young Nigerians.

They will also challenge Boko Haram’s claim that secular teaching is “un-Islamic” – Boko Haram means “Western education is sinful” in Hausa, the dominant language in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north. Maska Road teaches only Koranic verses and other tenets of Muslim faith, and encourages its 300 students to take classes such as science and literature outside its walls.

“We want them to get a Western education and combine it with... religious learning,” Mr Saiki says. Fatah Abdul, who studies at Maska Road, scoffs at the idea of violence in the name of Islam.

“Our religion doesn’t entertain killing. Boko Haram is absolutely different from what our religion advocates,” she said. “And it’s not true what they say that we need an Islamic state. The leadership doesn’t have to be Islamic.”

Mr Saiki was a neighbour of Abdulmutallab. He says Abdulmutallab did not learn to hate the West there but “was deceived afterwards”.

Abdulmutallab, a loner from a well-to-do northern family, showed how easily youths can be radicalised. Add poverty into the mix, as in Nigeria’s troubled north-eastern Borno state, and it is not hard to see how Boko Haram finds recruits.

Boko Haram is suspected of being behind suicide bombings that killed 82 people in Kaduna last week, including one against a Muslim cleric about to lead a public prayer.

Kaduna, the capital of the north in colonial times, is richer than anywhere in the north-eastern region where Boko Haram is based. But it shares many of its problems – such as high youth unemployment, attested by the many children begging and hawking phone credit on its rubbish-filled streets.

President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has been pilloried for its apparent powerlessness to crush the rebels or protect civilians, including more than 200 school girls kidnapped in April and who remain in captivity. But he has also faced censure for neglecting the insurgency’s underlying causes.

So when Mr Jonathan’s national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki, announced a new “soft approach to terrorism” in March, many instantly dismissed it as lacking in substance. But officials say Imams in mosques and traditional elders will be co-opted to preach tolerance, while measures will be taken to ensure Koranic schools teach “correct” interpretations of sacred texts.

The drive will also include educational programmes, especially increased sports and music in northern schools, plus reform programmes for convicted Boko Haram detainees.

“A lot them don’t have much Islamic knowledge, so they tend to believe what the mullahs say,” Fatima Akilu, director of behavioural analysis in the office of Mr Dasuki, said.

“We want to teach what the Koran actually says in a language they understand.” A parallel economic programme will address the chronic poverty seen as a major driver of the insurgency.

It may be too late to bring back hundreds of youths already fighting for Boko Haram, but the idea is to prevent more from joining. Northern Nigeria has much lower levels of education than the south, a legacy of British colonialism, which protected the caliphates of the north from the activity of Christian missionaries who set up many schools in the south. “The aspects of education Boko Haram don’t like are the ones that allow you to think,” Ms Akilu said. “Keep people in the dark and you can control them with a singular narrative.”

Undoing this partly involves showing how “Western” ideas, such as mathematics and some physics and astronomy, are rooted in mediaeval Islamic thought, which was making strides while Christians in Europe were busy burning witches.

At the Sultan Bello Mosque in Kaduna’s busy market area, the local Imam Ahmed Gumi takes an unusual step to illustrate his openness to the non-Islamic world: he invites journalists in to see, film and photograph his sermon.

He introduces the team to his congregation of about 350 packed into a main hall, and after a chorus of “welcome” he offers a live interview about his views on Boko Haram in front of the faithful. “It’s not right to call what those boys are doing Islamic,” he later said. “They hide behind Islam.”

Mr Gumi, one of northern Nigeria’s most popular clerics, sees the idea of an Islamic state dear to extremists as a throwback. “They want to bring back the golden age of Islamic triumph in this modern time,” he says. “For a state to survive you need a strong civilisation, education, money, lawyers, doctors. You don’t create a civilisation with AK-47s in the bush.”

He knows his outspoken views carry a risk he will be targeted by Boko Haram. His mosque, a towering structure spread between four sand-coloured turrets with turquoise-green domes, is guarded by scores of unarmed volunteers checking cars and bags. Boko Haram fighters have killed dozens of clerics. One of the targets of the Kaduna bombs was a Sheikh, Dahiru Bauchi, an Imam whose mystical Sufism is a far cry from the austere  al-Qa’ida-style type of Islam. Bauchi survived.

Taking issue with Boko Haram’s ideology will work only if the government can draw disaffected youths away from guns. The government’s economic programme aims to do this, starting with 2 billion naira (£7.3m), but with a further 60 billion that can be made available for projects.

They include mobile medical trucks, cash for the orphans and widows of Boko Haram’s victims, and a programme employing 150,000 youths to fix roads and rebuild police stations. Parts of Nigeria that are completely besieged by the insurgents are off-limits, but there are other vulnerable areas where the programme can be rolled out.

