Foreword by Muhammad Sani Umar

Summary

I am pleased to introduce this volume of richly documented and insightfully amazing case-studies of Islamic movements and their historical background, social origins, religious beliefs and practices, and their emergence in the economic and political context of Nigeria. The valuable contributions of the individual chapters and the volume as a whole are better appreciated in light of the older literature on Islamic movements in Nigeria, and the more recent literature on violent conflicts, security studies and inter-group relations among Nigeria’s ethno-religious communities, especially in the context of what one of the authors in this volume terms ‘fractious politics’, since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. In contrast to the disciplinary orientation in much of the literature on these themes, the present volume stands apart by its sustained and thorough engagement with the different disciplinary orientations, thereby enriching its contributions and enhancing the analytical bases for its policy recommendations.

Broadly, Islamic movements in Nigeria have been studied in waves that can be traced to the early colonial era, or even the travelogues of European explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Social scientists have often focused on the political and sociological dimensions of Islamic movements, without any sophisticated appreciations of the importance of the religious dimensions, often treated as an epiphenomenon that can be safely discounted. Similarly, humanities scholars, particularly historians and specialists of Islamic and Arabic studies, are only slightly better in their engagement with the religious dimensions. More than the social scientists, scholars of the humanities have been more attentive to the relevance of the longstanding traditions of Islamic movements dating back to the jihad of Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then going forward all the way to the Maitatsine uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of Boko Haram insurgency at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although laudable, some of the historical tracings have not captured discontinuities and novel developments in the longue durée of the evolution of Islamic movements in Nigeria.

Over the last two decades, inter-group relations among the numerous ethno-religious communities in Nigeria have become more and more characterized by violent conflicts.