With everyone fixating on Ukraine right now it is easy to overlook the rest of the world. There are several violent spots around the globe right now (which is not unusual), but none more so than Nigeria:

Nigeria falls into ‘a state of war’ as Islamist insurgency rages

[…]

Boko Haram is believed to be responsible for killing at least 1,300 people in the past two months and more than 130 people in the past week. The radical sect claims ties to al-Qaida and has ambitions to impose sharia law on Nigeria’s 170 million people. In Boko Haram’s heartland, even the national military is outgunned in what is fast becoming a lesson to the world in how not to tackle an Islamist insurgency.

[…]

One of the militia’s leaders, Mohammed Yusuf, was able to exploit the frustration and disappointment and blend it with an Islamist agenda that rejected the failings of secular government to form Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.

In the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, where the sect had its headquarters, it was dubbed Boko Haram. Loosely translated from the Hausa language, this means “western education is forbidden”. Poverty, joblessness and despair at feeble and corrupt central governance made for fertile territory among disenchanted young men. Even climate change played a part: the drying of Lake Chad meant that fishing families were displaced and had to search for alternative livelihoods, not always successfully.

[…]

Like so many self-appointed rebels and revolutionaries, Yusuf was not poor. He was said to be well-educated and to drive a Mercedes. In an interview with the BBC, he set out the group’s anti-science philosophy: “Prominent Islamic preachers have seen and understood that the present western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam. Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain. Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We reject the theory of Darwinism.”

[…]

This is religious literalism at its most violent.

And, Yusuf’s assertion about the physical world are in accordance with OT writers’ claims too.

Violent religious atavism - is that what the world is coming to?