“The Lapsed Abode of Unbelief”. The Takfīr Pendulum in Ǧihādī-Salafī Thought, Between the Caliphate and its West African Province

Abstract

This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes of jihadist mobilization. It argues that the continuous oscillations between more and less stringent interpretations of the same theological doctrine, similarly observable in the center and the periphery of the Caliphate, are the result of multiple discursive and strategic imperatives pulling the Ǧihādī-Salafī leadership towards contrasting directions. The “lapsed abode of unbelief” – a notion originally devised by a section of the Caliphate’s scholarly leadership in order to halt the oscillation of the takfīr pendulum – was unable to create an ideological consensus in the global Ǧihādī-Salafī community, showing the degree to which the latter has come to be enmeshed in a complex entanglement between its discursive and strategic needs.

The Boko Haram pluriverse

“…For example, scholars have detailed how Boko Haram’s violence is rooted in a history of warfare and predation inscribed in the region of the Lake Chad Basin (MacEachern, 2018; Seignobos, 2014). Others have shown how a relational perspective on security makes it possible to understand the double movement of oppositional yet complementary global paradigms – the War on Terror and Global Jihad – as integral parts of the same equation, in an approach that tries to overcome the static ‘local vs. global’ dispute (Brigaglia & Iocchi, 2017, 2020; Iocchi & Brigaglia, 2020).…”