Lindisfarne Analysis (June 2024)

It is now 10 years since the 276 mainly Christian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram jihadists from their school at Chibok in Borno State, Northern Nigeria. While some have been freed or killed – one was coerced into becoming a suicide bomber – it is estimated 82 are still missing, either killed or still in captivity.

160 more abducted on 24 May

At the end of May, 160 more people were abducted in Northern Nigeria’s Niger state by men on motorbikes. It was not a lone incident – in fact, there has been an epidemic of abductions in Nigeria’s North and Middle Belt. In the last 12 months alone there have been 634 abduction events in Nigeria (most in the North and Middle belt) and as far back as 2020, the International Committee of the Red Cross had registered nearly 23,000 such people as “missing”. Whilst not all of the victims are Christians, a great many are – particularly women and girls.

The significance of the Chibok kidnapping

What started this epidemic was the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls on the night of 14/15 April 2014. So, it’s really important to understand what happened then and why.

Abductions of Christians has long been a tactic used by jihadist groups – and was a particular feature of Jihadist targeting of Christians in Iraq which began in 2006. However, what set the abduction of the 2014 Chibok schoolgirls apart and made world headlines was the numbers abducted.

The justification was also significant. Abubakar Shekau leader of Boko Haram (or to give it its proper name Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad – meaning “The People Committed to the Prophet's Teachings for Propagation and Jihad") announced in a video:

Allah instructed me to sell them…I will carry put his instruction…slavery is allowed in my religion and I shall capture people and make them slaves.

Boko Haram had begun abductions almost exactly a year earlier and even once been quoted as saying it would treat those it took as “slaves”. But what this statement, after the Chibok abduction, did was to formally announce to the world that Boko Haram had re-implemented the provisions of shari’a (Islamic law) which allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims.

Reversing the abolition of slavery in the Islamic world

To put that in its context, throughout the twentieth century, Islamic countries had gradually renounced the legitimacy of slavery, generally being the last countries in the world to do so:

1923 Afghanistan

1928 Iran

1947 Bahrain

1952 Qatar

1962 Saudi Arabia

1962 Yemen

1970 Oman

1981 Mauritania

So, what Boko Haram did in its statement issued three weeks after the kidnapping the Chibok school girls was a complete reversal of the progressive abolition of slavery in the Islamic world which had been made during the twentieth century.

Islamic State

Boko Haram’s statement was followed by a number of other jihadist groups – particularly Islamic State, which later issued a slave price list for Christian women and girls. There had long been a problem with the abduction of Christian women and girls in countries such as Pakistan and Egypt – many of whom were subjected to rape, forced conversion to Islam and forced marriage. But what Boko Haram’s leader did was to formally claim that he had reinstituted the shari’a provisions allowing it.

Turning the clock back to the (pre1900) Sokoto Caliphate

In Nigeria, it was turning the clock back to the era before 1900 when the Sokoto Caliphate which encompassed parts of Northern Nigeria as well as neighbouring countries had been a major centre of the slave trade. Then it was estimated to have had at least 1 million slaves when the British annexed Northern Nigeria in 1900-03. Crucially, it had also engaged in raids down to Nigeria’s Middle Belt in order to capture and enslave non-Muslims.

In the report which the Lindisfarne Centre published last year on the Fulani attacks on Christians in Nigeria’s middle belt, we challenged the narrative repeatedly trumpeted by many western media that this is simply a conflict between nomadic herders who happen to be Muslim and settled farmers who happen to be Christians. Not only are the victims overwhelmingly Christian and the perpetrators overwhelmingly Muslim, but the Fulani militants who attack Christian villages are in many respects following the pattern of the slave raiding expeditions down to the Middle Belt, which were carried out only 4-5 generations ago by their forebears in the Sokoto Caliphate. 

At the time the teaching on jihad and slavery in the shari’a textbooks taught in Maliki madrassas in the region provided an Islamic legitimisation for the Fulani raids on the non-Muslim villages of the Middle Belt, even though the raids were probably primarily motivated by the prospect of booty.

Which brings us to the sudden epidemic of kidnapping which has beset Nigeria, particularly the North and Middle Belt since the Chibok kidnapping in 2014. Kidnapping is a crime in shari’a. But by declaring that shari’a allows enslavement, the leader Boko Haram effectively made abduction legitimate.

In our report the Lindisfarne Centre raised the question of whether Boko Haram was seeking to radicalise traditionalist Muslims in the region by inspiring them to engage in practices which previous generations had taken part in. The epidemic of abductions, which has followed the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls in 2014, suggests that strategy may have been at least partly successful.

Future risk

One the lesson that we need to take from this is that if this analysis is correct, then Christians, particularly Christian women and girls, are likely to be particularly vulnerable to such abductions and the reinstitution of slavery in other parts of the world. Those areas where they are likely to be particularly at risk in the future are those which have not only predominantly conservative Muslim populations, but also i) a history of Islamic slave trading within recent memory (3-5 generations) ii) radical Islamic governments or jihadist groups which are seeking to control territory in those areas. They include Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan and Zanzibar (Tanzania).

Ten years on from Chibok, the threat of abduction and enslavement for Christian women and girls is growing, not diminishing.

Please pray for the Chibok girls and thousands of others in Nigeria who have been abducted