Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria 9780226369174

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Muslims Talking Politics

Muslims Talking Politics Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria

BRANDON KENDHAMMER

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Brandon Kendhammmer is assistant professor of political science and the acting director of African Studies at Ohio University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36898-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36903-7 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36917-4 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226369174.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kendhammer, Brandon, author. Title: Muslims talking politics : framing Islam, democracy, and law in Northern Nigeria / Brandon Kendhammer. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041740| ISBN 9780226368986 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226369037 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226369174 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Nigeria, Northern—Religious aspects— Islam. | Islam and politics—Nigeria, Northern. | Islamic law—Nigeria, Northern. | Islamic renewal—Nigeria, Northern. Classification: LCC DT515.8 .K46 2016 | DDC 320.9669—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041740 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Kim And for all those who have perished in the fight against Boko Haram, may your countries once again know peace.

CONTENTS

Preface / ix ONE

T WO

/ Sharia Implementation and Democratic Discourse in Northern Nigeria / 1

/ What We Talk about When We Talk about Islam and Democracy / 24 THREE FOUR

/ Envisioning Sharia, Imagining the Past / 51

/ Democracy, Federalism, and the Sharia Question / 85 FIVE SIX

/ Sharia in a Time of Transition / 117

/ Framing Sharia and Democracy / 148

SEVEN EIGHT

/ Muslims Talking Politics / 180

/ All Sharia Is Local: Islamic Law and Democracy in Practice / 213 Appendix: Methodology / 235 Notes / 241 Bibliography / 263 Index / 285

P R E FAC E

This book is about how a group of Muslims in Nigeria talks and thinks about democracy in a time of religious revivalism. It is also about that revivalism itself and how, following Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999, popular demands for greater recognition of Islam and Islamic values in the public sphere came to center on the enactment of sharia (Islamic law) in criminal law. Its argument is threefold. First, in many Muslim-majority communities, the transition period that begins with the collapse of authoritarian rule also offers the opportunity for a broader reconsideration of the relationship between religion and state. Globally, one of the most important products of this process has been the emergence of a surprising number of popular movements for the preservation or expansion of Islamic law. Second, these demands are usually most successful when advanced not by Islamists bent on destroying the existing political order and establishing an “Islamic state” but by those who might reasonably be classed as “moderates”: members of non–religiously affiliated political parties and ordinary citizens who express strong, generalized support for democratic government over autocracy. And third, in northern Nigeria a large proportion of Muslim political elites and ordinary citizens alike see the revival of Islamic religious values and public morality not as contrary to but as complementary to democratic institutions and practices. What does this reconciliation look like as a matter of political reasoning? For politicians and other elites, it seems to be largely a matter of expediency—after all, democracy and religious revivalism are often both quite popular in the wake of violent, corrupt dictatorship, and support for both might serve to rebuild citizens’ trust in a tainted political class. For ordinary citizens, however, the story is more complex. In their hands, democratic and religious discourses both serve as vehicles for making sense of

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their country’s most pressing problems—corruption, insecurity, failing social services, and stagnant growth in economic opportunity—as moral failings that require a morally interventionist state to solve them. In the wake of military rule’s collapse in the late 1990s, both sharia and democracy came to be seen by many ordinary Nigerian Muslims as tools that might be used to force politicians and other public figures to live up to their obligations to the communities they govern. This third argument is also the most controversial. Indeed, given the hysterics that accompany nearly all discussion of sharia in the United States and Western Europe, suggesting that the story might be a bit more complicated than “all advocates of sharia are radicals and antidemocrats” is a provocative statement. Of course, the popular perception that sharia and democracy can coexist doesn’t necessarily make it so. For as long as I’ve followed religious affairs in Nigeria, I’ve found most Muslim supporters of sharia to be reasonable, thoughtful people motivated as much by the desire to improve the quality of life in their communities as by their own religious passions. To be clear, I don’t share their confidence that sharia is the answer to Nigeria’s problems, nor would I wish to live in a society governed by many of the policies they advocate. I’ve come to believe, however, that in a society as divided as Nigeria’s, the best hope for interreligious cooperation lies in acknowledging that its many faith communities have (at least, in some respects) fundamentally different visions of the state’s role in fostering public and individual morality. In a democracy, this cannot mean a return to the uncodified classical Islamic constitution or the unfettered local implementation of Islamic law. It can and should mean, however, that Muslims be free (or at least, as free as Christians and members of other religious communities) to pursue a measure of state recognition and support for their values in public policy, particularly when their broader goals—accountability, good governance, and development— might strengthen democratic institutions and practices over the long run. An optimism that such a balance could be struck—and that it was slowly emerging in Nigeria—was one of the most important things I brought back from my initial year of research for this book in 2007–8. But in late July 2009, a series of disturbing rumors began to trickle out of the formerly sleepy city of Maiduguri in Borno State. A small community of religious revivalists loosely connected to another group that had gained local notoriety a halfdecade earlier as the “Nigerian Taliban” had engaged in a series of clashes with local police and security officials, culminating in a massive outburst of violence that spanned three states and left perhaps a thousand dead. In both scale and gruesomeness—its most enduring image is Boko Haram’s leader,

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Mohammed Yusuf, naked from the waist up and flanked by security agents minutes before his illegal execution—this conflagration harkened back to other similar events in recent Nigerian history, all of which had begun with a small community of radicals rejecting the state’s authority and ended with brutal crackdowns. In the months following, uncertainty—about the group’s origins, its ideology, and its status following Yusuf’s assassination— proliferated, often at the expense of sound analysis of what had actually happened. But with few exceptions, nearly everyone I spoke with about it expressed the opinion that, just as it always had, the Nigerian government’s violent efforts would eventually succeed at eliminating the “threat.” In this, we were wrong. For all the immediacy of its violence, the long-term legacy of Boko Haram in Nigerian political and religious life remains uncertain. Some Nigerian Christians at home and in the diaspora have framed the conflict as a war against them, thereby earning the support of global conservative activists. Others have read into it a vast range of conspiracy theories, identifying at one time or another nearly all members of the country’s political establishment as shadowy “sponsors” of its activities. Still others have suggested, quite rightly in my estimation, that the conflict has imposed a huge cost on Muslim and Christian Nigerians alike and that it must be understood as a war on all Nigerians, with all equally likely to suffer the consequences if it cannot be won. The peaceful and fair presidential elections held in late March 2015, only six weeks after they had been delayed due to the Nigerian military’s insistence that it could not guarantee their security, are a testament to this latter interpretation. One only needs to juxtapose the peaceful voting in Maiduguri and in internally displaced peoples’ camps across Borno with the sporadic violence and fraud across the Niger Delta region, another sector of the country long victimized by both insurgents and the state agents sent to fight them, to disprove the idea that most Nigerian Muslims prefer radicalism and violence to security and stability. And without the widespread protests against President Goodluck Jonathan and his administration mobilized by civil society activists—including many Muslims—following the dramatic kidnapping of more than 270 girls from the town of Chibok in April 2014, it’s unlikely that the opposition could have gained the national traction necessary to overcome the considerable advantages of incumbency. For my part, I confess that I’m still unsure how to square my optimism of 2009 with the violence since. The simplest answer is that for all the attention they have drawn, Boko Haram hardly represents the beliefs and values of most Nigerian Muslims, who remain (as I will argue throughout) broadly

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supportive of both democracy and the idea of a multireligious Nigeria. Yet it’s also true that Boko Haram’s violence is part of a long-standing trend of escalating combativeness within parts of the Muslim community. Although Nigerian Christians often share an equal amount of the blame for fanning the flames of sectarian violence, this destructive legacy has helped make it “thinkable” for some Muslims to take up arms in the name of their faith and has contributed, along with many other factors, to the growing sense of distance between the lived experiences of young Nigerians in the north and south. While my own experiences as a researcher suggest that northern Nigeria is hardly a mass breeding ground for the “psychopaths of faith” that Wole Soyinka sees as the prime source of violence in today’s Nigeria,1 the realities of poverty, inequality, poor governance, and indeed, the ready availability of religious discourses justifying violence and the rejection of state authority make finding an effective response all that more difficult.

This book’s title owes a debt of influence to a pair of works focused on communities rather a long way from northern Nigeria. Although political conversations in Boston and Ann Arbor might seem to have little to do with attitudes toward democracy in Sokoto, my initial idea to approach the question of Islamic revivalism’s relationship with democracy in northern Nigeria by actually talking to ordinary people was directly shaped by my encounters with William Gamson’s Talking Politics and Kathy Cramer’s Talking about Politics, both of which masterfully demonstrate the importance of conversation as a window into the process of political reasoning. Without their insights, this project would have been impossible. My initial research was funded by a Fulbright IIE grant, part of the now sadly defunct “Islamic Civilizations” initiative. The Ohio University Political Science Department provided funding for a pair of trips back to Nigeria in 2012 and 2013, while director Steve Howard and the Ohio University African Studies program offered a wealth of personal and institutional connections in northern Nigeria. During more recent trips to Abuja and points north, Kole Shettima has been a gracious host and facilitator. In Sokoto, my wife and I were hosted by Dr. Malami Buba and his family, especially his younger brothers, Bello and Basiru, and his eldest brother, Magagi. Basiru and Malama Hadiza Koko, instructors at Sokoto College of Education, did excellent work as interview facilitators. At Usmanu Danfodiyo University, many members of the faculty, particularly Professor Mohammed Z. Umar, were encouraging and generous with their time and knowledge. The chair of the Department of Political Science, Dr.  Ibrahim

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Zagga, was a constant source of inspiration and information. His contribution also extended to the occasional use of his office, which provided a crucial (if unexpected) source of insight. The staff of the Waziri Junaidu History and Culture Bureau are the custodians of some of the most important historical records in West Africa. Most of their foreign visitors are concerned with their vast collection of jihadist papers from the nineteenth century, and I’m thankful for their efforts to switch gears and locate documents of a more recent vintage. My most important resource was the eighty-odd students who tolerated my unexpected intrusion into their curriculum as a lastminute replacement instructor for their Introduction to Comparative Politics course. I’m deeply grateful for their patience with their bature instructor and his odd notions about global politics. I’m also grateful to the various colleagues who invited me to share versions of this research or guided me toward important resources. Jaimie Bleck (Notre Dame), Sumit Ganguly (Indiana), Richard Joseph and Rebecca Shereikis (Northwestern), and Nasiru Abdulkadir Ahmad and Moses Aluaigba (Bayero University, Kano) assembled audiences that were willing to hear me out, offer useful advice and feedback, and correct my more outrageous errors and misconceptions. Michael Schatzberg, Alice Kang, Ed Friedman, Scott Straus, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, John Paden, and several anonymous reviewers for the press read and commented on portions of the manuscript, and the final version is better for it. So too did several reviewers for Comparative Politics, which published an early version of my argument as “The Sharia Controversy in Northern Nigeria and the Politics of Islamic Law in New and Uncertain Democracies” (43, no. 3), adapted here with permission. In Washington, DC, Rachel Warner, Jonah Victor, Kris Inman, and especially Matt Page helped connect me with a broad community of scholars and professionals interested in Nigeria and offered new and interesting opportunities to think about the real-world stakes of my academic arguments. Carmen McCain’s willingness to share her extensive knowledge of northern Nigeria saved me a great deal of time and effort, and her insights on Hausa and Muslim culture and politics (best expressed in her weekly columns for the Daily Trust) have often shaped my own. Philip Ostien, formerly of the University of Jos and justly regarded as the leading expert on the legal aspects of sharia implementation in Nigeria, was willing to field any and all narrow and esoteric inquiries, and his massive collection of sharia-related documents from all twelve states was essential. And there is surely a guaranteed spot in the heaven of his choosing for Peter Burtch, guardian of the Northwestern University Library’s collection of African newspapers and periodicals.

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My greatest thanks are reserved for my greatest supporters—my parents, Peggy and Tim, and my wife, Kim. My good fortune to travel, to pursue as much education as I could, and to write and teach about what I love is the product of my parents’ dedication to the goal that their children might have greater opportunities than they did. That I squandered it to become a college professor is hopefully not too much of a disappointment. Kim was with me at the very beginning, happily setting off for Nigeria four months after our wedding. She’s put up with the heat and the cold, the close quarters and the long separations, and made a great many sacrifices to help me see this through. In the dedication of one of his many fine books of political philosophy on the concepts of justice and charity, my former professor the late Patrick Riley said of his wife, Joan, “No one has ever been helped more than I, and in a sense I am only the person who has actually written down what should be viewed as a collaborative effort.” For all her patience, forbearance, and most of all, her willingness to listen, I offer the same sentiment.

ONE

Sharia Implementation and Democratic Discourse in Northern Nigeria

Obasanjo’s Challenge In August 2007, the recently “retired” first president of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, Olusegun Obasanjo, spoke at the convention of an evangelical Christian church in his home state of Ogun. The topic of his address was to be a discussion of the greatest challenge of his presidency and how he responded to it. Befitting both his audience and its venue—essentially, a tent revival—its cause was a supernatural one, as Obasanjo blamed “agents of darkness” for instigating what he called the defining crisis of his rule. The identity of the challenge was equally appropriate but less obvious.1 The Obasanjo administration faced many problems when it took power in May 1999, most of which remain unresolved. Scarred by sixteen years of military mismanagement, the economy needed rebuilding; except for a few bright spots (telecommunications and the entertainment industry, in particular), many sectors remain deeply dysfunctional. Tensions in the Delta region, driven by conflicts over environmental degradation and the distribution of largesse from oil revenues, spiraled out of control under Obasanjo’s stewardship. Despite an amnesty program for former militants that began in 2009, violence remains a part of daily life across the affected states. The president’s failure to craft institutions capable of rooting out corruption and upholding the rule of law was highlighted by the scandals that repeatedly drove his fellow Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) members from high office in shame. His own efforts to amend the constitution to extend his rule into a third term were thwarted in 2006, much to his public embarrassment. But on the day of his address, none of these earned top billing. The crisis Obasanjo identified began in September 1999, when Ahmed

2 / Chapter One

Sani Yerima, the newly elected governor of Zamfara State and member of the opposition All Peoples’ Party (APP), announced his intention to replace his state’s penal code and legal system with a strict and comprehensive form of sharia. Between 2000 and 2003, twelve states in northern Nigeria—that part of Nigeria with a Muslim-majority population and deep historical roots as an Islamic society—took steps to enact some form of Islamic law for their Muslim citizens.2 The sharia controversy drew hundreds of thousands into the street in protest and support, garnered international scorn from human rights organizations, and implicated the country in discussions of Islamic radicalism and its expanding influence in Sahelian Africa. Obasanjo, who famously proclaimed that the sharia issue would “fizzle out” of its own accord, proved unable to act decisively to diffuse the conflict and prevent escalating religious violence.3 Many of the key legal, constitutional, and social questions around Islamic law in Nigeria are still unsettled nearly two decades later, much like the future of the country’s democracy. Nigeria isn’t the first place that comes to mind when most Westerners think about Islamic law, and as a nation split nearly equally (if not exactly neatly) between Muslims and Christians, it’s hardly at the center of the Islamic world as we normally think of it.4 But with about 85 million Muslims (nearly the same size as the entire population of Egypt) out of a population of 170 million, a fifty-year history of democratic experiments, and a key strategic position in regional religious networks, Nigeria represents a crucial case for understanding the relationship between Islam and democracy. Religious identities play a central role in the lives of an overwhelming majority of Nigerians—one survey found that 91 percent of citizens (and 96 percent of Muslims) identify their religion as “very important” to them—and the politics of religion are situated firmly at the center of Nigerian public life.5 Nigeria is above all else a “multireligious” state, and almost all of its religious communities actively promote a greater role for religious values in the nation’s politics. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria depend on each other to find a durable solution for sectarian conflict, ideally one that provides for both vibrant public religion and competitive democracy.

The Puzzling Politics of Sharia in New Democracies More broadly, northern Nigeria’s sharia experiment is the largest example of the growing trend toward “sharia politics” in new and uncertain Muslim-majority democracies.6 In the West, sharia politics is usually as-

Sharia and Democratic Discourse in Northern Nigeria / 3

sociated with radical militants (in Afghanistan, Somalia, and most recently the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) willing to make use of horrific violence and destroy thousands of years of “un-Islamic” history to advance their cause, or with autocratic governments (Pakistan and Sudan in the 1980s, for example) seeking regime-preserving bargains with Islamist movements. Yet over the past twenty years, a wave of political openings across the Muslim world have generated new demands for the codification and application of Islamic law in the public and private lives of citizens. In countries as different as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan, campaigns to extend or defend sharia-inspired law and public policies have been a major feature in electoral politics, pursued not only by “classic” Islamist parties but also by religious actors working within otherwise secular or even multireligious electoral coalitions.7 From debates over family law reform and women’s rights legislation in Mali, Niger, and Palestine to local officials in Indonesia implementing sharia-style community ordinances and bylaws, making the law more Islamic is a goal many Muslims actively pursue via the ballot box. What should we make of these demands? From one perspective, the answer is obvious, and not particularly optimistic. Few honest observers were sad to see the likes of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi fall during the revolutions of 2011. Many, however, believed that the fate of the new regimes would be determined not by the secular protests of January and February but by the demonstrations of July, when Islamists occupied Tahrir Square with slogans like “the people want God’s law” and “the Quran is our constitution.”8 As public Islam came to the forefront, fears first expressed about Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front in the early 1990s—that Islamists’ commitment to electoral democracy goes no deeper than the desire to win power—returned with a vengeance. Similarly, Nigeria’s sharia activists were widely depicted by both local Christian activists and the international press as radical Islamists in democrats’ clothes, leading a march toward the “Talibanization” of their communities with a national Islamic state soon to follow.9 The meteoric rise of Boko Haram (roughly, “Westernization is forbidden”),10 a homegrown radical Islamist insurgency that rejects democracy and the authority of the Nigerian state and demands the “full” implementation of sharia nationwide by way of an extraordinary campaign of violence against Christians and Muslims, has further reinforced the notion that the sharia movement was merely the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. Globally, most efforts to understand the place of Islamic law in the modern world begin with the “compatibility question”: Is Islam, a religious tradition with a unique theological and historical experience dating

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back fourteen centuries to the Arabian Desert, compatible with democracy, a philosophy and set of institutions with origins in the political evolution of Western European society? If Islamists and social scientists have anything in common, it’s that they both often treat Islam and democracy as stable, separate, and ultimately competing visions of social life. But whether directed at theology or civilizational values, this approach delivers an inconclusive view of how Muslims actually think and feel about democracy. Indeed, despite being motivated by strong prior assumptions about the “theological pervasiveness” of Islam and the absence of a “distinction between the worldly and the divine” in Islamic culture,11 research in the political culture tradition has struggled to find empirical evidence that individual piety or overt commitments to Islamist ideology predict or even influence pro- or antidemocratic values. On the other side, a large body of research suggests that popular support for sharia is driven by a diverse range of motives, goals, and concerns. For one, as in American politics, where citizens have long expressed the desire for general budget reductions and tax cuts even as they prefer spending increases in specific policy realms, Muslims globally offer far more support for the generic proposition that governments should implement “only the laws of the sharia” than for any particular policies or proposals.12 For another, surveys that ask Muslims to define the characteristics of a shariainspired “government” find that most respondents cite issues like public goods provision, the elimination of corruption, and improved security far more often than the application of harsh physical punishments or restrictions on women’s appearance in public spaces—the practices associated with sharia in the global media.13 And scholars working around the world have found that the electoral advantage Islamist parties generally enjoy following a transition to multiparty competition owes less to popular religious fervor than to the “institutional and social landscapes” that give them initial advantages in organizational capacity and the opportunity to develop reputations as providers of social goods and services.14 Given the recent political successes of Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa offering visions of an “Islamic state” in which sharia is a central pillar, this is a point worth reinforcing. Moreover, many of the same citizens who wish to see sharia formally incorporated in their state’s laws and lawmaking process also express strong, even unequivocal, support for democratic forms of government. In a 2007 poll looking at four large Muslim-majority nations around the globe (Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan), the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that most of the Muslims surveyed favored

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both democratic rule (67 percent) and the “strict” application of sharia (71 percent). In 2010, a survey by Pew (again focused on a global sample of Muslim-majority states, both democratic and nondemocratic) found that many of the same Muslims who endorse corporal and even capital punishments drawn from the Islamic legal tradition also prefer democratic government to the alternative.15 In northern Nigeria too, support for democracy, at least in abstract terms, has hovered around 70 percent during the Fourth Republic era.16 Whatever else the rise of Islamist political ideologies might portend, the global Muslim community has largely concluded that state-sponsored sharia and democracy are compatible endeavors.

Sharia, Democracy, and the Politics of Public Reasoning In taking mass Muslim support for both sharia and democracy seriously, this book proposes to approach an otherwise well-worn topic (the relationship between Islam and democracy) from an unconventional perspective. Rather than arguing about whether or not particular Islamic values, doctrines, or institutions are compatible with liberal democracy, I ask how the relationship between Islam and democracy is constructed in practice—in the debates, conversations, and conflicts Nigerian Muslims engage in about sharia and democracy in societies where corruption, poor governance, and inequality are ever-present concerns. My argument builds on a growing body of research focused on the relationship between sharia institutions and politics at the local level, particularly in the context of courts and dispute resolution.17 It’s not, however, a study of particular institutions, legal questions, or movements, nor does it focus primarily on the thought of religious leaders and jurisprudents. Instead, it offers a broad account of how Muslims in northern Nigeria reason about Islam and democracy in public life, arriving at a local (and, as we’ll see, often incomplete) understanding of what “Muslim democracy” might look like. As Robert Hefner has suggested, even when they are couched in the language of reviving the religious practices of 1,400 years ago, conversations about the compatibility of Islamic law and democracy are “thoroughly contemporary,” in the sense that they take place in late modern societies defined by “pluralization, social fragmentation, and heightened debates over the common good.” They emerge, he argues, not out of some “backward-looking civilizational impulse  .  .  . but from Muslims’ engagement with the central political and ethical questions of our age,” including “what makes life really worth living?”18 And as Noah Feldman has argued, one of the things that makes both Islam and democracy such powerful

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ideas in these conversations is that they are fundamentally “mobile,” having spread throughout the world precisely because they are so susceptible to negotiation and synthesis with other worldviews.19 Of course, this isn’t always how their proponents see them. An increasingly large percentage of Muslims believe that there is a single, correct interpretation of sharia, an idea that flies directly in the face of more than a millennium of pluralistic legal jurisprudence.20 Meanwhile, advocates of liberal democracy often treat the possibility of other forms of democratic practice as illegitimate or naïve—fundamentally less than the original model.21 But as Frederic Schaffer argues in his remarkable study of the language of democracy, a diversity of meanings and opinions about exactly what democracy is and how such a vision might be given institutional form is the norm, even in longstanding democratic states. Indeed, Schaffer points out that even a cursory glance at everyday popular discourse in the United States reveals the idea of “democracy” being used to describe everything from the availability of gourmet ice cream at neighborhood food trucks (“street-corner democracy in action,” as in one Washington Post story he mentions) to the on-court action of a basketball game (“one man, one shot,” as a Los Angeles Times columnist he refers to described it).22 While it’s possible to dismiss these metaphorical appropriations as nothing more than loose talk, Schaffer argues for understanding them as evidence of the basic attributes Americans associate with democratic practice—in this case, “the leveling or discounting of difference” and “the availability of meaningful options.”23 So too has Islam given birth to an extraordinary diversity of practices, experiences, identities, and institutional forms, all of which serve as fodder for juxtaposing, extending, and reconciling it with other ideas. The global Islamic tradition has long been characterized by both the fact of pluralism (in expressions of belief, the production of religious knowledge, the theory and practice of jurisprudence) and an intense struggle to make sense of what that pluralism means for the community of the faithful. For a wide range of Muslim thinkers, democracy serves as a foil in these struggles, engaged with as a means of making sense of how the Islamic tradition might best preserve and protect the role of public religion in an increasingly pluralized world. Increasingly, these issues are debated within selfconsciously styled “Muslim publics,” drawn together by a breakdown in hierarchies of knowledge authority and the growing confidence with which many Muslims offer their own interpretations of Islamic identity, values, and practice.24 These publics and the “Muslim public spheres” they produce have little in common with the bourgeois (and desacralized) public spheres described by Jürgen Habermas,25 but they are important arenas in

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which claims about religious authority, authenticity, and the state’s role in religious life are contested by a diverse set of participants. My approach is to focus on these conversations and the places they happen as sites for what John Bowen calls “public reasoning” (“processes of reasoning about apparently incompatible ideas, towards workable arrangements to govern everyday social life”) about the theoretical and practical consequences of democratic government for Muslim citizens.26 In other words, how people talk and think about democracy (and sharia) plays a crucial role in determining how democracy (and sharia) is practiced, and in northern Nigeria, these conversations are often framed in terms of demands for and experiences with sharia (democracy). Although this might seem intuitive, it’s not often reflected in political science research on democratization, which generally relies on a thin definition of democracy—elections and procedures, with perhaps a cursory nod to the protection of civil liberties or rights—as its point of reference.27 While such definitions have advantages in facilitating cross-national comparisons or communicating with policy makers, they rarely reflect conversations on the ground in countries like Nigeria, where democracy remains a fundamentally contested concept. For many Nigerians (Muslims and Christians alike), the actual experience of “democracy” is better understood as “democrazy,” a bit of clever wordplay introduced to the Nigerian lexicon by the irrepressible Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose song “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” (1986) lampooned the failure of the Second Republic (1979–83) as the result of his country’s eagerness to adopt “Oyibo” (European) models of government that allowed elites to run roughshod over the interests of ordinary people. Nigerians have learned their skepticism of democracy the hard way, and as Ruth Marshall has documented in her study of Pentecostalism and politics in southern Nigeria, the “promise of democracy” is counterbalanced by an abiding doubt that any particular political system is better for helping ordinary people lead moral, prosperous, and fulfilling lives.28 There are also good reasons to be skeptical that the mere presence of public reasoning around the relationship between sharia and democracy will necessarily produce societies that are more democratic. As Lisa Wedeen argues in her study of public deliberation during communal qat (a mildly intoxicating leaf) chews in Yemen, the fact that members of a community are engaged in “identifiably democratic practice[s]” like deliberation about the quality of governance “does not necessarily imply the making of a democratic regime (however defined).” She notes that these limitations exist on two planes: first, democratic performances are rarely enough on

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their own to create the conditions for institutionalizing the electoral/procedural aspects of democracy, and second, there’s an important distinction between “democratic practices” (like open, freewheeling, critical debate) and “liberal values,” including toleration of difference.29 Such concerns aren’t limited to the Muslim world alone—in an influential study of informal political talk in the United States, Katherine Cramer found that everyday deliberative practices do as much to reinforce the social identities and biases of participants as to build broader democratic values.30 Ultimately, though, I side with Schaffer, who argues that the presence of multiple, local, and even (at least partially) illiberal democratic definitions and practices doesn’t mean “people are playing the democratic game badly” but rather that they are playing according to rules that have meaning for their specific circumstances.31 To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not arguing that all claims about what democracy “means” are equally valid or that the terrain of defining these issues must be ceded to Islamist movements. Where Muslim-majority societies fail to live up to their democratic rhetorics, it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize them by invoking the notions of liberal democracy and international human rights norms, even though we know that these languages are the product of particular cultural and political contexts. What matters more is that even seemingly unproblematic democratic concepts (competitive elections, for example, as Mariane Ferme’s careful ethnography of politics in Sierra Leone suggests) may have vastly different meanings across cultural and religious contexts.32 By focusing on what Nigerian Muslims think democracy is and how they imagine it relates to their religious values and identities, we can learn important lessons about the potential democratic future of Nigeria and nations like it.

Sharia and Democracy in Fourth Republic Nigeria: An Unfinished Story Sharia activists like Yerima—drawn mostly from among the first wave of democratically elected state governors and legislators rather than from Nigeria’s Islamist community—made many promises to the Muslim citizens who elected them. They guaranteed that sharia implementation would create a more pious society by ending the moral decay and corruption that ordinary Nigerians see as being at the heart of the country’s political and economic failures. They claimed it would create economic opportunities and better social services for northern Muslims, who suffer from greater poverty and a weaker educational system than in the south. They assured

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them it would address the region’s endemic lawlessness and insecurity. And perhaps most significantly, they argued that their sharia project not only was compatible with democracy but was itself a product of the country’s democratization. On the pages of northern newspapers, over the airwaves of Hausalanguage radio and local television, in mosques and religious gatherings, and in the neighborhoods and homes of many ordinary citizens, sharia implementation was discussed as a vehicle for promoting fair and just economic development and for protecting the religious and political rights of Muslims (men and women) and as a means of holding the political class accountable for their actions on behalf of the citizenry. Sharia proponents emphasized that they pursued their goals through the democratic process and with great care to respect the intent of the Nigerian constitution. Intentionally excluding the most radical Islamist voices, pro-sharia politicians took to the airwaves and the presses to argue that sharia was a “right” for Muslim citizens living within a religiously plural society. As Governor Abdulkadir Kure of Niger State argued: I am convinced that our Constitution guarantees the freedom of Religion . . . Consequently, it is only natural that once a State has . . . adopted a way of life, its choice should be respected subject to the condition that the choice does not trample on the rights of other people living within its borders. The acceptance of the choice . . . to be guided by the Shariah is an important ingredient of our Federal nature. Federalism enshrined in our constitution is not for our fancy. As a Federal State, our laws, institutions, and people must respect our cultural diversities, which are not just regional, ethnic, or tribal, but also extend to our religious beliefs and practices . . . Our return to democracy has far-reaching consequences. One of these is to give weight to our right to democratically choose the kind of society we wish to have. We do not need to uniformalize [sic] everything, particularly two disparate religions.33

Calling sharia a “dividend of democracy,” Kure claimed that without the democratic transition, the will of the people for a greater religious presence in public life couldn’t have been realized. Sharia proponents sought constitutional justifications and legal authority for their plans—authority that was begrudgingly acknowledged as having a basis in Nigerian constitutional law by the Obasanjo administration. Not surprisingly, Muslim responses were enthusiastic, with enormous crowds appearing at rallies across the north to welcome new states into the sharia fold.

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The most recognizable changes took place in the legal sphere, where states created sharia procedure codes and sharia criminal courts to try cases under the new laws. Equally substantive reforms, often borrowed from precedents set in other Muslim-majority nations, were adopted in the realm of public policy. Zamfara State banned women from riding motorcycle taxis and mandated “appropriate” Islamic dress for female students and public employees, and most states crafted ordinances to eliminate the sale of liquor and beer and close down suspected gambling houses and brothels. Other reforms sprang from local concerns. Several states prohibited praise singing, and many organized grants or small loans to help women transition from “prostitution” (often a euphemism for a range of socially stigmatized professions for women) or find husbands. Censorship boards sought to stamp out the “immoral” and “un-Islamic” aspects of popular artistic and cultural endeavors, resulting occasionally in the outright banning of musical performances. Sokoto State converted all its cinema houses into Islamic schools and mosques, while Kano State set up a governmental program called A Daidaita Sahu, part of a “directorate of social reorientation” tasked with reforming public morality. The responses from the south and the “Middle Belt,” an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous area with a long history of communal violence, were strongly negative. Promises that sharia would “not touch” nonMuslims did little to calm Christians’ fears for their legal and political status, a problem compounded by the fact that under Nigerian constitutional law, many were technically “nonindigenes”—a second-class citizenship category constitutionally accorded to most Nigerians living outside of their purported ethnic homeland—and without a formal voice in local politics, no matter how long they had resided there. They worried they would be forced into sharia courts or harassed by sharia police (hisbah) or that the regulations on dress, access to public transportation, and alcohol would all apply to them. It soon became apparent that there was reason for concern. Shortly after Yerima’s announcement, reports that Christian organizations could no longer obtain land for churches or place their advertisements on state-owned television and radio stations began trickling out of Zamfara. Greater still was the fear that general insecurity—often punctuated by runins with hisbah groups, conflicts in local markets, or even simple misunderstandings between neighbors—could turn to violence against Christian communities. The provocative claims by some Muslims that their states were “99 percent Muslim” (explicitly excluding non-Muslims as “immigrants” and nonindigenes), and therefore entitled to implement sharia in

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the name of democracy, offered a stark link between religious conflict and the politics of national citizenship. Observers inside and outside Nigeria feared (rightly, it turns out) that conflict over sharia would lead to widespread violence between Muslims and Christians. Between 2000 and 2005, riots stemming from protests for and against sharia killed thousands, and in 2002 and 2006, Muslim-led protests against perceived offences against the Prophet Mohammad turned into communal riots with hundreds of deaths. In the religiously divided Middle Belt states, these confrontations were compounded by a legacy of violence and discrimination dating back to the colonial era, when British administrators consciously placed non-Muslim communities and traditional leaders in positions of subservience to Muslim “subcolonial agents.”34 In Kaduna and Plateau States, these tensions combined with long-standing conflicts over which ethnic communities qualify for indigeneship and its implications for access to land and political power to form a volatile mix, resulting in the deaths and displacement of thousands.35 Since 2009, these dynamics have again been transformed by the emergence of Boko Haram and its extraordinary campaign of terror. As a number of local Nigerian scholars have carefully reconstructed, the group’s origins are inseparable from the politicking surrounding the sharia implementation controversy. Its early leader, a preacher and cleric named Mohammed Yusuf was involved, along with his followers, in the 2003 election victory of Borno State governor Ali Modu Sheriff, who campaigned vigorously on the promise of finally extending sharia implementation to that state, the last to officially enact it. But despite the promotion of one of the Yusuf’s wealthy associates to the post of state commissioner of religious affairs, his group soon fell out with the Sheriff administration over its seeming lack of commitment to the sharia enterprise. In this, the “Yusufiyya” (the name given colloquially to Yufuf’s followers) stood in for the sentiments of many northern Muslims, who had grown increasingly suspicious as the months and years wore on that the political enthusiasm for sharia had been little more than a ploy for temporarily buying their support. Slowly but seemingly inexorably, the Yusufiyya grew increasingly isolated from its allies in the Islamist community as it came into greater conflict with Sheriff and other regional powerbrokers, facing down continual harassment by security services with even more strident accusations of political and spiritual corruption in government. Yusuf’s assassination while in police custody in July 2009 launched a new era of violence, culminating in the insurgency that would eventually shake the Nigerian state to its very core.36

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Although the group had already tallied a staggering body count (perhaps as many as 9,000) by the spring of 2014, Boko Haram vaulted to international prominence that April with the kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in remote northeastern Borno State.37 Soon after, a “viral” social media campaign centered on the “Chibok girls” (originally organized in Nigeria but quickly co-opted by global activists) drew brief but massive attention, introducing the conflict to many Western audiences primarily in terms of global sex trafficking and attacks on girls’ rights to education. Concern among policy makers in Western capitals, however, focused on regional security issues, driven by a growing fear (and fed by the taunting pronouncements of the group’s nominal leader, Abubakar Shekau) that Boko Haram might become the West African foothold of a resurgent al-Qaeda or an outpost of the “Islamic State.” Domestically, the Chibok kidnappings politicized the conflict, making it perhaps the most important issue in the 2015 national elections and a significant source of public animus. Many Nigerian Muslims interpreted Boko Haram’s rise in terms of the region’s poverty, lack of educational opportunity, and economic neglect—notably, the same factors that had driven the sharia demands of the early 2000s—and saw the anemic national response (militarily and in humanitarian terms) as a sign of their region’s marginalization. But for many Christians, the insurgency was a proxy for the longsimmering radicalism of their Muslim neighbors, connecting the dots between the north’s political domination of the federation in the 1960s and 1970s, the sharia implementation controversy, and the current violence together into a picture of their own fears. Within the PDP-led administration of President Goodluck Jonathan (a Christian from the Delta-region state of Bayelsa), the kidnappings and subsequent public outcry were perceived as an attempt to discredit or undermine the authority of nonnortherners in government, with some presidential advisors going so far as to suggest publicly that the abductions might be an elaborate fabrication by his critics.38 No less a figure than First Lady Patience Jonathan reportedly accused female protesters of being Boko Haram members themselves, ominously threatening that “should anything happen to them [protest leaders] during protests, they should blame themselves.”39 This strategy backfired dramatically, as Jonathan’s reelection campaign was defeated in March 2015 by challenger Muhammadu Buhari, a devout Muslim (and public supporter of sharia implementation during the 2000s) whose experience as a former military head of state and campaign focus on crafting a more muscular response to the Boko Haram menace delivered a convincing victory. Yet

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in many circles, questions and fears about the link between Boko Haram’s ostensible “pro-sharia” violence and the broader demands of many Nigerian Muslims that sharia be given a place in public life and law remain. Although the insurgents attract precious little sympathy from the vast majority of ordinary Muslims, the conflict has redirected national attention away from finding viable strategies for accommodating Christian and Muslim religious values within Nigerian democracy and toward increasingly strident calls to assign blame along familiar ethno-religious lines.

Framing Islam and Democracy: The Structure of the Argument As Gudrun Kramer argues, it’s “not possible to talk about Islam and democracy in general, but only about Muslims living and theorizing about specific historical circumstances.”40 In new and uncertain Muslim democracies, debates over the prospect of Islamic law are exactly the “specific circumstances” through which Muslims converse, think, and reason about the relationship between Islam and democracy. Sharia debates are spaces in which political and religious activists bring the “language of Muslim politics” (the set of religious texts, symbols, and experiences that Muslims have in common) to bear on the question of how democracy might aid or impede the pursuit of the Islamic common good.41 By describing democracy in terms of Islamic experiences and by talking about Islam in the context of democratic politics, participants offer a vocabulary for making political claims in Islamic terms. In this sense, what Muslims have in common is a language (a “discursive tradition,” to use Talal Asad’s term) with all its potential and indeterminacy, not a fixed set of meanings and interpretations.42 Although generations of scholars and policy makers have regarded Islam as a belief system possessed of a “tight, logically connected, integrated network of internally consistent beliefs and values,” it’s clearer now more than ever that this simply isn’t the case.43 Mass education and the rise of new national and transnational media sources have destabilized patterns of religious authority and provided new voices with opportunities to participate in making and defining religious knowledge.44 The struggle to claim the right to “speak for Islam”—to offer definitive interpretations; define correct practice; and include or exclude particular historical remembrances, symbols, and even members from the religious community—is a key part of any story about Islam and democracy.

