| They did this in Egypt and it worked for a while to divert the jihadi impulse. Then ISIS erupted. |
[HumangleMedia] Different insurgent groups in Nigeria take Islamic texts out of their historical theological contexts to justify their acts of violence and bloodshed.In his small study at the entrance of his home in Kano, North West Nigeria, Tijjani Ismaila, the deputy imam of the Kwankwasiyya City Mosque, lays out a theological problem that has occupied generations of Islamic scholarship even before Boko Haram’s emergence in northeastern Nigeria. The question is simple yet intriguing: how should verses revealed in one historical era be used to judge situations in a different era that bears little resemblance to the one in which they were revealed?
The Islamic cleric emphasises the importance of this question, given the thousands who have died and the escalating armed violence in Nigeria, as extremists impose their interpretations of verses to justify violence whenever and wherever they desire.
“They take Qur’anic verses out of context,” he says. “They turn a verse revealed for an active battlefield in seventh-century Arabia into a permanent command even in times of peace. They also misapply a verse about combatant non-Muslims onto a fellow Muslim, because they redefine who is Muslim and who is not according to their own criteria.”
For more than a decade, violent extremist groups, most prominently Boko Haram, have manipulated Islamic texts to justify their terror campaigns, stripping theological principles of their historical or logical contexts. Boko Haram and other jihadist organisations in Nigeria rely on three theological theories. One is hakimiyya, which brands any government not run on its version of Sharia as illegitimate; another is jihad – interpreted as permanent war on whom they regard as nonbelievers – and takfir, a concept allowing the group to declare fellow Muslims disbelievers and legitimate targets.
Insurgent groups rely on these fundamental concepts to legitimise civilian massacres, abductions, and forced labour. The Kano-based Islamic scholar presents a counter-narrative that addresses the three concepts and critiques the classical scholarship that extremists rely on.
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