Kaduna - In classrooms facing a sandy courtyard in the northern
Nigerian city of Kaduna, Maska Road Islamic School teaches a creed
that condemns the violent ideology of groups like Boko Haram.
Not everyone has got its message. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known
as the "Pants Bomber", spent his youth in this school - and ended up
trying unsuccessfully to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009
with explosives hidden in his underwear.
But the school is steadfast in preaching tolerance to its pupils, and
the government is about to adopt this message in a new strategy for
containing Boko Haram, which has killed thousands in a five-year
campaign for an Islamic state.
"We teach them that what they (Boko Haram) are doing is a total
misunderstanding of the Islamic religion, that Prophet Mohammed was
compassionate, he even lived together with the non-Muslims in
Medina," said headmaster Sulaiman Saiki.
"We teach them tolerance," he told Reuters as girls in the next room
softly recited Koranic verses in Arabic melodies.
Abdulmutallab was radicalised in an al Qaeda camp in Yemen, but his
case shows that even youths given a relatively liberal Muslim education
can be seduced by radical Islam. This is something the new government
programme is aiming to combat.
Koranic schools like Maska Road will be a pillar of the strategy being
launched in September to counter Boko Haram's ideology. The aim is to
win over the "hearts and minds" of young Nigerians.
They will also challenge Boko Haram's claim that secular teaching is
"un-Islamic" - Boko Haram means "Western education is sinful" in
Hausa, the dominant language in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north.
Maska Road teaches only Koranic verses and other tenets of Muslim
faith, and encourages its 300 students to take classes such as science
and literature outside its walls.
"We want them to get a Western education and combine it with ...
religious learning," Saiki says. Classes are held between 4 and 6 p.m.,
after secular schools shut.
Fatah Abdul, who studies at Maska Road, scoffs at the idea of violence
in the name of Islam.
"Our religion doesn't entertain killing. Boko Haram is absolutely
different from what our religion advocates," she said. "And it's not
true what they say that we need an Islamic state. The leadership
doesn't have to be Islamic".
"DECEIVED"
Saiki was a neighbour of Abdulmutallab when the future Pants Bomber
was at school. He says Abdulmutallab didn't learn to hate the West
there but "was deceived afterwards".
Abdulmutallab, a loner from a well-to-do northern family, showed how
easily youths can be radicalised. Add poverty into the mix, as in
Nigeria's troubled northeastern Borno state, and it's not hard to see
how Boko Haram finds young recruits.
Boko Haram is suspected of being behind suicide bombings that killed
82 people in Kaduna last week, including one against a Muslim cleric
about to lead a public prayer.
Kaduna, the capital of the north in colonial times, is richer than
anywhere in the northeastern region where Boko Haram is based. But
it shares many of its problems such as high youth unemployment,
attested by the many children begging and hawking phone credit on its
rubbish-filled streets.
President Goodluck Jonathan's administration has been pilloried for its
apparent powerlessness to crush the rebels or protect civilians,
including more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in April and who remain
in captivity. But he has also faced censure for neglecting the
insurgency's underlying causes.
So when Jonathan's National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki
announced a new "soft approach to terrorism" in March, many
instantly dismissed it as lacking in substance.
But officials in the office of the NSA say imams in mosques and
traditional elders will be co-opted to preach tolerance, while measures
will be taken to ensure Koranic schools teach "correct" interpretations
of sacred texts.
The drive will also include educational programmes, especially increased
sports and music in northern schools, plus reform programmes for
convicted Boko Haram detainees.
"A lot them don't have much Islamic knowledge, so they tend to
believe what the mullahs say," Fatima Akilu, director of behavioural
analysis in the office of the NSA told Reuters. "We want to teach
what the Koran actually says in a language they understand."
A parallel economic programme, also funded by the NSA's budget, will
address the chronic poverty seen as a major driver of the insurgency.
It may be too late to bring back hundreds of youths already fighting
for Boko Haram, but the idea is to prevent more from joining.
Northern Nigeria has much lower levels of education than the south, a
legacy of British colonialism, which protected the caliphates of the
north from the activity of Christian missionaries who set up many
schools in the south.
"The aspects of education Boko Haram don't like are the ones that
allow you to think," Akilu said. "Keep people in the dark and you can
control them with a singular narrative."
Undoing this partly involves showing how "Western" ideas, such as
mathematics and some physics and astronomy, are rooted in mediaeval
Islamic thought, which was making strides while Christians in Europe
were busy burning witches.
"UN-ISLAMIC"
At the Sultan Bello mosque in Kaduna's busy downtown market area,
local imam Ahmed Gumi takes an unusual step to illustrate his
openness to the non-Islamic world: he invites four Reuters journalists
in to see, film and photograph his sermon.
Three are non-Muslim, including two Westerners. He introduces the
team to his congregation of about 350 packed into a main hall, and
after a chorus of "welcome" he offers a live interview about his views
on Boko Haram in front of the faithful.
"It's not right to call what those boys are doing Islamic," he later told
Reuters privately. "They hide behind Islam."
Gumi, one of northern Nigeria's most popular clerics, sees the idea of
an Islamic state dear to extremists as a throwback.
"They want to bring back the golden age of Islamic triumph in this
modern time." he says. "For a state to survive you need a strong
civilisation, education, money, lawyers, doctors. You don't create a
civilisation with AK-47s in the bush."
He knows his outspoken views carry a risk he'll be targeted by Boko
Haram. His mosque, a towering structure spread between four sand-
coloured turrets with turquoise-green domes, is guarded by scores of
unarmed volunteers checking cars and bags.
Boko Haram fighters have killed dozens of clerics. One of the targets
of the Kaduna bombs was a Sheikh Dahiru Bauchi, an imam whose
mystical Sufism is a far cry from the austere al Qaeda-style type of
Islam. Bauchi survived.
Though a government critic, Gumi approves of the soft approach, "but
it needs local Borno (leaders) more than people like us who are already
openly opposed to them".
"ROOT CAUSES"
Taking issue with Boko Haram's ideology will work only if the
government can draw disaffected youths away from the AK-47. The
NSA's economic programme aims to do this, starting with 2 billion naira
($12.3 million), but with a further 60 billion that can be made available
from other agencies for projects, said Soji Adelaja, NSA special
adviser on economic intelligence.
They include mobile medical trucks, cash for the orphans and widows
of Boko Haram's victims, and a programme employing 150,000 youths
to fix roads and rebuild police stations.
Parts of Nigeria that are completely besieged by the insurgents are
off-limits, but there are other vulnerable areas where the programme
can be rolled out, Adelaja says. "We are deploying in areas that are
safe, and where the community has some resilience against Boko
Haram."
The death of Boko Haram's founder Mohammed Yusuf in police
custody transformed what had been a clerical movement into an
armed rebellion in 2009. Akilu says Yusuf disliked "Western" science
which he saw as contradicting the Koran, especially evolutionary
theory, the fact that the world is round and the process of
evaporation, because "rain is a gift from God".
Getting schools to show how science and religion can co-exist, she
says, is essential to combating such ideas.
Down a dirt track with crater-like potholes on the outskirts of Kaduna
lies the iron-roofed Focus 1,2,3 International School. Twelve classrooms
packed with desks take 25 children each.
Secular education is between 7.30 a.m. and midday. After lunch,
Islamic schooling is between 1 p.m. and 5.30 p.m.
Muhammad Saleh, who runs the school, believes strongly in science,
although he has doubts about evolutionary theory - as do many
conservative Christians in the West.
Even so, his school teaches it. "I teach them evolution myself, and the
parents never complain," he told Reuters. "It's education. Once
children have an education they can decide for themselves what to
think.