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Muslim Public Spheres as Spaces of Public Reasoning One of this book’s central arguments is that the development of public religious discourses (Kramer’s “specific historical experiences”) matters far more than abstract theology or doctrine in influencing how ordinary Muslims think about and evaluate democracy. Chapter 2 lays out an approach to the “relationship” between Islam and democracy that takes seriously the complex ways in which Muslim communities imagine democracy. The chapter explores how religious revivalism and the Islamic legal tradition fit into public debates about the meaning and suitability of democracy for Muslims and how specific historical circumstances—most notably, the colonial experience—have shaped the emergence of Muslim “public spheres” of debate. It also introduces the “sharia paradox” in contemporary Islamism—the fact that growing public engagement with and participation in collectively interpreting the Islamic tradition have actually reduced popular belief in its pluralism and malleability, tipping the classical balance between popular “expectation[s] . . . that the state should uphold Islamic principles in fulfilling its obligations” and recognition of the “inherently political and secular nature of the state” strongly toward state authority.45 Most of today’s sharia implementation movements have taken on a distinctly statist character, one that, as Wael Hallaq has forcefully argued, represents both a dramatic departure from the classical model that most activists claim to be upholding and a key source of Islamism’s “massive political and legal failure” of governance.46 In northern Nigeria, public reasoning about the relationship between Islam and state relies heavily on the region’s legacy of sharia, which serves as both a focal point for imagining the role of Islamic values and institutions in contemporary social policy and a major source of contention. At the center is the Sokoto Caliphate, the nineteenth-century empire founded by Islamic reformer Usman dan Fodio, whose religious and political writings remain a key point of reference for Nigerian Muslims seeking to create an Islamic good society. This past is both tangible and yet distant, filtered through the lens of the colonial experience and its massive, transformative impact on Islamic legal practices. As a result, it’s often both endowed with the symbolic fixity of “tradition” and subject to dramatic reinterpretation. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of a Muslim public sphere in northern Nigeria, focusing on the centrality of sharia and the Islamic legal tradition in popular religious discourse. Although the rise of Islamic revivalism that culminated in the Sokoto Caliphate’s founding certainly played a key role

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in developing a local language of Muslim politics, the catalyzing event was colonial rule, which has had a profound (and often misunderstood) impact on religious identities, the production of religious knowledge, and the nature of religion/state relations. Most importantly, British colonial rule emphasized the standardization of Muslim “customary law” and its direct management by state authorities. The shift toward sharia statism empowered a generation of Muslim political elites to position “Islamic law” as a tool for consolidating their power during the turn toward electoral competition and independence in the 1950s and 1960s, even as it also inspired critics who saw these efforts as autocratic and un-Islamic. Although today’s sharia advocates consciously connect their efforts with Sokoto’s legacy, their goals and strategies reflect the tensions between embracing the state’s role in “implementing” sharia and an abiding distrust of state actors’ motives. Chapter 4 follows these changes into contemporary politics, focusing on the rise of popular demands for the establishment of state-sponsored sharia alongside the country’s failed (but influential) efforts to craft new democratic institutions in the wake of the 1967–70 Nigerian Civil War. Although the 1970s and 1980s were an important time globally for the rise of transnational Islamist discourse, the emergence of sharia implementation as a salient political goal in northern Nigeria was most directly tied to a shift in the Nigerian political incentive structure, a product of the efforts of Nigeria’s postwar constitutional framers to address problems of ethnic conflict and feelings of communal marginalization. By empowering new forms of claim making around “balance” and “fairness” in access to state resources, their efforts encouraged ethnic and religious communities to organize along interest group lines, teaching them to speak the language of Nigerian federalism and assert distributional “rights” to resources and recognition from the national center. Beginning with the 1977–78 Constituent Assembly crisis, which started as a procedural conflict over the creation of a new federal-level sharia appeals court and ended as an existential debate over the role of Islam in national public life, Muslim activists discovered the utility of framing demands for the recognition for Islamic values in public life as political entitlements to a Muslim community deserving of greater access to the rewards (symbolic and tangible) of Nigeria’s petro-economy. Chapter 5 provides a comprehensive overview of the sharia implementation controversy. Beginning with Yerima’s unexpected announcement, it traces the political, legal, and rhetorical strategies adopted by the twelve “sharia states,” as well as chronicling the national controversies surround-

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ing the constitutionality and human rights implications of the sharia project. It also explores the various ways in which, despite the claims of historical continuity offered by its implementers, this sharia project represented something fundamentally new in northern Nigerian Islam—a statesponsored and -administered “system” of Islamic governance that rarely lived up to popular expectations. “Framing” the Relationship between Sharia and Democracy It’s not a coincidence that the emergence of a new wave of popular demand for the “restoration” of sharia across northern Nigeria coincided with the country’s first attempt at civilian, democratic government in nearly a generation. Just as religious institutions, symbols, and experiences all shape popular ideas about democracy, so too can democratic openings provide new opportunities to revisit questions about the relationship between faith and state. The second half of the book considers how the space created by both the long-standing development of Muslim public spheres and the recent trend toward democratic transitions have generated new opportunities for public reasoning about the relationship between Islam and democracy. What did these debates look like? And what can we learn from them about how Muslim communities create the relationship between Islam and democracy in practice, within a set of specific political circumstances? Within any public debate, some voices are inevitably louder than others, and some messages more likely to resonate with their intended audiences. Scholars working in the United States have long emphasized the role of elite discourse leaders—the politicians, bureaucrats, religious and traditional leaders, journalists, public intellectuals, and activists on whom citizens “depend, directly or indirectly, for information about the world”47—and the mass media in “framing” the relationship between personal/collective values and public opinion. The idea of “framing,” borrowed from American political science research on how private attitudes are shaped by public discourse, emphasizes that citizens entering into the public sphere seek out ready-made, understandable frameworks through which to interpret new, complicated information on unfamiliar political questions. “Frames” function as shortcuts (what William Gamson calls “implicit organizing ideas”) between cultural/ religious values and political issues, providing a means of identifying political problems and their causes, of assigning moral blame, and of arriving at solutions.48 Frames don’t necessarily coincide with specific policy

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directives, nor are they merely the Machiavellian creations of a few powerful opinion makers. They may be constructed and intentionally sponsored by elite discourse leaders, but their success depends on an ability to “resonate”—to appeal to cultural narratives, themes, and values that are widely trafficked in and contain substantial, if ambiguous, meaning. Frames succeed because they come to be understood as commonsensical interpretations that fit in with broader cultural themes and narratives of how the world should be ordered. During the national sharia debate in Nigeria, thousands of newspaper editorials, cartoons, stories, and pamphlets were published, thousands of hours of radio and television reporting were broadcast, and countless public conversations took place. To examine how the relationship between Islam and democracy was framed in popular debate around the sharia issue, I collected a sample of more than one thousand newspaper articles, features, editorials, and letters to the editor on published between 1999 and 2004—the height of the sharia controversy—directed toward a Muslim audience. I supplemented this with a wide range of other locally produced media (TV, radio, and other publications) as well as a series of interviews with local opinion leaders (journalists in state-run and private media organizations, Islamic educators, sharia judges, and intellectuals). (More detail about the media sample and the analysis appears in chapter 6 and the appendix.) Together, what emerges is a fascinating picture of how sharia implementation emerged in the early days of the Fourth Republic and how leading sharia advocates imagined the relationship between Islam and democracy in Nigeria. Despite the sharia controversy’s reputation as a profoundly antidemocratic effort, most debates around the sharia issue within elite Muslim discourse framed the introduction of sharia policies as broadly compatible with democratic institutions and practices. Pro-sharia politicians and community leaders crafted a handful of influential frames that portrayed sharia as an issue of human and constitutional rights, as a source of economic development and social justice, and as a means of holding elites accountable for their actions. In other words, they promoted sharia implementation not in terms of an Islamic state governing solely from sharia but by emphasizing redistributive economic reforms and political accountability and presenting what most Nigerians saw as their nation’s most pressing problems (corruption, inequality, poor governance) as moral concerns best addressed by the state’s enforcement of ethical conduct. These frames portrayed sharia as both a “right” for Muslims living in a multireligious society

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defined by Christian symbols in public life and a top-down, paternalistic effort to remake Nigerian society by inculcating a new set of public values. How Muslim Citizens Respond to Elite Frames As Michael Peletz argues, most studies of political Islam represent the “relationship” between Islam and democracy through the lens of activists and movement politics—Islamist political parties, social movements, and the political theologies and philosophies of Muslim intellectuals. Islamist parties and movements certainly play a leading role in defining the religious terms of political debate across the Muslim world, and understanding their organizational strategies and religious doctrines adds a great deal to our knowledge of how Islamic activism shapes political outcomes. But what often results is the impression that “the entire Muslim community . . . is either centrally involved in the [Islamic] resurgence or at least squarely behind it.” Such studies tell us little about how the people whom Peletz calls “ordinary Muslims”—the “silent majority” who are not active supporters or participants in Islamic revivalist groups—think about the relationship between Islam and democracy.49 To access a portion of these everyday conversations about Islam, sharia, and democracy, I conducted a series of group interviews in Sokoto, the capital city of Sokoto State in northwestern Nigeria, in 2008. Sokoto is a religious center for Nigerian Islam and the historic seat of the Sokoto Caliphate. Although specific percentages are difficult to find, the vast majority of Sokoto’s five hundred thousand residents are Muslim. Like most northern Nigerian cities, it has also been profoundly shaped by the Islamic revival movements that have since the 1970s transformed how Muslims dress, interact in public, and participate in community life, and it was not surprising that Sokoto State was one of the first to follow Zamfara’s lead with sharia legislation in 2000. The “birnin Shehu” (“Shehu’s town,” an honorific for Usman dan Fodio’s capital) has experienced the full range of sharia implementation efforts since 1999, with varying levels of satisfaction. Why group interviews? Exploring how people reason out the implications of their values for their political surroundings is a task best undertaken with direct data. Only by hearing what people actually have to say can we evaluate the reasoning processes and influences that draw them to particular conclusions. Group interviews allow participants to go beyond expressing their opinions by providing them a time, a forum, and an audience for exploring the arguments, symbols, and personal preferences that underpin them. (A more detailed description of participant recruit-

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ment, the interview process, and analysis appears in chapter 7 and the appendix.) The results suggest that this popular debate has had a significant and enduring effect on how ordinary northern Muslims think about not only the sharia issue but the basic relationship between Islam and democracy. Put simply, Nigerian Muslims experienced the prospect (if not always the practice) of sharia as a democratizing experience, a development compatible with and even constitutive of democracy in the Fourth Republic. In doing so, they often rely on the frames used by Muslim elites to present the sharia issue to the public. In particular, my interviewees used elite-generated frames to link the potential of sharia-based political and economic reforms to the possibilities of democracy under the Fourth Republic. They argued for an expanded role for the state in creating and enforcing moral standards of behavior both as goods themselves and as vehicles for addressing corruption and poverty. By providing a language in which Muslim citizens could make specific political and economic demands on the state, several key frames emerging from the sharia debate have significantly altered the relationship between Muslims and their government in northern Nigeria. In other words, what elites say, and how they say it, matters for public opinion in Muslim societies, just as it does in Western democracies. Elite framing isn’t the only factor influencing popular beliefs about the relationship between Islam and democracy, but it’s an important one, and one largely absent from current conversations about attitudes toward democratization in the Muslim world. People are not merely passive receptors of frames, however. Many Nigerian Muslims are deeply dissatisfied with sharia implementation (and with democracy), but they retain hope that Islamic activism can address unemployment, inequality, and corruption and believe that democracy can serve as a vehicle for making sharia work. My interviewees relied on modified versions of frames originating in elite discourse to demand that the state directly address local issues like the affordability of marriage or access to religious education, insisting that if the state is to assume the role of sharia implementer, it must also meet religious obligations to assist individuals and communities. By framing sharia implementation in terms of state-led political (and ethical) transformations, the northern political class empowered ordinary citizens to make new and expansive demands for social justice, development, and accountability. And by framing sharia implementation as a matter of political rights, Muslim elites in northern Nigeria endowed even ordinary government policies with religious significance. Ambitious politicians have regularly tried to capitalize on this phe-

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nomenon by identifying even simple public works projects as “products of sharia.” I supplemented the formal interview process with ten months of field immersion, during which my wife and I lived in Sokoto and participated in life in the neighborhood of Gawon Nama. Much of what I learned in the interviews was verified and debated in informal conversations with friends, neighbors, research assistants, and colleagues at Usmanu Danfodiyo University. Much more still was articulated during my semester as a lecturer at the university, teaching an Introduction to Comparative Politics class concurrently with my interviews. More than any other audience, my students provided a crucial sounding board, critiquing my interpretations of what I was seeing and hearing and providing their own experiences with sharia and democracy in the Fourth Republic. Periodic return trips to the north have given me the opportunity to observe how sharia politics have shaped the struggle for human and women’s rights, the deepening of democracy, and the battle against Boko Haram as Nigeria began its second decade of civilian rule.

Sharia and Democracy: An Uncertain Future In northern Nigeria, public reasoning about sharia seems to provide a tentative affirmation of the compatibility of Islam and democracy—an affirmation that continues to be reflected in the attitudes and beliefs of Nigerian Muslims, despite their deep and abiding dissatisfaction with the country’s existing democratic institutions. In a recent book on Islamic social movements in Egypt and Iran, Asef Bayat coined the term post-Islamism to describe the political and religious thought of groups that, while committed to a religious outlook, reject the notion that the Islamic tradition is incompatible with cultural and political pluralism or that it requires harsh, religiously sanctioned social control. He chronicles the rise and fall of a moderate Islamic protest movement in Iran during the late 1990s, which despite capturing the presidency under Mohammad Khatamei failed to permanently unseat the conservative Islamist government and its institutions. For Bayat, this failure highlights the fact that the seeming incompatibility of Islam and democracy is grounded in local relationships of power. Reconciling Islam and democracy requires shifting power away from those who benefit politically and economically from viewing Islam as a “complete divine system” that “marginalize[s] and even criminalize[s] those who remain outside its strictures” and toward those who want a “democratic religion” that provides for meaningful participation and selfgovernance while maintaining space for religious dignity.50

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More than a decade later, sharia’s potential for creating a more just, egalitarian society in Nigeria remains unfulfilled, with one Western newsmagazine referring sardonically to the new status quo as “sharia lite.”51 Instead, sharia’s legacy has been the expansion of state authority over religion, occasionally through the creation of Islamic social welfare programs but primarily through the expansion of the state’s role in defining religious orthodoxy through school curriculum, the issuance of preaching permits, censorship, and the assimilation of religious leaders and scholars into quasi-official (and remunerative) relationships with state government. Outside of Kano State, where the Ibrahim Shekarau (2003–11) administration pursued sharia’s implementation with vigor, legislation enacted in the early 2000s has rarely translated systematically into policy.52 Public infrastructure continues to decay under democratic rule, and investments by state governments in sharia programming have done little to create new economic opportunities for ordinary Muslim citizens or to stem the concentration of wealth and access to resources and services in the hands of a small political and economic elite.53 Grassroots anger at the northern political class and their supporters degenerated into widespread rioting following the 2011 elections, which saw a popular Muslim candidate (eventual 2015 victor Buhari) lose an election in which he carried all twelve sharia states but received less than a quarter of the vote in twenty others. During the same riots, attacks against emirs and their palaces represented popular anger at the perception, rightly or wrongly, that traditional leaders speak for vested interests over those of their subjects. And of course, both the Boko Haram insurgency and disturbing revelations about the Nigerian military’s own conduct in this war—extrajudicial killings, imprisonment of civilians, and widespread torture of suspects—dominate these conversations. This explosion of violence has sapped confidence in the north’s political and social leaders. While the numbers reported by international nongovernmental organizations, media sources, and the government diverge widely, the Nigeria Security Tracker reported more than 11,400 civilian deaths from Boko Haram attacks between June 2011 and December 2014. They also recorded more than 5,000 civilian deaths at the hands of security forces, whose reputation for impunity has led Human Rights Watch to label these attacks as crimes against humanity.54 Assassination attempts against politicians, religious and traditional leaders—including the prominent Salafist cleric Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, whose 2007 death followed his split with former pupil Mohammed Yusuf, as well as nearly successful attempts on the lives of the Shehu of Borno in July 2012 and the emir of

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Kano in January 2013—signal the ability of radical elements to target leaders who stand symbolically or practically in opposition to them. Despite the failure of most Nigerian “sharia states” to transform their political, social, and economic fortunes, demands for sharia persist and have even increased according to some evidence. Based on the evidence I’ve gathered here, what Nigeria Muslims seem to want from a reconstructed system of Islamic law is not (with the exception of Boko Haram’s small community of participants and supporters) the creation of an “Islamic state” governed according to some harsh reimagining of the Arabian past but a political and legal system that renders the outcomes of a new and unstable democratic government a little less uncertain and a little more just. But when sharia policies fail—both on their own terms as populist reforms and in their negative effect on at-risk populations within Muslimmajority societies—they open new spaces for increasingly radical religious critiques of poor governance. Whatever prospects remain for Nigeria’s floundering democracy are inextricably bound up with sharia and with the unmet promises of its architects. The Boko Haram insurgency, its extraordinary violence, and its destabilizing effects on interreligious dialogue and cooperation across the country have not changed this, although they have made the task of building an effective and responsive Nigerian democracy far more difficult. Despite the 2015 election of longtime sharia implementation supporter Muhammadu Buhari to the presidency, we’ve likely seen the high-water mark of sharia’s legal scope in Nigeria. Buhari’s campaign and his first months in office have focused not at all on expanding or defending the scope of public Islam (despite the fervent cries of some of his PDP opponents, who used his personal piety to portray him as a religious radical) but on completing (with mixed success) the military defeat of Boko Haram begun with a late-term troop “surge” by the Jonathan administration and its regional partners in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. But despite the fact that Buhari and his party, the All Progressives Congress, have been largely silent on religious issues, popular expectations in many northern Muslim communities about what needs to be done to make democracy work are still often expressed in terms originally established during the sharia debate. The ongoing failure to meet these expectations has opened the same political class that’s long relied on religious symbolism and imagery for its legitimacy to an Islamic critique, one that gains popular support the more dysfunctional the Nigerian state becomes and one that serves to empower radical, violent critiques of the current status quo (in both religious and political terms) by the likes of Boko Haram. When states or political elites

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use the language of political Islam, they do more than mobilize communities of believers or politicize religious identity. They also shape the very relationship between Islam and political authority and legitimacy (within limits), often in ways that they aren’t fully in control of. For many Nigerian Muslims, the language of sharia politics is attractive not simply for the piety it invokes but for the consequences it imposes on rulers who abuse the public trust. As many of my interviewees saw it, not only do Muslim leaders need to abide by the injunctions of sharia, but they must also listen to the voices of their citizens, meeting their expectation for a greater voice and their “democratic dividend,” in the popular colloquial expression. These themes, which mirror the language used by citizens in many other new Muslim-majority democracies to demand religious and political accountability, shape how democracy is understood from below in Muslim communities. The good news is that if political and social elites emphasize the link between Islam and democracy—arguing that they are compatible and self-reinforcing—there’s good reason to believe that people will be persuaded. The bad news is that when these same leaders fail to deliver on political promises made in Islamic terms, they risk an Islamic opposition that may not support either the status quo or democracy, and they also create expectations for massive social and economic transformations that democratizing regimes are frequently unable to meet. In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s bloody career is merely the most recent reminder of this fact.

T WO

What We Talk about When We Talk about Islam and Democracy

Sin, Social Transformation, and Democracy In a story published in the April 17, 2011, edition of the New York Times, the following caption appeared under a photo of three Iraqi men dressed in Western-style attire, standing in front of a row of empty bottles at a nightclub: “Revelry in Iraq, guys gaping at dancers in a bar may hint at a democratic future.” In the article, provocatively titled “In Iraq, Bottoms Up for Democracy,” Baghdad bureau chief Tim Arango offered a quote from an attorney named Tariq Harb, who viewed his renewed ability to imbibe in public as a major step forward for Iraq’s fledgling democracy. Harb argued that his presence at the Iraqi Writers’ Union café, an establishment that faced periodic liquor raids by local authorities, was a statement against Islamic radicalism: “There are people who want to kill me because I drink . . . We are fighting the religious educators, the imams, the preachers, who are extremists.” The article’s tone suggests an underlying conflict in Iraq between secular democratic forces that defend individuals from state interference and Islamic powers that insist it’s in the state’s interest to foster moral order, even at the expense of personal freedoms. For Arango, it was a sign of progress in reconciling Islam and democracy that “nightlife in the capital has become more rambunctious and free-spirited than many people can remember.”1 Contrast this with a different tale of religion, politics, and liquor—the prohibition movement that swept Western democracies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the United States, support for prohibition emerged alongside religious disestablishment, as evangelists like Lyman Beecher relied on a new wave of voluntarism to organize the religious energies of citizens toward the goal of moral transformation in

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the service of democracy.2 American prohibitionists made their case for state restrictions on sinful behavior by presenting the institutionalization of Christian values as a vehicle for ensuring democratic performance and accountability. Temperance movements linked themselves to national discourses on the relationship between social morality and democracy, relying on issue frames that portrayed them as defenders of individual and communal liberty against the tyranny of alcohol’s grasp on the soul. Prohibitionists also attacked “capitalist interests” that were, they claimed, intent on undermining the democratic power of the people by rendering the masses quiescent with liquor. Harry S. Warner, the head of the Intercollegiate Prohibition Association, was well known for making the case (echoing the arguments of Nigerian sharia advocates seventy-five years later) that prohibition was a necessary policy choice for furthering the causes of liberty and effective democracy. In Prohibition: An Adventure in Freedom, Warner argued that “intoxicated” mass societies are susceptible to the antidemocratic machinations of “saloon-keepers” and “breweryowners” who use liquor to control the votes of their customers. Estimating rather loosely that as many as two million US citizens were under the thrall of these corrupting influences, he claimed, “Any group of this size, drugged with alcohol to such an extent that morals and patriotism were but words, and led by saloon politicians or ward bosses in support of questionable interest or policy, must be, as it was, a serious menace in any election.”3 The belief that a moral society and moral citizens are necessary components of democracy pervades American culture, and even ostensibly secular political rhetoric often relies on Christian notions of “duty” and “covenant” that mandate moral action as a precursor to successful politics.4 Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville’s positive assessment of the United States’ political culture in the early nineteenth century was based on his belief that democracy and liberty depend on the strong foundation of religious morality constructed in the New World: “The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom.”5 American liberalism is grounded in notions of sin and moral improvement drawn from the Puritan heritage, and even if Christian temperance movements have disappeared from view, the discourse that nurtured them remains a powerful force in American civic life. Across time and place, Muslims, Christians, and even the occasional secularist have all espoused the belief that religiously derived morality is essential to democratic society. Many Iraqi Muslims undoubtedly agree with Mr. Harb that the prohibition of alcohol represents the triumph of extremism and that democracy is the best form of government for Iraq,

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but survey data suggest that most also desire that religious values and practices be manifested in government policy.6 Democracies are no less prone to dividing society into the “virtuous and the vicious” than other forms of government, and it’s not only in the Muslim world that questions of public values and morality are linked to popular definitions and expectations of democracy.7 It’s impossible to consider the future of democracy in any society without considering how religious and moral discourse shape popular notions about how government ought to work. Despite the pull of orientalist narratives suggesting that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with popular sovereignty and liberal values, most Muslims not only desire but demand democratic government, so long as it preserves a strong role for the state in defending religious morality. But assuming such a strong role for religious values in public life raises complex and perhaps even unresolvable challenges for Muslim democrats. Popular participation in religious debates gives voice to Muslims who view the Islamic legal tradition as a valuable partner alongside democratic institutions in facilitating social justice, development, and accountable government. But even committed Muslim democrats tend to imagine sharia in terms of explicitly Islamic state institutions and state regulations on religious behavior (such as the policing of Mr. Harb’s favorite Baghdad nightspots)—policies that are deeply problematic for any democracy. Many Muslims remain hopeful that Islamic law holds the key to making democracy “work,” but attempts to integrate sharia and sharia policies into democratic government have generally produced disagreement and disappointment on all sides.

Is Islam “Exceptional”? Islam, Democracy, and the Compatibility Question In an influential 1993 essay for the Atlantic Monthly, historian Bernard Lewis sought to explain the United States’ successes and failures in promoting democracy in the Arab world. His introduction presents the classic form of the “compatibility question”: “Can liberal democracy work in a society inspired by Islamic beliefs and principles and shaped by Islamic experience and tradition? It is of course for Muslims, primarily and perhaps exclusively, to interpret and reinterpret the pristine original message of their faith, and to decide how much to retain, and in what form, of the rich accumulated heritage of fourteen centuries of Islamic history and culture. Not all Muslims give the same answers to the question posed above, but much will depend on the answer that prevails.”8

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Lewis begins by acknowledging that religious texts and teachings have multiple meanings and that not all Muslims interpret the Islamic tradition in the same way. Nonetheless, he argues that the “pristine, original message” of Islam is a constant, unchanging model that all Muslims must reckon with and that the democratic potential of Muslim-majority nations hinges on their ability to reconcile this message with the foreign doctrine of liberal democracy. He approvingly cites precedents in the Islamic tradition establishing limits on political authority but emphasizes the apparent absence from the Islamic cultural lexicon of core democratic concepts such as “citizenship” and “freedom,” so central to the development of liberal democracy in Western Europe.9 Lewis echoes another longtime skeptic of Islamic democracy, Elie Kedourie, who once argued, “There is nothing in the political traditions of the Arab world—which are the political traditions of Islam—which might make familiar, or indeed intelligible, the organizing ideas of constitutional and representative government.”10 In this telling, the blending of religious and political authority in the life of the early umma (community of believers) provides an unyielding template for Muslims, who, having had “no need to give anything unto Caesar” at the outset, are unlikely to recognize such limits today.11 Prominent Islamic thinkers from the United States to Pakistan (and all points in between) concur with this claim, in spirit if not in the specifics, arguing that Islam and democracy are incompatible on the grounds that sovereignty belongs to God and that the legislative authority of democratic government contradicts the authority of sharia. In Nigeria, I often encountered these claims in discussions with faculty members in political science and Islamic studies, many of whom invoked no less an Islamic authority than Samuel Huntington to make their case. Lewis’s argument also resembles those made by an earlier generation of scholars who saw Catholicism as a chief source of durable authoritarianism in Iberia and Latin America. They argued that, in stark contrast with the culture of dissent and defense of individual conscience in Protestantism, the church’s hierarchical and authoritarian organizational structure bred deference to both priestly and secular authorities. They saw Catholic political parties as little more than creatures of the clerical hierarchy, embracing democracy only when it was perceived to be in the church’s best interest.12 In the United States, Catholic politicians like Al Smith, the long-serving governor of New York and the first major US Catholic presidential candidate, faced constant criticism that their allegiance to Rome bound them to a foreign institution committed to undermining the American principles of church/state separation. During the 1928 presidential campaign, Smith’s

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Protestant opponents focused their attacks on both his purported subservience to a higher religious power and his opposition to Prohibition—a policy inspired by Protestant efforts to enact their own religious convictions into law.13 In these arguments, the barriers to democratization thrown up by religious doctrine go well beyond the assumptions of modernization theory, which holds that mass religious values must be replaced by secular commitments before democracy can emerge. For example, Max Weber’s famous “Protestant ethic” thesis focused on the role of the Protestant Reformation in the emergence of a “practical ethic” embedded in modern capitalism, a process that demonstrated for him not the enduring consequences of religious doctrine but how religious values change in response to shifting sociological context. Indeed, Weber carefully avoided concluding that religion or culture were destiny, calling the idea that the “spirit of capitalism” could only have arisen within Protestant culture a “foolish and doctrinaire thesis.”14 However, recent compatibility theorists interested in broad differences between the West and the “rest” devote their efforts to explaining the absence of change (as modernization) in religion and culture, leading to a far greater measure of determinism than Weber’s original thesis intended.15 The “Catholic wave” of democratization that swept Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s forced a reconsideration of Catholicism’s role in sustaining autocratic government. Top-down shifts in doctrine, especially Vatican II’s (1962–65) liturgical reforms, broke ranks with the church’s nineteenth-century rejection of liberalism, while the bottom-up transformation of Catholic social movements in Latin America into sites of opposition to human rights violations and authoritarian rule helped move Catholic-majority nations into the democracy column.16 The church’s competition with evangelical Protestantism, which made inroads into Catholic communities by appealing to poor and politically marginal members, also contributed significantly to Catholicism’s “democratization” in Latin America. In particular, the church leadership’s activism on behalf of social justice was part of a concerted effort to keep the church relevant for potential converts to evangelical denominations.17 New scholarship also argues that Catholic-dominated political parties adopted democratic perspectives far earlier than they have been credited for, as participation in parliamentary institutions brought lay activists new sources of power and influence independent of the church, encouraging many to embrace democracy in practice, even if mass Catholic values did not always keep up.18

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Islam and Democracy in Practice Are there grounds for a similar reconsideration of the relationship between Islam and democracy? There are some hard realities when it comes to democratic achievement in the Muslim world, where many countries fail to either meet minimal standards for democracy, accord basic civil rights and liberties, or hold fair and open elections. As Freedom House director Adrian Karatnycky argued in 2002, the “gap” between the Islamic world and the rest looked so substantial that the “third wave” of democratization could hardly be said to have touched the region at all. While all other regions made “significant gains for democracy and freedom” during the 1980s and 1990s, the Islamic world stood alone, having experienced an “equally significant increase in the number of repressive regimes” during the same period. Indeed, it’s only with the Arab Spring revolutions that we’ve finally seen a serious reevaluation of the “durable Arab authoritarianism” hypothesis among regional experts.19 When we disaggregate democratic outcomes in the Arab world from the rest of the Muslim world, however, we see a different story. Outside the Middle East and North Africa, the vast majority of Muslims live under regimes that have made significant strides toward democratization, even if most remain troubled by persistent corruption and lingering questions about the rights of women and minorities. Optimists point to the success of democracy in the “Muslim periphery”—Senegal and Indonesia, for example—to suggest that the Muslim world has an “Arab,” not an “Islam,” problem. In fact, as Alfred Stepan has argued, many Muslim nations exceed the level of democracy predicted for them based on their economic status, an encouraging finding by any standard.20 And despite decades of failed transitions, aborted liberalization campaigns, and brutal repression by both secular and religiously motivated regimes, democracy remains deeply popular even in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. What you make of the progress of democracy in the Muslim world depends on where you stand within it. An Islamic Reformation? What’s driving this turn toward mass support for democracy? One source is the small but influential community of thinkers calling for an “Islamic reformation,” a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Islam’s role in public life that reaffirms democracy’s compatibility with God’s sovereignty and the im-

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portance of state-protected rights and freedoms in ensuring God’s justice on earth. The concept dates back at least as far as the nineteenth century Persian reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who drew frequent parallels between the importance of Martin Luther in Europe’s political and economic development and the condition of the Islamic world during his lifetime. Al-Afghani popularized two key innovations that have since become important parts of the language of “liberal” Islam—the notion that despotism has contributed to the Muslim world’s global decline and that concepts embedded in the classical Islamic tradition, particularly shura (consultation), might facilitate the construction of constitutional, republican forms of government that remain recognizably Islamic and able to accommodate sharia.21 Contemporary reformers as different as UCLA professor Khaled Abou El Fadl and Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi attack the claim that Islam and democracy are incompatible by emphasizing the importance of shura and consent in governing a Muslim society. Adapting rights language to the religious obligations of citizens and rulers, al-Qaradawi argues for democracy by proclaiming that “among the rights of the Muslims is to show him [the ruler] the right way when he errs, to set him straight when he deviates.”22 El Fadl argues that as long as a democratic government recognizes that “God’s law is given prior to human action” and permits the Muslim community to make a good faith effort to pursue the law (an act that, he notes, does not begin or end with the state’s enforcement of sharia), it’s entirely compatible with the spirit of God’s sovereignty.23 There are other factors that make it difficult for these sorts of reform projects to gain popular traction. The secular attitudes and public images of some prominent reformers are often interpreted (wrongly) as a sign that their ideas are culturally inauthentic, derived from Western viewpoints and politically bound up in a “colonial and imperial agenda.”24 When the influential Sudanese scholar Abdullahi an-Na’im, a critic of state-sponsored sharia programs as incompatible with the doctrine of free choice in religion prescribed by the Quran, was invited to present these views at a 2004 conference on the “sharia question” in Jos, Nigeria, he inspired a walkout led by Sheikh Umar Kabo, the chair of Kano State’s Sharia Implementation Advisory Committee. In the weeks following, an-Na’im and the conference organizers faced claims in the Nigerian press that an-Na’im was secretly advancing an anti-Islamic agenda.25 These accusations hardly capture the nuance of an-Na’im’s position, but the fact that he routinely uses the term secularize to describe the separation of state authority and sharia makes him an easy target.

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The suspicion cast upon these reform projects owes in part to the support they occasionally receive from “State Department planners” and think tanks in search of secular Muslim allies in the battle against radicalism.26 Indeed, US policy under the second Bush administration supported the secularization of Islamic culture through school curriculum reforms and attempts to influence programming on Arab-language television. These projects were based on analysis from sources like a 2003 RAND Corporation report that suggested that Muslims who sought religious guidance in their daily affairs were more likely to adopt anti-American and antidemocratic perspectives than their more “secular” neighbors.27 By depicting anyone who might look to a religious leader for a fatwa (a noncompulsory legal finding) as a potential radical, these perspectives undermine the ability of reformers to gather support during popular debates over how to integrate Islamic law with democratic government. Islamists who don’t explicitly cultivate Western audiences (like alQaradawi) are successful in gaining local support precisely because they can so easily articulate the differences between their positions and those of others without ceding any religious credibility or authority.28 But for all the support he offers for the possibility of a real-world synthesis of Islam and democracy, al-Qaradawi also holds troubling views on gender equality (he endorses women’s participation in politics but rejects the possibility of a female head of state) and violence (he categorically rejected the actions of the 9/11 hijackers as un-Islamic but has supported Palestinian suicide bombers). More important, he understands democracy as a “means” for pursuing the achievement of ends defined by sharia, desirable (even obligatory) not on its own terms but on those defined by the “transcendent claims” of religious truth.29 What Muslims Want Ultimately, as Graham Fuller argues, it’s not “what Islam is” that will determine democracy’s future in the Muslim world but “what Muslims want.”30 Thirty years ago, this would have been difficult to describe empirically, but today we can draw on data from cross-national survey research to challenge the Islamic exceptionalism thesis. These surveys show that despite a legacy of persistent authoritarianism, demand for democratic rule is remarkably high—consistently above the levels seen in Latin America and the former Soviet Union, for example—approaching a broad consensus that “despite its drawbacks, democracy is the best system of governance.”31 Indeed, support for democracy is as high in Arab nations where outright dictatorship

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or partially liberalized autocracies (Algeria, Jordan, Yemen) have been the most common forms of government as it is in the freer Muslim-majority nations of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Not surprisingly, there’s been a great deal of disagreement about what exactly this support means, how robust it is, or how much it is shaped by key intervening factors, such as level of religiosity, gender, and the Sunni/Shia divide. The closest thing to a definitive statement might be Mark Tessler’s: “All that can be said is that most people claim to be pious and most also have a favorable opinion of democracy, thus suggesting, in the aggregate, that there is no incompatibility between Islam and democracy. Support for democracy, in other words, is widespread in Arab societies where most citizens have strong Islamic attachments.”32 But does widespread support for democracy among a diverse group of Muslims tell us anything useful about the relationship between Islam and democracy? Political scientists are skeptical that support for democracy, no matter how high, can replace the need for an open political culture that places less emphasis on the role of the state in enforcing religious values. Surveys from the mid-1990s in three Muslim-majority nations with high levels of support for democracy (Jordan, Algeria, and the Palestinian territories) found that only in one did a bare plurality of citizens possess a “civic culture” characterized by tolerance of differing views, acceptance of gender equality, high levels of civic engagement, and interpersonal trust, while in Pakistan, supporters of democratic government often also endorse violent Islamic militant groups.33 Perhaps, as Ronald Inglehart argues, favorable mass attitudes toward democracy in societies without “civic cultures” are shallow and instrumental—citizens may say they want democracy, but only inasmuch as they view it as a path to “prosperity and order.”34 A more sympathetic view is that Muslims simply define democracy in terms that depart from the liberal civic culture model. Afrobarometer data suggests that Muslims and Christians in Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda all value democracy’s protection of civil liberties, voting rights, and electoral choice but that Muslims are more likely to stress economic equality and social justice as key components of democratic government.35 Muslim communities harbor a range of beliefs about the appropriate role of religion in a democratic society, with “secular democrats” preferring a clear separation between religion and state and “Muslim democrats” supporting competitive elections and pluralism but insisting upon a strong role for public Islam in government.36 But while Muslim citizens often lack tolerance toward pluralism or deep commitments to democratic participation, they overwhelmingly demand accountability and checks on government

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action.37 Moreover, Muslim democrats are no fools. Arab Barometer data from 2010–11 demonstrate that few citizens in states like Yemen and Algeria see the false pageantry of elections and parliaments as true democracy.38 Even when Muslims are willing to support leaders who represent deeply illiberal values, they demand that everyone play by the same rules. This is hardly a ringing endorsement of liberal democracy, but it doesn’t support the conclusion that these demands are empty instrumentalism, either. Mass support for democracy is an undeniable fact that poses a serious challenge to proponents of Muslim exceptionalism. Yet the impact of this support on political outcomes has been uneven. Political liberalization has led some Muslim activists toward moderation, while others remain staunchly committed to subordinating participatory politics to religious edict. The simple version of the “compatibility question” does not tell us very much about the future of democracy in the Muslim world or about how Muslims themselves will make it. Without a more nuanced understanding of how individuals and communities in the Muslim world imagine the relationship between Islam and democracy, we will continue, as Yahya Sadowski puts it, to “ask the wrong questions.”39 The story of what democracy means to Muslims—what they hope to gain by it, how they reconcile and adapt it in terms of their culture and faith, how they hope it might be achieved in their own diverse societies—remains largely unwritten.

Sharia Politics Among the fears expressed by Western observers about the recent political upheavals of the Arab Spring protests and their impacts on Muslim-majority states, it’s the specter of state-sponsored Islamic law that many find most haunting. Survey research has repeatedly demonstrated that “sharia” (in the abstract) is far and away the most popular component of the Islamist agenda across the Muslim world, gaining a broad consensus where specific sharia-derived policies do not. Not surprisingly then, the prospect of elections and constitutional drafting following the fall of long-serving dictators has often quickly produced demands for the implementation or recognition of Islamic law and “sharia-style” social reforms. In Libya, a premature announcement in October 2011 (just days after Qaddafi’s capture and death) by the chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC) stating that his body would annul all laws “contrary” to sharia set off a firestorm of criticism in conservative American and European press outlets. For critics, the language in the NTC’s interim constitutional declaration proclaiming

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that “Islam is the Religion of the State and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence” was proof that liberal democracy has no future across the region. Similarly, many prominent Egyptian Salafist leaders during the Mubarak era argued that democracy was forbidden under Islam, discouraging their followers from participating in partisan politics (much to the regime’s advantage). But following a recognition by leading Salafi activists that the democratic process might advance their interests, the Salafist al-Nour Party and its allies in the Islamist bloc won a quarter of the parliamentary seats in the 2011–12 elections, playing a key role in the (temporary) presidential victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. They also briefly parlayed their influence into several proposed constitutional clauses—articles 4 and 219—that would have reduced the Supreme Constitutional Court’s interpretive power over the relationship between state law and the Islamic legal tradition in favor of religious authorities less inclined to recognize the legitimacy of multiple interpretations. Faced with seemingly definitive evidence of the illiberal, antidemocratic nature of sharia promotion, critics raise a number of concerns about the spread of sharia legal codes. They argue that sharia violates core values of individual freedom, legally enshrining the oppression of women, minorities, and non-Muslims—charges that, while not always nuanced, are often true. International organizations target national and local governments that have implemented sharia legal provisions with claims of human rights violations, again often with genuine cause but also sometimes in terms that reflect a shallow understanding of the core concerns of Islamic jurisprudence.40 Even requests by Muslim groups to create religious arbitration institutions using sharia to resolve civil contract and family disputes in Canada and the United Kingdom have created outsized controversies. Facing pressure from an unlikely coalition of feminist and conservative groups, the Ontario provincial government banned all religious arbitration in 2006. At least sixteen US states have introduced “preemptory” bans on the use of sharia and other “foreign laws,” although one (Oklahoma) has had theirs struck down in federal court as discriminatory.41 There are good reasons to be skeptical that a community committed to sharia can also commit to democracy. States simply cannot remain religiously neutral toward their citizens—a core principle of liberal democracy—while implementing most aspects of Islamic law, even if they restrict them to their Muslim citizens. The state-run Islamic legal systems created in Nigeria and elsewhere have often been patently undemocratic, failing to provide satisfactory assurances that the rights and freedoms of all citizens are protected equally under the law. Even in nations with clear democratic

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institutional commitments, Islamic law often discriminates both formally and informally against women, religious minorities, and other marginal and disadvantaged communities, and poorly planned implementation schemes rely on semiformal, untrained, and minimally supervised “Islamic police” forces that often amount to little more than groups of young vigilantes with a veneer of state sponsorship. Hastily written legislation and poorly trained, inadequately supplied court staff are left by original implementers for later governments to address, often long after public opinion has shifted negatively as a result of the uneven and untransparent application of the new laws. And as many Muslim-led women’s rights organizations rightly point out, the governments that write and codify Islamic law generally represent the political and economic interests of a narrow (and elite) range of the Muslim community. But when we listen to what Muslims say about sharia and democracy, they seem far less radical than they appear in the Western press, in human rights reports, or in the words of Islamist movements. A poll conducted in the weeks before the 2012 Egyptian presidential election found that while 66 percent of Egyptians favored using sharia as the basis of Egyptian law, a mere 17 percent favored a “literal” application. The rest favored the “spirit” of sharia adapted to contemporary circumstances—a view built on the Muslim Brotherhood’s insistence that it serve as “a general guide and heritage from which to draw” in designing legislation and law.42 Based on survey evidence from thirty-five Muslim-majority countries, Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito argue that most Muslims who support both democracy and sharia do so not out of a desire to “remake” democracy in a theocratic image but rather because they want a free society in which religious values inform how government relates to its citizens. They show convincingly that support for sharia is rarely correlated with the desire for religious leaders to take on a broader role in legislating or with demands for the “exclusive” use of sharia as a model for lawmaking.43 Similar findings in Indonesia suggest that sharia supporters reject inegalitarian or rights-violating policies derived from sharia traditions, including limits on women standing for office, corporal punishments like amputation, or government enforcement of veiling.44 This evidence can’t speak to the small but highly visible minority of sharia movements that pursue their goals with violence. The imposition of sharia across northern Mali by armed Islamist militias in the spring of 2012 was neither preceded by local community action to demand the extension of Islamic law nor met with popular support. In fact, survey evidence suggests that popular support for Islamic law plummeted between

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2010 and 2012 from 84 percent to a mere 46 percent.45 Muslim activists in Mali have long sought to defend Islamic family law from reform attempts championed by women’s rights groups and international rights activists, but there’s a chasm between their efforts to engage in the legislative process and the actions of Islamist military groups like Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Gao and Timbuktu. Indeed, documents found after French forces retook Timbuktu in January 2013 show that even AQIM leader Abdelmalek Droukdel was critical of his fighters’ overzealousness with respect to their vision of sharia, arguing that harsh physical punishments, severe restrictions on the presence of women and children in public, and the destruction of World Heritage sites all alienated the local Muslim population.46

The Sharia Paradox If most Muslims view sharia and democracy as broadly compatible, how exactly do they imagine this coexistence would work? In a recent book, Noah Feldman offers a compelling account of how the Islamic state (a  form of political organization that adopts sharia as its primary source of law and legislation) became the main political goal of most contemporary Islamist movements. For Feldman, the “call for an Islamic state is . . . first and foremost a call for law—for a legal state that would be justified by law and govern through it.” The failures of governments in the Muslim world—corruption and insecurity, weak institutions, and ineffectual justice systems—call out for a clear vision of the rule of law offering clear limits on the power of the ruler. “Mainstream” Islamist movements (Feldman’s example is the Muslim Brotherhood) usually position their advocacy for sharia within of a grander vision of social transformation that restores justice, prosperity, and international influence to the Muslim world. They attract popular support not merely with calls to piety but with shariainspired policies meant to improve accountability and create conditions for just, equitable development.47 As Ronald Robinson and Nancy Davis argue, support for sharia is also correlated with support for a broad range of communitarian social and economic commitments, including government action to create a more equal distribution of wealth or expanded welfare programs.48 Many Muslims don’t want the state to enforce strict personal piety (such as the policing of fasting, an unpopular policy adopted by some units of the Kano hisbah during Ramadan in 2012), but most demand that the state enforce a consistent set of rules based in Islamic ethics. It’s hardly surprising that that

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these movements often endorse the possibility that democratic institutions and elections might help in bringing about these changes. Democracy assumes a similar commitment to equality under the law, making the language of rights a natural (if problematic) ally for sharia proponents. As the experiences of Iran under the ayatollahs and Afghanistan under the Taliban suggest, democracy is hardly the only form that a modern Islamic community can adopt, and theocracy of any sort is unlikely to prove compatible with even minimal democratic definitions. But democracy is an important part of the vocabulary with which Muslims demand moral revival from their governments, and these claims deserve to be taken seriously. One confirmation of these arguments comes from a series of innovative national surveys conducted in Pakistan from 2007 to 2009. In terms of popular support for sharia and democracy, Pakistan looks like most other non-Arab Muslim nations. A large majority of Pakistanis expresses support for democracy (71 percent), but few trust the existing institutions (a mere 18 percent expressed strong confidence that Pakistan was being governed democratically). Support for an expanded role for sharia in law and government is quite high (60 percent), and a majority of these sharia supporters (64 percent) rated democracy as “absolutely important” in their lives.49 But what exactly do they mean by sharia, and what do they expect from it? Pakistanis have strong reasons to associate sharia with physical punishment and the strong arm of the state. Although the Hudood Ordinances enacted in 1979 by the Zia military regime were initially conceived as part of a broad, thoroughgoing Islamicization of Pakistani society, they are publically remembered in terms of the promise of lashings and amputations (the latter never carried out), constructing the idea of Islamic law in terms of coercive state action to enforce a single, “correct” vision of Muslim public behavior.50 Indeed, the 1981 Ramadan Ordinance (still in effect today) empowered the police to arrest and charge Muslims caught eating, drinking, or smoking during the fast. Not surprisingly, a majority of those surveyed in 2009 (55 percent) mentioned physical punishments as a key component of sharia, while slightly less than half pointed to restrictions on women’s roles in the public sphere—likely an association with the zina (adultery) component of the Hudood Ordinances that generated international attention by criminalizing women who file rape accusations but fail to prove their cases.51 And as Muhammad Qasim Zaman has argued, Pakistan’s Islamic scholarly class (ulema) have no real tradition of framing sharia as a source of social justice and development.52 Remarkably, however, this punitive, legalistic heritage seems to have

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had little direct influence on how ordinary Pakistanis think about and define “sharia government.” Nearly every survey respondent (95 percent or more, n = 6,000) indicated that they viewed sharia as a source of expanded government services and improved personal security and as a means of fighting corruption in government and the court system. Large majorities believed that sharia’s expansion would have a positive effect on government behavior, reducing corruption (70 percent) and producing fairer outcomes within the justice system (79 percent). As the survey team concluded, support for sharia in Pakistan seems to be rooted not in religious belief in a “backward looking social order” but in demands for “aspects of good governance that citizens in other democracies also want.” Moreover, Pakistanis who have adopted this justice- and service-provision-oriented definition of sharia government are significantly more likely to also express support for democratic values (such as free speech, democratic elections, and civilian control of the military) than their more punitively oriented countrymen and women.53 In other words, the more they embrace the idea of sharia as a set of moral and public law principles that guide individual and state behavior rather than a “rulebook” designed around a single correct interpretation of the Islamic legal tradition, the more they also value democratic rights and freedoms. But if what most Muslims seem to want from sharia is justice and better governance, what they have gotten is a centralized, bureaucratized form of Islamic law that puts great power in the hands of the very state apparatus they have so little faith in. Contemporary sharia legislation gives state authorities “more laws, regulations and stipulations on homogeneity in order to govern the Muslim subject,”54 a development that seems profoundly at odds with the expanded participation of ordinary Muslims in public debates about religious meaning. Indeed, survey research in Malaysia, for example, where sharia and religious authority have been heavily institutionalized within state-run religious bureaucracies since the 1980s, suggests that the greater the level of state authority in defining the scope of Islamic values in the public sphere, the more likely citizens are to support politicians and religious leaders who make universalizing claims “on behalf of Islam” and to demand a “single, authoritative interpretation of the legal tradition.”55 How does rising participation in “public reasoning” around sharia, religious revival, and Islam’s compatibility with democracy end up producing a narrower, more doctrinaire, and often unsatisfying version of sharia that does little to meet the democratic demands of citizens? This outcome reflects a paradox embedded in the political and social upheavals that

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shook the Muslim world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as revolutions in education and literacy, expanded networks of communication and travel, mass urbanization, and exposure to new values and social practices provoked growing religious self-consciousness. The result, which Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori sum up as the “objectification” of the Islamic tradition, was that Muslim communities around the globe began to subject their faith to “conscious reflection, discussion and debate” with the goal of articulating an explicit, coherent vision of how to be a “good Muslim.”56 This new spirit of debate and participation encouraged the proliferation of new voices in public religious conversations and the opening up of new “Muslim public spheres” as sites of contention and debate about religious meaning. This same era also proffered an unprecedented breakdown in the political, institutional, and community-centered foundations that had sustained sharia as the “supreme legal and moral force regulating both society and government” for nearly twelve centuries.57 Modernizing domestic leaders and colonial administrators effectively dismantled sharia in order to shoehorn it into the legal framework of the modern nation-state, which required the pursuit of “an absolute monopoly over lawmaking . . . result[ing] in a uniform set of rules” that could order the lives of its citizens.58 Along the way, sharia was reduced to mere “Islamic law,” its jurisdiction limited and its content homogenized for administration by state agents. These developments reinforced another aspect of objectification—the move toward defining religious identities in terms of adherence to a systematic, “abstract system of ideas.” Contemporary sharia advocates imagine Islam as an “encompassing and modern ideology”—a set of characteristics against which governmental forms can be compared.59 Along the way, they also read the pluralism out the past, producing a religious vision that portrays sharia as a fixed, predetermined structure to be enforced by state action. The contrast between growing participation and pluralism in debates surrounding the relationship between Islam and politics and the increasingly narrow way in which this relationship is enacted into state law highlights the challenges faced by sharia supporters who view Islamic law as a vehicle for making democracy work in the Muslim world.

