An African Vortex: Islamism in Sub-Saharan Africa

The potential for the full application of Islamism in Nigeria has not gone unnoticed by global jihadis.  According to Dr. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “there is a great deal of favorable sentiment toward al-Qaeda in the north,” and it is believed that Hizballah already maintains training camps in the region.[37]  Recognizing this atmosphere, in a May 2003 tape Usama bin Laden named Nigeria as one of six states “most qualified…for liberation.”[38]

In what could be considered a sign of times to come, in December 2003 and January 2004, a group of some 200 militant Islamists calling themselves the “Taliban” waged a brief insurgency, intending to establish an independent Muslim state along Nigeria’s border with Niger Republic.  Only after several weeks of murder and conquest was the insurrection crushed by the Nigerian army.[39]  It has since been discovered that the Saudi funded charity Al-Muntada Al-Islami, which works primarily in Africa, may have provided tens of thousands of dollars to the rebels.[40]

Al-Muntada has, incidentally, been particularly active in promoting Wahhabi-style Islamism in Nigeria.  As explained by a Sufi of Kano state, “before al-Muntada came to Kano there had been little or no inter-religious conflict…Now…we are almost on the verge of civil war.”  Al-Muntada, he explains, pays for Nigerian clerics to be “brainwashed” in Saudi universities and imposed on Nigerian Muslims through its well-funded network of mosques and schools.[41]  Such is the nature of Islamist intervention in Nigeria.

Islamism is well-advanced in Nigeria, does not show signs of abating, and has the potential to engulf the country in full scale conflict.  Importantly, disagreements among the many Islamist groups are coming to be seen as less threatening than the rise in opposition to political Islam by non-Muslim and southern power groups.  The imperative of Muslim unity thus appears to be trumping doctrinal disputes, and today Islamism is more unified than at any other point in Nigerian history.  For its part, the central government has tacitly recognized its own weakness and inability to reign in the Islamist tide, and has espoused only limited criticisms of the actions of the northern states, further emboldening Islamist ambitions.  The Nigerian Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Wole Soyinka, has captured the mood best: “The roof is already burning over our head…the prelude to war, civil war.”

Kenya

Across the continent, Kenya has been experiencing Islamism in a manner not unlike Nigeria, but on a smaller scale.  Islam in Kenya claims three million adherents (roughly ten percent of the population) who reside primarily in the North Eastern province, adjacent to the Somali border, and in Coast province along the Indian Oceanseaboard.[42]  Despite the small number of Kenyan Muslims, however, Islamist influences have begun to push Kenyan society and politics in a disturbing direction.

Like much of the rest of Africa, Islam arrived along the eastern coast primarily through commercial exchanges.  Unlike in West Africa, however, the Horn’s geographic proximity to the Arabian peninsula assured that Islam would arrive earlier (perhaps by the 8^th Century), and allowed it to maintain closer ties with the heart of the Muslim world.  Still, the Islam that developed maintained a distinct nature, incorporating local religious practices and cultural (mostly Somali and Swahili) attributes, and moderate tendencies prevailed to the present age.