The Nigerian lawyer and activist Hauwa Ibrahim, formerly a lecturer at HDS and a research associate of the School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP), spoke in New York recently on Mother’s Without Borders: Steering Youth Away from Violent Extremism. The text of her talk—abridged and edited for clarity—follows below.
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In 2014, the president of Nigeria invited me to come to that country because of the 219 girls that were kidnapped in their school by the extremist group Boko Haram. For six months, I experienced and saw terror. I saw despair. But amid everything, I saw hope. And the hope was the mothers.
In 2015, I was invited to Jordan by his Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal. I worked on issues of empowerment, but I also got to understand a little bit about the terrorist group ISIS. I had the opportunity to meet, both in Nigeria and in Amman, people that have either entered or left ISIS, and people that are preparing to go in. The mothers were able to change it.
The world is a different place. Youth (some of our children) are bored. They are hopeless. They are fighting about their identity. I did some work with French Algerians living in France. They have no voice. They want to explore. They want to be creative. The economy has not made it any better because there is no employment. And then we have some half-baked preachers that take advantage of the interpretation and translation of religious texts. A text does not speak. We speak to it. So, we have some religious leaders, and they interpret or translate things in a different way and push our children into it.
In the four countries where I have worked—Nigeria and Jordan, and a little bit in Kenya and Yemen—the biggest trend is social media. One of the biggest challenges right now in fighting violent extremism is not only the recruitment, but the information that children get. You see two young people sitting here on the table talking on the cell phone. That is what they do daily. I have two teens, 19 and 15, and I have to remove the phone once in a while. Social media is a big deal in these issues of violent extremism.
So, where do we come in as mothers? Nobody knows a child like his mother. My mother will look at me on Wednesday and tell me that on Friday I will have some fever. Some of us that have children, we feel the same. And if you don't have, maybe you have cousins or you have adopted somebody. There is that connection. Across borders we share the same fear. We share tears. We don't share a common language—English or Arabic or what have you—but we share a lot of things in common. It is this commonality that has pulled us together as we steer youth away from violent extremism.
We ask ourselves, “What have I done wrong as a mother that my child has joined violent extremism? What can I do differently?” Mothers have the key to solutions for some of these difficulties we face with our youth. For us to be able to use the key to unlock the door, however, we must be at the table.
When I was working to free the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, we had a lot of intelligence from the United States. You gave us drones. Israel gave us drones, as well as France and Britain and other military hardware as well. Do we fight ideology and succeed with some of these instruments of power? I think in as much as the hardware is required, we need the mothers at center stage, and to have a mother-to-mother and woman-to-woman alliance. It will become our biggest strength as we move on. We can share creative and innovative practice and strategies. I'll give you one example in Nigeria and one example in Jordan.
While we were handling the case of the girls that were kidnapped, the Nigerian government arrested some of the Boko Haram people and kept them in a prison in one of the towns in the northeast. After a very long conversation with our committee chairman, I convinced him to allow me to travel beyond the government-protected safe zone. I really wanted to get to the villages of the prisoners’ families. We took the files of the police and the Nigerian Secret Security Service that identified who they were and who their mothers were. We got to the villages and were able to identify the mothers. We wanted to bring them with us. They accepted and we went to the prison.
Now, the Boko Haram prisoners had been arrested and kept for more than two years by the time we visited with them. At their age—25, 27—you don't go and hold your mother in my culture, but when they saw their mothers, they ran. The mothers thought the children were dead. The children thought the mothers had forgotten about them. One of the sons was so excited to see his mother that he fell on her lap and they were both crying. And the mother just looked at him and said “What went wrong so bad?” And he started talking about how he got involved with Boko Haram. Those in the intelligence service—even after torture and beating—didn’t get the information that a simple statement by the mother was able to extract. At that moment, I sat back and I said to myself, “The power within. The power of one. How do we use it?” So, that is my project now. How do we get this power at the table? How do we slow down violent extremism from the influence of the mother?
While I was in Jordan, I went to a camp that contains over half a million people. It's managed by the Japanese, and the Americans built a massive hospital. We went in and a lot of the youth—maybe 60 percent of the people in the camp—are between the ages of 12 to 25, really the age for recruitment by extremists. They don't have jobs. They really have passion. They want to become somebody. They want to define their own world themselves, and the only instrument they have is their cellphone. So, through the online chat rooms, they can be easily recruited. So, what did their mothers do? They decided to identify the red flags. They see that the way their sons dress is changing. Their language is changing. These are some red flags. So, what did they do? They decided to put a positive peer group around their children. They didn't condemn them. They didn't judge them. This is the power of one. And we can do much more.
Truth is relative to our knowledge and our understanding of context. This idea of using religious texts in a misguided way to sway children away from us… we have the ability to be on top of these issues. Do not underestimate the power inside of us.
May our souls not fall silent. Let our talk of bequeathing a better future and a world with generation yet to come keep our spirit alive. We give. We give bountifully. Together, rolling over, may it come back to us the same way we give.