Imagining Democracy in New Muslim Public Spheres As the first and most visible face of these transformations, the “participatory revolution” that’s swept the Islamic world over the past several decades has allowed many more Muslims not only to engage with public debates

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about religious meaning but to influence their shape and outcome.60 “Traditional” scholars have frequently lost ground in terms of mass influence and their control of the production of religious knowledge to pious Western-educated professionals who weave “elements of philosophy, modern populism and Quranic reference” into explicit, objective statements of faith and correct Islamic action.61 The result has been an eclectic body of religious thought, produced and distributed across a wide range of media, appealing to a mass audience interested in concrete, practical advice about how to live a Muslim life. As Charles Hirschkind argues, public debates about the relationship among Islam, sharia, and democracy combine religious models of ethical behavior with liberal ideals about public deliberation and persuasion that increasingly resemble the Habermasian “public sphere.”62 Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, grounded in the bourgeois experience of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been rightly criticized for exaggerating the democratic potential of institutions that excluded (and continue to exclude) women, minorities, and other marginal voices. Habermas also expressed deep skepticism about the incorporation of religious values and religiously motivated actors into the democratic public sphere, beginning, as Craig Calhoun and Seyla Benhabib argue, from “antireligious assumptions” that see questions grounded in personal morality and conscience as “rationally irresolvable.”63 Even in his later thinking, Habermas argued that unless religious citizens “self-modernize” their values, acquiring the “epistemic ability to consider [their] own faith(s) reflexively from the outside and to relate it to secular views,” they cannot “fulfill the normative expectations of the liberal role of citizenship.”64 However, the idea of the public sphere as a “theatre in modern societ[y] in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk . . . the space where citizens deliberate about their common affairs”65 fits well with new patterns of participation that enable Muslims to share in global conversations about Islamic identity, values, and community. These spaces help create a shared sense of values and purpose among Muslims with diverse personal backgrounds and experiences, driving public engagement with religious discourse for political ends and facilitating involvement with an ever-growing range of organizations, groups, and communities (“Muslim publics”) that use shared conceptions of the Islamic common good to advocate for change.66 The spread of digital publishing, call-in television programs (often with international audiences on satellite networks), and a bewildering array of “cyber-Islamic environments” has created powerful new opportunities for ordinary Muslims to become active participants in

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creating religious knowledge. Online imams offer individualized fatwas on how to navigate new social situations, and “Islamic studies” textbooks progress in grade-level sequences, conveying Islamic knowledge in a systematic, objective manner and detaching individuals from local, particular expressions of “being Muslim” in favor of a common transnational discourse. One example is the practice of Nigerian newspapers with large Muslim audiences of publishing weekly Islamic education tracts. Appearing on Fridays, these articles are occasionally original or reprinted works by prominent Islamic scholars focusing on weighty doctrinal questions. More often, they are composed by lay intellectuals and intended to didactically clarify the significance of key events in the Islamic calendar or explain correct Islamic practice in daily life. With titles like “Greetings in Islam,” the “Islamic Approach to Poverty Alleviation,” or “Ramadan, Some Useful Tips,” they provide detailed (often running in serialized form over several weeks), step-by-step guidance to Muslims with bullet-point lists of recommendations and copious scriptural references. But despite their attention to detail, these essays don’t read as confident entries into a vibrant theological debate. Instead, they come off as the efforts of writers who, in the face of deep-seated uncertainty about their faith, focus on crafting a set of rules to ensure that they will remain identifiably Muslim in all spheres of experience. These articles and their authors sometimes attract significant followings but rarely seem to inform broader popular debates about issues like sharia and democracy. The emergence of Muslim public spheres has also substantially (if not entirely) diminished state control over religious authority and discourse. Religious debates during the high-water mark of authoritarianism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were dominated by state-run media and the strategic integration of state power with religious authorities. But this was steadily undermined by new technologies (VCRs, fax machines, photocopiers, and unlicensed radio), allowing both explicitly religious movements and new media outlets with an interest in disseminating religious voices to reach popular audiences. The success of Al Jazeera and other, less well-known media enterprises (Al-Manar, a Lebanese television network with strong links to Hezbollah, for example) that disseminate political information in religious idioms depended on the skills and capacity of journalists developed in these earlier eras. Many of the most successful media platforms that challenged state authority in the 1990s were engineered and staffed by individuals who got their start in explicitly religious communications projects.67 The remaining autocrats of the Muslim world have fared even less well

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on this score in recent years. For example, Saudi financial support for television and cellular networks, made in the expectation that they could be controlled with state censorship and restriction, has unexpectedly provided citizens with new sources of social critique (reality television programming depicting Arabs living alternative lifestyles) and opportunities for transgressing state-sponsored religious morality (the role of Bluetooth in facilitating flirting and other sexual communication).68 Efforts by the Mubarak regime to cut off social media and mobile communications during the height of the Tahrir Square protests in January 2011 failed to stem the uprising, instead creating animosity among groups (in particular, business communities) that, despite their lack of visible support for the protests, suddenly found their access to mobile and SMS technology blocked.69 There’s a great deal of debate about whether or not Muslim public spheres can ultimately serve as sites for democratic innovation, where “civic seedlings” of pluralism supported by “independent associations, spirited public dialogue, and the demonstrated decency of believers” can take root.70 Much depends on how the different notions of freedom, equality, and rights embedded in the liberal democratic and Islamic traditions are mapped onto each other through common political and religious experiences. The social forces that created the resurgence of public piety and religious activity in the Muslim world during the 1970s and 1980s are, paradoxically, the same forces that opened the door to democratization across the region several decades later. The choices Muslim activists face regarding participation in state politics—moderation and the endorsement of pluralism, rejection, or co-option in an effort to establish religious hegemony— depend just as much on local context, on the dynamics of political competition, bargaining, and the possibility of repression, as they do on religious ideology.

The Sharia/State Nexus The reverse image of these seemingly open and pluralistic debates can be found in the increasingly narrow, state-centric vision of sharia offered by contemporary Islamists. As John Kelsay has argued, the centrality of sharia and “sharia reasoning”—the use of the classical Islamic tradition as an explicit model for contemporary life—in contemporary Islamist discourse represents a profoundly limited account of the breadth of classical Islamic thinking on issues as far-ranging as the justifications for jihad and the correct way for Muslims to live within non-Muslim communities.71 While many sharia proponents frame their goals in terms of “restoring” past prac-

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tice and ridding the Islamic tradition of bida (innovation), what they offer is a rule-bound vision of Islamic law that fails to capture the spirit and intent of its classical practice. And what was classical practice? Obviously, this is a complex question, and one that falls rather far from this book’s central thesis. But put simply, the “classical Islamic constitution” placed sharia not under the control of the state or political ruler but in the hands of the ulema, whose unique access to the methodologies of the Islamic jurisprudential tradition gave them a measure of control over the scope and legitimacy of political authority.72 How did this work? Briefly, sharia is the law revealed by God to his prophet, Mohammed. The Quran is the primary source of this revelation, and the sunna (the sayings and doings of the Prophet, collected, and transmitted orally in the first generations after his death) are a secondary source. These sources don’t, however, provide a transparent, immediately accessible vision of sharia. This must be approximated in the form of fiqh, the “opinions of scholars who by their piety and learning have become qualified to interpret the scriptural sources and derive laws.”73 As Brinkley Messick argues, sharia is as much defined by this process of finding the law and creating legal/religious expertise as it is by its content. Sharia is not merely a legal system but a “total discourse” embedded in social, legal, economic, and political institutions and bound up in the very process of creating religious knowledge and authority.74 In the Sunni world (of which northern Nigeria is a part), four large “schools” (pl. madahib, s. madhab) of fiqh—based in the ijtihad, or independent interpretation of the revelations made by qualified jurists according to formal jurisprudential methods—are accepted as equally valid. Generally, local religious authorities adopt one of these madahib as “official” for jurisprudential and legislative purposes—a distinction that has remained important even as Islamic legal education becomes less bound by the practices of specific communities. In Nigeria, it’s the Maliki school, notable for its reliance on the practices of the residents of Medina during and in the first generations after the Prophet’s lifetime. Governing under sharia (really, implementing a particular version of fiqh) is a complicated process. Fiqh isn’t “state law” (a “code” defined and sanctioned by government) in the sense meant by European legal traditions. The actions of independent legal scholars, rather than the legislative action of the state, create fiqh and give it legitimacy. Another difference lies in the scope of the social commandment laid out by fiqh, which focuses primarily on questions of personal behavior and social interaction rather than issues like penal law. As Wael Hallaq puts it, fiqh’s goal is to consoli-

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date the divine guidance of the revelation “for the purpose of setting human life in good order . . . not to control or discipline, the two most salient missions of modern law and the modern state that commands it.”75 Certainly, governmental authority played a key role in the classical Islamic legal tradition. Any learned scholar of fiqh can become a mufti, a private jurist who issues fatwas; the Internet puts hundreds of these at the fingertips of Muslims every day. Only political authority can create official courts, however, where a qadi (or as they’re called in Hausa, the lingua franca of northern Nigeria, alkali, pl. alkalai) passes judgments enforceable by secular authority, and only Islamic rulers can use the powers of siyasa (“policy,” “politics”) and maslaha (public welfare) to legislate for the public good. Yet these powers were fundamentally limited. A state might defend sharia, but it could hardly “enact” it in the sense of promulgating a legal code defining or “fixing” sharia in a particular form. While there are questions about how much scholars actually controlled the law’s practice during the classical era, the consensus is that that the ulema and their power to “make” the law served as an effective check on the executive authority of Muslim rulers, binding them to sharia and its principles. It’s the hope that sharia might serve as an effective check on the power of contemporary authoritarian leaders that attracts many modern Islamists to the sociopolitical models of the “classical” era. The end of the “classical” constitution starts with zenith of European imperialism. Beginning in India under British rule in the late eighteenth century and taking full form with the Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, rulers and colonial administrators sought to create rationalized and codified legal systems that would reduce the complexity and diversity of the fiqh for administrative purposes. Between 1869 and 1876, Ottoman legal scholars compiled the Mejelle, an Islamic legal code for use across the empire. The Mejelle transformed sharia, taking it from “a body of doctrines and principles to be discovered by the human efforts of scholars to a set of rules that could be looked up in a code.”76 Other reforms, like the division of legal systems in most colonial territories into “sharia” and “national” or “magistrates” courts (governed by European-style codes), gave states de facto control over what areas of life sharia might apply to. In British, French, and Dutch colonies, the process of legal “reform” was inextricably bound up in administrative efforts to define and codify “custom” and “tradition” in order to convert them into “technolog[ies] of governance” for managing colonial subject communities.77 From Indonesia to the French Sudan and nearly all points in between, this project took an

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ethnographic turn, driven by a deep concern with gaining “scientific” understandings of local religious practices and other traditions. The goal was certainly to preserve them (and their presumptive legitimacy within colonized communities) but also to locate irreducible principles from which reformulations more in line with the needs of the colonial state could begin. In Indonesia, this took the form of Dutch Islamic studies scholar Christian Snouck Hurgronje’s efforts to separate out the “living,” dynamic aspects of customary law (adat) from the supposedly dogmatic, unchanging, ossified religious law (hokum), while British “legal orientalist” scholarship like Joseph Schacht’s widely read Introduction to Islamic Law reduced sharia to its most “law-like” categories (“contracts, property, inheritance, family and penal law”) at the expense of the broad jurisprudential tradition focused on religious duties and the regulation of political power.78 By empowering the colonial state to take charge of these traditions (albeit through local adjuncts), eliminating or limiting aspects that they found “repugnant” to Western values, and channeling popular debate and legal practice into narrow normative bands, the production of colonial knowledge about Islamic law limited the field of vision for future sharia activists. Drawing on “objectified” understandings of the Islamic legal tradition, contemporary efforts to revive sharia as state-sponsored law have mostly resulted in end products that bear little institutional or practical resemblance to the classical sharia. These campaigns don’t ask for a return to the jurisprudence led by independent scholars and encompassing the pluralism of interpretation such leadership implies. Instead, they demand statesponsored sharia legal codes that echo the Tanzimat in form (if not inspiration) and the elimination of laws not “inspired by” or derived from sharia. In the modern world, it’s the state—through legislation, the courts, constitutions, and even democratic institutions—that enacts and administers Islamic law.79 Eickelman and Piscatori, who refer to this phenomenon as the “invention of the Islamic state,”80 describe a process in which the symbols and signifiers of Islamic piety (in Nigeria, the caliphate, the writings of Usman dan Fodio and his successors, and the legal transformations of the colonial era) remain outwardly static, while their meaning and social consequence shifts to justify an endeavor that would have been unrecognizable in nineteenth-century Sokoto. One visible manifestation of this process is the fact that recent debates over Islamic law and the state around the Muslim world have revolved heavily around behavioral manifestations of Islamic identity (veiling and other issues of dress, which are central issues for Muslim activists in Nigeria and its neighbors) and demands that the state recognize or endorse these

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practices, such that turns toward “tradition” require an unprecedented level of intervention and enforcement. State-engineered sharia is inherently “political sharia” (to adopt the derogatory term used in Nigerian debate) in that it’s a tool of “state engineering” whose goals are to eliminate “theft, homosexuality, extra-marital sex, music [and] American cultural icons” rather than to restore the social order that sustained the classical sharia.81 As Olivier Roy argues, the puritanical society that results is “profoundly modern and urban,” as far from the reestablishment of life under the classical Islamic constitution (which left piety to the individual and community norms) as can be.82

Sharia and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century The politics of Islamic law in uncertain Muslim democracies cast the challenges of finding a working accord between Islam and democracy in stark relief. Popular commitment to democracy across the Muslim world is undeniable, but so is the insistence that democratic institutions place Islamic legal institutions and moral values at the center of political and social life. And what form can sharia—particularly a version that grants state authorities unprecedented control over the lives and bodies of Muslim citizens— take while safeguarding the pluralism necessary for democracy? Islamic identities, practices, and the social context that sustain them are changing across the Muslim world, and nowhere more rapidly than in West Africa, where new media, religious movements, and models of religious authority contribute to high-stakes popular debates about how to apply religious principles to political life.83 The results have been mixed for both democracy and sharia. Take the case of Mali, where French colonial policy and the economic and social changes that accompanied them fostered the emergence of a conscious, “objectified” popular Islamic identity. The result, as Benjamin Soares has argued, was the emergence of a Muslim public sphere during the middle of the twentieth century dominated by an explosive growth in public preaching, Islamic religious education, and religious organizational life, all maintained under the secularizing “laicité” policies that rendered Islam “officially invisible” in state discourse.84 Much as across the rest of West Africa, however, autocratic rule complicated the expansion of public Islam. Faced with competing interests in maintaining laicité and soliciting the public support of religious leaders, the country’s successive socialist and military regimes alternately cracked down on organized Muslim interest groups like the Union Culturelle Musulmane (UCM), a Wahhabi-

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inspired organization that gained significant political influence before being banned by both the Keita and Traoré administrations, and cooperated with religious officials to close down bars and nightclubs during Ramadan.85 The 1992 transition offered a new opening for public discussion about the state’s role in enforcing and defending Islamic principles. Initially, the election of new leadership for the first time in a generation led to a scaling down of government limits on business and personal mobility, inspiring both popular excitement and a creeping fear of moral laxity. President Alpha Oumar Konaré withdrew the previous restrictions on nightclubs, risqué films were screened in theaters, and a casino was opened in Bamako, capitalizing on the parimutuel betting craze that had already swept much of Francophone Africa.86 Most significantly, the Konaré government proposed sweeping changes to the Malian code de la famille (family law code), designed to bring the country into compliance with its international treaty obligations with regards to the rights of women and children. The issue was a deeply complicated one, driven by the uneven, even occasionally inconsistent colonial and postcolonial status of fiqh and Islamic jurisprudence in Malian family and civil law, as well as the fact that, despite the basically secular nature of the 1962 Code de la Marriage et la Tutelle (Marriage and Guardianship Code), many Muslims continued to pursue religious marriage contracts in conformance with local understandings of sharia.87 However, Mali faced significant reform pressure from international and local rights activists, and following the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the Konaré administration pursued these reforms with vigor, concluding with a 2002 proposal that raised the legal age of marriage to eighteen, eliminated the legal requirement that women “obey” their husbands, and gave Mali’s secular civil code jurisdiction over most inheritance issues. Conversely, democratization also facilitated a new era of expansion in religious associational life, limited previously by the military regime’s policy of recognizing and negotiating with a single national group, AMPUI (Association Malienne pour l’Unité et le Progrès de l’Islam). Muslim activists, many building on the anti-Sufi, Wahhabi-inspired traditions that had initially risen to social prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, drew heavily on public support from the growing number of Malians exposed to expanded Islamic education and Islamic media programming, much of it in Bambara, the national lingua franca. Muslim groups devoted to moral revival at the community level multiplied rapidly, particularly among women drawn to the opportunity to acquire greater religious knowledge and learn “proper” religious behavior.88 And while Muslim organizations—chief among them

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LIMAMA (Malian League of Imams and Scholars for Islamic Solidarity) and UNAFEM (Union Nationale des Associations de Femmes Musulmanes du Mali, the National Union of Muslim Women)—rarely marched in doctrinal lockstep, their political influence under Konaré and his successor, former military ruler General Amadou Toumani Touré, was substantial. In large part due to organized Islamic opposition framed in terms of both “traditional” patriarchal objections to its elimination of male “rights” over wives and concerns that secular inheritance laws would actually disadvantage rural women by denying them their “Islamic rights,” Konaré abandoned his family law reforms shortly after they were proposed in 2002. The debate continued under the Touré administration, which offered a new version in 2009 that passed in the parliament before pressure from religious groups again forced its withdrawal. Throughout two decades of uncertain democracy, this new generation of Islamic leaders pushed for greater access to the public sphere, challenging the Malian government’s commitment to its laicité model. Perhaps the most prominent Islamic preacher in pre–civil war Mali, Chérif Ousmane Madani Haidara was a particular thorn in the regime’s side as the leader of Ancar Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”), a movement stressing a systematic, objectified vision of Islam boasting as many as a million followers but also unaffiliated with the salafi-inspired “reformist” leadership that dominated most Islamic organizations by the late 1990s.89 Excluded from state-controlled media until 2001, Haidara’s preaching, combining ritual advice with scathing critiques of government corruption and political and religious “hypocrisy,” reached Malians through audio and video recordings sold in local marketplaces. His influence was eventually acknowledged with a seat on the Haut Conseil Islamique (HCI), a new state-sanctioned religious body that had initially sought to keep him out. The fall of northern Mali to a rebellion led by Tuareg insurgents, the March 2012 coup, and the rise of the “other” Ansar Dine—the radical Islamist group led by Iyad ag-Ghali that sought to implement sharia across northern Mali in 2012 and 2013—all complicated the relationship among Islam, law, and democracy. None of Mali’s largest Islamic groups actively campaigned for sharia, but support for some manner of Islamic law (including corporal punishments for criminals and death penalties for apostates and adulterers) was quite high in the years leading up to the rebellion. Indeed, 2009 survey data suggest that a large majority of Muslims (67 percent) saw the intrusion of Western values in the form of movies, TV, and music as damaging to public morality, with an equally large number opposed to alcohol consumption (77 percent). As a result, demands

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for state action to restore and protect public morality were a fundamental part of Islamic activism across the country.90 Following the coup, the damage done to Timbuktu’s religious heritage, and the months of harsh, often brutal punishments and social restrictions, the language of Muslim politics in Mali has begun to shift. Haidara openly condemned the sharia plans of radical Salafist movements such as that of the “other” Ansar Dine and MUJAO (the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa), insisting: “We don’t need their shari’a. We have been Muslim here for centuries. We don’t need their new Islam that they are bringing to impose among us . . . Mali is a secular country. The shari’a is for Muslims. But here in Mali, we live with Christians, we live with Jews, and we live with animists. We are all Malians together here . . . We are not in agreement with the shari’a of Iyad. We reject it.”91 While Haidara had long opposed the expansion of sharia through the Malian state, such a statement by a man feared by the Malian government as a “fundamentalist threat to . . . [the] secular constitution” is a testament to how the experiences of 2012–13 reshaped the discourse of religious reformers and revivalists.92 As noted earlier, support for state-sponsored sharia in Malian law has declined precipitously, as visions of women forced to wear full veils and the violent destruction of bars, hotels, and the mausoleums of saints remain fresh in the public’s mind. Perhaps the most striking evidence of this change comes from a 2013 interview with Moussa Boubacar Bah, the head of the HCI’s youth wing. Committing his organization to a policy of negotiation with the Malian government and moral persuasion within the Muslim community, Bah offered a categorical rejection of the “other” Ansar Dine’s use of political authority to coerce citizens into moral behavior: “I will not destroy a bar; I will convince the people not to drink.”93 Nigeria’s sharia implementation saga shares a number of key similarities with the Malian experience. The emergence of a Muslim public sphere in northern Nigeria can’t be understood outside the context of both the region’s long Islamic history and its colonial experience, which brought dramatic changes to legal practices, religion/state relations, and popular Islamic identities. Unlike in Mali, where popular interest in Islamic law never amounted to a mass political movement, sharia in Nigeria was adopted through the ballot box. But the religious vision that underlined it relied on a similarly “objectified” vision of Islam as a coherent social system emerging from an era of religious revival in the 1970s and 1980s that placed correct ritual practice, moral reform, and a critique of Muslim political elites at its center. Similarly, dissatisfaction with how sharia has (and

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hasn’t) transformed Muslim society in Nigeria has created a new kind of critique of state power and authority, one that alternatively represents both the most democratic side of Muslim religious life and its most violent. In the next three chapters, I explore the rise of sharia as a central theme in Muslim political life in northern Nigeria, focusing on how contemporary reference to the model of Nigeria’s precolonial Islamic past and its destruction by British colonial rule mask the essentially modern, state-centric form of the Fourth Republic sharia project.

THREE

Envisioning Sharia, Imagining the Past

May God help us to pluck up the tents of the heathen from our lands, and set up the tents of the law. —Caliph Muhammad Bello1

When I told my colleagues at Usmanu Danfodiyo University that I was interested in how sharia implementation was perceived by ordinary people, their responses offered a telling window into how many Nigerian Muslims think about Islamic law. Why would you be interested in what motorcycle taxi drivers or traders say about sharia when you can go directly to the source—the writings of Shehu Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi, and his son Muhammad Bello, who crafted the religious and political thought upon which the Sokoto Caliphate was built?2 In interviews and daily conversations, I had to do a great deal of cajoling to get people to talk about contemporary events surrounding sharia without turning the conversation toward the intricacies of caliphal administration. Sharia politics are embedded in a set of shared debates around the questions of what it is to be a good Muslim and how Muslim communities might adapt their Islamic past to contemporary circumstances. During the twentieth century, these debates became more inclusive and globalized, with national religious communities diminishing in importance in favor of transnational Islamic conversations that define “being Muslim” in universalizing terms. Nigeria’s Muslims aren’t new to these conversations, but expanded access to global discourses has transformed their religious and political horizons, fostering an intimate awareness of the sorts of issues and challenges faced by their coreligionists around the world. Popular demands for sharia in northern Nigeria during the 1990s and 2000s were

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clearly shaped by the increased centrality of sharia politics in transnational Muslim discourse. Yet local conflicts, debates, and historical patterns play a crucial role as well, rooting questions about the relationship among Islam, law, and democracy in shared experiences and systems of significance. In northern Nigeria, the language of Muslim politics draws on a uniquely West African history of Islamic revival and state-building. Born in the 1804 jihad led by the Shehu, the Sokoto Caliphate was a functioning Islamic state— indeed, the “largest, most heavily populated, most complexly organized and wealthiest state system in nineteenth-century West Africa.”3 It’s also a mythologized moment, an idealized reminder of what’s possible through sharia, and a (potentially) plausible template for the modern Nigerian state. The Shehu’s jihad wasn’t the beginning of the Islamic state tradition in northern Nigeria (the neighboring Borno Empire, parts of which survive in present-day northeastern Nigeria, had been Islamic for centuries—a fact that its ruler, Muhammad al-Kamemi, didn’t hesitate to point out in his famous correspondence with the Shehu’s son, Caliph Muhammad Bello, during hostilities between the two powers). And even at its height, Sokoto’s control over its frontier regions was incomplete and sporadic, defined by a mixture of uncertain accommodation and outright conflict with populations that resisted its political and religious control. But what the caliphate lacked in territorial hegemony, it made up for in political and symbolic influence, particularly its legacy of Islamic law and legal institutions. Northern Nigerian politics have long revolved around efforts to “claim” the religious and political mantles of the Sokoto Caliphate, and contemporary activists insist that they are re-creating the moral conditions under which the caliphate thrived. But when it comes to interpreting the historical record, the question “what is possible through sharia and an Islamic state?” can be a source of intense conflict.

Sharia, State Power, and the Origins of Nigeria’s Muslim Public Sphere In a recent book on sharia, secularity, and state power in Egypt, anthropologist Hussein Ali Agrama offers an extended critique of scholarship that analyzes Islam and the Islamic tradition through the “objectification” lens described in chapter 2. For Agrama, the core of the “objectification” argument is that contemporary Muslim activists ignore the “truth of change” across the Muslim world. In this reading, Islamists are intent on restoring what they believe to be tradition, unaware of the fact that their efforts

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impose an unprecedented level of order, self-consciousness, and consistency onto the Islamic past. Agrama argues that by viewing contemporary Islamist thought as a “form of modern falsehood,” scholars working with the objectification framework end up treating the dramatic growth of public Muslim piety and its reliance on a particular reading of the Islamic tradition not as products of specific historical and ideational circumstances but as “problem[s] in need explanation.”4 Clearly, the objectification argument directs our attention to an important set of developments around law, faith, and politics in the Muslim world. Popular movements to carve out a greater role for Islamic values in public life are riven by what seem to be contradictory methods and goals, many of which cut against the pluralism of interpretation present in the classical tradition and rely awkwardly on Western discourses of rights and state authority. In Egypt, for example, widespread support for “liberalized sharia”—led by the Supreme Constitutional Court’s effort to interpret article 2 of the Egyptian constitution (which calls for “the principles of Islamic shari’a [to be] the chief source of legislation”) in terms that recognize and protect individual rights—sits uncomfortably next to the successful prosecution of Cairo University professor Nasr Abu Zayd for apostasy in 1995. The Abu Zayd case was notable because it was brought forward through the mechanism of hisbah, whereby private citizens engage in “moral criticism” against an individual through the state courts, a broad expansion of the power of religion in the private sphere. In Nigeria, contemporary sharia movements present a similarly complicated story. On one hand, sharia advocates regularly invoke the language of individual rights to defend the viability of Islamic law in a basically secular state system, arguing that Muslims possess personal rights to conscience and religious freedom that are poorly served by a religiously neutral state. On the other, sharia legislation and sharia-inspired policies involve intrusive state intervention in the religious (and political) lives of their citizens, enforcing their notion of correct religious practice by offering financial incentives and policing public spaces. What are we to make of these inconsistencies, if that’s what they are? For Agrama, one fault of the objectification camp has been that in their extensive exploration of the mediums of communication (satellite television, the Internet, and print) that have shaped Muslim public spheres, they have paid less attention to the “distinctive styles of argument and reasoning” at work within them.5 From this perspective, these seemingly divergent trajectories—the adoption of international human rights discourse and modernist legal perspectives on the one hand and the expansionary, totalizing

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vision of sharia offered by contemporary revivalists on the other—are less anomalous than they first appear. What connects both tendencies is their common origin in the transformative expansion of secular state authority, a universal experience across the Muslim world as a result of European conquest and colonial rule. Although the secularization thesis promising the decline of religious beliefs and values and the retreat of religious expressions into the private sphere has proven to be spectacularly wrong, the secular project of imposing the state as the central authority for creating and managing social order is alive and well.6 Rather than representing a failure of secularism, the rise of objectified visions of state-supported sharia flows from the essentially secular power to define religion’s place in the public sphere, often through the establishment and control of law and the legal system. Northern Nigeria’s defining experience in this regard was the confrontation between the Sokoto Caliphate’s Islamic legal tradition and the secular power of the colonial state. As Ebrahim Moosa has argued, the relationship between colonialism and law in Muslim communities was rarely as simple as outsiders seizing power, “dislod[ing] native laws, and replac[ing] them with European ones.”7 Law and the legal sphere were of paramount importance to both colonizer and colonized; they were sites for colonial administrators and scholars to create new modes of governance that could undergird the imperial project and for local members of the ulema and the Muslim ruling class to negotiate whatever sort of advantage they could. The transformation of caliphal institutions through the introduction of new bureaucratic, political, and legal forms grounded in secular state power had the paradoxical consequence of both undermining the religious legitimacy of the caliphate system and providing its representatives with an unprecedented degree of control over religious space. It also facilitated the emergence of a new Muslim legal culture that retained many of the same intellectual and institutional parameters that evolved under the caliphate, but took for granted the colonial state (and later the independent nationstate) as the primary venue for public debates about enacting and managing sharia. The “state-ification” of Islamic law under colonial rule has had a substantial impact on contemporary Nigerian sharia politics. Today’s sharia advocates tend to read the caliphate past through the lens of the state—as a consistent, coherent, and rule-bound model rather than a complex and messy polity ordered around the religious mission of its founders. This vision, which historian Mervyn Hiskett once described as the “folklore of Muslim Hausa ‘nationalism,’” regards the theological and jurisprudential

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texts produced by the jihadists and their successors as not only a body of political theory but as evidence of how the caliphate functioned long after they were written.8 Contemporary intellectuals reject academic reconstructions of the caliphate that point out violence, conflicts, or incongruities between theory and practice as “distortions, misconceptions, and fabrications” that ignore its potential as a counternarrative to the capitalist tradition they see as embedded in the postcolonial state project.9 In their work, we see an institution in continuously perfect working order, despite the instability caused by corruption, internal slave raiding, and internal critiques by disillusioned Muslim leaders. Women, children, slaves, and nonMuslims are silent, except as bit players who facilitate the actions of Islamic reformers.10 But while it’s easy to criticize these narratives as “modern falsehoods,” what’s more interesting is their relationship with the power of the very secular state they would replace. The political model they draw from caliphate history emphasizes religious legitimacy and activism—a morally interventionist state—at the expense of recognizing the tensions that have also defined northern Nigeria’s sharia experiences for more than two centuries. For them, the caliphate legacy serves less as a check on secular state power and more as a means of enhancing its reach. The popularity of the revivalist narrative also skirts the fact that debates over Islamic law and legal practice have long been embedded in larger struggles about the power to claim the religious legitimacy of the caliphate for political ends. British engagement with sharia placed the power to define the scope and practice of Islamic law in the hands of their local collaborators, many of whom readily used this growing authority to advance their own interests. The result has been increasingly intense conflict over who has the power to “speak” for the Islamic tradition and the growing salience of sharia policies as a means of reinforcing claims to state authority.

Sharia and State in the Caliphate Era Northern Nigeria’s Islamic heritage has its origins in the empires, independent city-states, and loosely organized societies of Central Sudan. The core of what would become the Sokoto Caliphate was Hausaland, a collection of linguistically linked city-states located to the west of the Islamic empires of Kanem and Borno in the Lake Chad basin. As a hub for the trans-Saharan trade networks, the region was exposed to Islam as early as the eleventh century, and ascendance of Muslim rulers in Katsina and Kano during the fifteenth century accelerated the Islamicization of Hausa society. The debate over sharia’s role in Hausa society dates to the mid-fifteenth

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century arrival of Algerian scholar/reformer al-Maghili in Kano. Al-Maghili, whose writings included a “mirror for princes” for Emir Muhammadu Rumfa of Kano, did more than anyone else to establish the reformist, messianic traditions that played a crucial role in the founding of the Sokoto Caliphate. He named purifying the faith and enforcing sharia as the central responsibilities of Muslim rulers and argued that it was the responsibility of Muslims to rise up against ostensibly Islamic political authorities who sanctioned non-Islamic practices in government and daily life.11 In the mid-eighteenth century, the Hausa ruling classes came into conflict with al-Maghili’s spiritual successors—communities of Fulani ulema preaching a reformist, sharia-centric doctrine. The Shehu, who began his career as a cleric and scholar in Degel (about thirty-five kilometers southwest of Sokoto), became the principle leader of this movement in the mid-1770s, attracting a large following with his uncompromising attitude toward rulers who failed to uphold sharia. Over the next several decades, he clashed with the king of the Hausa city-state of Gobir, who responded with repression of local Muslims. Following his exile in 1804, the Shehu and his supports undertook a jihad, capturing Alkalawa (the walled capital of Gobir) in 1808. As his successes multiplied, the Shehu sponsored “flag bearers,” or local leaders who carried his green-and-white pennant and pledged to wage war in his name, and by 1812, Katsina, Zaria, Bauchi, and Kano had fallen. Initially, the Shehu divided political authority between Abdullahi and Bello, with his flag bearers as the emirs of the individual states. After the Shehu’s death in 1817, Bello succeeded him as caliph (amir al-mu’minin, or commander of the faithful), and Sokoto established itself as the region’s dominant political and cultural power. The ideal of a political system based on justice and the supremacy of law served the caliphate both as a practical administrative goal and as a source of political and religious authority. The state’s primary purpose was, as the Shehu argued, to implement and enforce sharia, leading a constant religious revival: I say—and help is with God—the purpose of the Muslims in their governments is to strip evil things from religious and temporal affairs, and introduce reforms into religious and temporal affairs . . . An example of introducing reforms  .  .  . is that the governor of every country shall strive to repair the mosques and establish the five prayers in them, and order the people to strive to read the Quran and make [others] read it, and learn knowledge, and teach it; that he should strive to reform the markets and set to rights

Envisioning Sharia, Imagining the Past / 57 the affairs of the poor and the needy, and order the doing of every approved thing.12

John Paden, whose research on the politics of religion in Kano provides a crucial record of how Muslim activists have used the caliphate tradition for their own ends, describes this theory as “theocracy in a legalistic framework,” in which the ruler’s key obligation is to assure that Muslims live in a political community of believers, guided by leaders committed to consultation to justice.13 The Shehu justified the jihad in terms of the Hausa ruling class’s failure to provide these assurances, classing them as apostates, minglers of Islamic practices with traditional beliefs, and oppressors of their true Muslim subjects. They not only failed to uphold sharia but actively circumvented it—“chang[ing] the laws of God”—by forcing Muslims to pay taxes without religious justification and ignoring the punishments prescribed in sharia. The government had “shut the door in the face of the needy,” ignoring the religious obligations of a ruler for his subjects in favor of corruption and confiscation.14 There’s no reason to doubt the genuineness of the Shehu’s followers’ commitment to creating an Islamic polity based on the jihad’s vision. While colonial-era histories focused on the racial or ethnic motives (Fulani vs. Hausa) of the jihad, later scholars have emphasized its genuinely revolutionary qualities and are certainly correct in describing its primary goals as religious reform and revival.15 The caliphate’s religious authority depended on the universal legality and legitimacy of sharia and on its leaders’ ability to parlay this legitimacy into military and political support from the emirates and their leadership. This commitment held it together as a political unit for a century despite nearly constant internal rebellion and external warfare. Describing the exact parameters of the Islamic legal system under Sokoto’s rule is more difficult. Aside from the work of the jihadists, one of the few available starting points is the work of colonial-era Islamic legal scholars Joseph Schacht and Norman Anderson, a pair of British-based orientalists who conducted research in the north under the auspices of the colonial office in the late 1950s.16 Drawing on a series of short research trips in the early to mid-1950s, both Schacht and Anderson concluded that, unlike most other colonies where Islamic law had succumbed to “reform,” northern Nigeria had been largely untouched by the colonial tendency to limit its jurisdiction to personal and family law and that colonial institution-building had even (at least in some instances) helped expand the

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scope and application of classical Islamic jurisprudence. Anderson’s assertion that “Islamic law is in fact applied more widely [in northern Nigeria] than in any other part of the British Empire, except the Aden Protectorate” remains widely cited by Nigerian Muslims, who argue that contemporary Islamic legal reforms would do no more than restore caliphate-era practices.17 Yet the fact is that there are virtually no written records of the dayto-day administration of justice in Sokoto or the emirates. Schacht and Anderson based their findings on scant fieldwork and limited knowledge of the caliphate legal background and could only speak with authority about the colonial era. Indeed, there are remarkably few firsthand records of any kind of court or jurisprudential practice in the precolonial period, and even the best sources rely on secondhand reports or extrapolations based on colonial-era court records.18 Islamic law under Sokoto seems to have conformed to the classical model, inasmuch as alkali courts played a primary role in implementing sharia under the auspices of state authority while the ulema retained a great deal of influence on the law’s practice. The emirs also held legal authority through their judicial councils, adjudicating a range of property law and criminal cases. It’s less certain just how accessible the justice of the emir’s councils and the alkali courts was for the majority of the population, particularly in rural areas. In at least some arenas, particularly land tenure and inheritance, family law, and the status of women, emirate rule confronted long-standing local practices that melded imperfectly with Maliki fiqh, and many citizens preferred to avoid the “formal apparatus of Islamic law” when money and land were at stake.19 Evidence from the early colonial era suggests that “harsh” punishments of the hudud (those that have mandatory penalties defined in the Quran) crimes or qisas (retaliatory punishments for murder or physical injury) were rarely applied—the emir of Bauchi reported to one British official that only three thieves had suffered amputation in his lifetime—but that adherence to Islamic evidentiary procedure (in which only eyewitness testimony by adult Muslims is admissible) was rigorous.20 It is also clear that Sokoto’s (and the emirates’) rule was full of compromises and departures from the Shehu’s initial vision. In their later years, both the Shehu and Abdullahi expressed dissatisfaction with what they saw as the creeping return of corruption, and following the Shehu’s death, prominent members of the jihadist community raised intellectual and military challenges to the new leadership’s claims of religious legitimacy. These protests peaked in 1817 with a revolt against Bello led by Abd-al Salam, a scholar and former student of the Shehu, but politically moti-

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vated rebellions against caliphal authority remained commonplace, particularly during its final quarter-century of independence.21 With time also came the slow scaling back of the reforms proposed by the first generation of Fulani emirs, including the elimination of traditional Hausa titles and honorifics, prohibitions on the sale of offices, and an end to unauthorized fines, levies, and taxes. The reemergence of the lineage-based title-holding system and its elites (the masu sarauta or sarakuna) with new Fulani personnel meant that many aspects of pre-jihad inequality continued, while slavery (slaves accounted for perhaps half of the caliphate’s population) and slave raiding against Muslim communities not only persisted but expanded. The fear and economic disruption of the constant raiding are vividly described by Baba, a friend and informant of anthropologist Mary Smith, whose first-person account of Baba’s life is a remarkable testament to the violent realities of the era: Not long after the raid on Ubangida’s house, about thirty days later, we heard that the raiders had gone away, and Father said they could go out of the town to look at his rice-field near the river—there were father’s wife Rabi, Kado’s bride and ten men who were working amongst the tall rice. Silence, they were all working, then suddenly gom-gom-gom—there were horsemen and men on foot surrounding them. The farm slaves ran away but the raiders caught Rabi and Kado’s bride, they tied their hands across their breasts, each hand on the opposite shoulder, with rope, and they carried them off to Katsina.22

Ultimately, it remains devilishly difficult to pin down the nature of justice in the caliphate at the end of the nineteenth century. Tellingly, the most comprehensive account of the caliphate’s “decadence” and decline is the one offered by British administrator-scholars, in no small part as a self-interested justification for their military campaign against Kano and Sokoto. British agents emphasized the prevalence of slavery (“the Jihad degenerates into the slave-raid”), the “oppression” of emirate communities by tyrannical ruling elites, and heavy and “irregular” taxation as factors that “necessitated [the caliphate’s] overthrow” at their own hand.23 Indeed, the immediate pretext for the invasion itself—the supposed threats of war against British interests proffered by Sokoto in May 1902—was an exaggeration on the part of the British high commissioner, the notorious Sir Frederick Lugard.24 Certainly, in many emirates, the relationship between Islam and state tilted heavily in favor of centralized power, with sharia used as a tool for advancing particular political and economic interests. But despite

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the violence and uncertainty of the late caliphate, the ideals of the jihadists seem to have remained central to political practice, serving as much more than mere props used by the emirate elite to justify inequality. These ideals also remained central to the efforts of the masu sarauta to navigate the colonial situation, although there would be increasing conflict over how to realize them in practice.

