Boko Haram, a Sunni Islamist sect, has targeted Nigeria's police, rival clerics, politicians, and public institutions with increasing violence since 2009. Some experts view the group as an armed revolt against government corruption, abusive security forces, and widening regional economic disparity in an already impoverished country. They argue that Abuja should do more to address the strife between the disaffected Muslim north and the Christian south.
But Boko Haram's increasingly violent campaign, including a suicide attack on a UN building in Abuja in 2011 and the murder of dozens of students in their sleep in 2013, as well as its ties to regional terror groups, led the U.S. Department of State to designate it a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" (FTO). The designation, which included the splinter group Ansaru, may spark a stronger international response that makes it harder for Boko Haram to address the north's alienation.
The Road to Radicalization
Mohammad Yusuf, a radical Islamist cleric, created Boko Haram in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno. The group aims to establish a fully Islamic state in Nigeria, including the implementation of criminal sharia courts across the country. Paul Lubeck, a University of California professor studying Muslim societies in Africa, says Yusuf was a trained salafist (a school of thought often associated with jihad), and was strongly influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah, a fourteenth-century legal scholar who preached Islamic fundamentalism and is considered a "major theorist" for radical groups in the Middle East.
Boko Haram colloquially translates into "Western education is sin," which experts say is a name assigned by the state. The sect calls itself Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati Wal-Jihad, or "people committed to the propagation of the prophet's teachings and jihad." Some analysts say the movement is an outgrowth of the Maitatsine riots of the 1980s and the religious and ethnic tensions that followed in the late 1990s. Many Nigerians believe Yusuf rejected all things Western, but Lubeck argues that Yusuf, who embraced technology, believed Western education should be "mediated through Islamic scholarship," such as rejecting the theory of evolution and Western-style banking.
Mohammad Yusuf, a radical Islamist cleric, created Boko Haram in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno. The group aims to establish a fully Islamic state in Nigeria, including the implementation of criminal sharia courts across the country.