THE BOKO HARAM WAR WITHOUT END

AS one of the longest-running conflicts in
contemporary Nigeria, the Boko Haram
insurgency has become intractable. Defy- ing military solution, the terror group has
mutated significantly from a rag-tag gang of
rural marauders to a well-organized army
of professional fighters that are brazenly
attacking hard targets of Nigeria’s security
forces and inflicting heavy losses on officers,
men and equipment on a scale never experienced since the end of the civil war in 1970.
To underscore the military cul-de-sac
that has become the war on terror, Umara
Babagana Zulum, the governor of Borno
State, where it all started and has remained
10 years on, had this to say: “The capacity
of the military has to be re-examined in
terms of technological warfare. Otherwise,
this thing (insurgency) will never end. Boko
Haram now uses drones to monitor the operations of the military. Without providing
proper and up-to-date technological capacity to the military, this thing will never end’.’
While it is a truism that Nigeria’s security
agencies, much like other aspects of governance, are faced with enormous challenges
of maladministration-induced incapacitation, which undermines their constitutional
responsibilities to protect life, property and
defend the country’s territorial integrity, it is
time to look beyond symptoms as expressed
by Zulum to see the root causes of the Boko
Haram insurgency.
The Boko Haram insurgency, which
began 10 years ago, actually has its root in
an ideology that predates modern Nige- ria, spanning several centuries to the 7th
century. Upon the death of the Prophet of
Islam, Muhammad PBUH, in 632 AD, his
companions developed and incorporated
certain doctrines into mainstream Islamic
theology in order to maintain unity and
cohesion of the early Muslim community.
To legitimise a centralised rule over the
fledgling Muslim community, which had
developed in the city of Medina under the
divinely guided leadership of the prophet of
Islam, and command absolute loyalty from
the ummah, the doctrine of caliphacy was
introduced into Islamic theology. Caliphacy
essentially entails a unitarian Islamic state
governed as a theocracy with the Quran
as exemplified [Sunnah] by the prophet of
Islam as the legal framework [Sharia] under
the leadership of his acclaimed successor,
designated as the Caliph.
Having achieved a semblance of unity of the early Muslim community under the
caliphacy, Muslim rulers soon went from
being religious leaders and guardians of
faith to empire builders. To advance their
worldly cause of dynastic empire building,
a religious justification had to be sought.
To expand the boundaries of the Muslim
state outside the precincts of Medina to the
Judeo-Christian lands of Egypt, Damascus,
Jerusalem and Constantinople, a doctrine
that reclassified believing People of the
Book [Christian and Jews] as unbelieving
enemies of Muslims had to be evolved.
The reclassification of the People of the
Book as outright unbelievers, henceforth,
legitimised expansionist aggression against
people of other faiths by empire builders as
a noble struggle in the cause of the spread of
God’s religion [Jihad].
Vested in the Caliph are temporal and
spiritual powers as acclaimed successors
of the prophet of Islam in a clear case of
non-separation of the state and religion.
As religion is a subjective interpretation of
faith, the Muslim religion would essentially
become a subjective interpretation of the Is- lamic faith by the ruling authorities. Under
the pretext of abiding by their own version
of prophetic traditions, any dissenting
opinion from the mainstream was regarded
as an innovation in religious practices by
the ruling authorities. With the expansion
of the Muslim state beyond Medina into
an empire straddling much of Arabia, the
Levant, Persia, Palestine, Anatolia, North Africa, India and Spanish Andalusia, the
power and fortunes of the Caliph increased
significantly, signalling an intense struggle
for the leadership of the Muslim world.
The struggles for leadership would became
bloody but not before obtaining a religious
sanction.
The introduction of the Taqfiri doctrine,
which equates disobedience and innovative
religious practices to outright disbelief, was
exploited by rival claimants to the Caliphacy
when they often mutually excommunicated each other, making killing of fellow
Muslims lawful. The Taqfiri doctrine would
prove to be a very potent weapon in mobilising religious warriors in the numerous
intra-religious wars that characterised epic
dynastic struggles for control of the global
Muslim community throughout the over
1,000 years of the Muslim Caliphacy.
Whereas the twin doctrines of Caliphacy
and Taqfiri as well as the reclassification of
the believing, One-God-worshiping People
of the Book as outright unbelievers are not
Islamic but only a Muslim invention for the
purpose of empire building, they nevertheless are the most entrenched doctrines of
mainstream Islamic theology in contemporary times. Following the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire in 1924, signalling the end
of the over 12 centuries-old Muslim Caliphacy, a wave of nationalism swept through
its successor nation states of modern-day
Turkey as well those of the Middle East and
North Africa.
Emergent nation states from the rubble of
the Ottoman Empire fiercely protected their
territorial integrity by elevating citizenship
of the state over cross-border pan-Muslim
solidarity. To achieve this, these governments took proactive steps to rid their
mainstream Islamic theology of any strand
of doctrinal imprints of ancient empire
builders, especially as concerns the concept
of the Caliphacy, through a purposeful
regulatory framework. This is precisely what
Nigeria has failed to do so far.
In a religiously plural country like Nige- ria, the proliferation of such doctrines as
Caliphacy, reclassification of People of the
Book as unbelieving enemies of Muslims
and Taqfiri, which equates disobedience to
disbelief by mainstream Muslim authorities,
inevitably led to the current Boko Haram
insurgency.
By wholly imbibing the subjective
interpretation of the Islamic faith by empire
builders, the Muslim authorities in Nigeria
incubated whole generations of radical Mus- lims who consider fellow citizens of Nigeria
who belong to other faiths as enemies as
well as a burning aspiration to revive the
Caliphacy by first establishing an Islamic
state out of plural Nigeria. Arising from an
innate conflict of their faith and citizenship
is the ideal Islamic state that Boko Haram
seeks to forcefully install by dismantling
the current constitutional, democratic and
plural Nigeria.
Therefore, it is rather simplistic to ascribe
the insurgency to the killing of Mohammed
Yusuf, the founder of the Boko Haram sect,
in 2009. The insurgency was a long time in
coming, with the Sharia movement of 1980s
and 1990s that swept through northern
Nigeria like a whirlwind as the immediate
precursor. Mohammed Yusuf was just one
out of many mainstream Muslim authorities who preached, and still preach, the
ideals upon which the Boko Haram sect was
founded. The Boko Haram insurgency is just
putting to practice what has been preached
over a long time.
Religion as a subjective interpretation
of faith is an opium whose formulation,
dissemination and consumption, much like
every other psychopathic substance, must
be regulated to prevent abuses resulting in
the kind of Boko Haram devastation staring
at us today.
Unfortunately, this has not been done
because modern-day empire builders [politi- cians] have found radical Islamic ideology
useful in their quest for power. In a plural
country like Nigeria, radical Islamic ideol- ogy is a useful election protectionist tool
in the hands of the predominantly Muslim
political elite of Northern Nigeria.
The unwillingness of Nigeria’s political
leadership to reconcile the faith and citizenship of millions of radical Muslims, imbed- ded in every strata of society, by evolving a
purposeful regulatory framework that aims
to rid Islamic theology of doctrinal embellishments of empire builders has ensured a
steady flow of willing recruits into the ranks
of the Boko Haram group.
The continuous watering of the seeds
of radicalisation by mainstream Muslim
authorities has contributed the most in
making the Boko Haram insurgency intrac- table 10 years on because, for every single
insurgent felled by bullets in the theatre of
war, there are tens of replacements.