Colonialism and Change: Religious Authority and Sharia under British Rule Here [in Nigeria] we have a state that is in transition. We know what it is a transition from, but we are not so clear as to what it is a transition to. —A. Victor Murray, 193525

Sokoto’s defeat in March 1903 brought these social and intellectual tensions to a head. Caliph Attahiru I fled into hijra (toward the Holy Lands) accompanied by a considerable host of followers; he fell in battle against a pursuing British force at Burmi on July 27. The new caliph (now merely sultan) Attahiru II accepted his turban and gown from Lugard, whose March 21 speech announced that the rights of conquest that once belonged to the caliphate had definitively “come into the hands of the British.”26 It was left to the remaining ulema to define this new colonial dispensation in Islamic terms. While the responses ranged from further calls to hijra to open resistance and fervent eschatology, the most influential was that of the highest-ranking caliphate official who remained, the Wazirin Sokoto, Muhammad al-Buhari. The Waziri argued that in light of Lugard’s promises not to interfere with the five pillars of Islam or abrogate sharia, the best path for the community was peaceful coexistence without compromise as regards to Islam and taqiyya (dissimulation) as necessary for preserving sharia.27 Although other voices suggested more confrontational tactics, most of the emirate political leadership chose collaboration, albeit as distinctly junior partners (“not to be regarded as independent chiefs,” as Lugard put it in his 1906 private memorandum on “Native Administration”).28 The immediate payoff was Sokoto’s cooperation with the British in putting down the Mahdist uprising of 1905–6 at Satiru, ending in the slaughter of two thousand (mostly peasants and escaped slaves) by a combined British and Sokoto force. In repressing the Satiruwa, British and Sokoto interests were aligned against a movement with both a decidedly anticolonial

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and anticaliphate character. The British feared its Mahdist ideology, which evoked the battle that cost Charles “Chinese” Gordon and his troops their lives at Khartoum in 1885 and endangered their ill-staffed grip on power. Sokoto feared it because it was a movement of commoners, many of whom anticipated that the arrival of the British would bring “complete freedom” and put “an end to all laws and taxation,” and of escaped slaves, who fled their masters in enormous numbers following the conquest. Attahiru II received the Companionship of the Order of St. Michael and St. George for his efforts, and two other members of the aristocracy who played crucial roles in the Satiru affair subsequently became sultans as well.29 Over the next six decades, this uneasy cooperation mingled with considerable resistance, much of it framed in religious terms such as the occasional invocation of jihad against the nasara, or “Christians.”30 Yet it also allowed the emirate elite to maintain a measure of continuity with the precolonial past. Sharia continued to be applied under the heirs of dan Fodio, who governed both as emirs and as agents of the “Native Administration” (NA) apparatus crafted by Lugard and his successors. Despite the outward similarities, however, British rule changed more than it maintained, disrupting the underlying social mechanisms by which emirate elites asserted and exercised social control over the talakawa (commoners), particularly in areas of law and justice.31 British intervention also “objectified” sharia in Nigerian public consciousness, defining it in terms of positive law enforced by state agents. Colonial rule rewrote fluid local practices in the language of the state, further privileging the power of the emirate elite and their associated ulema. The result was an opening for a religious critique of the ruling class grounded in the caliphate’s revival tradition. Indirect Rule and Religious Authority As historian Robert Heussler once argued, to speak of British colonial “policy” as a single, coherent project in a territory as large and diverse as Nigeria was to vastly overestimate it. For most of the colonial era, charismatic, independent-minded colonial administrators had considerable autonomy to respond to local, on-the-ground circumstances, and there was rarely consensus within the colonial government on major policy areas, particularly between the northern and southern offices in Lagos and Kaduna.32 Yet British attitudes toward sharia in northern Nigeria did reflect some basic continuities grounded in a shared desire to avoid unraveling the underlying social fabric on which the indirect rule system depended. In this sense, the “objectification” of sharia was an unintended consequence that emerged

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from a set of broadly concerted efforts to manage the Islamic legal system and the authorities that represented it. British interest in Islam focused on two overarching goals—the preservation of the NA system and the identification and containment of potentially anticolonial religious movements. Both emerged from a belief that maintaining public order depended on preserving “custom” as a source of political and legal authority. For the masu sarauta, this meant the power to use tradition as a trump card to justify new policies as “reforms” that would return the law to a more pristine, “traditional” condition. For the British, it meant the power to selectively ignore or misread the Islamic legal tradition, even as many administrators understood themselves as defenders of emirate culture. The victims were the talakawa, women, and nonMuslims, who experienced greater state surveillance and control, eroded rights and reciprocities, and continued demands for their taxes and labor. Northern colonial officials weren’t necessarily resistant to introducing Western civilization to the emirates, a charge levied at them by their counterparts in Lagos and missionaries angered by policies that denied them access to the emirate areas until the late 1930s. Their concern, rather, was to control and direct its introduction without robbing local institutions and authorities of their “traditional” legitimacy. In this sense, as Andrew Barnes has argued, what was most attractive to the British about the emirate elite was not their religious tradition but their aristocratic one.33 As Dame Margery Perham (the doyenne of British African colonial theorists) saw it, the Fulani emirs were prone to “extravagance,” surrounded by “their wives, concubines, eunuchs and . . . slaves” and therefore (as Lugard himself observed) “hateful to the bulk of the population.”34 Yet colonial officials feared that abandoning emirate authority and the legitimacy it carried would be too risky a move for the underlying social structure to bear. As C. L. Temple, a former northern colonial officer and a key architect of indirect rule suggested, to remove the constraints of emirate authority from native subjects would be to make them “like a kite without a tail,” unmoored from tradition and therefore unmanageable.35 The first decade of colonial rule also introduced new taxes, overhauled court systems, and created a new hierarchy of titleholders—the district and village “heads” (“territorial bureaucrats,” to use Steven Pierce’s phrase)— meant to bureaucratize the hierarchy of free and royal slave officials found in the emir’s court.36 Colonial officials wrapped these proposals in Islamic language, designed through a combination of anthropological study and efforts to read the existing Islamic legal precedents in supportive terms. For example, Lugard’s incremental approach to abolition—an issue on which

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British officials felt compelled to act but which proffered the possibility of dramatic (and, from their perspective, undesirable) social and economic changes to the status quo of emirate authority—depended on an appeal to the Islamic legal instrument of murgu, by which slaves could enter into agreements allowing them to work independently of their masters in exchange for a regular payment, perhaps (but not necessarily) buying their freedom. Murgu agreements were recognized by alkali courts and provided compensation to slave owners while also providing revenue to the colonial government, as slaves under such agreements were often subject to taxation.37 And where local justifications were harder to come by, the British imported them. In 1925, colonial authorities solicited and obtained a fatwa from an imam in Mecca with West African origins in order to lend religious legitimacy to their policy of punishing anyone claiming to be the Mahdi.38 With their “territorial bureaucrats,” colonial officials also looked to create a streamlined tax system—lucrative yet perceived as religiously legitimate by local populations. The British confronted a decentralized and diverse system of Islamic taxes (including, for those with sufficient incomes, the zakat, or mandatory charitable giving) that they believed (wrongly) could be easily consolidated and modified. The relationship between small farmers and title holders was defined by a complex web of patron-client relations that included demands for “customary gifts” (gaisuwa) from commoners to local rulers. Most court officials were absentee landlords who left the actual tax collection to the jakadu (“messengers”), whose considerable autonomy had sometimes been backed by the threat of slave raids against uncooperative communities.39 Colonial authorities tended to read this arrangement as a sign of how far caliphate government had fallen from its religious ideals and demanded that court officials move into the countryside to administer their fiefs directly. Meanwhile, the jakadu were replaced by a system of landholding surveys and centralized recordings of tax payments (payments that were far more onerous than those demanded in the rest of the colony, reaching as high as 30 percent of farmers’ net income).40 NA authorities had strong incentives to extort extra tax payments from farmers or demand bribes in exchange for falsifying assessment records, and smallholders had little recourse. The British weren’t reticent about deposing or transferring NA officials who ostentatiously violated the law, but they also had a stake in not recognizing the connection between indirect rule as an institution and the exploitation of the talakawa.41 Colonial officials relied on the autocratic authority of the masu sarauta to carry out ordinary administrative tasks

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ranging from tax and data collection to criminal justice, and undermining it would have likely proven disastrous to the indirect rule project. For some Nigerian observers, there were obvious parallels between the decay of jihadist principles in the face of administrative realities in the nineteenth century and the reconfigured exploitation of the NAs. Indeed, the Shehu’s writings didn’t circulate freely during much of this period, part of a seemingly conscious effort to prevent widespread recognition of the gap between the caliphate theory of government and the practice of administration under the NAs.42 British and masu sarauta interests converged on the issue of containing religious threats to the status quo. Colonial officials used their intelligence apparatus to distinguish between what Jonathan Reynolds has sardonically called “good” and “bad” Muslims, reflecting a distrust of religious movements dedicated to “strict” practice, religious revival, or international religious communities, and a preference for what they believed (misleadingly) to be the more “lax” religious outlook of the masu sarauta and the religious movement most strongly associated with the Shehu, the Qadiriyya Sufi darika (brotherhood). British officials followed a policy of arrest, harassment, and intensive surveillance toward those they feared, including any Muslims who actively sought regional or international religious ties. They monitored the movements of leading religious scholars and restricted travel on the hajj (pilgrimage) and applications to study abroad at institutions of Islamic learning such as Al-Azhar in Cairo, fearful of returnees bearing radical Islamic ideologies.43 And who were the “bad” Muslims? Well into the 1930s, Mahdism served as a colonial bogeyman, read by enthusiastic administrators into nearly every Islamic movement operating outside of emirate elite society. Subsequently, British suspicions were redirected toward the Tijaniyya, the second-largest darika in Nigeria, and often erroneously lumped in with Mahdism by British intelligence reports.44 Beginning with Emir Abbas of Kano’s choice to openly affiliate with the Tijaniyya in 1914, membership became a means of signaling independence from Sokoto and opposition to cultural “innovations” introduced under colonial rule, a pattern that would escalate as the Tijaniyya expanded their popular reach in the late 1930s and 1940s. The British administration maintained its surveillance of the Tijaniyya into the 1950s, while their support for the Qadiriyya allowed emirate elites to use NA resources to attack politically active Tijaniyya members in the lead-up to independence.45 More broadly, however, the British bias is best summarized as anti-“conservative,” directed at Muslim intellec-

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tuals and activists who promoted what they perceived as rigidity in belief and in the application of sharia. Whatever their preferences for the autocratic tradition of the caliphate, it was resistance of this community toward “reform” and “modernization” in the legal sphere that came to dominate British policy toward Islam from the late 1920s onward. Colonizing Sharia As Mahmood Mamdani argues, British colonial preoccupations with the legal manifestations of custom first emerged in India, where the 1857 rebellion demonstrated the failure of long-standing efforts to incorporate Indian natives into British-style administrative (the army, particularly) and legal systems. Now colonial administrators would seek to preserve local ruling and legal structures, albeit in terms intended to further British interests. This philosophy found an anthropological justification in the work of Sir Henry Maine, a legal advisor to the British viceroy. Maine argued that while legal systems developed in the Roman “civil” tradition emerged from sovereign authority and aspired to be universally applied, “customary” law was bound to particular places and communities and its legitimacy derived from long-standing familiarity. Where civil law was “obeyed,” customary law was merely “observed.”46 In the colonial administrative unit of Northern Nigeria, this meant that British officials viewed the question of sharia’s place in the colonial legal system through a primarily empirical lens. In matters of criminal and personal law, it was to be preserved primarily because it had been “found in force there . . . and was recognized as the native law and custom,” with all the popular legitimacy that came along with such a recognition.47 But in other realms—particularly land and inheritance law—where sharia’s position seemed less certain, British administrator-scholars and anthropologists sought to record and then fit complex, localized norms into their own intellectual models (drawn from both classical Islamic law and British experience), inadvertently “inventing” a version of customary land tenure that bore only a passing resemblance to existing practice.48 But despite its apparently humble origins, customary law (including sharia) was widely seen as a force for preserving colonial order, provided it could be catalogued and administered by the state and used “to inculcate a sense of responsibility, and evolve among a primitive community some sense of discipline and respect for authority.”49 In effect, it became the responsibility of British administrators to abstract each community’s normative values and

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principles, filter them through colonial authority, and impose the resulting “law” back on them at the barrel of a gun. To say that the results were often unsatisfactory for both sides is an understatement. While most colonial legal scholars recognized that the classical Islamic jurisprudential tradition was rich, complex, and diverse, the tendency across the empire was to identify a set of “more or less homogenous legal rules” based as much as possible on textual evidence, which was seen as more reliable than the amorphous realities of daily practice.50 But unlike in the case of Indian “Anglo-Mohammadan law,” with which colonial orientalist legal scholarship quickly produced a “largely codified” and structurally transformed system of law (albeit one almost entirely divorced from the lived “policy or philosophy of Islamic legal practice”),51 efforts in Northern Nigeria were primarily directed toward simply maintaining sharia’s viability as a vehicle for their administrative goals. The mostly uncodified law that emerged was still broadly understood as “sharia” by most members of the ulema and the Muslim community, and it was applied largely as it had been under the caliphate. Yet inasmuch as these efforts also strengthened the hand of the colonial state in its efforts to bend the Islamic legal tradition to its own ends, they also reinforced the power of secular state authorities to constitute the law—a transformation that would have significant consequences moving forward. Although Lugard’s 1903 speech at Sokoto famously promised accommodation and noninterference with Islamic institutions, the reality was more complicated. As the historian (and former Nigeria colonial officer) I. F. Nicolson once argued, the real face of the colonial edifice in the first decades after conquest was a military one, in which on-the-ground administrators were not to be “hampered by legal technicalities” but free to bring a “common sense point of view” to bear in order to act swiftly and decisively.52 Beginning with the Native Courts Ordinances of 1900 and 1906, existing courts were reconstituted under colonial authority, with residents and district officers empowered to approve or dismiss alkalai and to “suspend, reduce, or modify” their decisions with few explicit guidelines on the exercise of these prerogatives.53 Again, unlike in India, where codification and the establishment of a system of precedent based on appeals to higher courts channeled what was left of sharia into a single colonial legal apparatus run largely by British judges, the Native Courts (NCs) operated strictly in parallel to the newly created Provincial (after 1933, “Magistrate”) court system, which applied a modified version of British criminal and civil law to “nonnatives.” Although there was a Northern Region Supreme Court in place after 1900 to adjudicate conflicts between the NC and the Provin-

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cial Courts, it was seldom used, and there was seemingly little interest on the part of the local British administrators in forcing the courts to develop a more systematized application of Islamic law. Indeed, the residents and the district officers were allowed to intervene in specific cases at their own discretion—which is to say, without any systematic application of legal principles. As the British understood it, this system represented continuity with caliphate practice with two exceptions—one for laws or practices found to be “repugnant to natural justice” and another for those conflicting with colonial legislation. Yet almost immediately, it became clear that whenever “Moslem law” was deemed contradictory to their administrative goals, there were few qualms about subordinating or redefining it. These new rules imposed new forms of court record keeping and instituted mandatory court fees—practices that proved unpopular among jurists and court participants alike. Alkalai were also forced to accept police and medical reports as evidence (despite no basis for doing so under Maliki law), to recognize the testimony of non-Muslims, and to abandon or modify the hudud punishments in favor of imprisonment and fines. Amputation (rare as it was) was summarily banned, although flogging—justified as a “traditional” practice for Muslims and quickly adopted in the Provincial Courts as well—enjoyed something of a renaissance.54 As British administrative practices evolved, efforts to enhance political control of the court focused further on bringing the NC system under the control of the emirs and the NAs. This goal seems to have had two primary motives. For one, local and provincial colonial officials (correctly) saw themselves as having political leverage over the NAs that could be applied to the NCs if the emirs were granted greater powers of appeal and prerogative. The 1906 ordinance created a formal court hierarchy, assigning NCs “grades” (A through D) determining their competency and jurisdiction. Ordinary (“district”) alkalai courts were granted the power to hear cases with limited damages (civil) or carrying restricted terms of punishment (criminal), while chief alkali courts and the judicial councils of major emirates were assigned competency over capital crimes. These judicial councils were also granted control over cases with political implications, including those dealing with boundary disputes, “sedition,” and religious radicalism. A second motivation was the belief that a system run by the emirs and NAs and grounded in the authority of their classical siyasa powers would ultimately prove more adaptable to modern circumstances than one administered primarily by members of the ulema. For colonial staff, many of whom drew an intellectual distinction between the “strict shari’a” prac-

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ticed by some alkalai and a “modified form” they hoped to encourage,55 it seemed that the “traditional” authority of the emirs would be more likely to bear the gradual adoption of a legal system influenced by but not entirely consistent with fiqh, as most other British Muslim-majority colonies (Sudan, in particular) had done earlier. As Muhammad Sani Umar has documented, the question of finding an acceptable Islamic justification for granting the emirs’ councils powers of appeal and prerogative over the alkalai, whose inclination was to believe that their religious authority was (to quote from a 1932 report on the issue) “not dependent on that of the Emir,” dominated British administrative debates for the better part of twenty years, culminating in the 1933 Protectorate Courts Ordinance that officially granted them appeals powers over the NCs.56 One important consequence of these efforts was the space they provided emirate leaders to change local legal practices to suit their interests, as in the case of a 1923 proclamation by Emir Usman of Kano prohibiting women from inheriting houses and farms. Despite the fact that women’s rights to the inheritance of land was a fairly settled issue in Maliki law, Usman and his supporters presented this reform not only as the reestablishment of caliphate-era practice (a dubious claim) but, more important, as part of the reestablishment of traditional limits on the role of women in society. This second argument not only resonated with both popular opinion in Kano and British notions of gender propriety but provided Usman the opportunity (unfortunately for him, later curtailed) to gain control of these properties as a source of revenue.57 A second and perhaps even more significant consequence was that the 1933 ordinance put NCs headed by alkalai and emirs in the position of administering not only the uncodified sharia but the Northern Nigerian Criminal Code—the secular, codified law applied in the Magistrate Courts—as well. For the British, the desire to see the NCs take on this new role was particularly pressing given the influx of non-Muslims into the Northern Region’s cities—especially the sabon garis (new towns) outside the walls of cities like Kano and Zaria—and the significant numbers of non-Muslims living on the fringes of emirate-controlled areas. Under the principles of indirect rule, communities were to be subject to the generally prevailing “native law and custom.” But what would that mean in plural communities? Would immigrants be subject to “native justice” under Muslim-led courts? Would they carry their “native” status from their homes, necessitating their own NCs? Or would they no longer be viewed as members of “native communities” and be subject to British-style laws in Magistrate Courts? A 1934 colonial edict solved the problem by defining NC jurisdic-

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tion in terms of the “general mode of life” of a native community—put simply, if someone looked to the British like a native, he or she would be subject to native justice, applied by whatever NC was available. Consistent with regards to their notions about NA superiority over the alkalai courts, British administrators seem to have initially assumed that emirs would welcome this expansion of their power. And indeed, as Shobana Shankar has documented, NA officials had already demonstrated flexibility in other areas—particularly in the eventual accommodation of Christian missionaries in medical affairs—when it could be used to expand their own authority, and during the 1930s and 1940s, their administrative power was gradually extended outward to include both the sabon gari communities and most non-Muslim “natives.”58 In a 1957 case at the Northern High Court, the terms of this expansion were laid out as clearly as possible. Effiong Ekpo, a non-Muslim from Calabar accused of a theft of £40 and the assault of a police officer in Kano, was ruled to be subject to the justice of the emir of Kano’s Judicial Council, despite the fact that the court had explicitly applied Maliki fiqh-based evidentiary standards and court procedures. In the decision, the two British judges (writing with the assistance of a pair of Muslim aids to clarify the Islamic legal context) wrote simply: “There can be no doubt that although the appellant is not a Moslem, the court had jurisdiction to try him by Moslem law. The question which we have to decide is whether his trial conforms with the requirements of Moslem law.”59 And even prior to the Ekpo decision, Muslim alkalai NCs seem to have frequently applied sharia in cases involving non-Muslims, even lobbying British officials to prevent them from establishing alternative NCs for these areas.60 But if the political powers these reforms provided were popular within the NAs, their religious implications were not always greeted so cheerfully. In the 1952 Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry (the so-called Brooke Report, named after its primary author), fears about the administration of secular law by NC judges trained in fiqh were described largely in terms of the need for more training and education in these “foreign” legal rules and procedures, lest the initial challenges they faced undermine the prestige of their Islamic facet.61 The Brooke Report cites a letter from the “Sheikhs of the Law School at Kano” suggesting the possibility of establishing a second track of native courts staffed by Muslims “having knowledge of the world and of the laws of the Government” to apply secular law as needed, thereby providing a measure of insulation to the alkalai.62 And indeed, this seems to have been one primary goal behind the program, beginning in 1954, to send promising students abroad

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for training in Arabic and Islamic studies, either in colonial dependencies (particularly Sudan, Egypt, and Pakistan) where sharia “reform” was already well-established or to the School for African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, where they could study under the Western reform “experts” (including Norman Anderson) directly.63 Yet even in the official account, there was an undercurrent of anger with these new realities. In 1930 and 1952, advisory councils constituted from leading emirs and members of their judiciaries passed resolutions objecting to any requirement that they administer anything other than sharia, and Brooke noted a “harden[ing]” of attitudes among the ulema on these questions, remarking that some judges refused entirely to hear criminal cases based on sections of the Northern Criminal Code, which had no corresponding offence under “Mohammedan law” or insisted (as in the Ekpo case) on using “Mohammedan procedure” if they were to do so.64 What caused this resistance? For one, contemporary observers such as Brooke and Schacht failed to appreciate just how coercive the efforts of colonial officials had been in their pursuit of expanding the jurisdiction of the NAs and bringing sharia “up to date.” In 1931, the chief colonial official in Kano, Resident John Carrow, succeeded in getting the emir to agree to have courts under his jurisdiction hear cases concerning non-Muslims, but only after threatening him with more “direct action” should he refuse. Given that in other emirates (including Sokoto itself) this had involved significantly curtailing emirs’ discretionary power or even deposing sitting rulers, the message was not hard to receive.65 For another, the 1947 decision of the West African Court of Appeal in the famous Tsofo Gubba v. Gwandu Native Authority case demonstrated to many emirs and members of the ulema that the clear intent of the British was to proceed with sharia “reforms” that would eventually make it subservient to secular law. Tsofo Gubba overturned a death sentence handed down by the court of one of the most prominent emirs in the colony on what amounted to a legal technicality, finding that had the case been heard in a Magistrate Court, the defendant would have been found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and thus would not have been eligible for capital punishment. In effect, this established a precedent that NCs (even grade As) would no longer be able to apply punishments on the basis of sharia if they conflicted with the Northern Criminal Code, a rule codified a year later in the 1948 Native Courts Ordinance. British administrative opinion seems to have regarded this furor as little more than sour grapes—a “temporary reaction”66 (in Brooke’s terms) that would eventually be met with the understanding (particularly by scholars with “modern” Islamic studies training abroad) that the changes they pro-

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posed were a necessary step in the process of preserving a place for sharia within a modernized legal system. Yet the concerns expressed by members of the ulema appear to have been genuine, rooted in the fear that taking on these new responsibilities might diminish their religious authority in the eyes of their communities. And as the Nigerian legal scholar Jamil AbunNasr argues based on a reading of Schacht’s private field notes, alkalai and other members of the ulema also seem to have felt that, for all the colonial pressure they received to “moderate” or temper their application of the “strict” sharia, textual literalism was a much more effective strategy for justifying their decisions to British officials, themselves trained to defer to appeals to classical legal authorities.67 These concerns forced colonial administrators to weigh the costs of undermining the NA system by removing capital case jurisdiction from prominent grade A courts against the challenge of informally identifying and transferring all potentially problematic homicide cases into the Magistrate system.68 In some sense, however, Brooke and his colonial colleagues were right. Although British interference had limited the power of the masu sarauta in new and unprecedented ways, the choice to strengthen the judicial and executive powers of the emirs’ Judicial Councils at the expense of the alkalai courts took on new, unexpected importance as the 1940s gave birth to the Nigerian nationalist movement and the clamor for independence. With the emergence of mass politics, NA control over the NCs provided the masu sarauta with the ability to both claim continuity with the caliphate past and use their legal authority (and, by extension, sharia) to silence their emerging political rivals. In their hands, this power would decide the fate of sharia for the next fifty years.

Debating Sharia in a Constitutional Era (I): The Late Colonial Period and the First Republic As the nationalist struggle accelerated in the mid-1940s, the religious underpinnings of politico-legal authority in Northern Nigeria showed signs of strain. The problems associated with this tension were most strongly voiced by non-Muslim minorities living south of the traditional limits of emirate authority. Here, memories of the caliphate’s expansion invoked an era of uncertainty and violence. British initiatives in these areas often amounted to what Moses Ochonu has called “colonialism within colonialism,” with the caliphate model (and Hausa/Islamic identity) not only held up as “the unspoken paradigmatic cultural formation” but eagerly extended to noncaliphate territories. While indirect rule relied on local “pa-

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gan” (non-Muslim, non-Hausaphone) authorities as expediency required, the overarching goal was to integrate these areas into the “northern Nigerian political mainstream,” shorthand for the emirate system.69 In Jos, a Middle Belt city founded in 1915 and settled by a diverse mix of Nigerians from across the colony, British efforts to govern according to the principles of native authority laid the groundwork for generations of conflict. Colonial officials alternated offers of support and recognition between the Hausa and Birom (a smaller, non-Muslim ethnic group from the Jos Plateau) in their efforts to control the city through the NA apparatus, creating ample space for conflict over religious and ethnic “ownership” of the area. These tensions resulted in a full-scale ethnic riot in 1945, the first of its kind in Nigerian history. Meanwhile, growing dissatisfaction with British and NA officials’ interventions in sharia decisions generated a strong sense that some sort of additional legal and political reform to address the “minorities” question was necessary prior to independence. These strains were accentuated by political conflict within the heart of the Muslim community. Beginning in the late 1930s, the leadership of both the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya took on increasingly prominent roles in reviving interest in the caliphate tradition, serving to further politicize intraMuslim difference. The Tijaniyya expanded its influence through the efforts of Kano Emir Muhammad Sanusi and Sheikh Ibrahim Niass from Kaolack, Senegal, arguably the most prominent Tijaniyya leader of the twentieth century.70 In 1945, Niass visited Kano, meeting with the emir and speaking with a select group of religious scholars. These scholars, along with Emirs Bayero and Sanusi, led the drive to create a consolidated “reformed Tijaniyya” (Tijaniyya-Ibrahamiyya) movement centered on Niass’s spiritual authority and Sanusi’s political clout and linked with successful business and trading interests. Tijaniyya leaders took this movement directly to local communities, leading “conversion tours” across the north in the late 1940s and securing dominant positions within Kano’s religious hierarchy.71 The 1940s also saw the emergence of a different kind of Islamist movement interested in religious revival and challenging both colonial rule and the injustices of NA authority. These activists and scholars were educated in the north’s small cohort of Western-style educational institutions and intimately familiar with the nationalism of their southern Nigerian counterparts. They also shared a detailed knowledge of jihadist scholarship and global Islamic trends, using both to formulate a scathing critique of colonialism and the NA system that harkened back to conflicts around justice and legitimacy in the early caliphate era. In their eyes, the British conquest

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had subordinated the emirates to such a degree that they were no longer able to fulfill their Islamic mission. Two of the most prominent voices, Sa’adu Zungur and Aminu Kano, attacked the emirate leadership by invoking the reformist impulse of the jihad as a mirror to be held up to the caliphate’s ostensible successors in the NA. Kano began his political career in the late 1930s as a student at Kaduna College, where he composed a series of plays dramatizing corruption in the courts of the emirs and collusion between the masu sarauta and colonial officers (an “Anglo-Fulani aristocracy”). His speeches ridiculed the NA leadership as having lost the moral authority to lead, a process that had hardly begun (but that had certainly accelerated) under British rule: “Apart from our government today, where else has there been a blind man leading the sighted, a one-eyed man laughing at the two-eyed, and an ignorant man occupying a position reserved for the knowledgeable? Is this what we have inherited from Fulani rule? Or is it that even before the Europeans came our emirs had started being ignorant and concerned only with power?”72 For Kano, this critique provided a religious mandate to improve the lives of the talakawa. Arguing that “an ideal Islamic state is a democratic republic in which the people choose the best man to administer the affairs of the State,” he attacked public expectations of deference and subservience, insisting that his allies abandon the practice of removing their shoes and “prostrating themselves” when they appeared before members of the masu sarauta in their capacities as NA administrators.73 In his view, by adopting hereditary rule and taking a heavy hand in administering the NC courts, the emirate elite had alienated northern society from the “true” sharia, which required genuine participatory engagement by the whole Muslim community.74 A third was the man would become Nigeria’s greatest Islamist, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi. Gumi’s vision of sharia represented many of the classic attributes of “objectification.” In northern Nigeria, colonization and the new administrative needs of the colonial state played important roles in shifting educational practices toward greater rationalization and functionalization. The British assisted in founding Islamic schools in Kano to provide “comprehensive” legal training for the judges needed in the ongoing expansion of the NC system. Where earlier generations of Quranic scholars could have counted on an education in a traditional “makarantar ilmi” school that focused on the memorization of texts led by local ulema, Gumi’s account of his time at the Kano School for Arabic Studies (SAS;

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and later in Sudan as a member of the inaugural class of overseas scholarship students) emphasizes his study of Arabic so that he might approach the core texts on his own and a classroom environment that encouraged students to “assert their own independence and initiative, rather than [pay] blind obedience to the views of our teachers.”75 Even if, as Joseph Schacht himself noted during a research trip to Kano, Islamic studies at the SAS remained focused on the “uncompromising, theoretical aspects of Islamic law,”76 this new generation of scholars was trained to view Islam as a holistic, coherent system of thought standing in stark contrast to “British” or “Christian” law under colonial rule. Gumi made his reputation as a gadfly critical of colonial rule’s role in centralizing religious and political authority in the hands of the emirs. In 1948, he collaborated with Aminu Kano in criticizing the sultan for failing to repress the “unorthodox” views of the imam of Maru, earning a response from the British authorities, who temporarily forbade public preaching in the district. Also, like Zungur (and unlike Kano), Gumi’s commitment to religious revival focused on criticism of Sufism. But while Gumi’s antiSufism attracted little public recognition during his early career, his connections to power ensured his politics evolved in the direction of a strident defense of the very status quo of which he had once been so critical.77 In the mid-1950s, Gumi began to work closely with leading masu sarauta politicians, particularly the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, whom he met in 1955 during the hajj in Saudi Arabia.78 He became Bello’s religious advisor, eventually rising to the rank of Grand Qadi of the Northern Region. During the First Republic, Gumi collaborated with Bello to found the Jama’at Nasr al-Islam (JNI), an organization designed to unify the northern Nigerian Muslim community around a common vision of Islam. From this post, he maintained an unrivalled level of political influence and access. The NPC, NEPU, and the Politics of Islamic History Throughout the 1940s, British and emirate officials discouraged political activism, firing or transferring lower NA officers who, inspired by contact with southern nationalist organizations, sought to create similar movements in the north. Nonetheless, progressive, prodemocracy critics of NA authority succeeded in founding the north’s first formal political party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), in April 1951 (with Aminu Kano as its vice president). But despite their wariness, the northern aristocracy recognized the advantages of political mobilization and engagement in electoral politics. With the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC), the masu

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sarauta sought to convert the power and influence of the NA and the emirate legacy into democratic political authority. The NPC’s challenges were summarized in an August 1950 speech by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Balewa, who would rise from a talakawa background to become Nigeria’s first prime minister, acknowledged that under British rule, the NA administrative order gave too much ill-defined power to the emirs and their cronies, who engaged in corruption and abused their authority with little fear of consequence. The system had stunted the development of a common northern political identity, the growth of political participation, and the formal recognition of legally protected freedoms. The result was undemocratic and un-Islamic—a violation of traditional and modern norms of governmental conduct.79 Maitama Sule, another leading NPC figure, made the religious critique more clearly. Invoking the consultative selection of leaders in the early Islamic community, Sule argued that although Islamic history was compatible with the “principles of democracy,” this evolution had been arrested by imperial conquest. In place of the NA system’s arbitrary, unchecked power, he imagined a system in which “the ordinary man—the ‘talaka’  .  .  . [would be] respected and listened to” and in which even the emir’s power would be subject to consultation and approval and perhaps even election.80 The NPC’s response was to use the party’s association with the masu sarauta to “clothe” it in the mantle of the Shehu, relying on the legal and administrative powers of the NA to silence dissent. The primary architect of this strategy was the Sardauna, a leading member of the ruling dynasty in Sokoto and a towering figure in the history of Nigerian politics. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been sultans, and he had been a darkhorse contender to succeed to the throne in 1938. His career began, like Zungur’s and Kano’s, as a teacher, followed by service as a district head and NA official. In 1951, Bello became the minister of works in the Northern Region government, and by 1954, he was the premier, holding the office until his assassination in 1966. While Bello’s achievements placed him at the pinnacle of northern society, the broader connection between masu sarauta status and political influence was widely acknowledged. Members of the masu sarauta utterly dominated public office (in 1965, sixteen of twenty-three ministerial positions in the Northern Region government were held by NPC members who also occupied high “traditional” offices), with electoral competition and success providing a crucial resource for advancement within the royal hierarchies of the emirates.81 Indeed, the stakes of political contestation were high enough that emirs often intervened directly in struggles over electoral opportunities in order to avoid

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unseemly public conflicts. As a result, the NPC quickly found itself to be in the business of “adjudicat[ing] traditional claims” as a matter of political necessity.82 Ostensibly, the NPC’s electoral slogan—“One North, One People, Irrespective of Religion, Rank, or Tribe”—signaled the goal of crafting a unified northern political movement as a bulwark against the southern parties. And on some level, their leadership was serious about building a nonsectarian coalition, reaching out to non-Muslim/Hausa elites from the “Middle Belt” and including prominent Christian politicians like Peter Achimugu and Sunday Awoniyi among their leadership. But in practice, the NPC’s idea of unity was buttressed with Islamic imagery intended to further the connection between the masu sarauta and the political legitimacy of the caliphate. By portraying itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Muslim community, the NPC sought construct a popular “consensus” around the party’s leadership while defining those who might challenge its authority as outside the bounds of Islam itself. This narrative was reinforced by Sheikh Kabara’s 1956 proclamation forbidding followers of the Qadiriyya from joining NEPU. As one contemporary observer described it, “The identification of the party [the NPC] and its leaders with the religion of Islam is such as to suggest that the party represents the consensus of the society— Ijma’—and that not to accept the consensus of society is to be heretical— Bid’a [‘innovation’]—a rebel from the community, but as the Prophet said: ‘The hand of God is upon the community, and he who sets himself apart from it will be set apart in Hell-fire. He who departs from the community by a hand-span ceases to be a Muslim.’”83 The NPC’s efforts to co-opt the jihad’s symbolism are best understood through Bello’s own career. Although he first gained public recognition under the name “Ahmadu Sardauna,” he began using the “Bello” during the 1954 campaign as a way of emphasizing his connection to Caliph Muhammad Bello. He flew the Shehu’s war banner at rallies, made visits to his grave, and generally tried to show himself as the “reincarnation” of the Shehu’s reformist spirit. Beginning in 1963, he embarked on “conversion tours” in rural areas, turning his efforts toward “pagans” who remained religiously (and thus politically) outside the northern community. Characterized as the Sardauna’s “jihad” in the sympathetic northern press (which also kept “score” of the numbers converted to Islam), these tours were meant to evoke the notion of the Sardauna as a contemporary mujaddid, a peer of the Shehu. Echoing his namesake’s efforts to establish his Islamic credentials in print, he published his own chain of spiritual authority (silsisa) in 1962. Later, he also oversaw the republication of the legal and po-

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litical scholarship of the jihadists. By the 1964 elections, this strategy had been so successful that, as one observer reported, “the only campaign posters being used in Kano City by the NPC were photographs of the Sardauna with a diagrammatic rendering of his spiritual and lineage descent from the Prophet Mohammed” via the Shehu.84 As the primary opposition vehicle in the north to the NPC, NEPU also relied heavily on religious discourse and references to the caliphate tradition. Many prominent NEPU members were well-known preachers who identified with the dissenting tradition within the caliphate, and they sought to propagate their message of reform and peasant empowerment through explicitly religious channels—particularly tafsir, or public preaching and Quranic exegesis sessions. NEPU’s religious narrative emphasized that the oppression of the talakawa by the NA system was a direct consequence of the masu sarauta’s departure from the original, egalitarian vision of the jihadists. NEPU described dan Fodio and his immediate successors as “great Muslim democrats” whose lesser successors paved the way for British conquest with slave raiding, taxation, and ostentatious accumulation of wealth.85 Both Kano and Zungur saw “their political campaign as a jihad against the emirate authorities” and invoked the language of jihad and jahiliyya (“ignorance,” in the sense of a pre-Islamic society’s ignorance of the revelation) as campaign slogans.86 Zungur went furthest, arguing in his poem “Arewa, jumhuriya ko mulukiya?” (“The North, a Republic or a Constitutional Oligarchy?”) that Islamically guided kingship on the Shehu’s model was preferable to “republicanism,” which he associated with political domination by secular interests and the abandonment of sharia.87 Coming from one of the first northerners to ally with a southern nationalist party, this was a strong indictment of democracy, and one not shared by many NEPU activists. NEPU stalwart Mudi Sipikin responded to Zungur with a poem called “The North Should Support Republic Only,” in which he argued that colonialism had so irretrievably transformed the NA system that it was only in a “republic” (which is to say, an electoral democracy) that the true, just vision of the Shehu could be realized.88 NEPU was also the first Muslim-led organization in Northern Nigeria to appeal directly to human rights discourse in its political activism. During the 1953 constitutional conference, NEPU members lobbied for the inclusion of a “Declaration of Fundamental Rights,” citing the “slavery under disguise,” “forced labour,” and “remnants of feudalism” under which many colonial subjects in the north still lived.89 Kano and his NEPU associate Isa Wali were among the only Muslim intellectuals of the era interested

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in promoting women’s freedom and legal rights. Wali published widely on the subject of female seclusion (in Arabic, purdah; in Hausa, kulle), drawing on Quranic and sunna sources to pressure the regional government into providing female education and voting rights. Here there was also a considerable caliphate legacy to draw on, led by the Shehu’s daughter Nana Asma’u, whose efforts to educate women on religious issues as a means of embedding Islamic beliefs and practices into daily life made her one of the leading figures in the early caliphate. Wali compared the status of Muslim women in the north to that of women in pre-Islamic Arabia, arguing that “local scholars”—representing the NPC and the masu sarauta—were guilty of the same “mingling” of Islamic and non-Islamic practices on which the Shehu had justified jihad against the Hausa kingdoms.90 For their efforts, NEPU members were harassed, stymied, and imprisoned by the NPC and their allies in the NA. NEPU-affiliated NA officials could expect “dismissal or at best stagnation in their careers,” while their children were denied admittance to or fee assistance for school.91 NPC literature depicted NEPU members as kafir, “infidels” excluded from the spiritual and political community. Through the NAs, the NPC was also in de facto control of the NC system, and emirate leaders used their siyasa powers to justify expanding laws against slander, breach of peace laws, and rules limiting political demonstrations and meetings, all enforced and prosecuted by the NAs. Mohammed Kuna, whose unpublished dissertation is perhaps the most detailed study of the use of sharia institutions to suppress NEPU, details the wide range of offences created under colonial ordinances (particularly the 1954 memo “Notes for the Guidance of Moslem Legal Advisers and Native Authority Police in Dealing with Subversive Activities”) to target political speech, defended with Islamic legal justifications provided by the Wazirin Zaria in the Native Courts. The Waziri argued that for purposes of defamation or slander cases, an NA located in a Muslim community and with Muslim leaders could be treated as a “corporate body” capable of being defamed by NEPU leaders and other critics.92 Kuna lists more than twenty categories of offences used to target NEPU members, each with a justification both under colonial legal codes and from the Waziri himself. These included the August 1953 conviction of fifteen NEPU supporters accused of “cin mutunci” (insulting behavior) for criticizing the northern delegates to the London constitutional conference in the Kano airport.93 Privately and in official reports, colonial administrators defended many of these efforts, including NA restrictions on NEPU’s ability to hold public meetings, Aminu Kano’s arrest and imprisonment in

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1954 for flying a NEPU flag on his car, and charges of sedition against the editorial staff of the NEPU paper Daily Comet.94 A report sent from Lagos to London on September 4, 1954, recounts that fifty-six NEPU supporters were prosecuted in a three-month stretch, most for “breach of peace” and “illegal consorting of women with men”—charges with distinct religious overtones.95 This NEPU poem reflects its views on the religious consequences of the collaboration among the NAs, the NPC, and the colonial authorities: Think of the self-respect of our country [in the past], Our ancestors had Islamic learning, And the Shari’a which had no equal, Today our chiefs have no respect Those NPC fellows and the rest have given respect to the Europeans. With their aid our chiefs have been demoted, They have been turned into mere parliamentary representatives, Today, they refuse to apply our [Islamic] knowledge As for our Shari’a, all it does is harm us, The chief and the alkali are in league with the Europeans.96

The northern electoral system was also biased in favor of the NA elites. Despite commencing elections for a regional House of Assembly in 1951, an electoral college chose parliament members from among their own members until 1956. Often, their nominees were candidates defeated in earlier voting and injected back into the process by nomination from the NAs, thereby winning seats at the expense of opposition candidates elected to the college by popular vote. Despite attacks on this system’s antidemocratic tendencies in the British press, colonial administrators who saw the talakawa as an “uninformed and uninterested peasantry” defended it as a necessary arrangement in the face of the destabilizing potential of mass politics.97 NEPU faced near-constant surveillance by colonial officials, many of whom were openly pro-Sardauna and pro-NPC, and polling stations were often located in the compounds of village heads, with ballot boxes out in the open and subject to surveillance by NA personnel.98 NEPU lost legislative share in every election from 1959 onward, and even in coalition with southern partners (as the Northern Progressive Front) and after 1963 (and Sanusi’s deposition) with the Tijaniyya movement in Kano, it failed to gain electoral traction outside of its home base.

