The Next Jihad

Stop the Christian Genocide in Africa

Rev. Johnnie Moore,Rabbi Abraham Cooper

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780785241478
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Next Jihad drawsfrom the on-the-ground experience and personal testimonials of two of the world's leading advocates for religious freedom and human rights—one Jewish and one Christian—as they explain what's happening to Christians across Africa, why it matters, and what must be done now.

Although news of Christians being killed overseas hits major media outlets from time to time, the news quickly fades away while our fellow believers continue to suffer. Johnnie Moore, as he has done before, wants to awaken the church and American politicians to the daily horrors happening to Christians, focusing this time on Africa.

While the world has been fixated on jihadist threats in the Middle East, terrorists from Nigeria to Kenya have had free reign to massacre on a scale far beyond that of the terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Whole villages have been razed, mothers and children have been grotesquely killed, and an unabashed effort at ethnic cleansing has been embarked upon with unrelenting resolve. Their intention is to rid Africa of its Christians, either by forced conversion to Islam or by destruction and murder.

One

THE PERPETRATORS

We are not a cancer. . . . The disease is unbelief. . . . [E]veryone knows democracy is unbelief, and everyone knows the constitution is unbelief, and everyone knows that there are things Allah has forbidden in the Qur’an . . . [things] that are going on in western schools.

—ABUBAKAR SHEKAU

We never dwelled on it, but in the weeks leading up to our scheduled departure, we were shaken every time we learned of another brutal attack in Nigeria. The mostly unspoken question was, Why are we doing this? Every time we were able to put a name and face on even one unknown victim, we knew we had to go. But the scope of one attack that took place just days before our arrival shook us up. Such brazen, cold-blooded, calculated brutality—how to make sense of it all? We would soon learn that full answers and easy solutions would prove elusive.

The attack happened near the city of Auno in Borno State, not far from its capital, Maiduguri, after the travelers had been refused passage at a military checkpoint.¹

According to CNN, the military officers told them that they couldn’t enter the city after 4:00 p.m., so they were faced with two terrible options: turn back and drive all night through a dangerous area or sleep in their cars outside the gates of the city until the next morning.

They opted for the latter because it seemed safer, but that decision would prove fatal. Terrorist gunmen speeding past on motorcycles began spraying gunfire at the civilian cars. They eventually set nearly twenty vehicles on fire, burning alive the trapped victims. Those they didn’t kill they kidnapped. Among the innocents ruthlessly massacred was a beautiful nineteen-year-old student named Fatima Babagana. She was studying political science at the University of Maiduguri to pursue a childhood dream of becoming a journalist. Within earshot of a military checkpoint, she and her traveling companions were left in a terrorist’s fishbowl.²

The governor of Borno told the local media that the federal government’s soldiers responsible for guarding the checkpoint normally just abandon their positions after 5:00 p.m., leaving the entire area vulnerable to the terrorists.³ This was at least the sixth attack on Auno in less than a year.

One observer tweeted, How do you lock the city gate, leaving innocent citizens to sleep on the Highway in a conflict zone, without providing adequate protection for them? What kind of a Country is this?⁴

Welcome to Nigeria.

BOKO HARAM SEEKS A HOLY WAR

The group that committed the massacre in Auno is technically called Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad. It means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.”

The rest of the world calls them by a common local reference: Boko Haram. It brings together two words, one in the local Hausa language and the other in Arabic, and together they mean “Western education is forbidden.”⁵

The group was once an “isolated sect in Northern Nigeria [that] came to reach out to international jihadists in the al-Qaeda network [before] later switching their allegiance to [ISIS].”⁶ Their armed insurgency began in Northern Nigeria as early as 2009, but today their influence is multinational, stretching from northeastern Nigerian territories to the broader Lake Chad region, including northern Cameroon, western Chad, and Niger.⁷

Boko Haram became active long before taking up arms; the group formed in the early 1990s in Maiduguri, which was a “ramshackle city of just over a million people, draped along an ancient shoreline of Lake Chad called the Bama Ridge.”⁸

The name Boko Haram may initially seem strange for a terrorist organization, but it isn’t when you understand a bit more about the history of Nigeria—a history in which Islam came and conquered before eventually settling into a delicate but uneasy balance with outside influences and European colonial powers. This was accompanied by growing conflict within Muslim leadership.

Scott MacEachern provides helpful context:

The religious and political roots of Boko Haram extend much further back in time, however, to the coming of Islam to this part of Africa. People do not realize the long history of Islam and the African continent, especially between the Atlantic and Lake Chad in West Africa, and along the East African coast. . . . Muslims certainly lived . . . northeast of Lake Chad, by the early eleventh century . . . [and] rulers of Islamic states [in the region, then] made accommodations with the religions of their non-Muslim subjects. . . . By the seventeenth century, controversies concerning Islam began to bubble up across this part of the continent. Reformist [conservative] Muslim clerics criticized the reigning Muslim rulers for being both wicked in their governance and lax in their duties as Muslims and in their responsibility for converting their citizens to Islam. They replaced the earlier elite tolerance of non-Muslim practice with a purer, more rigorous and more inclusive form of Islam, one that encompassed the entire state within the dar al-Islam. . . . Muslim reformers put those critiques into action in a series of jihads.⁹

