Exploring the nexus between Islamic education and violent conflict: Qur'anic schools and the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria

Connecting the field of conflict and education studies with scholarship on Islamic education, this paper explores the nexus between Islamic education and violent conflict, while providing urgently needed insights into the dynamics of Nigeria’s ‘Boko Haram’ insurgency, one of the world’s least understood conflicts. In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic militancy, existing studies on Islamic education and conflict have mostly asked whether such schools contribute to radicalization and militancy while showing limited interest in their students and teachers, and how they fare in situations of violent conflict. Drawing on 76 interviews and group conversations conducted in northeast Nigeria in 2021-24, this paper explores what role Qur’anic schools played for the conflict and how the conflict has affected them. We use the notion of a ‘violence continuum’ (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004) to understand recent acts of ‘direct’ violence through the prism of longer histories of structural and cultural/epistemic violence in northeast Nigeria. This helps us move away from simplistic victim/perpetrator dichotomies when reflecting on the place of Qur’anic students within the conflict. We draw on the notion of ‘dangerous discourses’ (Scheper-Hughes 2004) to explore why certain groups, including Qur’anic students, are prone to being framed as ‘dangerous’, and what dangers ensue from such framings. Finally, we draw on the idea that social and political processes ‘invisibilise’ certain forms of violence (Paulson & Tikly 2023), and argue that, from a decolonial perspective, conflict and education studies ought to ‘see’ and study Islamic schools in their own right.