Er zijn meerdere islamitische gewapende groeperingen actief in Nigeria, ze worden allemaal Boko Haram genoemd door de media.
'Boko Haram' doesn't really mean 'Western education is a sin'It turns out the
Hausa language doesn't have a four-letter word that means "Western education." It isn't a mash-up or an acronym. What it has is a word that came to be applied to a century-old
British colonial education policy that many Hausa-speakers saw as an attempt, more-or-less, to
colonize their minds. Let's go back to the British colonialists in northern Nigeria. In their aggressive push for modern secular schooling – and the resistance from Muslims – lies the spark for Boko Haram's murderous rampages against "Western" education.
Newman explains that when Britain's colonial government began introducing its education system into Nigeria,
seeking to replace traditional Islamic education (including replacing the Arabic script traditionally used to write Hausa with a Roman-based script that they also quickly called "boko") , this was seen as a "fraudulent deception being imposed upon the Hausa by a
conquering European force."
Newman accepts (as can been in the passage above) that "boko" is reasonably associated with "Western education" in English translation today. But the actual resistance was to something being imposed by triumphant foreigners. I suspect that an imposition of a
Japanese or Chinese or Indian educational system would have been just as boko (in the sense of "bogus") to the Hausa elites of a century ago as the British imposition. And it would probably not go down well today.
What a little reading about the group's name reveals is that their desire is not to obliterate non-Islamic education all over the world. Just in their own backyards. While that does not make their behavior in Nigeria any less horrific, recognizing that this group is inwardly focused (like most Islamist militants throughout history) is useful to start trying to understand what the US, the rest of the "West," Nigeria, and anyone else should do about the situation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/(...)n-education-is-a-sin