Political Islam, Boko Haram, and the Illusion of an Islamic State in Nigeria

Political Islam refers to the belief that Islam as a religion has a guiding political doctrine and a clearly stated injunctions about how state and society should be ordered. It involves the avowed commitment and dedication to the establishment of an Islamically ordered society based on the principles of the Islamic law called the Sharia. In a historical and analytical manner, this paper examines the emergence, activities, and agitations of the Boko Haram sect in Nigeria. It observes that rather than the establishment of an Islamic state, the Boko Haram sect harbors ethnic, social, and political grievances against the state that compel it to carry out insurgency and terrorist activities. It argues that despite its claimed desire to foist an Islamic State on Nigeria, its insurgent posture, terroristic inclinations, and wanton destruction of innocent life and property of both Muslims and Christians represent a total negation of the dictates of Islam as a religion and thus cannot achieve the Islamization of the country. It concludes that the state's fragility, incompetence, rampant social and economic exclusion of a majority of the people, inept political leadership, and wanton corruption, as well as the mismanagement of state resources by a coterie of individuals and the attendant consequences of poverty, and the unemployment and mass illiteracy in the Northern region of the country are actually the root causes of the quest for political Islam in Nigeria.