Down a dirt track with crater-like potholes on the outskirts of Kaduna, lies the Focus 1,2,3 International School. Twelve classrooms packed with desks take 25 children each. Secular education is between 7.30am and midday. After lunch, Islamic schooling is between 1pm and 5.30pm.

Muhammad Saleh, who runs the school, believes strongly in science, although he has doubts about evolutionary theory – as do many conservative Christians in the West.

Even so, his school teaches it. “I teach them evolution myself, and the parents never complain,” he says. “It’s education. Once children have an education they can decide for themselves what to think.”

By Tim Cocks, www.independent.co.uk 
http://getpocket.com/a/read/678383930

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Top Saudi cleric condemns Boko Haram over kidnapping of schoolgirls

Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, described Boko Haram as misguided and 'set up to smear the image of Islam'.
Saudi Arabia's grand mufti has condemned Nigeria's Boko Haram for its kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls and described the group as "set up to smear the image of Islam".

Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh said the movement, which says it wants to establish a pure Islamic state in northern Nigeria, was misguided.

His remarks came as religious leaders in the Muslim world, who rarely comment on militant violence, joined in denouncing Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, for saying Allah had told him to sell off the kidnapped girls as forced brides.

"This is a group that has been set up to smear the image of Islam and must be offered advice, shown their wrong path and be made to reject it," Sheikh told the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in an interview published on Friday.

"These groups are not on the right path because Islam is against kidnapping, killing and aggression," he said. "Marrying kidnapped girls is not permitted."

Boko Haram militants kidnapped more than 200 girls from a secondary school in Chibok village, near the Cameroon border, while they took exams on 14 April. Fifty have since escaped.

Shekau's video was released on Monday, sparking a wave of revulsion in Nigeria and abroad, and prompting offers of help from countries such as the US, Britain and France to search for them.

Boko Haram's five-year insurgency aims to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria, whose 170 million people are split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.

Its violent attacks have become by far the biggest security threat to Africa's top oil producer and it has expanded to menace the neighbouring countries of Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

On Thursday, Islamic scholars and human rights officials at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation denounced the kidnapping as "a gross misinterpretation of Islam".

This week, Al-Azhar, the prestigious Cairo-based seat of Sunni learning, also said that the kidnappings had "nothing to do with the tolerant and noble teachings of Islam".

Read more from The Guardian

Nigeria underestimated Boko Haram

UNTIL Boko Haram staged Nigeria’s first suicide bombing in 2010, most of their compatriots (this writer included) complacently assumed that home-grown Islamic militants could be controlled and were, although undoubtedly dangerous, pretty tame compared to their counterparts elsewhere. How wrong we were.

This shadowy, brutal and fearless jihadist group, which kidnapped seven French citizens in northern Cameroon last week and has killed thousands of innocents on its native soil, has made a mockery of the once-widespread conviction that no Nigerian on the planet was religious, brave or selfless enough to sacrifice his or her life for a cause.

Even when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian Al Qaeda devotee, was caught trying to detonate a bomb on a US-bound flight in 2009, almost every Nigerian I spoke to at the time suspected that he got cold feet and deliberately sabotaged the mission.

http://dawn.com/2013/03/02/nigeria-underestimated-boko-haram/

The “evidence” that fed this suspicion was that, having boarded the plane in Amsterdam, he sat on the bomb for several hours, and then handled the detonation exercise so ineptly that another passenger was able to subdue him fairly easily.

Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, is in the north-central part of the country. I lived there for 12 years until Oct 2011. And I witnessed Boko Haram dispelling the above myth, becoming a terrifying force and seriously undermining the public’s confidence in President Goodluck Jonathan.

Boko Haram has notched up some spectacular successes. It has blown up the United Nations building in Abuja. It has gained entry to Abuja’s police headquarters. And its outrages have had an enormous psychological impact on the nation. Many believe the movement is invincible. At one point the Hilton hotel was almost deserted because of fears it would be targeted. Meanwhile, foreign airline crews stopped sleeping over in Abuja and several children were sent abroad to school by frightened parents.

Boko Haram has now stepped up its campaign, with an aggressive and high-profile incursion into foreign territory. On Tuesday the group released a video of the hostages in which the kidnapping was described as retribution for France’s military intervention in Mali.

The borders that separate Nigeria from its neighbours have always been porous. But, until last week’s audacious Cameroonian abduction, the insurgents had restricted their terror campaign to northern Nigeria. The churches they attacked were always in the north. They didn’t venture to the south, where most Nigerian Christians live. But the fear is they may now start to do so.

