African Affairs, 114/457, 577-597 doi: lo.KM/afra&dvfrø © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved Advance Access Publication 12 August 2015 AUTOCRATIC LEGACIES AND STATE MANAGEMENT OF ISLAMIC ACTIVISM IN NIGER Sebastian Elischer* ABSTRACT In contrast to similar organizations in its neighbouring countries, Niger’s domestic Salafi associations have remained peaceful and apolitical. Drawing on historical institutionalist scholarship and on recent conceptualizations of the state as a religious actor, this article examines how the Nigerien state has tried to regulate religious practices since Seyni Kountché’s military coup in 1974. It argues that the institutional regulation of religious practices is one important variable that accounts for Niger’s deviant trajectory. During Niger’s autocratic period (1974-91), the government established the Association islamique du Niger (AIN) as the sole legal authority regulating access to Niger’s Friday prayer mosques. Committed to peaceful and apolit ical interpretations of the Koran, the AIN confined access to Niger’s reli gious sphere to local clerics and Sufi brotherhoods. After the breakdown of autocratic rule in 1991, the AIN served as a religious advisory body. Salafi associations could assemble freely but had to abide by certain criteria. Confronted with the prospect of Islamic violence in 2000, the Nigerien state intervened in Niger’s religious sphere in several ways. Among other initia tives, the government began to resurrect a more rigorous system of religious supervision in order to monitor religious practices on an ongoing basis. Increasingly in recent years, the sahel region has become the site of large-scale Salafi violence. Algeria experienced a long and deadly conflict between its state forces and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which later transformed into Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, a trans- Sahel jihadi group. 1 In Nigeria, the emergence of the Yan Izala movement provided the theological grounds for the spread of Boko Haram. 2 Most *Sebastian Elischer (sebastian.elischer@gmail.com) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Florida. He would like to thank the two reviewers and the editors of African Affairs for their invaluable input, as well as Matthijs Bogaards, Ann Wainscott, and Brandon Kenthammer for commenting on previous versions of the article. 1. Claire Heristchi, ‘The Islamist discourse of the FIS and the democratic experiment in Algeria’, Democratization 11,4 (2004), pp. 111-32. 2. Muhammad Sani Umar, ‘The popular discourses of Salafi radicalism and Salafi counter radicalism in Nigeria: A case study of Boko Haram’, Journal of Religion in Africa 42, 2 (2012), 577 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.eom/afraf/article-abstract/114/457/577/2195175 by University of Florida user on 07 December 2018