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Reforming or Renouncing Sharia? The Penal Code of 1960 Despite his image as a religious revivalist, the Sardauna’s main concern seems to have been to preserve NPC and northern political clout in the ramp-up to independence. During the decade of extended constitutional negotiations that preceded independence, NPC officials faced pressure from both the British and the southern Nigerian leadership to clarify the status of the customary legal system and eliminate the complex jurisdictional questions that accompanied it. Concerns about non-Muslim minorities being subjected to sharia in the NCs were reinforced by the Willink Commission’s report on the status of minorities in 1958, which framed the issue in terms of ensuring national protections for civil and human rights that all courts would be responsible for enforcing.99 In 1958, the Sardauna convened a panel of jurists consisting of Nigerian and outside legal experts and colonial officers.100 Their purpose was to study the reorganization of the existing northern legal regime in light of similar reforms undertaken in other Muslim-majority British colonies, especially the Sudan. Their recommendations replaced the uncodified sharia with a Northern Nigerian Penal and Criminal Procedure Code specifically designed to address Muslim sensibilities by incorporating limited aspects of Islamic jurisprudence. The goal, as one later Nigerian scholar argued, was to “graf[t] Islamic principles” onto an English criminal law framework, preserving a wide range of offenses (including adultery, the consumption of alcohol, and offences against the “modesty of a woman”) from sharia, but only for Muslims, and even a limited form of hudud punishment for Muslims convicts.101 More sweepingly, their proposals included the regionalization of the court system (taking the appointment of alkali and court administration out of the hands of the NA) and eliminating “blood money” payments for homicide cases. They also provided for a Northern Region Sharia Court of Appeal, independent of the regional and federal High Courts, to handle issues of personal law decided under sharia. The passage of the appropriate legislation in 1959 and the implementation of the new system a year later were major political victories for the Sardauna, allaying initial objections from among the emirs (who stood to lose most of their legal authority) and at least some prominent members of the ulema. For many contemporary Muslim activists, his support for these reforms has been puzzling given both his personal and political religious commitments, with some going so far as to suggest that he had been “duped” by a British ploy of some sort.102 But despite their heavy reliance on the symbols of the caliphate in both their political struggles with NEPU

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and their efforts to sustain their own popular legitimacy, Bello and many of his closest associates in the NPC and the Northern Region government were committed modernizers in a wide range of arenas, from agriculture and economic development to public administration. Given their secular educational (at elite domestic schools like Katsina College, where Bello and Balewa were educated, as well as in the United Kingdom) and technocratic backgrounds, it’s rather less surprising that they were willing to push through legal reforms both favored by their British allies and already made and accepted in other “modernizing” Muslim-majority states in the empire.103 For his part, the Sardauna addressed the religious criticisms personally in a speech on December 12, 1958: Our problem  .  .  . was to preserve for the Muslim majority the fundamentals of Islam, to allay the fears of the minorities, and to provide in the commercial sphere the stable conditions necessary for development . . . On the subject of Islam, let me say that I and my colleagues are satisfied that there is nothing in the central recommendation of the panel that a new penal code of criminal law should be introduced into the region that is in any way contrary to the tenets of our religion. The new code will be almost identical with those that have been in force for years in the Sudan and Pakistan and which have proved perfectly acceptable to the millions of Muslims among the populations of those countries.104

The irony of subsequent developments in the Sudan and Pakistan aside, the available evidence suggests that, at least by the Panel of Jurists’ second report in 1962, Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes had been widely accepted (or at least quietly acquiesced to) by most legal practitioners and within the general population. What opposition there was, ironically, came from non-Muslim opponents of the NPC. Members of the Action Group, a western region–based party that led the opposition within the Northern House of Assembly, argued that the penal code’s clear debt to sharia amounted to an attempt to “Islamize” the north, and they sued to prevent the judges from the Sharia Court of Appeal from taking their seats. But efforts by Muslim leaders to calm these fears prevented a full-blown crisis, and by the time the Panel of Jurists issued their second report, the controversy was resolved. The new codes also addressed criticisms levied by NEPU, which had called for an independent (but still Islamic) judiciary free from political manipulation; in fact, NEPU even demanded that sharia be codified to remove the leeway that permitted corrupt or politically motivated alkali to apply it arbitrarily. Although some within NEPU

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made political hay out of the formal abrogation of sharia, their leadership was generally supportive. Following the Sardauna’s assassination in the 1966 coup, reforms introduced by the military regimes of Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi and Yakubu Gowon finally severed the link between the practice of sharia and the political institutions of the emirate system. Under Ironsi, the NCs, prisons, and police were removed from NA control and placed under the authority of the new regional government. Gowon completed the process in 1968 by abolishing the NAs and eliminating the emirs (and the emirs’ courts) entirely from the judicial system, although the bifurcation between the now renamed “Area Courts” courts applying “native law and custom” (in effect, a still-uncodified version of sharia) and the Magistrate (criminal)/District (civil) Courts remained confusingly in place. The 1976 Local Government laws definitively removed the emirs from the formal government system in all but an advisory capacity. A second hiccup occurred when the Gowon regime carved six new states out of the old Northern Region in 1967. Now, instead of a single Sharia Court of Appeal for the Northern Region, there were courts for each state without a formal mechanism for harmonizing their decisions. The creation of a final Federal Sharia Court of Appeal (FSCA) was advocated throughout the early 1970s, and it was included in the draft constitution prepared by the Constitutional Drafting Committee in 1976. Moving into the proposed democratic transition in 1979, this was where the sharia issue stood—a matter of little concern outside legal circles, rarely debated in public, and certainly not a site of major political conflict.

Sharia and Political Legitimacy after the Caliphate The collapse of the First Republic in 1966 suggests how badly the delicate federal balancing act negotiated during the 1950s failed once competitive politics began in earnest. Nigeria’s successive federal constitutions tilted heavily in favor of organized masu sarauta interests, an arrangement negotiated specifically by Bello and his British allies, who feared the disruptive forces of open political competition on emirate society. The NPC was able to parlay its religious symbolism, the coercive power of the NA apparatus, and an extensive patronage system into not only dominance of northern elections but a stranglehold on the federal parliament. Each passing election became more of a “do or die affair” for all involved, leading directly to the 1966 coups and the horrors of the Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970. But while there are numerous scholarly accounts of the First Re-

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public’s fall that emphasize ethnic and religious tensions resulting from Nigeria’s failed federalism, none describe conflict over sharia and the penal code reforms as major factors.105 Why wasn’t sharia a bigger part of the NPC’s campaign to assert their continuity with the caliphate tradition? Their association with the NAs and the existing Islamic legal institutions, already transformed by sixty years of British rule, seems to have played a key role in their thinking about what sharia was and how to defend it. Despite the commitment of many judges and members of the ulema to preserving the “classical” sharia, by 1960 what existed was a top-down, state-centric version of Islamic law, strongly implicated in expanding NA authority at the expense of its opponents. Many influential Muslim thinkers (Bello included) didn’t see the replacement of sharia with the penal code as a particularly drastic departure from the status quo. The courts retained their existing form and personnel, with sharia applied in civil cases and a penal code deeply informed by Islamic “principles” administered by judges with minimal training in its secular nuances. The NPC’s dominance depended on their ability to plausibly claim to represent the unity of the Muslim community in northern Nigeria while at the same time relying on the power of the “sharia” institutions inherited from colonial rule to strategically exclude their religious and political critics. NEPU was quite conscious of the transformed nature of these institutions and could accurately claim, as Lawan Danbazau put it, that the Islamic legal and social system administered by the NAs bore little resemblance to what the jihadists had fought to establish: “If Shehu Uthman dan Fodio were to return today, he would find that the religion he suffered to reform, the Emirs he appointed and the just system of Law he established were completely debased. Shehu Uthman dan Fodio would certainly fight another jihad to remove the Emirs, and destroy the oppressive anti-Islamic courts.”106 NEPU made the case for establishing a “republic,” diminishing the power of the NA system and restoring the “true” caliphate heritage. For its members, the lessons of the jihad and the ideals of the caliphate represented a mirror that could be held up to the leadership, reflecting back their failures as guardians of the responsibilities that come with ruling as Muslim sovereigns. But despite these efforts, it was the NPC’s vision of the past—a vision that downplayed the transformative possibilities of Islamic revival—that won out. The collapse of the First Republic and the dismantling of the NA system were significant blows to sarakuna dominance. The next generation of

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northern leaders—the so-called Kaduna Mafia, who played a key role in defending northern interests during the military years and in the Second Republic—consisted not only of aristocrats and merchants but of military officers and young civil servants who had benefited from the NPC’s “northernization” policies to gain access to state power. They shared a common educational background in the north’s elite secondary schools as well as an investment in protecting the federal arrangements that provided them with leverage in national politics. Religiously, members of the new Muslim intellectual class also found themselves dissatisfied with Bello’s politicization of the caliphate tradition. Closed off from the public sphere by the NPC’s dominance, many chose to adopt neither Aminu Kano’s path of public engagement nor Gumi’s strategy of collaboration and service in the legal sphere, opting instead for retreat into the newly “Nigerianized” bureaucracy based in Kaduna, the new northern universities (Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria opened in 1962), and the mosques. Eventually, they would reemerge to lead a full-scale reconsideration of sharia’s heritage in the coming decades, once again bringing the “sharia question” to the forefront of Nigerian politics.

FOUR

Democracy, Federalism, and the Sharia Question

With the legacy of Sokoto at an easy reach, the Muslims of Northern Nigeria will always turn to Shari’ah whenever there is that opportunity. —Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa1

In 1972, Sheikh Gumi published Al-‘Aqida ai-Sahiha bi-Muwafaqat alShari’a (The True Belief in Accordance with the Sharia), his most influential work of religious scholarship. It came on the heels of his ascendance as a major popular figure in Nigerian Islam, with a series of “Advice for Muslims” articles in Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo (the largest Hausa-language paper in the country) and regular appearances to conduct tafsir on Radio Kaduna (the country’s largest Hausa-language radio station). Given the skepticism with which new media was regarded by leading Muslims (Emir Abdullahi Bayero of Kano had forbidden Quranic recitation over the radio in the 1940s), his ascent also represented the rise of a new relationship between religious knowledge and authority. Gumi’s scholarship often neglected secondary or contemporary sources in favor of direct reference to the Quran and the sunna, arguing that all believers were equal so long as they based their actions on a careful understanding of scripture. By taking his interpretations of the core Islamic texts directly to a mass audience (written in Arabic but translated into Hausa and English), he looked to establish his religious authority based on the strength of his own intellectual acumen.2 Influenced by the emergence of salafi (in reference to the salaf, or the first generation of Muslims and their practice) Islam in the work of Arab thinkers like Sayyid Qtub, Gumi came to view sharia as a set of binding rules for correct behavior, a vision of “rational religion . . . centered around a coherent normative code designed to regulate social life.”3 This was instrumental

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in Gumi’s intensified attacks against his old nemeses, the Sufi brotherhoods, whose leaders he described, using the language of the Sokoto jihad, as “venal scholars” who used their political connections to promote their illegitimate practices and beliefs. These claims made him a marked man among Sufi elites but translated into enormous influence across the region. Gumi also drew attention with his forays into the political sphere, particularly his infamous claim prior to the 1983 elections that voting was an obligatory religious act on par with prayer. But surprisingly, reinvigorating sharia as a matter of state law was not among his primary goals. The salafi-inspired group Gumi helped found in 1978, Jama’t Izalat al Bid’a Wa Iqamat as Sunna (Society for the Removal of Innovation and the Reinstatement of the Sunna, commonly called Izala), made virtually no effort to call for the state-led expansion of sharia, focusing instead on da’wa (the “call to faith”) and on building social networks for their members, a growing combination of lower-class Muslims and prominent businessmen and bureaucrats. Izala frequently appealed to the Nigerian state on behalf of Muslim interests, but calls for a return to “complete” or “full” sharia seem to have been dismissed as impractical by nearly all major Muslim organizations well into the 1990s. Despite Gumi’s indifference, popular interest in sharia grew steadily between the end of the First Republic and the rise of the Fourth, part of a broad, cross-denominational politicization of religious identity in nearly all aspects of Nigerian life. There’s been a great deal of research on this process in sub-Saharan Africa, much of it focused on the role of Pentecostal churches, whose growth has had an ambiguous effect on democratization. While these churches provide a useful language for making sense of power relations in a rapidly changing world, they are just as subject as any other social institution within a neopatrimonial political system to capture by “big men,” who use their moral credibility to perform and legitimate autocratic power.4 Islamic revival movements in Nigeria occupy a similarly ambiguous status, serving as both a critique of and an apology for the status quo. While a few reject the Nigerian state and participation in formal politics, most owe their existence as much to their ability to carve out a space within new forms of political competition as they do to their particular religious vision. This chapter focuses on the role of two key forces in shaping the revival of the sharia question in the Nigeria of the 1970s and 1980s. The first was the ongoing objectification of Islam in public life, abetted by the massive social and economic transitions resulting from the extraordinary growth of the country’s oil sector and, to a lesser extent, exposure to global Islamic

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trends. These transformations encouraged Muslim activists to identify with sharia as a solution to the travails of the Nigerian state, drawing on the caliphate legacy not to reconstitute the classical Islamic constitution but to demand that the state take an active role in fostering religious revival. The second emerged from the efforts of Nigeria’s post–civil war constitutional framers to stem the ethnic outbidding and violence that brought down the First Republic. What they created—slowly at first, but accelerated by the adoption of the 1979 Second Republic constitution—was a set of institutions and informal norms for “balancing” ethnic and religious claims. As Muslim “interest groups” organized during the late 1970s and 1980s in response to the incentives, they began to promote the idea that sharia might be a means not only of restoring the precolonial past but of solving contemporary problems of governance and economics. With religious conflict accelerating as Christian groups pursued similar strategies to press their own interests, the scene was set for the rise of a new sort of sharia politics.

Debating Sharia in a Constitutional Era (II): The FSCA Debacle Contemporary sharia politics in Nigeria begin in earnest in 1977, when a Constituent Assembly (CA) was called to debate and ratify the Constitutional Drafting Committee (CDC) draft, which included the creation of the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal (FSCA). Despite “extend[ing] the application of Islamic law to no new persons, to no new subject matter, and to no new part of the country,” the FSCA became the defining political conflict of the assembly.5 In retrospect, the level of antagonism seems entirely out of proportion to the reality of the proposal. Chief Rotimi Williams, the principle author of the CDC draft, made precisely this point in his preamble to the CA’s first session, pointing out that his colleagues had seen fit to include the FSCA not out of any desire to rank-order the relative values of different legal frameworks in national affairs but to provide for the “resolution or harmonization of conflicting judicial decisions” should they arise across states that already enforced sharia in personal and civil matters.6 It was, as one contemporary observer remarked, a “technical matter.”7 Despite the struggle between the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) and the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), there had been little overt religious conflict during the First Republic. The 1953 Kano riot, which pitted Igbo residents of the sabon gari against Muslim indigenes, represented the presecession nadir of north–south relations, but at the time, it seems to have been understood as an ethnic conflict. The riot took place

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following a heated debate between the Sardauna and the southern nationalist leader Obafemi Awolowo over the prospects of “self-government,” which northern officials worried would lead to southern domination. Similarly, the pogroms against Kano’s Igbo community in September/October 1966, shortly before the beginning of the civil war, were conducted almost entirely in ethnic terms, as was federal propaganda against secession.8 The first real hint of deepening religious animosity came during the war, when the terms “Muslim North” and “Christian South” first gained serious currency in national and international discourse. The Biafran effort to attract international support from Christian nongovernmental organizations and churches proved remarkably effective, drawing a papal delegation, support from the pulpit at Westminster Cathedral, and hundreds of Christian missionaries and aid workers. Biafrans in the United States and Europe used these connections to frame the conflict as “Brothers in Christ” defending themselves from the genocidal, jihadist intentions of the Muslim North, a narrative picked up in turn by Biafran allies in the Western media.9 While many Igbos returned to Kano after the war, religious tension remained a powerful source of conflict at the national level. In his opening remarks, Chief Williams noted that these tensions had been on the CDC’s mind since it introduced its draft publically in October 1976, devoting nearly half of his available time to a spirited defense of the FSCA’s necessity. However, within minutes of the start of debate, the “sharia issue” became the single most discussed issue before the assembly, driving other key issues—including the freedom of the press, the allocation of national revenues, and the design of the federal institutions—temporarily off the table. The FSCA debate is notable because, far more so than in any previous instance, it was a religious conflict fought in the open—on a national stage and for a pan-Nigerian audience. Whereas the “debate” over the penal code in the late 1950s was restricted to a narrow elite of NPC politicians and NEPU activists, the FSCA controversy drew national attention, earning the ire of Muslims from across the religious and political spectrum and highlighting the role of the Middle Belt (the most spirited anti-FSCA rhetoric originated with the Plateau and Bendel State delegations, two Christian-majority areas that had formerly been part of the old Northern Region) as a locus of national religious conflict.10 But for all the ferocious rhetoric—“the stuff for symbolic crusades,” as David Laitin described it—the FSCA debate is as remarkable for what didn’t happen as for what did.11 For one, the conflict ended without bloodshed. More interesting still, for all the passion with which even moderate Muslims defended the FSCA, the moment passed without a broader effort

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to reopen the legal status of sharia as established in the 1960 reforms. The best explanation here is that, from the perspectives of nearly all northern Muslims, sharia was still a going concern. As pro-FSCA activist and jurist Sulaiman Kumo argued at the time, even if the organizational structure inherited from the British was an “architectural eye sore,” popular opinion was that the post-1960 legal system remained a “sharia” system, at least in matters of civil law.12 Writing at the height of the debate, Kumo estimated that 94 percent of cases that came through the northern legal system ended up in Area Courts with a mandate to apply “native” or “customary” law. Of these (criminal and civil combined), he speculated that at least 75 percent were tried under a reasonably accurate version of sharia—the same uncodified, fiqh-based law applied since the caliphate era. As he put it, “The legislation [in 1967–68 ending the Native Administrations and establishing the Area Courts] itself has, in effect, rendered Islamic law the applicable law in most of Northern Nigeria and to the majority of the population.”13 Whether or not Kumo’s claims were a fair description of how the Area Courts actually worked is harder to evaluate. For every instance where classical Islamic legal norms were reaffirmed—Shittu v. Biu in 1973, for example, where the Federal High Court upheld an Area Court’s decision to disallow a defendant from presenting his own evidence once the plaintiff had “proved” his case according to sharia requirements—there were others where classical practices were effectively ignored.14 And with the emirs eliminated from the legal system, the power to appoint and oversee court personnel was transferred to the states, placing the Area Courts under entirely secular supervision. Nonetheless, the perceived “Islamic-ness” of these courts remained a key point of contention between Christians and Muslims. As human rights advocates complained, Muslim judges often acted as though they still presided over sharia courts even when confronted with non-Muslim parties, abetted by rules that allowed them to essentially ignore federal evidentiary and criminal procedure law at their discretion.15 The fact that these courts remained “sharia courts” in the eyes of most Muslims didn’t mean they always operated as such. The preservation of uncodified sharia at the lower level hadn’t translated into the superior and appellate court, and both the defunct Northern Region Sharia Court of Appeal and (in the absence of an FSCA) the Federal Court of Appeal in Kaduna operated on an essentially common law basis, even developing a large body of precedent around issues of civil procedure and family law. But again, the noncanonical nature of these courts and their role drew remarkably little criticism from the northern political and religious establishment. Indeed, their most common complaint was that despite the fact

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that Area Courts continued to hear a wide range of sharia cases, only those tied to questions of “personal status . . . waqfs [charitable trusts] and gifts” were eligible for the special sitting of the Federal Court of Appeal staffed by justices trained in Islamic jurisprudence.16 The irony of defending “sharia” institutions operating according to British rules seems to have occasionally been lost on some FSCA proponents, even those who were otherwise critical of sharia’s secondary status within the national legal system. As former chief magistrate of Kaduna State Yahaya Mahmood argued in the introduction to his popular casebook on sharia personal law, it was this procedural exclusion that violated the “fundamental right” of a Nigerian Muslim to “fashion his entire life in accordance with the dictates of the religion,” not the broader departure from the classical constitution.17 For another, their sharia credentials did little to prevent the Area Courts from being targets of suspicion and dissatisfaction, part of a broader loss of confidence in state institutions under military rule. Reports of corruption— particularly the willingness of judges to sway their decisions in return for bribes and interference by local politicians in court affairs—seem to have led many Muslims to seek to avoid them all together when money was on the line, as in cases involving land and inheritance disputes.18 The results of a 1975 survey in (now) Kano, Bauchi, Adamawa, and Kwara States suggested the same, pointing to high popular perceptions of corruption and a general loss of trust in both the Area Courts and law enforcement personnel (the Nigerian Police Force [NPF], the federal successor to the Native Administration [NA] police).19 There were also frequent complaints about the quality of the judges, many of whom lacked any kind of standardized legal training. Nonetheless, the alternatives—the Magistrates’ Courts and the federal legal system—remained even more suspect. For all their faults, the Area Courts were “the people’s courts,” and they remained the only legal system most Muslims ever availed themselves of.20 What were the terms of debate for Muslim FSCA activists? Both inside and outside the CA, their demands reflected a broader sense of grievance with the symbolism of writing out the most visible federal recognition of sharia’s centrality to Muslim life. As Ibrahim Gusau (delegate from Sokoto and future federal minister) argued, what Muslims heard when their Christian conationalists challenged the FSCA was a breakdown in the federal bargain of “unity and diversity,” a denial of the “right” for each part of the national community to “live in the way it wants to live.”21 Although even within the Muslim delegation there was disagreement about the utility of a sharia appellate court given the nature of “God-made” law,22 there was broad consensus that Muslims ought to have access to some national in-

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stitution that recognized sharia’s importance to their lives. In one of the most-quoted passages of the entire debate, Kaduna State delegate Abdul Mashi summarized this position in the clearest possible terms: “To deny Sharia which governs the lives of millions of its adherents is like passing a Bill in Parliament or enacting a law in the Constitution suspending all Christians in this country from attending Sunday worship . . . Now, if the Constitution provides for the freedom of worship, the right to fair hearing . . . and the right to freedom from discrimination . . . it is inconceivable that one should be restricted and denied the right to appeal to the highest court in the land.”23 For many northern delegates, opposition to creating an institution that, from their perspective, would benefit Nigeria’s Muslims while harming no non-Muslims could only be explained by prejudice or ignorance. Most focused on the latter, offering detailed explanations of the FSCA’s significance into the record. Outside the CA, this line of thinking took a decidedly more aggressive tone. At a March 1977 seminar on Islam and the draft constitution, Maaji Baba Shani, a faculty member at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, remarked that while “minorities have a right to demand safeguards for their legitimate rights and interests . . . it is not fair for minorities to ask us to throw our ideology overboard.” Shani argued that while Muslims had previously been “helpless” to defend themselves against the colonial transformation of sharia, the new debate offered Muslims the opportunity to be “masters of their own destiny,” including seizing a wide role for the state in promoting religious piety.24 The few speakers at these events who went further, suggesting that sharia be made “complete” across northern Nigeria, did so in similarly broad anticolonial terms, focused less on the specific mechanisms of creating a national legal system based on Islamic law and more on the connection between “the ascendency of crime . . . injustice, economic exploitation and corruption” and the “slavish copying of English law” which, in their view, the CDC draft had recommitted to.25 Ultimately, the Christian strategy proved more successful; despite a walk-out by eighty Muslim delegates, the CA voted to remove the court from the draft constitution, which was eventually ratified in 1978. The real legacy of the FSCA debate in the Muslim community was not the loss of the institution, however, which had little practical effect on court practice across the north. Rather, it was a wave of popular anxiety about the prospect of a secularized society—not simply in terms of the constitutional separation of church and state but of the victory of Western culture over Islam, evidenced by the inability of concerted Muslim effort to defend even a fairly trivial body. While Laitin famously argued that the conflict’s peaceful

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resolution depended on the moderation of the religiously mixed Yoruba community, it’s equally true to say that in the mid-1970s, the groundwork simply hadn’t yet been laid for a program of Islamic reform with sharia at its center.26 What had emerged was a series of faultlines and narratives that would play a key role in more expansive sharia demands going forward.

Islam and Politics in the Second Republic Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–83) presented a new set of challenges for Muslim activists. Gone were charismatic leaders like the Sardauna and the unifying Islamic message of the NPC. Its successor party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), was a broad multiethnic coalition, albeit one dominated by northern Muslims—including Shehu Shagari, winner of the 1979 presidential election and the dour son of a village head from Sokoto—that lacked a monopoly on the use of religious symbols in the northern states. This was not for lack of trying; the NPN framed its opponents as atheists or anti-Muslims, and Shagari even collaborated with British academic Jean Boyd on a biography of the Shehu that appeared the year before the election. But despite the NPN’s best efforts, parties from across the country competed for Muslim votes on roughly equal footing, producing Hausalanguage campaign songs and adhering to the dramaturgical format of the Hausa “campaign rally,” including the use of Islamic moral discourse.27 Under the new order, electoral success would have less to do with overt religious affiliations and more to do with relative skill at navigating the institutional incentive structure that advantaged certain kinds of religious claims over others. The Federal Character Principle and Religious Politics As the years of military rule wore on, there was broad recognition within the Nigerian political class that before returning to democratic rule, something would have to be done to address the institutionalized inequities of power that had dragged down the federation in 1966. As Shagari argued in a 1981 radio address, many felt that the First Republic had created a national culture of “ignorance and unfamiliarity, and therefore fear and mistrust,” and there was wide support for reforms to encourage cross-regional political cooperation.28 However, there was also no real interest in a governmental model that didn’t recognize ethnic nationality and, increasingly, religion as fundamental categories of political life, either—a point driven home by the spectacular failure of just such a plan under the short-lived

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Ironsi regime, whose decision to abolish the regional structure in favor of a unitary system contributed directly to his downfall. The Second Republic constitution offered a mishmash of policies that, on the one hand, sought to force political coalitions to mobilize broad, multiethnic bases of support, and, on the other, enshrined ethnic and religious identities as the main criteria for distributing political and economic resources. In a process that began as a last-ditch effort to avoid civil war in 1967 and continued under military rule, the regions were divided into progressively smaller states, splitting the largest ethnic blocs (Hausa and Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo) across multiple units and providing select minority groups with their “own” states. This trend was reinforced by the move to a presidential system and the electoral requirement that presidential candidates win at least 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of the (now nineteen) states. Along with formal bans on organizing specifically ethnic or religious parties, it would now be impossible for a “northern” or “Muslim” candidate to win without building significant external support. On the consociational side was the “federal character” principle, a collection of formal and informal policies to ensure the equitable balancing of state power and resources along community lines. Originating in a 1976 speech to the CDC by military head of state General Murtala Mohammed, the term federal character gave a name to the thinking outlined by Shagari a half-decade later—that the best strategy for promoting national unity was to address popular sentiments of “marginalization” by providing a reasonably transparent means of balancing access to public revenues and resources. The 1978 constitution required that states and the federal government ensure no major areas of administration had, as section 14(4) put it, a “predominance of persons from a few States or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups.” Section 135(3) required that for appointments to “count” toward a state’s federal character representation, they would have to be filled by an “indigene,” a member of a community native to the territory in question. In one fell swoop, Nigeria officially adopted ethnic and religious communities as the core units for distributing political appointments and state resources. In an early response to these new rules, the NPN pioneered a “zonal” strategy for constructing electoral alliances, carefully recruiting allies to meet the distributional rules while using the federal character requirements to offer a credible commitment that the party would distribute its largess along sectarian lines once it had achieved power. This process, which Richard Joseph described memorably as “prebendal politics,” was not new to Nigeria, but the binding nature of the federal character made it easier for

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local political elites to establish themselves as “conduits for their people’s share of national expenditures.”29 Indeed, part of the Shagari administration’s reputation for profligate spending (administrative costs as a share of the federal budget tripled from 1979 to 1983) and cronyism stemmed from the need to assemble a cabinet large enough to offer the necessary representation to indigenes from all nineteen states. As longtime Nigeria observer Anthony Kirk-Greene wondered in 1983, what would the consequences be if the federal character principle “should become extended, logically, and with some apparent justification, to other national institutions”?30 A succession of military rulers that began with the New Years’ Eve coup in 1983 quickly adapted the federal character logic into a ready-made formula for regime survival, particularly as declining oil revenues closed off other strategies for paying off supporters. The Babangida and Abacha regimes created seventeen new states between 1984 and 1996 (all entitled to their share of federal largesse) while allowing an incredible degree of bloat to develop in the civil service. The 1996 creation of the Federal Character Commission (FCC) reinforced the emphasis on rote balancing, fixing the percentage of positions in the federal civil service allotted to each state at “not less than 2.5 percent and not more than 3 percent” of the total. The FCC’s publication of tables of civil service and ministerial appointments by state heightened public awareness of these efforts, even though they have accomplished little in addressing fundamental inequalities of income and access. In retrospect, the introduction of the federal character principle was a watershed moment in Nigerian political life. Today, it exists at the very center of the Nigerian moral economy, serving as a narrative that both describes the origins of inequality in Nigerian society (the dominance of a particular community) and offers a remedy (the state-assisted redistribution of resources and opportunity). From debates about university admissions and the geographic distribution of public services to the roster of the Golden Eagles national football team, federal character “logic,” with its emphasis on head counting and tit-for-tat “balancing” as the yardstick for measuring success in nation-building, has done a great deal to drive ethnic and religious polarization in the national public sphere. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the federal character’s legacy is its role in resurrecting the logic of indirect rule, with its overwhelming emphasis on defining who is “native” and who is not. The principle federal character “unit” for the purposes of allocating access to employment and public services is the state, but beginning with section 135(5) of the 1978 constitution, subnational citizenship has been officially defined in terms

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of “indigeneship”—membership in an ethnic community “native” to the state in question. And having left any official definition or even grounds for determining a groups’ native status out of both the 1978 and 1999 constitutions, it’s fallen to the FCC and the state and local governments to make these determinations for themselves. The result has been a steady escalation of violence in many of the country’s most divided communities (notably in and around the Jos area in Plateau State), as control of local and state councils and legislatures translates into the ability to include or exclude entire communities from access to federal character benefits. Nearly all Nigerian states have adopted careful administrative distinctions between “indigenous” and “nonindigenous” ethnic categories, amounting to a de facto system of “dual citizenship” that tightly controls access to public education for “nonindigenes” through higher fees and limits opportunities for state employment, even for families settled in these areas for generations.31 In short, the federal character principle operates “almost exclusively as a mechanism for the . . . distribution and ethno-political appropriation of centrally collected oil revenues,” creating the conditions for a nearly perpetual mobilization of ethnic identity in Nigerian political life.32 Although ethnic identity had always been at the forefront of the federalizing agenda, the federal character sections in both the 1978 constitution and its 1999 successor are silent on religion. Both contain explicit nonestablishment clauses, and the 1999 version has language (paralleling the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) prohibiting the establishment of “privilege or advantage” on religious grounds. Nonetheless, the federal character logic provided Muslim and Christian activists with a powerful new sort of language for making political demands on the state, an opportunity both communities capitalized on by organizing religious “interest groups” to demand state recognition and resources on behalf of their constituencies at the federal level. The origins of this process predate the official recognition of the federal character principle by about fifteen years, reaching back into the early 1960s and the NPC’s efforts to “speak” for the caliphate tradition in northern politics. Jama’at Nasr al-Islam (JNI), founded by the Sardauna in the early 1960s, was the first large-scale Muslim “interest group,” followed closely by the Fityan al-Islam, a Tijaniyya organization originally associated with Kano-based protests against the Sardauna’s political clout. By the early 1970s, Fityan was the largest Muslim organization in the country, responsible for an enormous network of religious schools and in control of nearly nine hundred mosques across the north.33 But the first post–First

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Republic group to take advantage of the emerging federal character logic was the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), founded in 1973 with a mission to “serve as a channel of contact with the Governmental Authorities of Nigeria on Islamic Affairs.”34 Titularly led by the sultan of Sokoto but managed by Ibrahim Dasuki, a scion of the Sokoto aristocracy (and eventually sultan himself in 1988), influential businessman, and member of the “Kaduna Mafia,” the NSCIA represented the efforts of Muslim elites to integrate and amplify key Muslim voices in business, political, and military circles. Alongside the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), founded in 1976, the NSCIA became a key player in translating the ethnic tendencies of the federal character into religious language. Beginning in the late 1970s, nearly all religious organizations in Nigeria adopted some form of rights language to press for the recognition of religion in public life. In some respects, this development parallels the efforts of Muslim activists globally to articulate alternatives to international human rights discourse, captured by the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. In Nigeria, however, both Muslim and Christian groups were inspired by the federal character principle to focus on the language of “distributional rights,” demanding their “fair” share of governmental recognition and revenue. In most settings, distributional rights claims take the form of demands for “social citizenship” or the “equal opportunity of welfare,” requiring not only that the state take responsibility for ensuring the well-being of its citizens but that social resources be redistributed in recognition of historic inequalities and disadvantages. The federal character model, however, encourages Nigerians to think about access to state resources as “privileges or benefits” that all groups are entitled to once they have been put on the table.35 Even though Christians and Muslims in Nigeria disagree profoundly on how to understand the religion–state relationship, most believe that state sponsorship of Muslim (or Christian) activism is necessary to correct for the natural advantage of Christianity (or Islam) in an ostensibly secular postcolonial state. Christian and Muslim lobbies use federal character language to secure state subsidies for the expansion of public religion—for constructing religious schools and places of worship and for state media to offer religious programming, for example—even while arguing vehemently that any new government sponsorship of the other religion is unfair and must be eliminated. CAN’s operational document names this mission in plain language, charging it to ensure that “federal resources are distributed rationally and justly to both religious groups and their regions.”36 In 1986, Christian organizations even successfully

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campaigned for state sponsorship of an annual pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem to balance out state funding for hajj participants. In the mid-1980s, the Babangida regime’s frantic efforts to secure its power base further politicized the distribution of high offices and resources along religious lines. During a tumultuous year bookended by Babangida’s decision to bring Nigeria into the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a “full” member in January 1986 and an outbreak of religious violence on a college campus in Kafanchan in March 1987, religious tensions rose to a fever pitch, catapulting the NSCIA and CAN into the national spotlight as defenders of Muslim and Christian interests. In 1989, positional reshuffles in the federal cabinet and the Armed Forces Ruling Council that tilted toward Muslims set off accusations in Christian corners that these changes represented the “last phase of a carefully implemented design for the ultimate promulgation of Nigeria as an Islamic state,” while a failed coup in 1990, in which the plotters intended to expel five northern states from the federation, led to similar accusations on the Muslim side.37 Well-known CAN activist Ambassador Jolly Tanko Yusuf made the terms of religious bargaining explicit in a 1990 newspaper interview, arguing that “if a Muslim was appointed Minister of External Affairs, a Christian should be made Minister of Petroleum Resources, and if the President was a Muslim, a Christian should be the Minister of Defense.”38 The specifics of Tanko’s hierarchy haven’t always been adhered to, but efforts to “rotate” key federal positions (president, vice president, senate president, speaker of the assembly, party chairperson) among Muslims and Christians have been at the center of political strategy ever since. Women, Sharia, and the Right to Vote The impact of the Second Republic’s new incentive structure was also seen in the changing political status of Muslim women in the north. During the First Republic, prominent NPC members argued that women’s participation would insult the values of northern men and cause household conflicts between husbands and wives; they even argued that women did not wish to vote. Similarly, the NPC used cultural norms of female seclusion (kulle) to attack women in partisan politics, labeling them as karuwai, or prostitutes. Foreshadowing similar efforts in the 2000s, the NAs conducted periodic “antiprostitution” sweeps, arresting women who appeared at rallies and public events in support of NEPU. This exclusion was also possible because it had few political implications. Under the 1960 constitu-

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tion, seats in the national parliament were allotted in a fixed number to each region, and the north (with more than half of the total) possessed a guaranteed permanent electoral advantage even without female voters on the rolls. Northern Muslim women were formally enfranchised by a 1976 military decree, but it wasn’t until the 1978 constitution instated direct, national presidential elections that elite opinion began to shift in favor of women’s participation. This shift is reflected in the public pronouncements of Sheikh Gumi, whose informal affiliation with the NPN was well publicized. During the First Republic, Gumi had remained silent on the question of women’s participation, actively supporting the opponents of progressive Islamic reform in his capacity as Bello’s chief religious advisor. But by the height of the 1982 voter registration drive and amid fear that Shagari would lose the next year’s election, Gumi’s religious interpretation reversed. In an interview published in Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo in August of that year, Gumi declared that it was the duty of Muslim men to ensure that their wives and daughters registered and voted. In a society in which female seclusion is a strong marker of piety and middle-class success, the call to bring women out en masse for political purposes was a strong break with the past. Gumi argued, however, that in the new electoral dispensation, voting was the only practical way to defend the Muslim community: “Well, it is said that if the Muslims rest, the unbelievers will make war on them, so it is a duty for men and women to arise and take up arms. If a woman takes up arms, isn’t there a mixing of the sexes in this situation? You see why the Muslims are not oppressed! Well, [by analogy to this], it is correct to cast a vote.”39 Gumi’s famous assertion that voting was a religious obligation on par with prayer cast this fear in stark relief. In his view, Muslims risked being politically overrun if they did not take responsibility for ensuring their electoral success, leading him eventually to argue that Muslims should never vote for non-Muslims. In this light, his “defense” of women’s participation sounds more like a call to arms for Muslim men than it does an appeal for female empowerment: With politics, one protects men’s blood and their well-being. With politics, one protects the wealth of men, and their belongings, and also one’s kinsfolk and associates, and whatever one cares about. With politics, one protects the manliness of men, so if you say that you won’t do it, who is going to protect us? Pagans who don’t even know whether or not they are Muslims? Because of the importance of what confronts you, will you not make an effort not

Democracy, Federalism, and the Sharia Question / 99 to lose it? Well then, one does politics. It is a necessity that every man takes his women and children above the age of eighteen to register so that we can predominate over the non-Muslims.40

Women’s expanding electoral participation during the Second Republic also coincided with new opportunities in religious organizational life. In the 1970s and 1980s, women attained greater visibility as religious activists and leaders within the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, buoyed by their training in Islamic studies in “Western-style” secondary and university programs. Others benefited from Izala’s education courses, which promoted a simple, straightforward code of Islamic conduct women could follow to preserve their morality.41 The first major umbrella group for Muslim women, the Muslim Sisters Organization, was founded in 1976, but it was the creation of the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN) in 1986 that was the landmark moment. FOMWAN is an explicitly religious organization committed to da’wa and to the enhancement of women’s “practice of Islam” through education and policy advocacy. They accomplish these goals not by adopting international human rights language but by asserting “the rights of women under the shari’a.” One of FOMWAN’s first projects was to demand the creation of sharia courts for personal law outside the old Northern Region, so that Muslim women in these areas could gain access to the protections of Islamic inheritance and divorce law.42

“Fast Capitalism” and the Political Economy of Islamic Identity A second important factor in the rise of the “sharia question” was the economic and social upheaval that accompanied the rapid climb in international oil prices in the mid-1970s. What Peter Lewis has called the “windfall years” in Nigerian politics shifted the economy toward centralized state control, with oil revenue serving as an investment vehicle for a wide range of state-owned industrialization and agricultural development projects, many carried out with indifference to their sustainability or competitiveness. Not surprisingly, corruption and rent seeking grew apace. The situation took a turn for the worse under the Second Republic, as the NPN’s relative weakness created pressures all around for fiscal indiscipline and increased spending to satisfy the demands of supporters. As oil prices declined, borrowing rose, creating the debt burden that would haunt the nation for the next thirty years.43

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In cities like Kano, oil created vast wealth for a small elite with ties to business and government. From the perspective of many poor Muslims, “gigantic sums of cash seemed to have appeared as if from nowhere,” despite the recipients having “contributed virtually nothing to its production.”44 Moreover, this new wealth brought few obvious benefits to balance out the increased corruption and the loss of occupations dependent on older ways of life, with “anarchic and chaotic growth” as traditional mud construction was replaced in favor of new four-lane urban roads, industrial complexes, and housing estates built for government workers. As Paul Lubeck observed, these innovations also crowded out opportunities for small-scale traders and “independent commodity producers” such as craftsmen (tanning and dying, in particular) and tailors in favor of wage labor. By 1971, more than 90 percent of the residents in the neighborhoods outside the walled city (birni) in Kano were immigrants, many whom had come to take advantage of these new economic opportunities.45 Nonetheless, the majority of Kano’s urban residents subsisted at the “absolute poverty level,” with Muslims bearing the brunt. Imports skyrocketed, with new forms of conspicuous consumption (car ownership in Kano increased sevenfold during the late 1970s) for elites and higher food prices for urbanized workers dependent on foreign rice rather than local millet.46 In the context of this unequal, freewheeling growth (memorably described by Michael Watts as “fast capitalism”), Islamic identity and practice were both highly visible yet marginalized. Class identity among Kano’s working poor was organized around shared participation in Islamic institutions and community life, even as most remained excluded from prestigious markers of religious status such as frequent hajj trips and appearances at Friday mosques catering to the wealthy and powerful.47 The most visibly pious members of society—the large floating class of peripatetic Quranic students (almajirai) sent from their villages during the dry season to study and live with their malamai (teachers) in the urban centers—were particularly hurt by fast capitalism. As their parents pay no tuition and provide little support, almajirai depend on a combination of temporary labor opportunities and charity for survival in the cities. In the new Kano, both were increasingly scarce. Changes in architectural patterns, driven by cost considerations and a growing concern with security, eliminated the entryways in which many almajirai had received shelter, driving them physically and metaphorically to the margins of social life. The almajirai were reduced from a “respected social category” who saw their access to charity and seasonal employment as “rights” grounded in the religious obligations of the community to a mere “dangerous and immoral set of people,” converting

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their presence into a public policy problem to be addressed (ideally) by banning them entirely.48 The most potent symbol of this discontent was the movement led by Muhammed Marwa, or Maitatsine (“he who curses”). A Cameroonian by birth, Marwa was established in Kano as a malam by the mid-1960s, preaching a brand of Islam that was deeply conservative in its social outlook yet unyieldingly radical in its call to reject the influence of corrupt political and religious elites. His teachings condemned, among other things, Sufi brotherhoods, smoking cigarettes, riding bicycles, and reading any book other than the Quran, eventually attracting a broad following among almajirai and poor economic migrants (the ‘yan ci-rani, or “those who ‘eat’ the dry season” by coming to the urban centers for seasonal employment). On December 18, 1980, following a year of steadily escalating confrontations with the Kano State government, police sent to arrest members of the sect met with armed resistance. As many as four thousand people, including Marwa himself, were killed in the violence that followed. While the movement was destroyed in Kano, subsequent clashes attributed to Maitatsine’s followers took place between 1982 and 1985 in Kaduna, Maiduguri, Yola, and Gombe, perhaps doubling the overall death toll. The Maitatsine affair had a profound influence on how Nigerians think about religious protest and violence. The movement’s success in attracting followers was certainly rooted in its appeals to lower-class Muslims alienated economically and spiritually from rapidly changing urban society. But Maitatsine was hardly the only, or even the most popular, Islamic movement to have such an appeal in northern Nigeria. Marwa’s religious message was distinctive in its condemnation of “Westernization” and the “icons of modernity,” but his core criticisms were saved for what his movement perceived to be the “corruption and degeneration of Islam at the highest levels”—the “moral bankruptcy” of the Nigerian state and its leadership.49 The conditions that made Maitatsine possible—growing self-awareness of Islamic identity among ordinary Muslims, crushing inequality, and the obvious venality of the ruling classes—also created the conditions necessary for less esoteric calls for Islamic revival as a solution to state decline.

