INTELLECTUAL JIHAD: The Manifesto Now Guiding Nigeria’s National Curriculum
Bola Tinubu just handed the schoolbooks of fifty million Nigerian children to the man who wrote Islamization of Knowledge — the playbook for replacing Western education with Islamic doctrine from nursery through university. The book is thirty pages long. It is still in print. And it says exactly what it sounds like it says.
BY MIKE ARNOLD
Bola Tinubu put a man in charge of the curriculum for fifty million Nigerian children who wrote a book calling Western education a “radical intellectual war” that must be “ousted” from Nigerian schools — nursery through university.
His name is Salisu Shehu. The book is Islamization of Knowledge: Conceptual Background, Vision and Tasks. It was published in 1998 by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, Nigeria office. It is thirty pages long. It is available online.
On December 6, 2024, Tinubu appointed Shehu to run NERDC — the federal agency that writes the curriculum for every Nigerian primary school, junior secondary school, senior secondary school, and teacher-training program in the country.
The announcement, issued by Tinubu’s spokesman Bayo Onanuga, called Shehu “a renowned academic in educational and human psychology.” The president, Onanuga said, “believed the appointees’ experience and track record will bring a new sense of commitment, progress, and positive outcomes to fulfil Nigerians’ expectations.”
The announcement did not mention the book.
“Boko Haram” — in English
Before we get to the book, stop and remember what the word “Boko Haram” actually means.
It is Hausa. Boko — loosely, Western or secular education. Haram — forbidden by Islam. Put together: Western education is forbidden. That is the group’s founding slogan. That is the ideological core every beheading and kidnapped schoolgirl traces back to.
So when the President of Nigeria appoints a man to run the national curriculum whose most important published work is a manifesto calling for the ouster of Western education from every Nigerian classroom, that is not a coincidence. That is not a quirk of résumé. That is Boko Haram’s founding premise — dressed up in a professor’s robe, handed an office in Abuja, and given access to the schoolbooks of every child in the country.
Same jihad. Different suit.
The book
This is not a spiritual reflection or a thoughtful case for religious values in the classroom — which is a position a person of any faith might reasonably hold.
It is a manifesto. It names an enemy, describes what must be done to the enemy, and specifies exactly where the program must be carried out. On the page. In sequence. With citations from the Qur’an as the mandate.
Here is the architecture of the book. In Shehu’s own words.
The enemy. Shehu opens by dividing the world into two “antithetical, incompatible” worldviews — the Islamic and the Western. Not different. Not in tension. Antithetical. The two, he writes, “can never exist harmoniously side by side.”
The charge. Muslims who have been educated in secular schools are, per Shehu, “culturally misoriented, unproductive and intellectually sterile.” He approvingly quotes another author calling them “delude-hybrids… almost totally uprooted from their cultural and moral traditions.” That’s not a description of bad students. That’s a description of the kind of Muslim his program is coming for.
The program. The project must be “a radical intellectual war to oust the hegemony of secular thoughts in our universities and institutions of learning, and bring once again the Islamic thoughts in all fields of endeavour.”
Read that sentence twice. Radical intellectual war. Oust the hegemony. Not coexist. Not balance. Oust.
The scope. If anyone reads that and thinks Shehu is talking about theology classes at an Islamic university, Shehu closes the door himself:
“Muslims must overhaul all the contents of all the branches of knowledge right from nursery schools up to the Universities. Muslim children and youth should never be subjected to alien and sometimes atheistic concepts in any of the levels of education.”
From nursery school. Every branch of knowledge. Every level. In his own words.
Math. Science. History. Geography. Civics. Literature. Every subject. Every classroom. Every child.
The mandate. Why every subject? Because, Shehu writes, knowledge is never neutral. It always carries an ideological payload. Right now the payload is Western. The payload must change. Every discipline must be reframed so its “paradigms, methodologies, and contents” conform to the Islamic worldview. He lists them: Medicine. Engineering. Psychology. Sociology. Chemistry. Physics. Biology.
The teachers. The program requires a new teaching force. Existing teachers must be “re-educated” in Islamic sciences. New teachers must be trained “from the primary schools through the Universities” to deliver the Islamized curriculum. A man cannot teach the Islamized biology lesson until he himself has been Islamized.
The schools. The school-community relationship must also be “Islamized.” Shehu is explicit: “Unless this is done, our schools cannot be better or Islamically different from the secular schools.” That is the goal on the page. Schools must become — his phrase — “Islamically different.”
The funding. The book closes by framing the whole program as intellectual Jihad. That is Shehu’s word. And he quotes Qur’an 8:60 as the resource mandate:
“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power… to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of God and your enemies.”
Then Shehu writes: “Since Islamization of knowledge is an intellectual Jihad, the necessity of (Infaq) generating resources towards it must be appreciated.”
The Qur’anic verse about striking terror into enemies, cited as the mandate to raise money for curriculum reform.
On the page. In print. Under his name. Published in 1998.
