The “Popular Discourses of Salafi Counter-Radicalism in Nigeria” Revisited: A response to Abdullahi Lamido’s Review of Alexander Thurston, Boko Haram

This publication opens with a review of Alexander Thurston's monograph, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement, by Abdullahi Lamido. In his review, Lamido criticises Thurston for highlighting the relationship between Boko Haram's founder Muhammad Yusuf (d. 2009) and the Salafi scholar Ja'far Mahmud Adam (d. 2007), and for failing to highlight the previous links between Yusuf and the Shia scholar Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, which in his opinion, were responsible for inspiring the "radicalism" of Boko Haram's founder. In a response to Lamido's review, Andrea Brigaglia discusses some documents from the mid-2000s that show how the mainstream Nigerian Salafi scholars who were engaged in public debates against Yusuf were also, at the same time, lecturing to their public in favour of Al-Qaeda's global Jihad. Brigaglia argues that this ambiguity (trying to stop a jihadi movement in Nigeria while preaching in favour of the global movement that had inspired it) had a fundamental role in the history of the intra-Salafi conflict that ensued in the country. Brigaglia also argues that the recent attempt to shift the blame onto the Shia shows the co-optation of the Nigerian Salafi constituencies in the political game of the War on Terror in its Saudi version. In the third piece, Musa Ibrahim discusses a recent international conference held in Kano, in which the above debate featured prominently. After summarising the various viewpoints expressed by the speakers at the conference, Ibrahim suggests that in order to get out of the current impasse, Muslims of all orientations in Nigeria need to embrace a more inclusive theology towards Muslims of different orientations, as well as towards fellow non-Muslim citizens.