Islamic Revival and Sharia Politics, 1970s–1990s The culminating factor in the rise of the “sharia question” was the emergence of a new breed of Islamic reform movements that successfully married the salience of objectified religious consciousness and the reformist narratives of the Sokoto jihad with the political logic of the federal charac-

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ter principle. Both by seeking influence within the state system (Izala) and by railing against it (the Muslim Students’ Society, or MSS), they expanded the influence of Islamic voices in the political sphere, encouraging greater public participation in religious debates that could be channeled into demands for government action. Izala’s Anti-Sufi Revivalism Izala, the most influential Islamic revival group in Nigeria, was founded in 1978 by Sheikh Ismail Idris, a former army chaplain and follower of Gumi. The group’s incorporation came on the heels of Gumi’s most inflammatory attack on Sufism in April 1977, when he announced that members of Sufi orders were to be regarded as kafiri (unbelievers). Izala was the first major organization in Nigeria to build a grassroots movement around an objectified vision of Islam, relying on a network of religious schools, social service providers, and religious cassettes to spread its message of correct religious behavior. Izala leaders railed against social distinctions, rejecting lavish spending on weddings, dowries, and funerals and criticizing obligations of deference to “social superiors” (including the Sufi master–disciple relationship), an attractive message in poor urban communities filled with migrants unconnected to local social networks and among bureaucrats and businessmen looking to transcend them. Izala asserted control of public religious spaces, arguing that Sufi devotional practices made them “impure” to slaughter animals or lead prayer and expelling Sufi imams from prominent mosques. The result was a series of violent clashes between the late 1970s and mid-1980s. In response, the brotherhoods were forced to adopt many of the same tactics. This included forming broad umbrella groups like the Jundullahi movement in Kano, which united members of the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya in a common cause through joint anti-Izala campaigns in the early 1980s.50 Their confrontational nature did little to endear Izala members to the masu sarauta, who retained their much of their former influence in local affairs despite the abolition of the NAs. But for all their desire to disrupt existing hierarchies, Izala exhibited a great deal of circumspection when it came to interaction with the formal political sphere. While Gumi’s international connections brought in significant money, the majority of the resources necessary to create a grassroots organization came from local business leaders and bureaucrats eager to craft a community that could be mobilized on their behalf to make demands on state resources. This commitment meant that Izala offered few direct challenges to the status quo

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represented by the 1978 constitution, generally succeeding in operating with unofficial or semiofficial state recognition. As religious tensions escalated during the 1980s, Izala’s leadership became increasingly willing to set aside their anti-Sufi principles in favor of cooperation to defend broad Muslim interests at the federal level. As a result, Gumi’s partisanship was often a liability to the national organization, particularly following the 1983 coup and the NPN’s loss of credibility. His efforts to persuade Izala members to not vote for Sufi candidates in the 1987 local government elections backfired, leading to the victory of Christian candidates in many Muslim-majority Middle Belt communities, and he was forced to agree to a “resolution of mutual noninterference” with the major brotherhood leadership in early 1988.51 These choices contributed to a major split within the organization beginning in the mid-1980s that eventually “tarnished the reputation of the leadership” and damaged the society’s political influence.52 In the Fourth Republic, it would find new prominence when, after recovering from their initial surprise at the popularity of sharia demands, Izala leaders became key members of sharia advisory and drafting boards. The MSS and the Problem of Secularism The predominant radical organization during the 1970s and 1980s was the Muslim Students’ Society, or MSS, originally founded in the mid-1950s in southern Nigeria but claimed by northern student groups twenty years later. Their interests, much more so than the “traditional” ulema or Izala (both of whom were far closer to power), lay in a vision of society in which sharia was at the center of personal and public conduct. The Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) branch in Zaria was the organization’s locus, where student organizers began protests against the campus administration in 1975–76. The inciting incident for the first campus conflict was a report that drinking cups from the dining hall where Muslim students ate had also been used for drinking beer. This soon evolved into a clash over the use of student union fees to purchase alcohol and the presence of bars on campus. MSS activists at Bayero University in Kano successfully demanded that classes not be held during prayer time and that the “Islamic moral tradition” be integrated into the curriculum.53 The conflict over the FSCA served as a clarion call for Western-educated Muslims about the dangers of secularism. One of the primary grounds on which Christian delegates challenged the FSCA was article 10 of the 1978 constitution, which prohibited the federal government or any state from

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adopting an official religion. Some FSCA opponents argued strongly for further institutional separation of church and state, including the elimination of the various constitutional clauses that provided for the creation of lower sharia courts within states that wanted them. In response, MSS members ramped up their protests against the presence of “un-Islamic” activities on campus and took their first overtly political stances—demanding not only that the FSCA be reinstated but that sharia receive “full entrenchment in the constitution” in recognition of its centrality to Muslim lives.54 Arguably their most influential thinker was Ibrahim Sulaiman, a former society president who has spent most of his career at ABU, most recently at the Centre for Islamic Legal Studies. In a 1981 essay criticizing the Second Republic constitution, Sulaiman argued that the viability of any legal system depends on the presence of the “social, political, economic and administrative arrangements” that support it. For sharia, which is not simply a body of legal doctrine but a comprehensive “way of life,” any institutional “reforms” or restrictions that narrow its scope or application—for example, its restriction to civil law—sever the link among public culture, values, and law.55 Even more insidious was the colonial effort to replace public Islamic culture with “politics, social values, educational system and even . . . moral concepts” compatible with an “English” legal system. This new public culture, seen by many Nigerians as “secular” because it denied entry to Islamic symbols, was not religiously neutral, however. For the MSS, the use of the Gregorian calendar, Saturdays and Sundays as work-free days, and the cross as a symbol for hospitals all represented the victory of “Euro-Christian” culture, a victory inseparable from the expansion of the common (“English”) law system. Interestingly, one of their most common touchstones for suggesting the equivalency of secularization and Christianization is a 1917 British court case called Bowman v. Secular Society, best known in its home country for establishing that “decent and reasonable criticism” of Christianity was not illegal. Nigerian Muslims, however, cite only the minority opinion, in which a single dissenting judge sought to uphold the penalty against “blasphemous libel” by arguing that “[England] is, and always has been a Christian State” and that “English law may as well be called Christian law.”56 Sulaiman argued that this process of secularization was abetted by the masu sarauta’s collaboration with colonial rule, paving the way for the Sardauna’s acquiesce to the 1960 legal reforms (Sulaiman is one of the few Nigerian Islamists to criticize the Sardauna outright). Thus, he argued, no existing Nigerian political authority could rightfully claim to represent the jihadi heritage—not even the Shagari-led NPN, which was dismissed by the MSS as “an extension of [the] colonialism that displaced the Caliphate.”57

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Sulaiman’s response to the intrusion of “Euro-Christian” institutions and values was not, however, to propose a return to a precolonial vision of sharia in which nonstate actors dominated. Instead, he demanded state action to proactively replace “English” cultural influences with public Islam, rewriting the symbolic terms on which Muslims moved through Nigerian society. That this was denied was evidence that secularism was hardly neutral at all. Far better, he argued, to negotiate a bargain between Muslims and non-Muslims that spells out “precisely and unequivocally” the “rights” of all religious communities, including assurances that state limits on public religion would not inhibit the “free expression of Islam.” Echoing the federal character logic, he proposed that religious communities be offered “fair” shares of state recognition, allowing sharia to be applied “on its own terms, not on those dictated by others.”58 The challenge, of course, is to identify what exactly a “fair” distribution would look like. One of the most striking things about the hundreds of books and articles written about religion and politics in Nigeria is how nearly all of them (including those by foreign scholars) eventually come around to the claim that one religious side or another has “dominated” political power. In several cases, these arguments can be found side-by-side in edited volumes, with the Christian author claiming that Muslims have held political power for nearly all of Nigeria’s independence era, and the Muslim author arguing that via colonialism, Christian values and symbols dominate public culture.59 In a world of objectified religious traditions, there seem to be few ways around this. Christian communities demand balance, representation, and access to state resources but rarely imagine the state as an agent for transforming public morality. For CAN activists, “God’s foremost and ultimate purpose is eternal . . . salvation for man, not social change.” Christians are charged with offering prayers and moral guidance to political leaders, participating in elections, and even criticizing government policies when they deviate from the “light of the Gospel,” but it’s the individual’s responsibility to lead a good life.60 Channeling the jihadi tradition, Sulaiman argues for the exact opposite—the direct intervention of state authority in creating a more moral society. As one Nigerian scholar describes it, “Muslims are befuddled by what seems to be the Christian inability to seize on the moral impulse . . . [of] the constitution . . . to radically transform the conceptions and premises of the political order.”61 The MSS’s rallying cry of “Islam only” captured the mounting fear many Muslims felt about the prospects of living in a “secular” state. By 1980, some MSS members had pursued these fears to their logical conclusion, “burning copies of the Nigerian constitution” as a symbolic rejection of

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the possibility of working within its confines.62 The most radical faction was led by Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, an outspoken economics student who was particularly taken by the ongoing revolution in Iran and the alternative it offered to Nigerian secularism. Originally the leader of a group within the ABU MSS, Zakzaky progressed quickly to calling for a “second jihad” against the Nigerian state and demanding “full” implementation of sharia. Following his break with the MSS in 1979 (and his expulsion from ABU in 1980), Zakzaky split his time between trips to Iran and Lebanon and preaching tours across the north, speaking about his experiences abroad and his plans for an Islamic state in Nigeria.63 Zakzaky’s followers—the “Islamic Movement” or “Muslim Brothers,” or locally, ’yan shia (the “Shi’a” in reference to their Iranian influences)—are, like the MSS, made up of loosely affiliated groups across the north. The Brothers came to wider prominence in April 1991, when members held a demonstration against cartoons published in the Daily Times depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The rally turned violent following confrontations with security forces, leading more than one hundred arrests. Riots in Kano precipitated by the visit of a German evangelist named Reverend Reinhard Bonnke (1991) and the lynching of an Igbo trader named Gideon Akaluka, whose wife allegedly used a page from a Quran to wipe her baby’s bottom (1994), were also attributed to the movement. Zakzaky spent much of the decade imprisoned, and the Brothers fractured into competing sects.64 Much like Gumi, Zakzaky proved to be a master at using new communications technologies. The Islamic Movement was among the first Nigerian Islamist groups to have a web presence, and Zakzaky was an early leader in distributing lectures and sermons on cassette and CD. He also relied on traditional literary forms, publishing Hausa-language religious poetry in magazines and newsletters. Perhaps the most striking example in this area is the movement’s production of a feature-length movie for a domestic Hausa audience in 2002–3. Titled Shaheed (“The Martyr”), the film depicts a martyr’s efforts to convert rural pagans to Islam in a historical Nigerian setting, clearly meant to evoke the jihad.65 Between 2009 and 2012, the movement constructed an elaborate “film village” (essentially, a studio backlot) outside of Zaria, and Zakzaky has long claimed to be working on a film depicting the life of Usman dan Fodio. Reviving the Caliphate Model Another consequence of the MSS’s attacks on secularism and emphasis on restoring Islamic values was renewed popular interest in the jihad and ca-

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liphate as models for solving Nigeria’s contemporary malaise. This revival took place at the tail end of an era of dramatic growth in the scholarship on northern Nigerian history. During the 1960s and 1970s, Nigerian universities, particularly Ibadan and ABU, produced reams of studies on Sokoto’s political affairs, as well as detailed historical analyses of individual emirates. Their work challenged colonial preconceptions about the ethnic aspects of the jihad and provided sympathetic depictions of the jihadists alongside critical studies of quotidian social, economic, and political life.66 True to its anti-Sufi origins, much of it also “recast” the Shehu as a “true Sunni” Muslim whose achievements as an Islamic statebuilder and reformer are a template for “authentic Islamic rule,” a clear alternative to the secular (which is to say, Christian) orientation of the Nigerian state.67 The most prominent voice was Suleiman, who published a pair of scholarly works on dan Fodio (A Revolution in History: The Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio) and caliphate administration (The Islamic State and the Challenge of History: Ideals, Policies and Operation of the Sokoto Caliphate) in the late 1980s. Both books provided a strident, idealistic vision of the jihad and caliphate as moments of authentic Islamic practice, characterized by “absolute commitment to the application of the sharia in almost all its ramifications.”68 Sulaiman’s goal was to establish a unified theory of social revolution, drawing lessons for contemporary Nigeria from the successful religious and political transformations that established the caliphate. Echoing arguments often made by evangelical Christians, he proposed that the primary cause of Nigeria’s current decline was “apostasy,” understood broadly as a mass departure from true belief and the “world-view and way of life” it implies. What was needed was a leader of great character and wisdom, someone who, like the Shehu, combined “knowledge with moral excellence” to redirect the path of Hausa society toward justice through Islamic revival (tajdid).69 Throughout the 1980s, a handful of other prominent members of the northern political class—Sulaiman, Usman Bugaje (director of the Islamic Trust, a major education organization, and a member of the Fourth Republic national assembly), Shehu Umar Abdullahi (political commentator and history professor), and Mahmud Tukur (minister under Buhari and vice chancellor of Bayero University)—pursued this line of thinking. A prolific essayist and academic (he completed a master’s thesis on the history of Islamic revival in West Africa at the University of Khartoum), Bugaje presented the caliphate as an “authentic” manifestation of African and Nigerian culture—an alternative to foreign impositions such as the modern secular state.70 In an influential 1980 paper titled “The Sakkwato Model,”

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he argued that the greatest resource Nigerians had for escaping the “orbit of [the] western European capitalist system” was the “large mass of people who, though ignorant, have largely remained faithful to Islam and true to themselves.” Only by recognizing the revolutionary potential of this class, whose traditional religious educations as almajirai had taught them the value of the jihadist model, could the country hope to overcome the “propaganda” of vested interests that preferred the colonially constructed status quo.71 Abdullahi, whose 1984 book On the Search for a Viable Political Culture: Reflections on the Political Thought of Shaikh ‘Abdullahi Dan-Fodio remains available at booksellers across the north, saw his efforts to revive interest in the voluminous writings of Abdullahi dan Fodio as “instrumental in solving [Nigeria’s] chronic political instability,” going so far as to argue that had Abdullahi Dan-Fodio lived in the contemporary era and in today’s Nigeria he could have issued a legal declaration (Al-Fatwa) legalizing the extradition of the Nigerian fugitive politicians, even if it would amount to crating them [a reference to the infamous Umaru Dikko case, in which a former minister was kidnapped in London, drugged, and placed in a shipping crate for informal “extradition” to Nigeria], in order to defend themselves against charges of their betrayal of national trust and swindle. He would do so even if they would be physically liquidated when found guilty.72

Tukur’s Leadership and Governance in Nigeria: The Relevance of Values, originally written as a dissertation at ABU in the late 1970s, offers perhaps the most comprehensive description of how the “borrowed ideas and institutions” left to Nigeria by colonial rule might be replaced by those drawn from the local Islamic tradition. He argues while the caliphate model represents only a portion (albeit a large one) of the people who now make up the Nigerian nation, the indigenous nature of the jihadi message, particularly its emphasis on “justice, integrity, pre-eminence of the public interest, humility, selflessness and truth,” makes it an equitable model for “Nigerians of whatever background and religious persuasion.” Skeptics, particularly those who fail to see the relevance of moral reform in ending the corruption and impunity of the military era, are under the sway of “false secularism,” the unwitting “instrument[s] of those interests wishing to impose an exogenous worldview and ethos on the people.”73 The effort to present the caliphate as a pan-religious model for Nigeria demonstrates another important difference between the MSS trajectory and Gumi’s religious partisanship. While Izala’s Islam was “communitar-

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ian,” focused on creating grassroots religious solidarity and a distinctive, religiously “pure” community, Sulaiman, Bugaje, and Tukur stripped local identities and narratives from their accounts of the caliphate, describing it in universalizing terms as a timeless model for an ideal Islamic state.74 In a 1997 paper (delivered, coincidentally, at a conference celebrating the sultan), Bugaje even suggested that for the caliphate model to be broadly applied in Nigeria, it might be necessary for the masu sarauta to accept a “reinvented” role, one that freed them from the baggage of the local experience with colonial rule.75 Along with revived interest in the caliphate as a moral model came increased interest in sharia as public policy. Driven by what nearly all Nigerians saw as a marked decay in civility, security, and prosperity during the Second Republic and its military aftermath, Muslim intellectuals began to argue for sharia as a means of restoring the rule of law by reaffirming the divine guidance and structure that were so sorely lacking. In the wake of the Buhari regime’s (1984–85) short-lived “war against indiscipline,” an ostensibly secular effort to remoralize Nigerian society, Muslim academics published numerous articles and books arguing for the application of sharia criminal law and sharia-inspired social policy as a means of “reforming society [and] creating a disciplined people,” thereby reducing crime and corruption.76 This was an important departure from how sharia courts had been justified by pro-sharia members of the FSCA, who rarely made such sweeping claims. But without a greater presence for Islam and Islamic values in the public sphere, these writers saw little hope that such powerful transformations could take hold.

Debating Sharia in a Constitutional Era (III): Religion and Conflict in the Military Era With the intellectual groundwork laid, the sharia question moved into the political mainstream under the administrations of Generals Ibrahim Babangida (1985–93) and Sani Abacha (1993–98). Nigeria’s military rulers proved to be even more likely to play politics with religion than their civilian predecessors in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control of the long, often-delayed (and, with Abacha’s 1993 coup, ultimately aborted) transition process. Perhaps not surprisingly, the mid1980s saw a dramatic rise in interreligious conflict as well, much of it driven by confrontations and aggressive political strategies borne of federal character–style demands for recognition and balance. These tensions were exacerbated by the increasingly visible presence of

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evangelical Christianity across the north. Evangelical churches in the north expanded rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s by drawing on the organizational efforts of National Youth Service Corps members, immigrant communities, and university students. By the beginning of the Babangida era, they were well established not only in the Middle Belt but in Muslim strongholds like Sokoto and Zaria. In the face of growing Muslim opposition to their presence, many churches began to shift from passive reliance on prayer to political organizing, which they did to remarkable effect in the December 1987 local government elections. Across the Middle Belt, CAN coordinated nominations to ensure that Christians could unite around a single candidate (in one case in Kaduna, CAN supporters beat up a second Christian candidate to encourage him to drop out of the race), while Muslims split their votes between Izala and Sufi contestants.77 And where organization wasn’t enough, congregations also demonstrated a willingness to abandon biblical injunctions against retaliation in favor of violence. The moment most associated with this new era of conflict was the Babangida regime’s puzzling decision in January 1986 to enter into full membership in the OIC without consulting Christian civil society organizations. Given that Nigeria’s foreign policy toward the Arab world prior to (and even after) the OIC debacle had generally been pragmatic and moderate, this was a bizarre turn of events. The public debate over OIC membership was conducted almost entirely in terms of federal character language, an opportunity for both religious communities to conduct a thorough assessment and airing of their perceived slights and grievances. Christian leaders organized around CAN announced that OIC membership was the first step in the Islamicization of all Nigeria and demanded a government inquiry into the implications of the country’s participation. The ferocity of the Christian reaction brought together many of the most important Islamic organizations and leaders (including Gumi and his most irascible Sufi opponents, Dahiru Bauchi of the Tijaniyya and Nasiru Kabara of the Qadiriyya) to negotiate a common strategy. In January 1987, the recently constituted national Council of Ulema issued a broadside against secularism, insisting on not only continued membership in the OIC but also a reorientation of foreign affairs away from the West, the recognition of the Islamic calendar (including Friday as a work-free day) across the country, and the removal of Christian members of the national police and armed forces stationed in Muslim areas. Babangida’s response was to establish a presidential panel comprising Muslim and Christian leaders to study the issue. Eventually, the committee morphed into the Advisory Council on Religious Affairs, a federal body for resolv-

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ing religious intolerance that proved to be so divided it couldn’t even elect a chairperson. The experience did little to create a template for religious conflict resolution and much to solidify each side’s belief that the other religious community not only was dominant but would fight to the end to maintain its status. The OIC debacle was followed a year later by a violent confrontation between Muslim and Christian student groups on the campus of the Kafanchan College of Education. Kafanchan is a religiously diverse city in southern Kaduna State, an area politically dominated by tensions between “indigenous” Christian minorities and Hausa/Fulani “settlers,” a pair of historically problematic but salient identities. The conflict began when MSS members protested against on-campus missionary activities held by the Fellowship of Christian Students on March 5, which included hanging a banner reading “Welcome to Mission ’87 in Jesus Campus” on the college gates. This was a claim of spatial ownership similar to the MSS’s strategies of the decade prior at ABU, and several days of skirmishing culminated in full-scale rioting in Kafanchan proper on March 9. Irresponsible speculating about the causes of the violence in both Christian- and Muslim-dominated press outlets fueled the flames, and the rioting spread to larger northern cities such as Zaria, Kaduna, Katsina, and Funtua. Kafanchan was a turning point, laying down a pattern that would become sadly common over the next twenty-five years. A perceived slight committed by a Christian against a Muslim, often on a school campus or in a market, leads to localized violence that spreads via the media and word of mouth, becoming a series of riots hundreds of kilometers apart. Local and national officials fail to act decisively to diffuse tensions, and the violence runs its course only after hundreds of deaths and widespread property damage to businesses, homes, and sites of worship. Federal or state efforts (in the Kafanchan case, the controversial Karibi-Whyte Tribunal) to investigate the “causes” of the violence themselves become political targets, yet another opportunity for religious interest groups to make demands for resources and recognition. The immediate impetus for the revival of the sharia question, however, was the extended Babangida transition plan, which was launched to great fanfare in 1985 and came to an ignoble end in June 1993 with the annulment of perhaps Nigeria’s fairest and freest national election ever. Beginning almost immediately upon his arrival in power, Babangida launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to foster national dialogue around the terms of the country’s next democratic experiment. The centerpieces were the Political Bureau, created in 1985 to guide and synthesize this national

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debate into a constitutional template, and the “Directorate for Social Mobilization,” charged in 1987 with the task of inculcating a set of new national political values. As one member of the Political Bureau described it, the consultative process began at a moment of great optimism. The bureau’s nationwide tour (149 meetings and 27,324 contributions) offered a spectacular degree of diversity, demonstrating that Nigerians were hardly unaware of the challenges any institutional arrangement would face.78 The Report of the Political Bureau, published in March 1987, reflected the entrenchment of distributional rights logic in nearly all aspects of public life and the growing reification of “Christian” and “Muslim” positions as represented by their respective interest group organs. While the bureau recognized that the application of the federal character principle had driven ethnic and religious conflict, solidified the importance of “indigeneity” at the expense of national citizenship, and created unprecedented pressure to create new state and local government units (all while leaving almost no one satisfied), it was forced to recommend it be continued. Not surprisingly then, both Christian and Muslim groups relied on this logic to the fullest in expressing their positions to the bureau. The “official” Christian position was that “the state should not be involved in religious matters,” including pilgrimage and religious education. However, CAN’s position (expressed in a 1986 advertisement in the New Nigerian) included demands for the creation of ecclesiastical “courts” and government salaries for church leaders who “settle matters between and concerning Christians” in line with the those paid to alkalai in the public service.79 Among Muslims, the bureau found widespread belief that the state ought to play a significant role in supporting Islamic culture as a counterweight to secular/Christian values, demands that took a now predictable form—recognition for the Islamic calendar and holidays, continued OIC membership, and support for existing sharia institutions. The bureau also suggested that the FSCA be given another opportunity, recommending its inclusion in the new national constitution.80 More ominously, the bureau reported demands from some quarters for “total enthronement of the Sharia as the only body of laws in the country,” even if (just as in the 1977–78 debates) few details accompanied them. In particular, a public statement by the Council of Ulema published in the wake of the Kafanchan violence (and the same month the Report of the Political Bureau was issued) declared that the “full and uninhibited application of the Shari’a” was a “lifetime objective” for the organization, although without releasing any plan or program for what such an application would look like.81 Certainly, this wasn’t the first time such calls had been made. But the demands articu-

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lated in the report were something new, clearly linked to the two main developments in Islamic thinking since the end of the First Republic. On one hand, the federal character logic allowed religious leaders to demand state recognition for their religious “way of life,” obviously including sharia in some form. On the other, the religious revivalism of the MSS and (to an lesser extent) Izala, which saw Islamic values and morals as central to repairing the damage done by colonialism to the Nigerian nation, provided commonsense support to the idea of state intervention to “remoralize” society. What did the report find that Muslims wanted from “full sharia,” and how did they imagine such a system would work? Section IV of the report, aptly titled “A Philosophy of Government for Nigeria,” examined a handful of ideologies as potential solutions to the country’s struggles with inequality and injustice. Some, like capitalism and socialism, were described with careful thought to exactly how they might create opportunities for public engagement or address long-standing economic problems. The section on “Islamic theocracy,” however, provided few specifics on public policy. What it did offer was a fully objectified vision of the Islamic tradition as “complete code of life, with comprehensive principles and rules and regulations governing every aspect of the behaviours of man.” Following the arguments of Sulaiman and Tukur, the report described the requirement not only that a Muslim leader personally uphold the values of “piety, high morals, [and justice] but that he ensure they be upheld across society.” A sharia-compliant leader would “provide for the needs of the poor,” ensuring equitable development for all.82 Indeed, what little concrete discussion there was about what “full” sharia in practice meant strongly resembled the run-of-the-mill economic and social populism for which the Political Bureau found so much support across the country. Calls to “Islamicize” education, finance, and other social services, increasingly popular among Muslim intellectuals during the 1980s, generally proposed to maintain the exact administrative and bureaucratic institutions constructed by the secular Nigerian state, repurposed to Islamic goals. Rather than banishing secularism in favor of a comprehensively Islamic society, the outcome would be to give the secular state the power to “fashio[n] . . . religion as an object of continual management and intervention.”83 The statist assumptions of mainstream sharia activism were not shared by all Muslim intellectuals, some of whom urged caution about the incompatibility of “sharia-style” public policy making and serious efforts to restore the classical constitution. These critics married the anticolonialism of Sulaiman and the MSS with a more careful reading of the legacy of British

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interference in sharia, one that saw the existing Islamic legal apparatus as far more compromised than most Muslims acknowledged. Perhaps the most prominent was Bayero University legal scholar (and one-time legal advisor to the Abacha regime) Auwalu Hamisu Yadudu, who wrote a series of articles arguing that the slow internalization of common law ideas and norms into the Islamic legal system (notably, the idea of judicial precedent) had transformed sharia into little more than “customary law” for Muslims, unmoored from the classical tradition and its body of learned jurisprudence.84 Yadudu argued passionately against the further integration of “sharia courts” with secular state authority, even if at first glance the move might seem politically advantageous. Most tellingly, he claimed that the integration of common law norms into daily legal life in the north presented a substantive barrier to entry into the legal system for many Muslims, who lacked both the “cultural” knowledge and (more important) the ability to pay the “price of hiring able lawyers” necessary to navigate it.85 Other contemporaries called out for an even more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the 1960 reforms, effectively challenging the popular assessment that, at least in the Area Courts, sharia remained largely intact. In a scathing attack on the Area Court system, the former Grand Qadi of Bauchi State Abdulmalik Bappa Mahmud’s 1988 short book A Brief History of Shari’ah in the Defunct Northern Nigeria described the “humiliation” inflicted on sharia by a generation of courts and judges insufficiently trained in its nuances and by the use of a penal code system designed to appear Islamic while operating in ways fundamentally opposed to the spirit of Islamic jurisprudence. He cited in particular the story of a young woman imprisoned for six months following her husband’s accusation of infidelity against her. By inflicting such a punishment—which, he noted, only applied to Muslims—in the name of Islam while ignoring the clear evidentiary standard (four eyewitnesses) required in such cases, the result was the total delegitimation of sharia in this woman’s eyes.86 But if this was the case, what was to be done? Mahmud’s position was that if the very “word ‘Shariah’ has been made a threatening word to ignorant people who have regarded it as a system without mercy and which provides only cruel punishments,” the solution begins with the establishment of a more just society, a project that necessarily transcends the courtroom and even the federal government.87 But for most others, including Yadudu, political realities meant deferring to statist assumptions as a matter of practical necessity. As a participant in several military-led constitutional reform processes, Yadudu’s sharia advocacy reflected the power of federal character logic, arguing for state-sponsored sharia courts (including

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a revived FSCA) as a “fundamental right” for Muslim citizens needed to balance the Christian background of common law. The 1987–89 constitutional drafting process proceeded to refight many of the same battles of 1977 to 1978, this time in the context of a great deal more general animosity. While the positions taken by the political negotiators changed little, the organizational capacities of the Christian and Muslim lobbies certainly had. The result was a CA unable to consider any aspect of sharia without tremendous controversy, including the task of selecting members and a chair for the committee on judicial matters. Once an appropriately “balanced” body could be constituted, all votes on shariarelated questions became deadlocked, with no compromise possible. The fervor of the debate was disruptive enough to the overall process that Babangida ordered delegates to cease debate on this issue entirely. But nothing came of the 1988 constitution, as it was scrapped with the rest of the transition program after the annulment of the June 1993 elections.

The Sharia Question and Nigeria’s Endless Transition By the end of the 1980s, religious conflict was a sad fact of life across Nigeria, both a symptom of and a contributing factor in the slow-motion collapse of Babangida’s stage-managed transition process. The ban on most formal political groups (the regime mandated an official two-party system) only served to increase the power of religious organizations, which parlayed their organizational capacity into significant influence on the selection of candidates. Growing violence between Muslims and Christians, particularly the May 1992 incident in Zangon Kataf (a small community in religiously divided Kaduna State) that left thousands dead, served as evidence to many that Muslims and Christians would never be able to share power in a democratic government. The aborted victory of moderate Yoruba businessman Moshood Abiola in the June 1993 elections was yet another source of tension. Even though he was a Muslim, many southern Christians saw Abiola’s loss of the presidency and subsequent imprisonment by the Abacha regime as a further sign of northern domination. Abacha’s own reluctant transition plan, including a proposal to formally rotate the presidency along ethno-regional lines, went nowhere as his government became increasingly venal and erratic during the mid-1990s. Denied a formal political outlet and confronted with unprecedented violence and corruption, the politics of religious recognition combined with popular demand for moral revival to push Muslim activists toward greater insistence on the installation of Islamic values and institutions in

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the public sphere. Following a pattern that remained relatively intact until the late 2000s, Muslim activists in Nigeria relied on global Islamic influences (intellectual and financial) that emphasized sharia as a central facet of the Islamic experience to address local concerns about governance, all in the context of growing worry about how local traditions of Islamic revival would survive in a secular state. In this light, the slow growth of popular demands for “full” sharia from the 1970s and the FSCA debacle through the Report of the Political Bureau and into the 1990s are inseparable from the heightened political mobilization of religious identity that followed Nigeria’s constitutional experimentation with power sharing and the oil boom. Although, as many sharia advocates would argue during the Fourth Republic, Nigerian Muslims had never turned away from support for sharia, their concrete demands during this period reflected the struggle for access to state resources as much as their concern with restoring the classical Islamic constitution as practiced under the caliphate. Put another way, the federal character logic in Nigerian religious politics undermines the intent of the 1979 and 1999 constitutions—compromise documents prepared jointly by Muslims and Christians—to limit the influence of sectarian and, in particular, religious identities in national politics. But if the religious conflict driven by the federal character logic has tended to fall on the heads of ordinary citizens, the benefits of religious “rights” and power sharing have accrued mostly to elites able to convert these demands into political and economic resources. As a generation of critical Africanist scholarship has demonstrated, for all their embeddedness in complex webs of social obligation, clientelist, neopatrimonial, and prebendal political structures perpetuate inequality, offering far less to those at the bottom of these arrangements than elites are able to extract for their “behalf.”88 However innovative or well intentioned, power-sharing arrangements focused on the distribution of elite positions in government seem to do ordinary citizens little good. Demands for state recognition of religious law, values, and morality retain their popularity because they offer the possibility (if not always the reality) not only of accessing state resources but of holding elites accountable for their use. The tension between what citizens and elites each hope to gain from such arrangements would play a major role in the popular trajectory of sharia implementation following the return to democracy in 1999.

FIVE

Sharia in a Time of Transition

The movement to implement sharia across northern Nigeria in the early 2000s owes much more than its timing to the 1999 democratic transition. Religious identity was intensely politicized under military rule, but federal character discourse and the logic of “distributive rights” that drove the rhetorical arms race between Muslim and Christian organizations following the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal (FSCA) debacle are uniquely suited to democratic politics. In this spirit, critics of sharia implementation often portrayed it as a political ploy—a manifestation of northern elites’ desire to recreate the political unity of the First Republic and the federal power that went with it. As the argument goes, in the early days of the new republic, Muslim political leaders who had openly supported Obasanjo’s 1999 campaign saw their influence waning. Violence against Muslims was on the rise, evidenced by the bloody clash between Yoruba and Hausa communities in Shagamu, Ogun State, in July 1999 and the growth of the Yoruba nationalist vigilante group the Oodua Peoples’ Congress. A wave of mandatory “retirements” among senior northern military personnel also drove the belief that Obasanjo’s regime had “betrayed” its northern supporters. As one academic described it, the sharia controversy was thus nothing less than an act of “political blackmail” meant to arrest the shift of power from north to south.1 The reality was more complicated. Zamfara’s sharia project drew on long-simmering popular interest in religious revival, the intellectual appeal of the caliphate model, and the relative popularity of existing sharia institutions, but it can hardly be described as the opening salvo of an organized political plot. Indeed, Zamfara’s September 1999 sharia announcement took much of the country (north and south) by surprise, and for at least the first few months, support among leading Muslim politicians and religious

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figures was lukewarm at best, perhaps a result of the fact that the political consequences were so uncertain. The story of sharia implementation’s rapid spread reflects the momentum of popular support, all the more remarkable given the general deafness of the political class to public opinion across Nigeria’s democratic history. Whatever its initial impetus, implementing sharia in law and public policy proved extraordinarily challenging. Once the popular outcry began, states rushed to create new institutions from a combination of what was at hand (the Area Court system) and thin air, with wildly varying results. The uncertainty around many new policies—particularly, how they would affect the many non-Muslims residing in sharia states—contributed to a massive uptick in sectarian violence. Moreover, the new system’s performance has often been found wanting, even by its most fervent supporters. Outside of Kano, where sharia policies have been enthusiastically embraced by the political class, many of the ambitious programs and initiatives proposed in the first years have been abandoned or left dormant. Still, most of the new laws remain on the books, even as unsettled questions about their standing vis-à-vis the Nigerian and classical Islamic constitutions continue to spark debate.

The 1999 Transition The transition to civilian rule began in the summer of 1998, with the deaths of Abacha and Abiola a mere month apart. While tragic, Abiola’s death made it possible for the interim military regime, led by General Abdusalami Abubakar, to create a transition plan without directly addressing the 1993 election results, and a handoff date was set for May 29, 1999. Abubakar also created the Constitutional Debate Co-ordinating Committee (CDCC) to update the drafting work of the prior two decades. But belying its name, the CDCC offered no opportunity for debate, particularly on the sharia question and on the government’s relationship with religion. It was given only a month to submit its report, and none of the “issues of interest” suggested to the committee by the regime related to religion. The 1999 constitution’s provisions on sharia were nearly identical to those in the 1978 version. The largest party to emerge during the transition period was the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), an organization built on a cross-regional alliance unlike any that had come before. The PDP was forged in the last days of the Abacha regime around the “Group of 34,” comprising anti-Abacha holdovers from the last civilian administration and former military officers

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drawn from the networks of General Shehu Musa Yar’adua (deputy head of state under the Obasanjo military government and a name long associated with the “Kaduna Mafia”) and Babangida. Its success lay in its ability to parlay the sheer size of its coalition, which easily covered all the relevant “federal character” categories, into a credible commitment to prospective members that they would receive an equitable share in the “spoils” (offices, contracts, graft) of victory. The PDP’s internal workings reflected the business-as-usual of regional, ethnic, and religious balancing, including its promise to “zone” the presidency to a Yoruba in recognition of the election stolen from Abiola. And when Obasanjo failed to carry any of the six Yoruba states of the southwest for the PDP in local, state, or national elections, support from the PDP’s northern wing proved decisive. In the north, the PDP’s main opponent was the All Peoples’ Party (APP), made up primarily of former supporters of or participants in the Abacha regime who saw the national coalition of the PDP as damaging to northern interests. Unable to compete nationally, it formed a partnership of convenience with the Alliance for Democracy, which drew its support from Afenifere, a pan-Yoruba political action group favoring ethnic autonomy and a looser federation. After advancing an unsuccessful joint presidential ticket that paired a Yoruba regionalist (Olu Falae) and a member of the Sokoto aristocracy (Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi), the APP was left to salvage what was left at the state level. The APP won nine of the nineteen gubernatorial seats in the northern states (but none elsewhere), while the PDP won twenty-one total, including the other ten in the north. In a political environment where regionalist movements were gathering power in Yorubaland and the Delta region, this division put Muslim politicians at a disadvantage in making common appeals to the federal government for resource allocation. In sum, the Fourth Republic opened at a historically low point in Muslim elite political integration. When the sharia implementation “crisis” burst onto the scene four months later in Zamfara at the hands of an APP governor, northern PDP members were quickly forced to choose sides between massive Muslim popular support and equally strong opposition from their party’s southern wing.