In 2024, Bola Tinubu made him head of the national curriculum.
The escape clause Shehu closes himself
A defender of the appointment might say: “That was 1998. People evolve. An academic paper is not a policy platform.”
Shehu does not leave us that option. He has spent the last twenty-six years reinforcing exactly what he wrote.
He served as National Coordinator of the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Nigeria — the organization that published the book. Deputy Secretary-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. Founding Vice-Chancellor of Al-Istiqamah University, an Islamic university — a post he held until the day Tinubu promoted him. In 2024, Muslim clerics turbaned him “Khadimul Qur’an” — Servant of the Qur’an — for his service to Islamic knowledge.
The 1998 book is not a youthful pamphlet he drifted from. It is his life’s work. He has spent a quarter-century building the institutional scaffolding to execute it.
Tinubu just handed him the biggest classroom in Africa.
Why a Christian child in Enugu should care
Here is the part the press release left out.
NERDC does not write curricula for Muslim children. It writes curricula for every Nigerian child. The Catholic girl in Enugu State. The Methodist boy in Cross River. The Anglican in Ogun. The Pentecostal in Rivers. The Igbo altar boy, the Yoruba choir girl, the Tiv farmer’s son, the Berom shepherd’s daughter. Every one of them opens their schoolbooks to lessons written, approved, and distributed by the agency Salisu Shehu now runs.
Shehu’s own book says those children should never be subjected to “alien and sometimes atheistic concepts” — which in his framework means Western, secular, or pluralistic content — at any level of their education.
Nigeria’s constitution guarantees religious freedom. Nigeria’s education system is, on paper, pluralistic. The country has been held together since 1960 on the thin promise that a Christian child in Owerri and a Muslim child in Kano get a reasonably similar education and can compete in the same country for the same jobs.
The man now running that system wrote a book arguing the whole thing has to be replaced.
Behind the paywall
NERDC under Shehu’s watch has already begun publishing new curriculum documents — a “New Revised Basic Education Curriculum,” new primary school curricula, new implementation guidelines.
The actual content is behind a paid membership wall on the NERDC portal. A Nigerian parent cannot read what their child is being taught without first paying the agency that wrote it.
More than 125,000 Christians slaughtered since 2009. A manifesto-writing Islamist in charge of the curriculum. And the curriculum content is locked behind a paywall.
I appreciate a good subscription service as much as the next guy. Not when it’s what my child learns in second grade.
The same game, just quieter
Boko Haram burns the schools. Shehu writes the curriculum. The first kills a thousand children to keep the books out of their hands. The second makes sure that the children who do reach a classroom are taught from books that advance the same cause.
The men with machetes and the men with doctorates are not opposites. They are two ends of the same rope.
A Muslim father in Kano who wants his son to become a doctor should be just as alarmed as a Christian mother in Owerri who wants her daughter to become an engineer. Both of those children need real math, real biology, real chemistry — not “Islamized” chemistry taught by a teacher who had to be “re-educated” before he was allowed near a classroom. That is not education. That is indoctrination wearing a graduation gown.
Nigerians have been sold the lie that this is a religious disagreement between two sides. It is not. It is a fight between a 220-year conquest project and every single person — Christian, Muslim, traditionalist, atheist, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Tiv, Berom, Ijaw, Edo — who wants their child to have a future.
Shehu’s book is the memo. Tinubu’s appointment is the order. The curriculum is the weapon.
What to do with this
Read the book yourself. It is thirty pages. It is free. Look up Islamization of Knowledge Salisu Shehu and you will find it. Do not take my word for any of this. Take his.
Then share it. Send this post to every Nigerian parent you know. Send it to every Nigerian teacher you know. Send it to every Nigerian journalist who has been reporting on “insecurity” without ever connecting the insecurity to the curriculum. Send it to every American church that has adopted a Nigerian mission field. Send it to every congressman whose staff takes meetings with Nigerian lobbyists.
When Shehu’s revised curriculum shows up in your child’s backpack, read every page. When something doesn’t sound right, photograph it and post it. Make the paywall useless. Drag the content into the light.
And when the Tinubu government tells you there is nothing to see here — show them Shehu’s book. He wrote it. He signed his name to it. He has spent twenty-six years living by it. They cannot un-publish it. They cannot pretend it does not exist.
The schoolbook is the battlefield now. That is where the next generation of Nigeria will be won or lost — not in the bush, not in the camps, not in the halls of the National Assembly. In a second-grader’s desk in Port Harcourt. In a seventh-grader’s workbook in Jos. In a twelfth-grader’s exam prep in Kano.
Boko Haram burns the schools. The President of Nigeria just hired their most credentialed ideologue to run the curriculum.
That is not insecurity. That is a takeover.
Every Nigerian parent now has one question to answer: are you going to let this man teach your children — or not?
Rise.
#EarthShaker.
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order (#1 Amazon Bestseller) and founder of Africa Arise International.