If they are now crossing borders to hunt for expatriate hostages whose capture guarantees them maximum publicity on an international level, might they not also soon make an attempt to similarly expand their activities into southern Nigeria?

Meanwhile, Muslim Nigerians from the north are as concerned about the Boko Haram threat as Nigerians in the south.

According to Hassan Mohammed, a judge from the northeast: “It is laughable to describe these characters as pro-north or as defenders of Islam. They are evil anarchists who have not only killed almost every imam in the Maiduguri area, but are hell-bent on eliminating our political and traditional rulers as well.”

And he adds: “The northern elite is often accused of being in cahoots with Boko Haram … but nothing could be further from the truth. Why would we stupidly support terrorists who treat us like hated opponents and are always trying to kill us?”

Some believe Boko Haram is partly about hungry, angry, unemployed northern boys saying “enough is enough” in a country that is lamentably corrupt, with the privileged callously ignoring the poor. But Nigeria, sadly, is not going to become an oasis of enlightenment any time soon; and if a relatively sophisticated country such as Britain took decades to neutralise the IRA, it may take Nigeria at least as long to bring the homicidal and suicidal guerrilla fighters of Boko Haram to heel.

Boko Haram is a strange, amorphous, hydra-headed beast that is feeding off Nigeria’s many problems and grievances and has just demonstrated that it is willing and able to spread its terror campaign to new regions. — The Guardian, London.

The writer is a columnist for the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard.

http://dawn.com/2013/03/02/nigeria-underestimated-boko-haram/

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Nigeria: From the Sharia movement to Boko Haram

In the politics of Nigeria, religion, ethnicity and regionalism are intermingled. Almost all Hausa are Muslim and overwhelmingly located in the North. Almost all Igbos are Christian and are geographically concentrated in the East. The Yoruba, on the other hand, are half Christian and half Muslim and are concentrated mainly in Western Nigeria. Since its … Continue reading »

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Boko Haram: African Taliban of Nigeria

Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram - which has caused havoc in Africa's most populous country through a wave of bombings - is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state. Keep reading >>>>

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In Nigeria, a Deadly Group’s Rage Has Local Roots

KANO, Nigeria — In an imam’s quiet office, two young men in long hooded robes, their faces hidden by checked scarves, calmly described their deadly war against the Nigerian state.

The office door was open. Children from the Koranic school adjoining the mosque streamed past, laughing and jostling. Worshipers from the evening prayer service, which the young men had just left, poured into the parking lot. If the police had been alerted in any way, the two young men would have been instantly arrested, or worse. But neither appeared nervous about possible betrayal.

“It is not the people of Nigeria, it is only the army and the police who are against us,” said one of the men, explaining their membership in Boko Haram, the militant group that has claimed responsibility for killing hundreds in its battle against the Nigerian government. “Millions of people in Kano State are supporting us.”

His bravado notwithstanding, the violent Islamist army operating out of these dusty alleyways, ready to lash out and quickly fade back, is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of life in this sprawling metropolis, succored by an uneasy mix of fear and sympathy among the millions of impoverished people here.

The group’s lethality is undeniable. Boko Haram unleashed a hail of bullets and homemade bombs here last month to deadly effect: as many as 300 were killed in a few hours in the group’s deadliest and most organized assault yet after two years of attacks across northern Nigeria. It was an unprecedented wave of coordinated suicide bombing, sustained gunfire and explosions, much of it directed against the police.

But while Western and local officials cite the militants’ growing links to terrorist organizations in the region — presenting the ties as a reason behind the group’s increasingly deadly tactics and a cause for global concern — Boko Haram is not the imported, “foreign” menace Nigerian authorities depict it to be.

Since 2009, the group has killed well over 900 people, Human Rights Watch says. Yet on the streets of Kano, the government is more readily denounced than the militants. Anger at the pervasive squalor, not at the recent violence, dominates. Crowds quickly gather around to voice their heated discontent, not with Boko Haram, but with what they describe as a shared enemy: the Nigerian state, seen by the poor here as a purveyor of inequality.

“People are supporting them because the government is cheating them,” said Mohammed Ghali, the imam at the mosque where the two Boko Haram members pray. Imam Ghali is known as an intermediary between the militants and the authorities, and while open backing for the group can put almost anyone in the cross hairs of the Nigerian security services, there appears to be no shortage of Boko Haram supporters here.

“At any time I am ready to join them, to fight injustice in this country,” said Abdullahi Garba, a candy vendor who came into Imam Ghali’s office.

