Mohammed Yusuf's Founding and Boko Haram's Turn to Insurgency

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Boko Haram is a Salafi-jihadist militant group founded in 2002 in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, by the preacher Mohammed Yusuf. It began as an Islamic center and school built around Yusuf's own teaching, and its popular name, roughly translated as "Western education is forbidden," reflects the group's founding rejection of secular schooling and the secular Nigerian state alike; Yusuf preached against what he held to be the corrupting influence of Western-style institutions and sought to replace Nigeria's secular government with a state governed strictly under sharia law.

Yusuf died in a 2009 police custody killing after his capture, following clashes between his followers and Nigerian security forces, a death that helped drive the group's escalation from a preaching movement centered on one man's teaching into a prolonged armed insurgency under his successor, Abubakar Shekau. In 2015 a pledge of allegiance to Islamic State split the movement in two: a loyalist faction went on to operate as the Islamic State West Africa Province, while a rump faction remained under Shekau's own command until his death in 2021, by which time the insurgency had spread well beyond its original base in Maiduguri.