Salafism in Nigeria: the way to extremism or the best defence against Boko Haram?

Speaker: Dr Elodie Apard, Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Chair: Dr Vincent Hiribarren Dept of History, Africa Research Group, KCL.

For almost 40 years now, Salafism has occupied a prominent place in the Nigerian Islamic landscape, and always had a complex relationship with the political sphere. Its role in the rise of Boko Haram but also in the fight against the movement, needs to be looked at and discussed. Indeed, beyond the shaping of a conservative theological framework, the Salafi discourse provided one the very rare religious-based oppositions to the movement.

Dr Elodie Apard is a historian who studies 21^st-century political and religious dynamics in Niger and Nigeria. After writing a PhD on the transmission of the colonial State in Niger, she became a researcher at the French Institute for Research in Nigeria (IFRA) in 2012 and was based in Zaria, in the northern part of Nigeria. She has been director of IFRA since 2016 and has been based in Ibadan where she studies transnational movements - in particular religious circulations between Nigeria and Niger - and the ideological dimension of the Boko Haram phenomenon.