Of course, Boko Haram is feared and loathed by countless residents as well. Its brutal show of firepower here in Kano, a commercial center of about four million that for centuries has been a major entrepôt at the Sahara’s edge, has left many residents in shock. The attackers came on foot, by motorcycle and by car, throwing fertilizer bombs and pulling rifles from rice sacks, mowing down anybody who appeared to be in uniform. There were even decapitated bodies among the mounds of corpses the day after, said a witness, Nasir Adhama, who owns a textile factory with his family near one of the attack sites.

“When you saw this road, it was just shed with blood,” Mr. Adhama said. “Everywhere there were dead bodies. They passed through this place, just firing and shooting.”

One of the young men at the mosque said he had participated in the planning for the attack, asserting that the group had received no outside help.

But a United Nations report published in January cited regional officials as saying that “Boko Haram had established links with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” and that “some of its members from Nigeria and Chad had received training in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb camps in Mali during the summer of 2011.” Seven Boko Haram members passing through Niger were arrested with “names and contact details” of members of the Qaeda affiliate, the United Nations report said.

For now, Boko Haram’s targets remain largely local, despite its bombing of a United Nations headquarters in Abuja, the capital, last summer. The Nigerian state is typically the enemy, and many analysts see the nation’s enduring poverty as one reason.

This month figures were released in Abuja indicating that poverty has increased since 2004, despite the nation’s oil wealth; in the north, Boko Haram’s stronghold, about 75 percent of the population is considered poor. Overall, 60 percent live on less than $1 a day. Every citizen appears aware of the glaring contrast between his or her own life and those of the elite.

Ado Ibrahim, a 22-year-old sugar cane vendor wearing a yellow soccer jersey, suspected more violence could be ahead.

“Injustice, and misgovernance by officials,” he said, adding, “It’s possible, as long as injustice persists, it’s possible to have another flare-up.”

Down the street, squatting in his open-air stall where he sells cooked yams, Abdullahi Dantsabe had a similar point of view. Why had the attacks occurred? “Injustice,” he said. “The leaders are not concerned about the common man.”

One resident argued that Boko Haram made some effort to protect civilians. “They told us to move away,” said Mohammed Danami, a motorcycle taxi driver, describing a devastating police station attack on Jan. 25. “They said, ‘We are not here for you,’ ” he recalled.

But the fate of Alhaji Muhammadu suggests otherwise. He was fatally shot on Feb. 9 as he walked along a sandy alley to his cinder-block home. His son said that his father had alerted the police to a booby-trapped car in the neighborhood, several days before the shooting. Boko Haram found out. Two masked men on a motorcycle shouted: “Just try that again. Now you are dead,” recalled the son, Sudaifu Muhammadu, a 27-year-old student at Bayero University, shuddering.

“They are all around,” Mr. Muhammadu said.

Last July the Nigerian news media reported on a letter of warning from the group to Kano’s leaders, including the emir, the traditional ruler of this ancient aristocratic city: “All those arrested should be released immediately, otherwise, I swear with Almighty Allah, we may be forced to deploy our men to Kano,” the letter said.

Six months later, on Jan. 20, the group struck. The planning had gone on under the noses of the authorities. “What happened in Kano was something which the security agencies had foreseen,” said Dr. Bashir Aliyu, a prominent imam in Kano.

There were up to five suicide bombers that day, at least 20 explosions, assaults on what were thought to be well-guarded state and regional police headquarters, on the State Security Service, an immigration office and the residence of a high police official. Gunmen entered a police barracks and opened fire, killing dozens.

Kano officials have said little since the attacks, and the precise sequence of events that day remains a mystery. The police commissioner here declined requests for an interview, and the state’s information commissioner did not respond to a message or phone calls.

An elderly aristocrat with connections to the royal palace here, Yusuf Maitama Sule — Nigeria’s former United Nations ambassador, he was one of those to whom Boko Haram’s letter was addressed, according to the Nigerian media — said in an interview at his home here: “We are making some efforts quietly. I don’t think it is proper for me to speak out.”

Mr. Sule acknowledged, however, that the country faced deep social and economic challenges.

“Because of this oil habit, we are sending our girlfriends to do their hair in Paris,” he said.

For some analysts, the challenge posed by Boko Haram is a serious one for the Nigerian government.

“They’ve built cells in Kano,” said Paul Lubeck, a northern Nigeria expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They have much deeper networks in Kano than anybody ever assumed. My position is, this is a remarkably successful insurrection, more than anybody ever could have thought.”

In the imam’s office, the two young men spoke calmly and confidently of ultimate triumph. “God has already positioned us to follow his rule,” said one of the men, 25. “At any time, we can gain victory. Because God will give it to us.”

Musa Ibrahim contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/world/africa/in-northern-nigeria-boko-haram-stirs-fear-and-sympathy.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all