Zamfara State and the Promise of Sharia Implementation Zamfara is a small, rural state in northwestern Nigeria that, prior to the sharia controversy, had played virtually no role in national politics. Indeed, it was among the youngest states in the federation, carved out of Sokoto in 1996 by Abacha as part of a deal to offset the creation of new states in the

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south. Its inaugural civilian governor, Alhaji Ahmed Sani (Yeriman Bakura,2 known colloquially as Yerima), had an unexceptional background for a politician—a son of the emir of Bakura, educated at Bayero University, and a high-level civil servant in the Central Bank during the Abacha years with no public record of exceptional Islamic piety. He had, however, been allegedly complicit in corrupt financial dealings, skimming from funds allocated to Nigeria’s participation in the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) peacekeeping force in Liberia.3 Candidate Yerima left little in the way of a paper trail regarding his sharia intentions. His rallies featured Islamic symbolism and made appeals to religious leaders of the sort employed by virtually all northern politicians, but I’ve not been able to trace a single media report at the time suggesting that he actively campaigned on a platform of expanding sharia. The closest thing to national attention he attracted was the full-page advertorial he took out in the New Nigerian newspaper on February 17 to thank his supporters. It made no mention of Islamic law but promised a commitment to the two universal themes of Nigerian politics: poverty alleviation and development.4 Sharia politics in the Fourth Republic began to little fanfare in June 1999, when Yerima appointed a “sharia implementation committee” to study the feasibility of expanding sharia’s jurisdiction beyond private and family law. The first public announcement came September 19, and legislation establishing sharia courts and delineating their jurisdiction followed on October 8. The specifics are likely to remain forever vague, but there’s no evidence suggesting that Yerima’s administration coordinated with other states or major Muslim organizations outside Zamfara in laying this initial groundwork.5 Indeed, to most observers, Yerima’s motives seemed primarily local, centered on the goal of solidifying his political “support vis-à-vis other Zamfara notables” who had followed local kingmaker General Aliyu Mohammed Gusau in support of the PDP.6 On October 27, Yerima “launched” sharia with a rally in Gusau, Zamfara’s capital city. Outside, the initial response was surprisingly tepid, with neither the sultan of Sokoto nor the most prominent Muslim politicians attending the festivities.7 There’s little evidence that Yerima’s announcement was even taken seriously in most corners of the Muslim political and religious leadership, coming as it had without consulting them. It was, however, widely reported by both the northern and Lagos-based media, which described an immediate and emphatic outpouring of popular support across the state, including a reduction of fares into Zamfara by Muslim bus and taxi drivers as a show of solidarity.8

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The October 27 rally also provided a rhetorical model for defending sharia implementation that would be frequently repeated in the coming years. Expanding on the arguments made by Muslim activists during the 1970s and 1980s, Yerima and the other speakers framed their defense of sharia around a pair of basic claims. The first traced a direct line from the Council of Ulema and the Report of the Political Bureau to demand state recognition and support for public Islam. Well-known jurist Justice Mohammed Bashir Sambo filled in the familiar list, arguing that that since the Nigerian state already recognized Christian values and symbols (Sunday as a work-free day and the use of crosses as emblems in hospitals and on emergency vehicles), to oppose sharia on the grounds that it established a state religion would be hypocritical.9 In a later interview, Yerima attempted to reinforce the essential reasonableness of these demands in the context of the federal character bargain by an appeal to Nigeria’s new democratic dispensation, which provided Nigerian Muslims with their first real opportunity to “exercise their full rights since the period [the north was] invaded and colonized by the British.” With sharia, Muslims were finally able to insist that the federal government put resources behind the defense of their constitutionally protected freedom to worship, a guarantee long extended to Christians under the cover of secularism.10 With the second, Yerima drew on the caliphate narrative to link demands for religious rights and recognition with an account of Nigeria’s economic and political troubles as rooted in the decay of public morality. By harnessing values specifically grounded in the country’s historical experiences, sharia might do what moral “reorientation” programs under military rule couldn’t—offer a workable template for social renewal. In short, he intended “to apply an Islamic perspective of development to . . . [the] socio-economic development of the state  .  .  . [T]his sound economic development can best be achieved in an atmosphere of judicious, fair, and equitable distribution of state-owned resources and the wealth derived from such resources. Thus, under the Islamic sharia system prudent management and optimum utilization of all state owned resources is guaranteed as the fear of Allah shall be the guiding principle of both the government and the governed.”11 Certainly, one part of the appeal of Yerima’s project was the prospect of a return to “full” sharia in legal affairs. But even in areas where a reasonably accurate version of Islamic law had been applied without interruption, confidence in the legal system had always waxed and waned alongside broader trends in national politics, and the prospect of hudud punishments from these same courts would not necessarily have been enough to set off a na-

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tional movement. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the prospect of northern policies gaining leverage against the Obasanjo administration could have brought so many people into the streets. Rather, it was the chance to harness local values and the caliphate tradition to “make government work,” relying on sharia (and Islamic revival more broadly) as a strategy for economic development and better governance, that resonated most strongly with Muslim audiences. In this sense, the Zamfara sharia program was an extension of the populist, state-driven developmental talk that characterizes most of Nigerian politics and drove Yerima’s electoral victory. Sharia implementation meant a greater role for government in distributing the religiously gotten gains of improved public morality, and pro-sharia politicians explicitly linked the distribution of state patronage and resources with their moral agenda by investing in development projects to serve as evidence of sharia’s economic and social benefits. Zamfara promised to commit millions of naira to constructing “Islamic” hotels and lodgings— priming the economy and Islamicizing the public space in one fell swoop. A further emphasis, again drawing on the groundwork of thinkers like Bugaje and Tukur, was the suggestion that Islamic values could be used to hold the government accountable for its stewardship, with sharia providing swift and impartial justice even if the offenders were the sons of the emirs and the political class. Yerima took the lead, presenting sharia as a means of stemming Nigeria’s notorious corruption and waste by providing religious sanction and harsher punishments for the immoral acts of civil servants and politicians. Zamfara created a new “sharia” anticorruption commission to prosecute government officials, although few such cases seem to have been pursued. Other states focused on the public piety of their civil servants, mandating that all employees observe prayer times while at work. This scrutiny proved to be a double-edged sword for Yerima. His wife’s dancing at the launch party for the women’s wing of his 2007 presidential campaign drew censure from his PDP opponents, who accused him of hypocrisy in allowing his wife to frolic in contravention of his state’s own regulations banning public drumming, singing, and the mixing of sexes at such events.12 Shortly after he left office, Yerima’s name appeared on a list released by the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of former governors suspected of widespread financial corruption. And in 2010, his marriage to a thirteen-year-old Egyptian girl—illegal under federal law but extremely difficult to prosecute in the states—brought him to the attention of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons, likely ruining any future chance at national political office.

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How Popular Was Sharia Implementation? The true level of popular support for sharia among Muslims in these first months is hard to estimate. The northern press regularly overstated the size of pro-sharia rallies, publishing claims like those of Zamfara’s director of press affairs, Bashir Sanda Gusau, who announced that “millions of Muslims” attended open-air preaching sessions and a speech by Yerima in September 1999.13 Bearing in mind that the population of the entire state (most of which is rural) is less than four million, this number is utter fantasy. Nonetheless, reports like this and the “estimated” four million attendees at Kano State’s sharia launch event drove a national perception that Muslims overwhelmingly supported sharia implementation. A survey conducted by the Nigerian firm RMS Media Services in fall 2000 gives us a clearer picture (Table 5.1). Nationally, sharia was quite unpopular. Only 38 percent of Nigerians approved of Zamfara’s efforts, with 49 percent opposed. Not surprisingly, anti-sharia sentiments were strongest in the south and northern areas with large Christian populations. But even Muslims were suspicious. In Niger State, whose governor was an enthusiastic advocate, support hovered around 50 percent (reflecting, perhaps, the quarter of that state’s population RMS estimated to be

Table 5.1

State Katsina Kano Jigawa Kebbi Yobe Sokoto Borno Bauchi Niger Adamawa Gombe Nasarawa Kaduna Taraba Plateau Kogi Zamfara*

Sharia approval in the north by state, 2000 Approval (%)

Disapproval (%)

Muslims surveyed (%)

Christians surveyed (%)

92 89 89 86 83 80 75 64 52 48 43 36 34 32 25 18 n/a

5 8 7 10 15 10 20 34 31 43 55 46 58 47 70 75 n/a

97 95 93 91 91 92 83 73 73 58 78 51 44 55 23 52 n/a

3 5 6 9 9 8 17 27 26 40 22 49 56 45 77 48 n/a

*Data not collected for Zamfara State. Bold indicates a state that enacted sharia legislation. Table adapted from Cleveland, “Acceptance of Sharia Law in Nigeria,” 95–96.

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Christian). In Kaduna State, a mere 34 percent of the population favored it, pitting the Zaria emirate against the predominantly Christian South of the state. Thirty-three percent of Muslims actually expressed the opinion that the federal government should have intervened more forcefully to prevent Zamfara from implementing sharia. Sharia proposals were undeniably popular in states with large Muslim majorities, however. In many APP-controlled states, ruling administrations quietly convened sharia implementation committees within a month or two of Zamfara’s announcement, looping in the now enthusiastic leadership of Izala and the Sufi brotherhoods. Their membership typically included respected members of the ulema, legal scholars (often university affiliated and with MSS backgrounds) and judges, and traditional leaders drawn from state emirate councils. Invariably, they recommended swift action, along with extensive “sensitization” campaigns to inform local residents about how implementation would work. Sokoto’s governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, was the first to move, proposing sharia legislation focused heavily on social and economic reforms. His promises included the eliminating “un-Islamic” business practices, reforming the management of local markets, and providing more trustworthy weights and measures to merchants. PDP governors like Umaru Musa Yar’adua (Katsina) and Rabi’u Kwankwaso (Kano) faced a more difficult decision. Southern leaders in the party rushed to condemn sharia as both unconstitutional and another salvo in Muslims’ fight for national dominance, while northern PDP elites faced a mobilized and coordinated effort from a now energized (and highly organized) Muslim civil society to advance the sharia agenda. Efforts by Muslim national PDP figures, particularly Vice President Atiku Abubakar, to mediate between the most enthusiastic sharia supporters and those who advocated a more measured, gradual approach drew the ire of the APP leadership and ultimately accomplished little. In Katsina, Izala launched a campaign in October, arranging attacks by populist imams during Friday prayers against the Yar’adua administration’s hesitance. He acquiesced to forming a committee for examining sharia’s constitutionality by the end of month, and after having his lack of support for the “legitimate rights” of Muslims equated with “dictatorship” in the northern press, he withdrew his opposition in February 2000.14 Kwankwaso faced even more pressure, including systematic protests by government employees and religious organizations like Izala and the Jama’at Nasr al-Islam (JNI). He gave in on December 9, 1999, creating a pair of sharia committees (“technical” and

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“implementation”), the first led by Auwalu Yadudu and the second by the chief imam of the Kano Central Mosque, Sheikh Isa Waziri.

The Potential for Sharia, as Seen from Below Sokoto’s sharia implementation committee issued its initial report on October 13, a mere five days after its creation. It focused on providing constitutional justifications for the state’s potential crafting strategies and limited the specifics of the new legal regime to boilerplate lists of hudud crimes to be codified and social ills to be addressed.15 But like most of its counterparts, the committee also solicited letters and memoranda from the public, intending to incorporate the concerns and preferences of key interest groups and the general public into its final product. This input would also be used to craft strategies for “enlightening” local communities about the need for and benefits of Islamic law.16 The outpouring of feedback from organizations and private citizens (many published in northern newspapers in an effort to attract the attention of committee members) provides a remarkable window into the political and economic concerns of northern Muslims and their views on how Islamic legal reforms might alleviate them. Most of the memos reflected two core concerns. First, those composed on behalf of particular organizations and interest groups demanded that sharia policies be tailored to impact their (often quite specific) policy needs. In the Bauchi State report, Mahmood Aliyu, a revenue officer from Alkaleri Local Government, suggested that the sharia committee look into the “lack of punctuality by civil servants and [their habit of] leaving the office before the appropriate time” and into ensuring that government employees are paid their salaries in full and on time. Alhaji Hamza Maikudi Gawo, the executive chairman of Warji LG, entreated the committee to create a “welfare package” to address unemployment and to facilitate the advancement of Bauchi indigenes in the federal civil service, despite their frequent lack of “paper qualifications” when compared to Nigerians from other regions. The head of the Tafawa Balewa Council of Ulema requested merely that the state’s religious scholars be engaged by the state (at its expense, presumably) to “go to every nook and cranny to educate people on Muslims’ affairs.” Mallam Abubakar Abdullah Wambai, the imam of the Bauchi Cow Market, prepared an extensive memo detailing his hopes that sharia might prevent fraudulent and immoral business practices in his domain.17 Second, private citizens emphasized a strong desire that sharia imple-

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mentation go beyond the creation of sharia courts or the enforcement of hudud penalties to address “core” social problems. In Bauchi, Yaya Mu’azu Jahun asked the committee to improve the well-being of local almajirai, alerting them that these students were not receiving quality educations but instead could be found “doing nothing but committing sexual intercourse with young girls without limitation.”18 Others saw sharia as an opportunity for the state to take a heavier hand. One Bauchi resident suggested that state agents should meet with “prostitutes,” offering them the opportunity to marry as a way out of their lifestyle. Should they accept, he suggested (prophetically, it turned out) that the state assist them by providing housing and procuring a dowry. Women not participating would be deported from the state at public expense.19 The author of a November 5, 1999, letter to the New Nigerian titled “We Need Sharia’a on Bonny Road, Kaduna” argued that all he wanted from sharia was an end to the prostitution and drinking he alleged had become commonplace in his neighborhood. While he was open to a non-sharia remedy, he no longer trusted the police, whom he saw as complicit in this immoral behavior. Because sharia would “not distinguish between the rich and the poor, the ruled and the ruler,” he felt perhaps it would be above corruption.20

Legal Strategies of Sharia Implementation Once the state implementation committees had gathered their feedback, it fell to the state governors and legislatures to act. But how could they implement an entirely new legal system and wide-ranging social reforms, particularly amid widespread claims that their actions were unconstitutional? The most direct strategy was to simply grant the existing Area Courts the necessary authority to administer sharia in criminal matters, since they already effectively did that in personal status and family law cases. In doing so, the “sharia states” received aid from an unlikely source—section 277 (1) of the 1999 constitution, which contained a clause permitting states to assign new jurisdictions to their Sharia Courts of Appeal: “The Sharia Court of Appeal of a State shall, in addition to such other jurisdiction as may be conferred upon it by the law of the State, exercise such appellate and supervisory jurisdiction in civil proceedings involving questions of Islamic personal law which the court is competent to decide.” By all accounts, this passage was a mistake, accidentally inserted into the 1978 constitution and carried over into the new document verbatim.21 Whatever the original intent, however, Zamfara made specific reference to this clause

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when presenting its legal path to sharia, arguing that their plans were entirely constitutional.22 Just what “sharia” would be administered? In Zamfara, legislation mandated that the state “establish offences and their punishments, and the procedures for trials in criminal matters,” a choice that placed it solidly in the global mainstream.23 With the exception of Saudi Arabia, which lacks the colonial heritage of legal Westernization, all countries that have attempted to implement Islamic criminal law in the postcolonial era have legislated some sort of written code, following the Mejelle model in practice if not in inspiration. Ultimately, all twelve “sharia” states adopted written Islamic criminal and procedure codes (Table 5.2). Producing these documents turned out to be complicated and timeconsuming. Since each state was responsible for its own, there were tremendous variations in style, scope, and quality. At its best, this allowed communities to tailor their versions of sharia to local sensibilities and needs. In Kaduna, for example, where the initial announcement that the state would pursue sharia contributed to a rash of religious violence, Governor Ahmed Markafi (PDP) compromised by proposing that sharia courts be put in place only in the predominantly Muslim North of the state, while Table 5.2

Sharia implementation by state

State

Sharia court legislation adopted

Bauchi Borno Gombe Jigawa Kaduna

n/a June 1, 2001 (“adoption” of sharia) December 14, 2001 August 2, 2000 (courts begin operation) November 2, 2000

Kano Katsina Kebbi

November 25, 2000 (bills passed) August 1, 2000 (courts begin adjudicating sharia cases) July 21, 2000 (bill passed)

Niger

Mid-January 2000

Sokoto

February 2000 (sharia courts law); August 2, 2000 (courts begin operation) August 8, 2000 (sharia “introduced”); October 1, 2000 (sharia becomes “enforceable”) October 8, 1999, and October 27, 1999 (“launch”)

Yobe Zamfara

Sharia criminal code implemented May/June 2001 March 3, 2003 November 23, 2001 December 27, 2000 June 2002 (Tripartite Criminal Code) November 26, 2000 August 2001 December 1, 2000 (Amended Penal Code) May 4, 2000 (Amended Penal Code) January 31, 2001 April 25, 2001 (Signed Penal Code) January 27, 2000

Sources: Weimann, Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, passim; Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, 4:33–35; and Peters, Islamic Criminal Law in Nigeria, 54–60.

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maintaining “flexible” customary law courts elsewhere. At its worst, it meant near-legal chaos. In Katsina, the first attempt at a sharia “code” was a slapdash effort simply instructing sharia courts to govern their proceedings in accordance with the Quran and hadith, a solution that, while closer in spirit to the classical model, proved unworkable. In others, gross errors and omissions (often the result of sloppy efforts to lift passages or sections from previous state codes) created inconsistencies, left key terms underdefined, and failed to provide guidelines for sentencing. A project to address these inconsistencies by the Center for Islamic Legal Studies at Ahmadu Bello University produced “harmonized” sharia criminal and procedure codes, but as of 2015, only Zamfara has adopted them. In their eagerness to act, state proclamations announcing Islamic law sometimes preceded the creation of the necessary legal frameworks by months or even years. In the meantime, sharia courts often began trying cases, meaning that some Muslims were convicted of offenses that were not yet illegal when committed. The most notorious example was the case of Safiya Husseini Tugur Tudu, a Sokoto woman convicted of zina and sentenced to be stoned to death in September 2001. The complaint against her was filed on December 23, 2000, a full month before the sharia criminal code went into effect. This proved to be grounds for overturning the conviction with the Sokoto State Sharia Court of Appeal.24 An EU-commissioned study also found evidence of amputation sentences and lashings being carried out in Katsina and Sokoto during the interregnum between sharia’s announcement and codification.25 Only the high profile of Safiya’s case helped attract the legal attention necessary to bring this problem to light. Courts were also plagued by difficulties in locating and training qualified judges. Sitting Area Court judges often lacked comprehensive Islamic legal educations, and states that retained them in new roles were forced to train them on the job. Test scores reported by Kebbi’s implementation committee in 2001 found that only twenty-six of eighty-three judges met proficiency standards.26 For his part, Auwalu Yadudu has argued this the poor state of affairs was a product of British policies, specifically the introduction of formal legal training as a substitute for the “informal” study of fiqh. As he saw it, this new university-style training, less freewheeling or comprehensive and restricted to core concepts within a single madhab, left graduates unprepared for the realities of presiding over courts hearing a range of cases.27 Many judges also lacked access to the broad range of Islamic legal texts necessary for independent legal reasoning, and sharia implementation committees were slow to prioritize purchasing these materials, preferring to fund expensive “training exercises” in their stead.

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Finally, despite public reassurances that non-Muslims would be unaffected, the new system created severe jurisdictional challenges. Sharia states were forced to retain their Magistrate and High Court systems, which continued to apply the 1960 penal code to the cases that reached them. Reversing the colonial-era situation, in which non-Muslims were permitted to “opt out” of appearing in front of a Native Court that applied sharia, most states now encouraged them to “opt in,” touting swift and decisive justice.28 In the absence of good data, it’s difficult to know exactly how often this happens. At least some Muslims, however, have found it possible to strategically avoid sharia courts. An employee of the High Court in Sokoto reported to me in 2008 that whether a defendant made an initial appearance before a sharia court or a court applying the penal code often depended entirely on the discretion of the police officer making the arrest. As police are federal employees (often posted outside their home region), he suggested that many simply chose to ignore the sharia system or to accept bribes in order to direct defendants to their preferred court. The implication was that it was possible to simply buy one’s way out of sharia justice, an accusation that resonated strongly among ordinary Muslims.29 For this reason, seven states formally or semiformally sanctioned the creation of Islamic law enforcement committees, or hisbah.30 These organizations have varied widely—from Kano’s extensive (9–10,000 members) and well-funded operation to volunteer forces coordinated by local Islamic organizations—but their conduct has been controversial. During their early months, hisbah groups were often accused of targeting non-Muslims consuming or selling alcohol, while reports of beatings or other “summary justice” circulated in southern newspapers. It’s difficult to say just how truthful these reports were, although uncertainty from the top down about how precisely to administer sharia certainly contributed to the problem. In 2006, the federal government attempted to ban the Kano hisbah entirely, jailing its commissioner and his deputy and accusing them of running an illegal organization. The result was a series of lawsuits, some dismissed and others clear victories for Kano.31 Today, hisbah groups remain legal for all states that officially sanction and administer them. Hisbah groups serve two main purposes. The first is as adjuncts to “official” law enforcement. In Kano, they are charged with “rendering necessary assistance to the police . . . in the areas of prevention, detection, and reporting of offenses,” and although they wear state-issued uniforms, they do not carry firearms. In most states, they cannot make formal “arrests” but are permitted to detain suspects until the police arrive. Not surprisingly, relations between the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and hisbah groups haven’t

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always been smooth. In several cases, NPF officers have arrested active-duty hisbah officers following complaints from local residents about their zeal in breaking up “unlawful” activities.32 The second is as guardians and guarantors of public morality. In the classical Islamic constitution, this is the duty of any Islamic ruler, who is empowered by his siyasa authority to deal with what Frank Vogel calls the “worldly instrumentalities of religion”— the need to convert the uncertainty of legal scholarship into commands and prohibitions that serve the public good.33 Hisbah are tasked with “encouraging orderliness at religious gathering[s]”; “advis[ing] against [the] acquiring of interest, usury, hoarding and speculation”; and “encourag[ing] Muslims to unite in their quest for justice.”34 The Kano State Hisbah Board reports the numbers of “brothels” and drinking parlors they close down, along with the edifying lectures on sharia they give to the general public and non-Muslims they have “converted” to Islam.35 These efforts haven’t always been welcomed by citizens, who have often expressed frustration with the hard-nosed tactics employed by hisbah members. In other states, their most public role is to encourage Islamic business practices, including testing and certifying weights and measures, resolving disputes, and encouraging moral behavior among traders. While sharia institutions in most other states have receded dramatically from prominence, the Kano hisbah remain a visible part of the city’s daily life—directing traffic at busy intersections, mediating local disputes, and beginning in 2012, organizing mass marriages for men and women unable to secure the financial resources to begin married life on their own.

The Sharia Social Agenda Enacting the lofty transformational goals outlined by the implementation committees meant doing more than crafting legal codes and creating courts—it required addressing a wide range of real (and perceived) social ills. Issues ranging from elite corruption to liquor consumption and the public appearance of women have long histories as bugaboos in Nigerian society, and the implication that social morality and political stability are linked is a common one in the rhetoric of Muslim and Christian communities. Community-specific efforts to address these problems, cloaked in a thick layer of partisan religious rhetoric, have been flashpoints for conflict between Christian or secular authorities and religious reformers. Despite the fact that alcohol consumption was already criminalized for Muslims under the penal code, most states used sharia as an opportunity to dramatically ramp up public crackdowns on the sale of liquor

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and beer. Some staged public raids (including one notorious example led by the deputy governor of Kano in April 2001) on suspected drinking parlors, gambling houses, and brothels. Adultery and sodomy (defined in the sharia criminal code as “unnatural offenses”) were also already illegal, but sharia codes criminalized most sex outside marriage and homosexual sex, with penalties ranging from lashings to death by stoning. The standards of proof for these cases (four adult witnesses) are often prohibitively high, and homosexual and gender-nonconforming communities (and, presumably, adulterous behavior) continue to survive. However, sexual minorities experienced a dramatic upsurge in vilification and harassment. The most prominent examples were a pair of controversies in 2007, one in Kano and another in Bauchi, centered on supposed “gay marriage” celebrations. The first ended with the hisbah destroying the theater where the festivities took place and the second with the arrest and three-weeklong detention of eighteen men. As Rudi Gaudio argues, this concern with “gay marriage” was an odd development, given that not only were such marriages not recognized by any federal or state laws but none of the participants self-identified as “gay.” Western understandings of homosexuality overlap only partially with the terms in which most of the “Bauchi eighteen” would have understood themselves—yan daudu (roughly, “men who act like women”) or masu harka (“men who do the deed”), the majority of whom view marrying and having children as an overriding moral imperative.36 The “fear” of homosexuality and its presence in the public sphere among African Muslims (and Christians) relies on a discourse that regards homosexuality as a “Western” category imposed on African culture by imperialism rather than an “authentic” African sexual identity. In Nigeria, this fear culminated in 2013 with a harsh (but immensely popular) bill that criminalized “homosexual acts,” including registering for or participating in gay rights organizations or “public show[s]” of same-sex affection, with ten-year prison terms.37 Sharia-inspired moral revival efforts strongly echoed attacks on women’s autonomy and presence in the public sphere during the colonial era and the First Republic. Some states earmarked (and prominently disbursed) funds to “save” single women from alleged prostitution, devoting state resources to finding them husbands and supplying them with dowries and startup capital for small businesses. Kano State’s hisbah-sponsored matchmaking efforts, which provided “furniture, kitchen wares and foodstuffs as well as N20,000 to each couple” (gifts of furniture and kitchen goods are a central part of the Hausa wedding tradition) along with a N10,000 dowry, have gone the furthest, with one thousand couples tying the knot in April

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2013 alone.38 Echoing Izala’s criticism that traditional social obligations place a high financial cost on families, the Kebbi State Assembly passed a bill to reduce “extravagance” in naming ceremonies and marriages. Sharia implementers also targeted artistic and cultural endeavors. Efforts to stamp out “un-Islamic” performances resulted in the outright (but usually temporary) banning of musical performances, the disbanding of “cultural” performance troupes that featured men and women performing side by side, and the establishment of stricter and more powerful censorship of media. The controversial efforts of the Kano State Censorship Board (KSCB; with the motto “Morality Is Measurable”), founded in 2001 at the height of sharia’s popularity, drew the most attention. Since the mid1990s, Kano has played host to a large and influential Hausa-language video-production industry called “Kannywood,” which produces films that often adopt the aesthetic and narrative styles of Indian “Bollywood” movies that have long been popular with Nigerian Muslim audiences.39 This influence extends to the insertion of choreographed singing and dancing sequences interspersed with the main narrative, a practice that censors like Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, a former KSCB director-general, took particular umbrage with. The Kwankwaso administration issued a temporary ban on film production in December 2000, but with the election of Ibrahim Shekarau, the cleric/civil servant whose 2003 campaign revolved around the sharia issue, the KSCB took on a leading role in regulating the industry. It launched a strict new licensing regime for production houses, directors, and performers and adopted a restrictive code for on-screen action that included bans on any romantic physical contact between men and women, the wearing of trousers by actresses, and “passionate barbing,” a concept that goes undefined in the official Film Censorship Guidelines.40 Violators could expect jail time or fines of as much as N500,000 meted out in the board’s own “mobile court” located near the Kano airport. At the height of its power in 2007, the KSCB banned all film production in the state for six months, while its court imprisoned prominent director/producer Hamisu Lamido Iyan-Tama and director/actor Adam A. Zango for three months each. Kannywood stars campaigned heavily against Shekarau and Rabo’s administration during the 2011 elections, which witnessed Kwankwaso’s triumphant return to power.41 In Sokoto, the Bafarawa administration presented expanded government funding for Arabic and Islamic education, mosque-building, and the “conversion” of “anti-Islamic” enterprises (like cinema houses) into Islamic spaces. Most states expanded the number of religious leaders on

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government payrolls, and many set up zakkat boards to systematically collect and distribute alms. Government notables capitalized on the newfound public demand for charity, giving alms ostentatiously during Islamic holidays—gifting food in “break fast” centers and providing cars, motorcycles, and other big-ticket items to groups in “need,” including imams, the unemployed, and widows. These contributions often blurred the line between personal and state funds, with politicians receiving personal credit for “donating” state money to Islamic causes such as mosque renovations and school construction. Some even went so far as to suggest that ordinary development projects, such as road construction and dualization, were “Islamic achievements” only accomplished because of sharia.42 Another means of persuading the general public that sharia was “working” were the “sharia enlightenment campaigns” featuring television and radio programs, community rallies, and high-profile conferences for religious and traditional leaders. Many implementation committees demanded and received access to state-owned media, which provided production facilities and distribution for pro-sharia programs. Emirs cooperated, especially where (as in Zamfara and Kano) they were singled out for recognition— Yerima declared at the sharia implementation conference in September 1999 that henceforth, traditional leaders were to be called “custodians of Islamic values” in recognition of their guardianship of the caliphate heritage.43

Sharia and the Politics of Religious Conflict With tensions running high, the national debate over sharia was often angry and hyperbolic, with wild accusations and thinly veiled threats the order of the day. Underneath the overheated rhetoric were three major substantive concerns, each of which pitted Muslim sharia supporters against southern domestic and international opponents. The first was the question of sharia’s constitutionality, invoking long-standing conflicts over how to understand the meaning of secularism in Nigerian political institutions. The second focused on the relationship between the new sharia provisions and human rights. How would Muslims respond to accusations from Western rights groups that sharia violated international values and norms? Could sharia supporters plausibly articulate an “Islamic rights” scheme that squared their intentions with Nigeria’s domestic and international rights commitments? And finally, there was the violence. Conflict between Muslims and Christians in the north reached its highest levels ever during the first years of the sharia controversy, at the cost of thousands of lives and

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millions of dollars in property destroyed. It also substantially worsened relationships among religious communities in the divided towns and cities of the Middle Belt, where rioting sadly became a common part of the national landscape by the mid-2000s. Is Sharia Constitutional? A plain-language reading of section 277(1) of the 1999 constitution clearly suggests a constitutional path for expanding the jurisdictions of sharia courts. Subsection (2) complicates this story by providing a list of criteria for determining the jurisdiction of state Sharia Courts of Appeal—those dealing with marriage or family relationships; gifts, wills, and issues of succession; and other cases of Islamic personal law when both parties are Muslim and request it. During the 1980s and 1990s, a body of case law developed around these exact parameters, excluding issues such as land disputes.44 When state legislatures enacted sharia under the authority of subsection (1), it was unclear what effect these precedents would have. Some argued that the limits around subsection (2) were controlling, a line of thinking advanced in a pair of cases that reached the State High Courts in Borno and Niger. In both, the courts ruled that expanding Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction to matters of criminal law was unconstitutional, although sharia courts in both continue to try criminal cases. No federal ruling has yet been made to clarify the national implications of the Borno and Niger decisions.45 The thornier issue was section 10, which provides that “the Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion.” Here, the main accusation by Christians was that sharia implementers intended to transform Nigeria into an “Islamic state,” violating what they perceived to be an explicit guarantee of the state’s secularity. Muslims loudly refuted this claim, pointing to the fact that the new laws applied only to other Muslims and in no way placed any religious obligations on members of other faiths. There’s been little progress toward resolution on this issue and no definitive constitutional finding about what precisely “secularity” means in the Nigerian legal context. Many intellectuals in the south continue to call for the state to treat religion as a private manner (even as Christian leaders demand recognition of their values and interests in official government policy), while Muslim elites argue that secularism is a cover for the domination of Christian culture and that it’s better to officially recognize religion and provide for its support than to falsely ignore it. This is the motive behind the offers made by some Muslims to support

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the enactment of “canon” law in southern Nigeria—both a quid pro quo and a suggestion that, on the whole, Nigeria is better off constitutionally acknowledging the religiosity of its citizens. The Zamfara sharia committee’s report suggested an even more aggressive case for sharia focused on section 38(1), which provides that “every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion . . . and freedom . . . to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” The committee argued that without the ability to live under sharia, Muslims in Nigeria were denied the rights and freedoms necessary to fully practice their religion. This idea— that to prevent Muslims from imposing sharia violates their constitutional rights—resonates strongly with many in the north who express frustration with the use of rights language to oppose their demands to expand the role of Islam in the public sphere. The most orthodox Islamist position—one publically expressed by very few members of the northern political class—is that, as the supreme and final law of Nigeria, the constitution is fundamentally incompatible with sharia. As Bayero University law professor B. A. Haruna argues, any Islamic legal system that acknowledges the supremacy of a secular constitution cannot in good conscience sanction the application of the most violent penalties, which require a clear moral justification that can only exist in a fully Islamic setting.46 Sharia states have consistently recognized the federal constitution as supreme, and where there is a clear conflict between the two (the criminalization of apostasy, for example), the constitution has won out.47 Despite halting efforts by Attorney-General Kanu Agabi in April 2002 and the protestations of Christian organizations and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), no one with standing (having suffered a violation of their legal rights as a result of sharia laws) has filed a suit challenging sharia’s constitutionality that has reached the Federal Supreme Court. As former attorney-general Bola Ige put it, the main obstacle for southern opponents of sharia was that there were seemingly no Muslims who felt their rights had been violated: The truth of the matter is if somebody willingly submits himself to the jurisdiction and says at the end of it Allahu Akbar, God is Great, how does the Attorney-General of the Federation go to court and say “you have violated the man’s rights?”  .  .  . the people about whom you are complaining have not complained and I said I am waiting for someone whose rights have been violated to come and complain and then see whether I will not do anything . . . [N]ot one Moslem [sic] has gone to court to say his rights have

136 / Chapter Five been violated and no Christian has complained that he has been taken to the Sharia court.48

Sharia and Human Rights As Naz Modirzadeh argues, the international human rights community often struggles to engage productively with sharia advocates, particularly those working through democratic institutions. For one, rights advocates want to avoid being (or, at least, being labeled as) cultural “imperialists” imposing Western values on those with less power on the global stage. For another, rights organizations have long adopted a “naming and shaming” strategy that targets “violator states” as the culprits of human rights abuses. But what’s to be done when “many of the very people suffering from the violations so impressively documented by Western INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations] . . . believe that it is their duty as Muslims to live, marry, divorce, go to court, and even go to prison according to the rules of Shari’a”? And might not this “naming and shaming” be seen by Muslims as “documenting a conflict between God’s law and international law,” with the implication that international should take precedent?49 Muslim critics of codified, state-run sharia schemes generally respond that the human rights problem is not necessarily with “God’s law” but with its interpretation and structure, and there are voices within the international human rights community that have occasionally thrown their influence and support behind champions of reform and reinterpretation that read sharia in ways more compatible with Western rights norms. But many of the most powerful prospective allies on progressive reinterpretation for women’s rights also hold views on issues like homosexuality or violence against non-Muslims that make deeper collaboration impossible. As such, rights groups in the West are rarely able to engage with Islamic law as law—as a legal system “complete with internal reform mechanisms, constitutive narratives, key scholars, schools of thought, and thus, major schisms.”50 The conflict between Muslims and Christians around human rights norms thus appears civilizational, grounded in static cultural values and unresolvable through negotiation and debate. The idea that Muslims and Christians are locked in cultural combat featured prominently in the Nigerian and international press coverage of sharia implementation, which focused in particular on the hudud crimes— those that have mandatory penalties defined in the Quran—particularly amputation for sariqa (theft), stoning or flogging for zina (adultery), and flogging for the consumption of alcohol (sharb al-khamr). Zamfara was

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the first to act in February 2000 with the conviction of Buba Bello Jangebe for the crime of cattle theft. His amputation was carried out a month later amid a major international outcry. Local media reported that Jangebe acquiesced willingly to his sentence and that he received a job as a janitor in a state-run secondary school. In another case in spring of 2001, a convicted amputee was reportedly given both a government job and N50,000 (between US$400 and $450) cash by the Sokoto State government.51 The greatest controversy centered on the cases of three women—Safiya Husseini (mentioned above), Amina Lawal, and Bariya Mugazu—each convicted of zina between 2000 and 2002. As prescribed in the Quran, zina carries a sentence of flogging, but in the Prophet’s lifetime, it was clarified to be flogging for the unmarried and death by stoning for the married, divorced, and widowed. The harshness of the punishment was also mitigated by the extraordinarily high burden of proof for conviction—four adult eyewitnesses or a confession, with false accusations commanding an equal sentence to zina itself. Under the Maliki school of fiqh, however, pregnancy out of wedlock is considered circumstantial evidence of zina, and all three of the women in question were pregnant when brought before their states’ sharia courts. Unable to prove that their pregnancies were the result of anything but consensual sex, all three were duly convicted and sentenced, while the men they named as fathers (and, in Bariya’s case, as a rapist) escaped charges. For the unmarried Bariya, this meant one hundred lashes. For Safiya and Amina, the sentence was death. These cases sparked global outrage and angry international press coverage, met in kind by taunting statements from pro-sharia politicians and religious leaders.52 The plight of the youngest, seventeen-year-old Bariya, captured the attention of the Canadian press for several months in 2000– 2001; the Toronto-based Globe and Mail went so far as to send a reporter to Zamfara in January 2001. Sadly, the resulting story focused primarily on community rumors about Bariya’s sex life.53 The Western press’s emphasis on the salacious aspect of these cases (sex and stoning) reflects a long-standing concern among some activists and academics with the international human rights community’s focus on individual injustices, particularly against women. Much of this rhetoric, later picked up in a flurry of online petitions, cast Muslim women in the role of passive victims in need of saving, echoing colonial discourses that justified imperialism by invoking the marginalization or abuse of women in non-European cultures.54 This issue came to a head in the spring of 2003, when prominent Nigerian Muslim women’s right activist Ayesha Imam and her organization, BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, requested that international rights

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organizations stop all letter-writing and petition campaigns around the Amina case. Imam argued that not only did many of these efforts get basic facts wrong about the cases and about sharia in Nigeria, but they also emboldened pro-sharia forces that saw Western intervention as an affront. Even worse, all this attention was undermining the efforts of local groups to work for a solution through the legal system and establish a useful precedent for future potential victims. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch came out in tentative support of this request, and it received significant coverage in the United States and Europe, drawing attention to the dangers of “slacktivism” and other forms of passive advocacy campaigns on “behalf” of Africans.55 As a result, more nuanced voices took center stage. Human Rights Watch, for example, emphasized the failure of due process and procedural norms in sharia courts, pointing out that these problems also existed in other Nigerian institutions.56 What was absent was recognition that even beyond the voices of dedicated rights activists, Nigerian Muslims were using these cases to engage in considerable, open debate about the compatibility of a sharia legal system with a constitutional regime of rights. Aside from certain reliable judgments about the morality of the accused (even the southern Nigerian press referred to Safiya and Amina as “adulteresses”), Muslim responses varied widely, with voices critical of the convictions and the legal process earning a good measure of public attention. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (formerly the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and as of 2014 the emir of Kano), one of Nigeria’s few eloquent Muslim opponents of sharia implementation, took the position that the sharia legal system’s preoccupation with the conduct of women departed from the true spirit of the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad and Shehu Usman dan Fodio, whose aim had been to empower women through education and spiritual guidance. In contrast, the contemporary Nigerian ulema and the politicians they advised offered only blindly enforced behavioral guidelines fixated on female members of the community as “source[s] of temptation or an object of sexual desire which must be curtailed, locked up and separated from men in buses and on Okada [motorcycle taxis].”57 Other sharia advocates took a middle position, expressing disappointment with the lack of compassion shown to vulnerable Muslims in the new courts but pointing to the “due process” rights embedded in the Islamic legal tradition as a potential solution. In their eyes, justice was served in the Amina and Safiya cases because the system “worked,” with the appeals process eventually overturning the flawed convictions.58 This pragmatism is evidenced by the fact that since 2004, state governors and appeals

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courts have quietly avoided enforcing any of the hudud sentences handed down by lower courts. The only survey of sharia sentencing across northern Nigeria found that of fifty-two convictions with amputation sentences since 2000, only three have been carried out. Some have simply lingered in jail, while others have been set free on bail or been granted release by their governors, who argued that in the absence of true social justice, it is unfair to apply such harsh sentences to the mostly poor offenders who would face them.59 Most local commentary explicitly challenged Western rights norms, however, often drawing on broader claims that these norms are biased by their cultural origins. In particular, Nigerian Muslims often emphasize what they see as the hypocrisy of Western rights organizations, which they argue are quick to accuse Muslim-led states of violations but ignore the mistreatment of Muslim populations. Speaking in 2002, the prominent Izala-affiliated cleric Sheikh Ja’afar Adam argued that while Western attention in Nigeria was inevitably attracted to the hudud punishments of a few men and women, the collective tragedy of Muslims across the globe whose rights are violated by non-Muslim governments every day went unremarked upon.60 Islamic human rights schemes like the 1990 Cairo Declaration adopt the language of international human rights in principle while suggesting specific Islamic “conditions” that limit their applicability based on religious considerations. Yet as critics have argued, these “conditions” are often vaguely articulated and easily manipulated by political and religious elites.61 In Nigeria, sharia proponents—including Governor Shekarau, in a widely reprinted 2004 speech—argue that the sharia legal system functions just as well as its constitutional alternative to protect the rights of vulnerable Muslims. Since the example of “the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) has demonstrated the degree of precautionary measures that one would take before a penalty [such as stoning] could be invoked,” the power to pass such sentences will surely not be abused.62 The most original contribution made by Nigerian sharia proponents to Islamic “rights” language was to merge it with federal character discourse to emphasize the “rights” of Muslims to embed their values into their legal, political, and economic institutions. By reframing sharia’s application as a matter of the “freedom of religion,” some proponents went so far as to argue that the “right” of Muslims to live under the legal and ethical system of their choosing included a “right” to be subject to the hudud punishments. During the Bariya case, a previously unknown “Islamic human rights” organization, the “Movement for Protection of People’s Rights,” issued a

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press release arguing that Muslims had a “fundamental righ[t] to the strict adherence to the laws of their creators,” including the “right” to be flogged for committing zina. The organization claimed (dubiously) to have spoken to Bariya, who was said (again, dubiously) to have favored the “full application of Shari’a provisions . . . based on the offense she committed.”63 As outlandish as they sound, these claims raise practical concerns about the ability of sharia systems to protect nationally and internationally guaranteed rights. Like many nations with large Muslim populations, Nigeria is a signatory to a number of international rights treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The Nigerian constitution also provides extensive guarantees for religious freedom (including the right to change religions), the right to live, and the right to free expression, as well as guarantees against discrimination based on sex, ethnicity, and religion. In other Muslim-majority nations, it might be possible to simply Islamicize the constitutional language or sign on to these treaties “subject to reservations.” But Nigeria is a multireligious state in which Christians have political parity with Muslims. The concerns of minority communities in the north were voiced loudly and clearly, and even sharia’s most vociferous defenders have felt it necessary to stress its constitutional and jurisdictional limits. Many Muslims, on the other hand, saw their willingness to limit sharia’s legal impact on non-Muslims as a significant compromise. Yerima made this point frequently in his engagements with domestic and international opponents, including a meeting with George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 2001. His administration also touted the number of churches in Gusau as a significant achievement of the sharia program in Zamfara, arguing that such tolerance was clear evidence that no one wished to create an “Islamic state” in the north.64 But non-Muslims had legitimate concerns. Restrictions on women’s access to public transit and on the sale of alcohol, dress codes in public offices, and new school uniforms absolutely affected Christians, especially those living outside the sabon gari communities in cities like Kano, where some rules could be flaunted in relative safety. And while there is no evidence that Christians have been unwillingly tried under sharia, it is far from clear that existing guarantees are adequate. Sharia implementation also reinforced the long-standing Nigerian pattern of discrimination against “nonindigenes.” Northern Muslims use the indigeneity concept of citizenship when they justify sharia implementation by asserting that “99 percent” of the population in their state is Muslim.

