Political Language in Texts of Boko Haram

Abstract

The leaders of Boko Haram, the late Muhammad Yusuf, and Abubakar Shekau employed political rhetoric in their sermons and speeches in line with the tradition of leaders of Al-Qaeda and other forerunners of Jihadism. Applying the theory of semantic fields, this paper presents a lexical-semantic analysis of texts of Boko Haram and compares them with those of other Jihadists. The texts used are multiple transcripts from video messages of the leaders of Boko Haram, beginning with those of Muhammad Yusuf, even before the sect became violent, up to and including Abubakar Shekau’s speeches as of 2015. This investigation has discovered that politics is ingrained in the rhetoric of the sect’s leaders in spite of the fact that they claim to oppose Western democracy. Instead of using political rhetoric to struggle from political power, the sect uses political language to incite their followers against politicians, irrespective of their religious affiliation, and political leadership in Nigeria and in other parts of the world. This work recommends that Islamic religious leaders and teachers should counter the hate-filled political language of Boko Haram by providing the contextual and correct interpretation of scriptures used by the sect to control the minds of their followers.