When the rebels began to attack schools and universities, in February 2012,46 many citizens were upset with what they saw as unwarranted interference in their life. Local elites and many others who wanted their children to get ahead sent them to government schools, as this was a prerequisite for a career in the state administration and other modern sectors. Apart from this personal interest in us- ing the secular education system, they also believed that participation in the Western system of education was necessary for the welfare of the Muslim com- munity as a whole: “If you do not want Christian doctors to attend to your wife when she gives birth, you have to make sure that Muslims are enabled to study medicine.” Some Izala leaders blamed Boko Haram for spreading the misconcep- tion that Islam and modern sciences are incompatible.47 However, Yusuf and his successor Shekau were not anti-modernists like Maitatsine. They declared that Muslims should use science and technology developed in the West, and reject only the un-Islamic ideas mixed into it:
[T]he Prophet [Muhammad] said in his hadith concerning People of the Book, “if they bring to you anything that [is] agreeable in Qur’an, accept it; but if they bring anything that con- tradicts Islam, reject it; and if they bring anything that neither contradict nor support the Qur’an, it is your choice to accept or reject it.” … Western education is the body of knowledge that came to us through European colonialists, and included learning medicine, technology, Geography, Physics and so on. … They can all be used if they do not clash with the teachings of the Prophet. (Mohammed Yusuf, in Adamu 2010: 15, 16)48
In this respect Boko Haram did not differ from other Muslim organisations in the North. Izala clerics also maintained that Western education had been polluted by ungodly ideas and that the mixing of male and female students was immoral. Yet, as long as Muslims lacked the power to purge the school curricula, they grudgingly accepted secular education because it was indispensable to enhance their influence in the state apparatus. As a temporary measure, they could only supplement and partially correct the official syllabus by offering additional after- noon classes in Islamic studies. This pragmatic attitude of Izala appealed to Mus- lims who resented the immorality of the state but were forced to live on govern- ment jobs and contracts. It was less attractive, however, for the losers in modern- isation, and these included not just the products of almajiri education but also many of those who had spent some years in Western-type schools without gain- ing any significant qualification.49 To them, Western education might indeed
46
Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram.
47
Mohammed, Boko Haram, 41.
48
Shekau argued similarly: “We are not fighting Western education itself, what we are opposed to are the various un-Islamic things slotted into it” (in Zenn, Radical Ideologue, 14).
49
Prof. M. Modibbo, the executive general of the Universal Basic Education Commission, stated that “more than half of the teachers in some Northern states cannot read or write” (in (Anon.), “50% Illit- erate Northern Teachers”, Blueprint, 29 June 2012).
look harmful as it only benefited those who had decoupled themselves from the fate of the ordinary people: “western-style education … equips you for the mod- ern corrupt life of Nigerian politics and business”.50
The resentment towards Western education dates to early colonial times and has often been fuelled by Muslims elites, such as Sultan Ibrahim Dasuki, a mem- ber of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, who led the ummah until 1996. As a scion of a royal family, he had studied at Oxford, and his son majored in political science at Harvard. Yet he warned his subjects against acquiring alien, non-Islamic knowledge: “Western education undermines our culture.”51 Another Muslim in- tellectual declared: “Western education is useless, it is polluted, it is immoral! (…) what do you need it for? You need it to work in the government service, and there are no longer government jobs.”52 For university graduates, it is difficult to find government employment, yet there is intense competition for it because po- sitions in the civil service have become more lucrative since the transition to de- mocracy. At the end of the military regime, policemen, teachers, and administra- tive officers had a basic salary equivalent to ten, twenty, or thirty dollars a month (and even these meagre salaries were often not paid). Two years after the death of General Abacha in 1998, state employees earned ten times more. This rekin- dled interest in school and university degrees so that dozens of new universities were hastily erected all over Nigeria. The standards of learning, however, have continued to decrease, as students are mainly interested in attaining certificates by whatever means. Some lecturers with a long teaching experience told me that many of those who had passed through primary school in the 1960s and 1970s were better educated than today’s university graduates.53 Aliyu Tilde, a Fulani politician, wrote a provocative essay in which he claimed that the lack of genuine interest in what is taught at school is a major drawback for northern Muslims:
[W]e go to school only [to] obtain a certificate that will earn us a job without imbibing the principles and fundamentals that enabled the West to excel in such knowledge and technolo- gy … Our general contempt for knowledge is outstanding, making us to prefer ignorance as a companion. … we are culturally repulsive to any thing modern, from whatever direction it comes. Simply put, we are boko haram. Otherwise, what could explain our backwardness in every national endeavour, economic, social, political? Why do we have, for example, the lowest per capita income in the country, the lowest life expectancy, the lowest academic achievements ... highest poverty and highest maternal and infant mortality rates? (Tilde 2009)
50
Last, Pattern of Dissent, 10.
51
Godwin Ugwu, “Educational imbalance: The North and the rest”, The Guardian (Lagos, print edi- tion), 24 May 1994.
52
Sani Hassan Kontagora in M. Mumuni, “Western education is useless”, Tell (print edition), 9 July 2001, 53.
53
Prof. Ben Nwabueze, a former minister of education, spoke of an “incredible decline in educational standards” and “near-illiterate university graduates”. In: G. Oke, “The mistakes Rotimi Williams and I made about Nigeria’s constitution”. Vanguard, 21 March 2013.