That West African expansion of Islam eventually led to the “Lake Chad Basin by the late eighteenth century, when a reformist Fulani cleric named Usman dan Fodio overthrew the Hausa rulers of Northern Nigeria . . . establishing the Sokoto Caliphate [which] lasted until the coming of European colonial powers a century later.”¹⁰

Much criticism is levied against the vices of colonialists. But a Yale scholar from Gambia, the late Lamin Sanneh—whom we dined with in Los Angeles not long before his sudden passing in early 2019—helps us see that “colonial rule introduced modern, global forces—political and economic—into the Muslim world.”¹¹ This resulted in a “judicious mix of policies . . . [that] enabled the Islamization of society rather than the Islamization of the state,” which Sanneh argues “undercut [the preceding years of] armed jihad.”¹²

Yet to solidify their control, the British rulers also cut a deal with the historic Islamic leaders and “promised the emirs [of Northern Nigeria] that there would be no interference in religious matters and interpreted this to mean that Islam would be upheld as the religion of any state whose ruler called himself a Muslim.” As a result, the British, as Sanneh has noted, “enabled Islamic law to gain greater influence.”¹³

Nigeria, then, has a long history, ancient and present, when it comes to the institution of Islamic law in various forms throughout its northern states. Some rejected and felt threatened by new values the nation adopted when it became a democracy, and in the 1990s some seized the moment to entrench Islamic law throughout the Muslim North.

Boko Haram emerged during this “period of extreme political and religious tension, associated with the expansion of Sharia by the governments of different northern states within the Federal Republic of Nigeria, from 1999 onward.”¹⁴ That time of tension was partly the product of the weakening of the federal system of government in Nigeria, which ceded more power to individual states—states that were happy to intermingle religious authority with government. Many of these states had also been the focus of increased missionary activity by Wahhabist Muslims from the Gulf.

As a result, governors in these majority Muslim states also found (and still find) political support in accommodating increasingly conservative Nigerian Muslims.¹⁵ Twelve of Nigeria’s northern states are now governed by Sharia law.¹⁶ While the 1999 revision of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s constitution didn’t expand Sharia law per se, it further enshrined Islam within Nigeria’s government so that the entire country feels as if it is effectually an Islamic state, even though only half of the nation is Muslim.

As one retired military officer first told us in secret during a visit, “The Constitution mentions Islam in some form many dozens of times, but despite this country being half Christian—and a kind of democracy—there isn’t a single reference, or inference, related to Christianity.”

Moreover, during the regime of current president Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, the National Security Council and virtually all security agencies are led almost exclusively by northern Muslims.

This aggressive Islamization of the Nigerian state apparatus and key institutions also fuels conspiracy theories throughout the country, especially among Christians that “depict Boko Haram as a front for other actors.” In actuality, Boko Haram’s leaders have “repeatedly rejected central symbols of Nigerian national identity [like] the constitution, the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem,”¹⁷ and in February 2020, they threatened President Buhari when he visited Maiduguri days after the terrorists had murdered those thirty innocent civilians in Auno.¹⁸

It is troubling but true that on repeated occasions the Nigerian government attempted to negotiate with Boko Haram,¹⁹ causing many inside and outside Nigeria to question why the government didn’t simply crush the violent insurgent movement. Moreover, a West Point publication in 2012 struggled to explain why the Nigerian government wasn’t doing more to deal with this radical insurgency, concluding that

the Nigerian government seems incapable of responding to Boko Haram, and through a series of mistakes has revealed what outside observers have long suspected: certain elements of the security forces and political leaders of Muslim-majority northern Nigeria are either complicit with Boko Haram’s operations, or they are taking a rather complacent view of its success.²⁰

Complicit or not, one thing is clear: the Nigerian government will never be sufficiently “Islamic” to satisfy Boko Haram unless it becomes an Islamic state. Such a development could spawn horrors worse than what the world witnessed in Iraq and in Syria in 2014.

In fact, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said as much even prior to the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. The occasion was a video message to Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan (a Christian), who had called them a “cancer” after they bombed a church.

Shekau replied, “We are not a cancer. . . . The disease is unbelief. . . . [E]veryone knows democracy is unbelief, and everyone knows the constitution is unbelief, and everyone knows that there are things Allah has forbidden in the Qur’an . . . [things] that are going on in western schools.”²¹

Along with the mounting Islamization of Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to wage an unrelenting war throughout the northeast of the country, razing villages, beheading “infidels,” kidnapping young girls, and bringing every type of hell imaginable on earth. As we will soon see, these tactics particularly target Nigeria’s vulnerable Christians. As Shekau brazenly declared in 2010, “We are declaring a holy war! We will fight the Christians, because everyone knows what they have done to the Muslims!”²²

Boko Haram’s brutality is increasingly outpaced by Fulani Muslim militants in other parts of Nigeria with a scorched earth methodology, even if the Fulanis do not fully share Boko Haram’s theology or ideology.

They aren’t alone either. Thousands of miles away, in East Africa, another group has similar sights set on Christian...