Northern Nigeria's Militant Insurgency-Boko Haram

Political assassination is new neither in Nigeria nor in the history of Islam (nor indeed in Christian histories). But, in the large northern-Nigerian metropolis of Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s current campaign of assassination, both to intimidate systematically all opposition to it and to revenge itself on the authorities who sought to destroy it in 2009, is indeed new. I refer to the group as “Boko Haram” (or BH) because “Boko Haram”, though that is just its Hausa nickname, has now come to signify more than just a set of unconventional religious ideas. It is important to view the current campaign as both political and religious; though there is a religious dimension, it would be wrong to write off BH as religious ‘cranks’. Theirs is also an insurgency against the local Nigerian state which, in the eyes of BH, is secular (or at least not properly Muslim)...[continue reading]