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Large nonindigene populations residing in major northern cities like Sokoto, Maiduguri, Zaria, and especially Kano literally do not “count” when northern politicians claim that sharia is the will of their state’s citizens. The limits on the political rights of nonindigenes under this de facto system of “dual citizenship” mean that those who are most liable to face abuse have almost no recourse in local politics. That the sharia era has witnessed more and larger instances of sectarian violence than any other period is not a coincidence, as Christian communities band together to protect their “rights” with preemptory or retaliatory attacks on Muslims. Virtually all secular women’s rights groups rejected sharia, but Muslim women’s rights organizations face a much more difficult discursive terrain, one that requires them to carefully negotiate local and global hierarchies of gender and activist politics.65 If they reject the Islamicization of public policy as incompatible with global human rights norms, they may win international support at the expense of local influence. But if they attempt to engage with local Islamic authorities within a “Muslim discourse”—a move that often requires endorsing aspects of sharia—they risk alienating the global rights community. Most activists have learned the hard way that sharia can be a “double-edged sword” that often forces them to choose between local legitimacy and international resources and recognition.66 Women’s rights groups in Nigeria take a wide range of approaches to the “sharia question,” with differences that are often reducible to their level of engagement with the international community. On one extreme are organizations like WACOL (Women’s Aid Collective), which is not a “Muslim” organization but does encourage women to access their sharia legal rights. WACOL walks a rhetorical tightrope, downplaying certain aspects of international women’s rights discourse (particularly references to gender “equality”) in local contexts, while urging their allies abroad to take sharia seriously as a legal reality that affects how women’s rights will be protected. On the other are groups like the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN), which emphasizes the protection of a woman’s “religious rights,” including rights to Islamic education and financial support by her husband. When FOMWAN faces criticism from male Islamists that it represents “secular” or “feminist” interests, it counters with scathing criticism of political and religious leaders who fail to use Islamic injunctions to empower women.67 Groups that fall in the middle—identifiably “Muslim,” but more open to blending international rights discourse with Islamic language—have had mixed success at influencing the direction of sharia-inspired law and policy. Ayesha Imam and BAOBAB have consistently maintained that sharia as it

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is practiced across northern Nigeria violates the constitutional and human rights of Muslim women, arguing that far too much of the current legal system seems either overtly targeted or disproportionately applied to women’s behavior.68 For BAOBAB, the real problem isn’t that Islam is “antiwoman” but that underlying social conditions across the north (poverty, poor education) sanction the abuse and mistreatment of women. Thus government administrators of social welfare programs target unmarried women as “prostitutes,” hisbah groups attack women out in public spaces (often as a result of economic need) who do not wear the hijab, and judges make decisions that favor men over women, using their own interpretations of correct procedures as their justifications and ignoring rules that might favor women on trial. If, as one BAOBAB report puts, “Sharia court judges (who have been so far all male) believe in men’s right to marry young girls and/ or have themselves chosen their daughters’ husbands, they are unlikely to be sympathetic to a young girl’s rights or her misery in a forced marriage.”69 A slightly different approach that has gained more local support is seen in the work of Dr. Fatima Adamu, a feminist scholar at Usmanu Danfodiyo University in Sokoto, and in the advocacy of the Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA). Adamu coauthored a 2005 British Council–supported report titled “Promoting Women’s Rights through Sharia in Northern Nigeria,” which offered a comprehensive attempt to describe how Muslim women could use the sharia legal system to defend their rights. The report endorses many of the basic moral goals of sharia implementation—the segregation of women and men in public, for example—but encourages women to demand their “Islamic rights” to inheritance, economic support, and decent treatment in the home, using the courts if necessary.70 While this approach often strikes Western audiences as foolhardy, there’s some obvious merit to it. The legal anthropologist Lawrence Rosen has found that, globally, women win the vast majority (60–90 percent, depending on the country) of cases they take before sharia courts, suggesting that if barriers to access can be lifted, such a strategy could prove successful.71 WRAPA’s Islamic Family Law Project focuses on educating women, judges, and policy makers on Islamic legal protections for women, using seminars, public dialogues, and even radio programming to reach a wide Muslim audience. Credible sources suggest that women have become more successful in pursuing family law cases before sharia courts since the early 2000s.72 Sharia implementation places a great deal of power over the personal and public lives of Muslims in the hands of state governments. For the foreseeable future, this power lies in the hands of political and religious

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elites who are unwilling to consider a substantial reinterpretation of the Islamic legal tradition that might open up additional protections for women, non-Muslims, and other vulnerable populations. Certainly, some Nigerian scholars have suggested a willingness to consider fundamental “reforms” of Islamic law, but legal practitioners in the north are deeply attached to the Maliki fiqh canon, limiting debate on the possibility of big changes in interpretive paradigms.73 Indeed, court decisions in 1998 and 2002 confirmed that, in the absence of specific legislation, Maliki law is the only madhab that can be applied in Nigerian courts.74 The Sharia Court judges I interviewed in Sokoto (including the Grand Qadi) confirmed that individual judges were bound by the standard legal interpretations and that ijtihad was not performed in Sokoto courts. The legislative process is a more likely source of transformation, and activists have begun to focus their efforts in this direction. Much like the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in the 1950s, WRAPA and BAOBAB have campaigned for the codification of sharia as a defense against the capricious or discriminatory use of police or judicial power in sharia’s name. Sharia and the Dynamics of Violence While the level communal violence in the sharia era has been an order of magnitude worse than anything that has come before, it has followed the basic pattern laid down in the clashes of the 1980s and 1990s. Particularly in Kaduna and Jos, two northern cities outside the traditional boundaries of emirate authority, the question of “ownership” is inseparable from local politics. Here, Christian and Muslim political agents are engaged in a vicious cycle of conflict entirely predetermined by the federal character logic, which requires them to defend their group identity to the last if they are to gain access to state and federal resources.75 Not surprisingly, both cities and their outlying areas were among the hardest hit by the growing insecurity. In Kaduna, violence began in February 2000 (and again that May), as protests against Governor Markafi’s sharia plans spilled over into several days of intense rioting, with as many as one thousand deaths and dozens of churches and mosques destroyed. In Jos, the massive September 2001 riots that displaced tens of thousands of citizens were not immediately attributable to sharia proposals, but as Human Rights Watch documented at the time, the influx of escapees from sharia-related violence in nearby Bauchi and Taraba States during the preceding year clearly contributed to communal tensions already inflamed by local political struggles over indigeneship. Similarly, many participants in both the Kaduna and Jos riots joined

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in the violence only after attending local meetings that highlighted the need for Muslims and Christians to “defend” their communities against growing hostility.76 Another parallel in the pattern of violence between the 1980s and the 2000s was the role of communication and travel networks in spreading conflict from small, rural communities into the major cities, where the tolls could be much worse. May 2004 attacks against Muslims in Yelwa, Plateau State, inspired Muslim gangs to take up arms in Kano a little over a week later in retaliation.77 In both cases, the Nigerian police and armed forces seemed to have acquitted themselves in a most dishonorable fashion, engaging in extrajudicial killings yet failing to restore order or end the violence in a timely fashion. With tensions running so high, a wide range of provocations could quickly lead to community-wide violence. In Kano in October 2001, peaceful demonstrations by Muslims against the US invasion of Afghanistan evolved into a series of riots across the city. Although the violence was depicted in the international press as anti-Americanism run amok (many protesters displayed photos of Osama bin Laden merely weeks after the attack against the World Trade Center), the patterns within Kano suggest the violence was driven by local grievances, including conflict over sharia. The November 2002 “Miss World” riots in Kaduna were ostensibly triggered by an article carried in the Lagos daily ThisDay, in which journalist Isiomia Daniel referred to the opposition of some Muslim leaders to Nigeria’s hosting of the Miss World pageant by opining that the Prophet Mohammed not only would have approved but “would probably have chosen a wife from among them [the contestants].” The article drew protests across Nigeria, including the burning down of the Kaduna ThisDay office on November 20, and interviews by researchers for Human Rights Watch suggest that the attacks launched by Muslims across Kaduna’s mixed-religion neighborhoods on November 21 were premeditated and coordinated. The same seems to have been true of the retaliation attacks by Christians on November 22 and 23. In all, as many as 250 died in a three-day period.78 Leaders in both communities tried to stem the tide of violence. Their efforts included the “Kaduna Peace Declaration,” signed in January 2002 by twenty-two prominent religious leaders, and the establishment of an Interfaith Mediation Centre by Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye, two former combatants in the 1992 Zangon Kataf riots. The elite-based peace-making model that depended on large religious interest groups such as the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) to cooperate was a no-

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table failure, however. Since nearly all such groups were deeply invested in the outcome of the sharia debates, cooperation between the two sides reached an all-time low in the early 2000s, and renewed attempts to create a “National Council for Religious Affairs” failed. Government investigations into these outbreaks of violence also proved futile, producing white papers and reports but almost no prosecutions of participants. The result was a growing sense of impunity, with Muslim and Christian communities increasingly willing to turn to violence to defend their “interests” and state agents increasingly willing to crack down with brutal force, even when doing so merely fanned the flames of future conflict.

Sharia and Muslim Politics in the Fourth Republic Among both Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, there’s often a curious unwillingness to acknowledge that religion plays a central role in societal conflict. Both sides are quick to argue that when tensions run high or violence breaks out, the cause is “political”: the machinations of unseen actors stoking the fires of sectarian hatred for their own benefit. Not surprisingly, then, most Christians (and many Muslims) dismissed sharia implementation in Nigeria as a “political” phenomenon (“political sharia,” they call it), a strategic effort by a narrow band of elites to buff their tarnished image during the early days of the Fourth Republic. There’s more than a little truth to these accusations. On the road between Sokoto and Zaria in December 2007, I happened to pass through Gusau for the first time. There, I found several of the largest and bestmaintained billboards in the north congratulating Yerima on his recent election to the federal senate, where, like many two-term governors, he sought office after his term limit expired. The billboards showed him dressed not in traditional Hausa garb but with a long beard, turban, and keffiya (scarf) for all to see—as an Arab. Nor was this the first time. News coverage of the sharia announcement in 1999 had mocked his transformation into a “Bedouin-bearded” Muslim in official photos, suggesting that such a transparent attempt to “clothe” himself in the symbols of Islamic piety spoke volumes about the sincerity of his sharia program. Local Islamic imagery also played a crucial role in justifying sharia implementation. Sharia supporters explicitly and intentionally played on the common northern heritage of the jihad and the caliphate in order to position their movement and themselves as the successors or heirs to Islamic reformist traditions. Like the Sardauna, politicians have attempted to use their credibility as sharia implementers to build political coalitions, to at-

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tract grassroots support, and to connect themselves with other sources of power within northern culture. Yerima’s efforts were the most ostentatious, with the state-owned press and his public relations officers making every effort to compare him to the Shehu and Ahmadu Bello. He arranged to be given the honorary title of “khalifah” (caliph) at the October 1999 sharialaunching ceremony, and he was frequently referred to as a mujaddid in the press, an attempt to put him on a level with the Shehu as the great Islamic reformer of his generation. He even succeeded in being named Sardaunan Zamfara (the Sardauna of Zamfara), a title with dubious historical precedents, while Governor Shekarau extracted a similar title from the emir of Kano in 2009. Political efforts to co-opt religious authority are hardly unique to Islam. African politicians often seek—through proximity, piety, and even the adoption of religious powers and titles—to represent unity between religious and political authorities. By appearing at important religious ceremonies, taking religious titles, and being photographed in close proximity to religious authorities, political elites suggest, as Michael Schatzberg puts it, “an almost seamless elision between submission and fealty to God and then the ritual thanks to the head of state for all he has done for the particular community of believers.”79 In northern Nigeria, photos of politicians praying next to powerful imams or seated next to the sultan or some important emir during his public address are commonly featured in full-page color spreads in the major newspapers during Ramadan or at Sallah (Eid al-fitr) celebrations. For example, official publications in Sokoto featured photos of Governor Bafarawa with Sheikh Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, the chief imam of Al-Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, who came to Sokoto in 2001 to inaugurate the “Attahiru Bafarawa Institute for Quranic and General Studies.” The effort to unite the northern umma under the banner of sharia was only partially successful, however. Sharia strengthened “pan-Islamic” organizations like the NSCIA, JNI, and the new Nigerian Supreme Council for Sharia, which now had a great many more opportunities to “speak” for the Muslim community during public debate. But the need for states to recruit members of the ulema to join the numerous committees and commissions to design and administer sharia afforded a wide range of opportunities for individual clerics and representatives of smaller groups to participate as well. Membership in the burgeoning sharia administrative apparatus was hardly limited to “radicals” or even members of salafi groups like Izala. Even in Kano, where Shekarau (a cleric himself) actively sought the political support of the ulema during his 2003 election campaign, his appoint-

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ments to key commissions and positions of influence represented a fairly broad cross section of Sufi, Izala, and other affiliations in the state, and continued tensions between leading salafis and Shekarau helped contribute to his handpicked successor’s electoral defeat (to Kwankwaso, of all people) in 2011. Yerima’s personal ties to Izala notwithstanding, the same degree of pluralism among sharia administrators was true in Zamfara as well. But despite these efforts to mobilize unified support, the process of making sharia policy remained a largely top-down affair, offering relatively few venues for citizen engagement and feedback. For all its achievements, the 1999 transition did little to bridge the gap between ordinary citizens and their government; particularly in the north—the region with the highest levels of poverty and illiteracy—popular consultation rarely extends beyond elections. Already in 2003, a group of radical Muslims from Maiduguri dissatisfied with the state of sharia implementation had retreated, in the style of Maitatsine or the hijra of Sultan Attahiru, to rural Yobe State to forge its own Islamic community free from the sin of a secular Nigeria. Following a confrontation with local security forces, members of the group attacked a police station, stealing weapons that they used to fight a week of pitched battles in the last week of December. This group, which came to be called the “Nigerian Taliban” in the local press, engaged in sporadic violence with police and the national army throughout 2004, while its affiliates, including a popular young preacher named Mohammed Yusuf, were repeatedly arrested and investigated for potential links with international jihadist groups. Reestablishing itself in Maiduguri in 2007 and 2008, the group would eventually be christened Boko Haram by its neighbors, in honor of Yusuf’s invectives against Western culture and knowledge.

SIX

Framing Sharia and Democracy

From Usman dan Fodio through colonial rule, failed democracies, and military dictatorships, sharia has long been at the center of northern Nigeria’s language of Muslim politics. But while memories of an idealized Islamic society and growing popular engagement with global discourses both played important roles in inspiring the sharia implementation movement of the late 1990s, what emerges from the previous chapters most clearly is the power of politics. Whether it was the role of colonial legal “reforms” in empowering the masu sarauta to use sharia as a means of political control or the impact of the federal character principle on the discursive and organizational strategies of Muslim activists, shifting political incentives have played a central part in limiting and expanding the resonance of sharia ambitions in northern Nigeria. Equally important have been the strategic and ideological choices of key actors when confronted with these evolving incentives—from Aminu Kano and Sa’adu Zungur’s invocation of the jihadist legacy as a weapon to be wielded against elite corruption and misrule to Gumi’s evolving position on Muslim women’s political participation and Ibrahim Sulaiman’s invocation of the caliphate tradition as a means of articulating Muslim “rights” to state recognition for public Islam. Yet another theme is the transformation of sharia itself—or, if we understand sharia as the eternal law of God, then the transformation of how it’s enacted by state power. The sharia enacted by the governors and legislators of the Fourth Republic reflected more a century’s worth of change, much of it generated by the slow but growing entanglement between God’s law and secular state authority. By fully embracing their role as “implementers” of sharia, the northern Nigerian political class took both the opportunity to expand their power and influence and the risk that, if their efforts failed to satisfy popular demands, their legitimacy would be irretrievably damaged.

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Public discourse around the sharia “issue” during the first years of the Fourth Republic reflected the diverse hopes and expectations of ordinary citizens alongside the more carefully crafted justifications of the elites who engineered sharia legal and public policy. Politicians like Yerima, Bafarawa, and Shekarau emphasized the compatibility of their sharia aspirations with democratic institutions and Nigeria’s constitution, relying heavily on a language of religious and “distributional” rights to justify the recognition of Islamic law in a multireligious society. In one sense, it’s easy enough to understand why the northern political leadership would argue that sharia and democracy were compatible. The development of federal character discourse and religious interest groups to defend Muslim (and Christian) “rights” to a share of the Nigerian “national cake” are powerful tools in the hands of politicians eager to build the identity-based constituencies necessary to survive in national politics, while simple attentiveness to both the popularity of a return to democratic governance among their constituency and an awareness of the global legitimacy that comes with appeals to democratic values would do the rest. But their narratives also reflected a wider concern with democracy—what it means for citizens in terms of both rights and material benefits, its moral status, and whether or not it might offer a solution to pressing concerns like insecurity, inequality, and corruption.1 Put another way, despite all their apparent differences, the “sharia turn” across the Muslim world has a lot in common with the slow, uneven, and highly uncertain move toward democracy taking place in many of these same countries. Both are products of increasingly open, participatory public spheres. Similarly, the rise of demands for both have often outstripped the abilities (or the desire) of political leaders, institutions, and civil society actors to provide their anticipated benefits. And for all the universalizing language that surrounds them, both sharia and democracy are fundamentally “mobile” ideas, subject to negotiation and change across place and time. In this sense, their “compatibility” is as much a question of practice—do Muslim communities see them as opposites or as potential allies in the quest for a more just society?—as it is of theory and theology. What can the public conversation around sharia implementation tell us about the relationship between Islam and democracy in practice? This chapter and the one that follows are an attempt to answer that question by focusing on how both opinion leaders and the people Michael Peletz calls “ordinary Muslims” imagined sharia implementation as public policy and law in the context of the Fourth Republic’s democratic opening. Thinking about public reasoning around Islam and democracy as a conversation in-

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fluenced by a wide range of local and global narratives is a major departure from the approach outlined in chapter 2, which usually tries to understand the “compatibility” between Islam and democracy in terms of correlations between individual religious beliefs and political attitudes. It also directs us to the importance of considering the mechanics of public reasoning. As a generation of research from the United States and other global north democracies suggests, political ideas move through public spheres in predictable ways, with certain voices earning a more prominent position than others owing to their access to the machinery of public debate. However, a record of the “official” conversation also weights the loudest voices over those of Peletz’s “silent majority,” whose thinking about the potential compatibility of sharia and democracy is no less consequential in the long run. What I propose is to trace these conversations from the formal to the informal, the public to the private, and back again. By exploring how both the most and the least influential members of northern Nigerian society reason about the prospects of sharia and democracy in the Fourth Republic, I hope to suggest just how intertwined these two stories are.

Situating the Conversation During the 2008 spring term, the Political Science Department at Usmanu Danfodiyo University had a shortage of lecturers. In the spirit of international cooperation, I offered to cover one of the courses in danger of cancellation—Introduction to Comparative Politics—on a volunteer basis. To maximize the value of my trips to campus (which necessitated a rather lengthy ride on a motorcycle taxi) my lecture-day routine involved arriving several hours early to spend a little time in the department chair’s office, watching the news on his small, satellite-connected television. This was an important ritual because, as the only American around during US primary election season, I found it necessary to keep up with the race between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, if only to have something to tell people when they inevitably asked me remarkably specific questions about campaign strategy or delegate allotment. The chair preferred Al Jazeera English to CNN International, and we often spoke about the depth and quality of Al Jazeera’s coverage of US politics. The departmental staff, who were allowed access when the chair was out, preferred more exciting fare, especially the movie channels that featured a bewildering array of American films, ranging from independent dramas to Robocop 3. Outside of Sokoto’s ivory tower, citizen engagement with the mass media and the conversations it facilitates vary widely. Given the unreliabil-

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ity of Nigeria’s electrical grid, most prefer to get their news from batterypowered radios. From watchmen to shopkeepers, taxi drivers to cattle drivers, handheld radios are ubiquitous in Sokoto, tuned into international Hausa-language services (Voice of America and the BBC were most popular, but German and Chinese broadcasts also found favor) covering local and international affairs. Nigeria-based alternatives such as the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria’s AM and FM stations and Sokoto State’s Rima Radio provide a mixture of news, music, and religious programming. Televisions are also a visible part of many people’s daily lives, mostly in public spaces like offices, waiting rooms, and cybercafés. Given the paucity of over-the-air options, those without access to a satellite subscription watch the local Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) affiliate or state-owned Rima Television (RTV). Newspaper readership suffers from low levels of English literacy, and papers produced in the north for Muslim audiences generally have weaker circulation than those based in Lagos or Ibadan. Nevertheless, newspaper vendors are a common sight across Sokoto. At many of the larger distribution points, newspapers are available for “rent,” with benches of patrons reading a variety of news, sports, and tabloid publications (Table 6.1). Internet usage has also taken off since the beginning of the 2000s, with mobile phones quickly surpassing cybercafés as the primary means of access. While it’s easy to exaggerate just how much this has affected poor and rural segments of the population, in 2012, nearly 75 percent of Nigerians used mobile phones—a large portion of which have Internet capability. A 2012 Gallup report shows that the long-standing “gap” in web access between Hausa speakers and the rest of the country is quickly narrowing, as mobile phone ownership becomes ubiquitous across northern Nigeria.2 Dependence on wireless technology is so great that Boko Haram launched a series of attacks against cell towers in Borno in 2012 in an effort to disrupt communications. For its part, federal troops cut access to all mobile Table 6.1

Radio Television Newspaper

Weekly exposure to news by outlet, 2012 National (%)

Northwestern zone (%)

Northeastern zone (%)

82.5 57.7 14.8

85.8 26.1 6.1

88.2 68.7 12.5

Source: Afrobarometer Survey for Nigeria, Round 5, compiled by author. Percentages based on those who reported getting news from each source “several times per week” or “daily.” Note that these numbers are limited by their small sample size and difficulty in obtaining representative within-state samples in the northern states.

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networks in the three northeastern states declared “states of emergency” in May 2013 in order to disrupt Boko Haram’s use of the same. Beyond these local conversations, many Sokoto residents also found time to engage with global debates, particularly in the religious realm. Sokoto has been a seat of Islamic learning for more than two hundred years, but for most of its citizens, the connection to the globalized Muslim public sphere is far more direct than it once was. Through the Internet and the local marketplace, its students have access to a constantly expanding range of religious texts, opinions, and discussions (local and international), further integrating Nigerian Muslims into the global umma. Satellite providers offer a wide range of tafsir and other religious programming (subtitled in Arabic) of interest to graduates of Islamic curriculums that emphasize Arabic literacy, and Nigerians are active participants on online fatwa websites and discussion boards. But as we will see, there is very little information about how all this new media accessibility impacts the participation of ordinary Nigerians in political life.

Frames and Framing With Muslim public spheres serving as key sources of information and interpretation linking Islamic symbols to democratic discourse, understanding how citizens translate this participation into political engagement is a matter of critical concern. To take one example, despite the very public nature of the conversations about Islam and democracy that took place across North Africa during tumult of the “Arab Spring,” there has been surprisingly little research into how Muslim citizens make sense of these new debates as they are happening.3 As a starting point, I assume that Muslims face the same challenges and concerns as other global citizens when it comes to forming political opinions: (1) accessing the information they need and (2) parsing complex debates into digestible, readily understood frameworks for making sense of new information. Rather than looking to their faith and “knowing” the correct way of understanding political issues, they struggle to make sense of ambiguous meanings and incomplete information and seek out shortcuts for processing the overwhelming flow of opinions they encounter. In Western democracies, the terms of this struggle were defined in the early twentieth century by Walter Lippmann, who described how the expanding scope of modern society forces individuals to navigate complex political issues about which they have little personal knowledge or connection, participating in a world “out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.”4

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Put more directly, Donald Kinder has described modern mass publics as “awash in ignorance” of the major political debates of the day and lacking the basic information necessary to arrive at informed conclusions.5 To make matters worse, scholars of rational choice theory have long suggested that when it comes to politics, ignorance can be rational—a reasonable tradeoff between the effort necessary to become informed and the possibility of exerting a real influence on political outcomes.6 The result, as Philip Converse found in his classic study, is that only a small percentage of citizens in democracies possess “consistent” ideologies aligned with the terms used in elite political debate.7 Research building on Converse’s findings demonstrates that, rather than arriving at “one true opinion” on each issue based on extensive deliberation, most people balance multiple perspectives and considerations on the fly, weighing and incorporating new information and arguments as they come in. This is done with the help of “heuristics”—cognitive shortcuts that help individuals fill in the gaps in their knowledge with fleshed-out narratives from which they can infer reasonably well-informed conclusions and opinions.8 But where do these heuristics, these “frames of reference,” come from? Certainly, personal experience and daily interactions with family, friends, and community members are one source. But in most cases, they come from the public sphere—the speeches and sermons, newspapers, radio and television programs, and Internet communications that define the language of politics for most citizens. Research on the relationship between public discourse and mass opinion in Western democracies emphasizes two important functions performed by the mass media: agenda-setting, or highlighting particular issues or concerns as of public significance, and priming, or establishing benchmarks for evaluating the success or failure of policy and policy makers. Interpretively inclined researchers, however, point to a third category of “media effect”—framing—that takes a broader view of how citizens relate information and experience to political issues. As William Gamson and Andre Modigliani argue, every political issue has its own “culture,” an “ongoing discourse that evolves and changes over time, providing interpretations and meanings for relevant events.”9 And within every issue culture, there are competing “packages”—symbols, images, and metaphors organized around a central theme—that define its basic premise, outline its consequence, and suggest potential solutions. These “packages”—these “frames”—are the narratives or “storylines” that go along with particular issues, helping people make sense of complex debates and providing the “facts” of political life with meaning. More than merely announcing

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particular considerations around an issue, frames bridge, amplify, extend, and even transform existing cultural themes through communication.10 As Erving Goffman famously claimed, frames help people answer that most important of questions—“what is going on?”—with an answer grounded in socially produced meaning.11 To provide one oft-cited example of a frame “in action,” the Progress frame that dominated US media discourse on nuclear power until the late 1970s suggested that opposition to nuclear energy development was misguided because it prevented the country from meeting its economic and social needs (cheap, abundant energy) based on a retrograde, luddite fear of technology. Also implicit in this frame was the idea that the development of new, better technology would solve the safety problems associated with nuclear power, and political action was deemed necessary to facilitate progress toward a safe nuclear future.12 Here, simply expressing support for nuclear power isn’t the same as articulating a particular frame. Indeed, frames are often consistent with a range of proposals that can be debated within their context. A frame works to structure that debate, providing a (reasonably) coherent set of arguments and logic that endow particular alternatives and lines of thinking with the aura of common sense, excluding or eliminating others as inconsistent with “reality.” Political debate is, in this sense, a competition over which interpretive framework—which “frame”—will define what constitutes common sense around a particular issue in the public sphere. Most successful frames draw on and expand larger cultural themes that lend them an aura of naturalness and connection to popular wisdom. Others gain resonance because they are entrenched in institutional practice through legal doctrines and bureaucratic organizational structures. For example, research on attitudes toward same-sex marriage in the United States finds that by pursuing a courts-based approach, marriage activists succeeded in activating an “equality and rights” frame around the legal consequences of discrimination against same-sex couples, moving popular discourse away from the more polarizing “morality” frame. The result was a rapid shift in popular opinion toward support for marriage equality.13 If most frames originate in the media, then it stands to reason that the most influential framers—the political “elite,” to put it another way— are those with access to the machinery of framing. Certainly, this group includes journalists, producers, editors, and other members of the media industry. More broadly, it includes the national cohorts who “devote themselves full time to some aspect of politics or public affairs” and, as a result, understand how to gain access to the media and disseminate their

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messages. This group may, as John Zaller describes it, include “politicians [and] higher-level government officials” but also “activists, and many kinds of experts and policy specialists,” all of whom influence the direction of public debate through their central role in defining the universe of information and perspectives available to the mass media in the first place.14 The extent to which this “elite” represents a coherent set of political and class interests has been a long-standing area of debate in both Western democracies and postcolonial Africa, one that has particular resonance in northern Nigeria given the continued dominance of the masu sarauta in politics and the civil service.15 Although to my knowledge no one has ever attempted to update C. S. Whitaker’s findings from the mid-1960s demonstrating the titleholding class’s tenacious grip on the machinery of political power in the north, even a quick glance at any list of northern legislators or delegates to national political conventions reaffirms that sarauta backgrounds remain a valuable resource in the pursuit of political power.16 As Benjamin Page argues in the US context, the media’s reliance on elite opinion in covering political issues plays a substantial role in narrowing the range of ideas and arguments that eventually make it into the broader public discourse.17 In most countries, citizens are well aware that political messages are framed for the benefit of political interest—“elite manipulation of the media” is its own cultural theme in the United States, celebrated in films like Network and Wag the Dog—but it’s misleading to think of “frame sponsorship” as so efficiently manipulative. Far from being static “systems of significance,” frames are subject to constant interpretation, and no individual or organization can completely control their content or how they are applied. The issue, then, is often one of resources—government agencies, political campaigns, and corporations all employ public relations professionals with experience speaking to journalists and presenting their arguments in ways likely to be reported in favorable terms, and the resource-intensive nature of crafting frames favors elite voices. Organizational considerations—the division of journalistic responsibility into “beats,” dependence on official sources and channels of information, and the political economy of media ownership—all structure what journalists hear and how they make sense of it.18 So do professional norms and journalistic training, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where journalists face substantial legal, political, and social pressures and often lack access to the same resources that their Western counterparts take for granted. In Nigeria, the press is not in a strong position to overcome “official” discourse, particularly on controversial issues.

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Nigerian Media Politics and Democracy How well does this basic framework travel to West Africa? There are some obvious challenges, beginning with the fact that, as Jeffery Conroy-Krutz argues, “political information is generally quite costly in most African countries.”19 It’s certainly the case that despite the enormous strides of the past several decades, ordinary Nigerian citizens, particularly in the north, lack ready access to the same array of information available to citizens in the Western nations where these theories and approaches were originally developed. And even as engagement with mass media has grown in countries like Nigeria, it remains highly stratified by age, class, education, and gender. This is particularly true when it comes to mobile devices, which are far more likely to be owned by the young and educated.20 Given the notorious imprecision of efforts to describe an African (and particularly a Nigerian) “middle class” in terms of economic power or political access, we can do worse that thinking of them as a group that, however they have fared economically, is above all else connected by virtue of their engagement with mass media. One place where the “framing” model is more clearly aligned with Nigerian realities is the “elite-driven” nature of public discourse. From the founding of the first West African–owned daily (Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News) in 1925 to the heyday of the Nigerian nationalist press in the 1930s and 1940s, Nigerian journalism has a proud history of activism in the cause of national unity. In their struggles against the Babangida and Abacha regimes’ violent repression (including the October 1986 assassination of Dele Giwa, editor of Newswatch magazine, in which members of the Babangida inner circle have long been suspected of involvement), Nigerian journalists earned a reputation for standing up to and exposing corruption.21 Sadly, they also have a long legacy of baiting ethnic and religious divisions and serving the interests of political sponsors, often in exchange for the ubiquitous “brown envelopes” of cash widely believed to pass from politicians to reporters in exchange for favorable coverage. In northern Nigeria, media culture often exhibits a particular deference to authority. Unlike in the south, where Western-educated nationalists took the lead in creating the mass media, in the north, it’s largely a colonial creation, with British administrators having taken the lead in everything from soliciting and publishing of the first “modern” Hausa novels to founding the first Hausa-language newspaper in 1939. This control extended to radio as well, where colonial authorities created an elaborate system of fixed, public loudspeakers and individually wired home boxes in

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order to control programming at a granular level.22 The Sardauna’s launch of the New Nigerian as the state-owned voice of the Northern Region’s interests in 1966 provided for a strong and distinctly Muslim slant in the national press that supported regional/ethnic quotas in civil service recruitment, the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal (FSCA), and the expansion of northern industry. Not surprisingly, Muslim-oriented media remains predominantly state owned. Babangida’s 1992 decision to allow private ownership of radio and television stations has had an enormous impact in Lagos and across southern Nigeria, where new radio and over-the-air television stations have drawn large audiences away from state media. But in the north, only Freedom FM Kano has had similar success, and there are no privately owned over-the-air television networks. Media owned and operated by individual states, however, have continued to expand—the number of state-owned television stations more than doubled (from 58 to 130) between 2000 and 2005.23 Government regulation of media and journalists in Nigeria is strict but mercurial. Two agencies—the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) and the Nigerian Press Council—have statutory powers to investigate and sanction journalists and media houses, and both have a record of attacking critical voices enduring well into the Fourth Republic.24 State security agents also have a well-established history of harassing and jailing journalists who challenge political authority. Most recently, in April 2013, journalists at the independent Leadership newspaper were detained for two days after publishing an article accusing President Jonathan of ordering attacks on opposition figures. Despite the 2011 passage of a Freedom of Information Act, Nigeria ranks 115th in the 2013 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index—a drastic decline since 2002, when Nigeria ranked 49th.25 Boko Haram has also targeted journalists who oppose its message in print or on the air with assassination, most notoriously with its April 26, 2012, bombing of three newspaper offices in Abuja. Although there have been relatively few formal investigations of the impact of the Nigerian state’s continued regulatory heavy-handedness on media performance and credibility, research from Ghana, where similar trends have prevailed, is instructive. As Jennifer Hasty argues in her ethnography of press politics in Accra, the return to open multiparty competition and the formal relaxation of state control over what could be printed had a surprisingly limited impact on the substance of political reporting. The reason, she argued, was that journalists remained bound to the “corporeal rituals of patrimonial authority,” which diminished their ability to effectively challenge government discourse and ultimately undermined their

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credibility with a public that recognizes the gaps and silences in media coverage for what they are.26 Although African media have acquired a powerful track record of voicing the grievances and concerns of ordinary citizens, most still struggle to produce counternarratives that effectively challenge “official” public discourse. The advent of social media and the rise of the Nigerian “commentariat” on sites like Sahara Reporters have offered access to a new set of voices, many of whom have been able to exercise remarkable influence on national affairs. For instance, in 2014, Twitter and Facebook commenters unearthed and publicized the efforts of Reno Omroki, President Jonathan’s special advisor on “new media,” to discredit Central Bank chairman (and now emir of Kano) Sanusi Lamido Sanusi by drafting a pseudonymous letter (under the name Wendell Simlin) accusing him of links to Boko Haram. But despite the public visibility of this community, their influence over public opinion is far more limited. Just as in Western democracies, the details of political scandals and the electoral “horse race”—the primary focus of “insider” journalists and social media users—filter unevenly at best into the awareness of most citizens. More prosaically, shortcomings in journalistic organization and practice are also an important factor in the Nigerian media’s dependence on elite political discourse. The most obvious problems are technical and financial. The cost of ink, aging facilities, poor conditions for record keeping, and a lack of up-to-date technology all pose serious challenges, especially for smaller media outlets. In 2009, there were fifty-eight postsecondary programs offering degree or certificate programs in journalism or media production, but most can’t afford to offer hands-on experience or training in subjects journalists are likely to cover, like business, religion, or politics.27 Ethics are difficult to maintain when access to governmental information often requires bribes (making fact-checking or obtaining multiple sources much more difficult), and the constant nonpayment of salaries leaves journalists vulnerable to corruption. These constraints mean that journalists are often stuck taking on a passive role in gathering the news. Most stories in Nigerian newspapers originate with invitations from governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses, and rely on official transcripts and press releases, “spin” and all. In Sokoto, coverage of the governor’s daily activities reaches saturation levels on Rima TV and Radio, largely because his office provides logistical support in the form of transportation, which in 2008 meant a ubiquitous but ancient white station wagon with “Sokoto State Press Corps” stenciled on the side. What resources these networks do have are funneled into prestige projects like

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the hajj, which Rima TV was able to cover extensively by sending a crew to Mecca and e-mailing photos and video back to Sokoto, an effort that came at the expense of local investigative journalism or coverage of events in rural areas.28

Covering Religion in Nigeria How does religion fit into this story? Although religious broadcasts were prohibited by the military during much of the 1980s in an effort to stem conflict, religious content was again pervasive across all media by the dawn of the Fourth Republic. Religious events, congregation activities, and international religious affairs all receive prominent and meticulous coverage, and nearly all major newspapers and television stations offer their audiences weekly Christian and Muslim sermons and religious texts. Much as with political news, religious coverage focuses on the actions of elites and large organizations or congregations. Most Nigerian newspapers offer a catalogic record of public statements and courtesy visits made by religious leaders, with the coverage rarely extending beyond press releases and public statements into context or analysis. Federal media with a mandate for “national unity” (requiring them to balance Muslim and Christian content) have to compete for viewership with state outlets that provide an enormously high percentage of Islamic programming. Indeed, statesponsored networks in Sokoto and Zamfara regularly violate federal law and National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) regulations on the amount of religious programming local stations are allowed to broadcast, often by hundreds of hours annually.29 As local station management explained to me, not only are they rarely fined or sanctioned for breaking the rules, but since much of this religious programming is privately sponsored, it’s an enormous source of revenue. In all, the Nigerian media remain a major source of religious tension. The use of new media technologies (particularly the video industry) by Muslim and evangelical Christian groups for the express purpose of “Christianizing” or “Islamicizing” Nigerian society has driven conflict over the ownership of public space. And media-aided evangelism—televised public revival meetings, pamphleteering, street preaching and the use of public address systems, and recorded sermons—fill public discourse with an acute awareness of the salience of religious identity and spread uncivil rhetoric. Many journalists noted that when it came to covering sharia implementation, they ultimately failed to provide informative and nonbiased coverage. One excuse was that the southern journalists who dominated cover-

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age for the major national dailies were usually dependent on translators to deal with Hausa-language materials and interviewees. Moreover, journalists of all stripes faced Nigeria’s notoriously inaccessible bureaucratic culture and poor official record keeping, both of which made accurate information about the intentions and plans of those with the power to implement sharia hard to come by. The resulting gaps, combined with occasionally sloppy work and mistrust on all sides, contributed to the inability of Christian and Muslim sides to fully engage each other in productive conversation.

Analyzing Frames What sorts of frames circulated around the sharia debate in northern Nigeria during the height of the controversy? And where are they to be found? The discourse of sharia implementation is embedded in a wide range of texts—sermons, Islamic studies textbooks, novels, television and film dramas, and even sociable discussions. However, the mass media remains the best and easiest site for both finding and analyzing framing “projects”— indeed, it’s where frame sponsors themselves look to see if their message has gained traction in the wider discourse.30 My frame analysis draws on an enormous collection of materials gathered over nearly a decade of research (books, essays, pamphlets, television and radio clips, and online sources) focused specifically on those that present a “northern” or “Muslim” perspective on Islam, sharia, and democracy. While it’s consistent with my central interests, this choice necessarily excludes a good portion of the national discussion, particularly opposition voices from Christian communities. But including these voices and the frames they advanced (which I’ve touched on in chapter 5 in less formal terms) would turn this into a very different book, reducing the leverage I have to answer questions about public reasoning around the relationship between Islam and democracy within Muslim communities. As a result, I refrain for the most part from speculating about how Christian and southern Nigerian sharia opponents “framed” their own positions. For practical reasons, most of this material is drawn from print media, despite its relative lack of circulation in comparison to television and radio. In most Nigerian media houses, recordings and transcripts are rarely available after broadcast, and even obtaining accurate programming schedules older than a few months is often impossible. Much as was the case during the “golden age” of American television in the 1950s and 1960s, live pro-

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gramming on these stations is either never recorded or quickly erased, leaving virtually no record. However, newspaper coverage tends to have both a high profile and a significant influence on how television and radio cover stories. Indeed, Rima Radio’s news coverage of regional and national affairs often consisted entirely of blurbs (or, occasionally, entire stories) lifted directly from the largest newspapers. My primary source is a database of every single article, feature, op-ed, and letter to the editor on the “sharia question” published in the governmentowned New Nigerian newspaper between June 1999 (when Zamfara State created its sharia implementation committee) and June 2004 (a month after the last of the major outbreaks of sharia-related violence in Kano and Jos). During that time frame, I identified 1,030 pieces that treated the “sharia question” or some manifestation of sharia policy in sufficient depth to identify the adoption of one or more frames. These stories, which include the initial controversy, coverage of numerous instances of violence attributed to conflict over sharia, and the public outcry over the zina prosecutions, provide a key window into the sharia debate’s evolution as the various policies and legal reforms came online, were tried out, and were judged by local communities across the north. They also offer a sense of the distribution and frequency of particular frames, providing a useful (but limited) means of evaluating which frames resonated most strongly with Muslim audiences. And what about the source? Once arguably the most influential paper in the country, the New Nigerian was launched in 1966 with a mission to represent “the North and its peoples, their interests and aspirations.”31 Although it was placed under federal ownership in 1975, it never ceased to represent Muslim interests in its scope and tone, and early in the Fourth Republic, its ownership was transferred back jointly to the nineteen state governments of the old Northern Region. In short, the New Nigerian was a typical news outlet in northern Nigeria—government owned, with an organizational focus on covering Muslim issues with primarily Muslim personnel. Since 2008, the paper has fallen on financial hard times (it ceased publication “temporarily” in early 2013 and has not yet returned), but at the time of the sharia debate, its readership and public profile made it the semiofficial “paper of record” for the north. Obviously, there are very real limits to relying on a single source—even a “typical” one. But in this case, the source’s bias is also an advantage. No available media outlets offered such a direct line into the official discourse around the sharia issue, relying as heavily as it did on press releases and public speeches, and none

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had equal access to the same range of local government, civil society, and religious contacts. I identify, describe, and analyze frames in discursive terms. As David Howarth defines it, discourse analysis is “concerned with understanding and interpreting socially produced meanings, rather than [providing] explanations of observed behavior based on universal laws of cause and effect.”32 The study of frames from this perspective is an effort to categorize the content and meanings of frame-laden texts in a particular moment in time, relying on both the texts themselves and evidence of how they are actually interpreted “out there” in the world to delineate their (often fuzzy) boundaries and limits.33 The discursive approach differs in several important respects from another common approach—content analysis—and adopting it is both an ontological and practical choice. Most sophisticated content analysis of the appearance and use of frames in political discourse is based on the automatic, computer-aided processing of a fixed universe of texts (political party manifestos or platforms, for example) for particular words, phrases, or constructions. There was no single digitized source available for northern Nigeria over the time period in question, however, and the cost of constructing one was prohibitive. Similarly, content analysis is best suited to analyses operating within a “known” discursive framework, in which the meaning and interpretation of key ideas across texts can be taken as relatively stable.34 It’s not designed to identify frames or to provide an understanding of how frames relate to broader cultural themes—a key goal of this study. Discourse analysis, on the other hand, approaches texts as embedded in “context”—the extratextual social processes that give meaning to frame “content.” Put another way, content analysis is particularly effective at answering questions about the distribution of classifications, a process that relies on restrictive coding categories to produce consistent results with strong internal validity. Discourse analysis is best at interrogating and analyzing the nature of categories and classifications (recognizing, of course, that texts are read in different ways), and the key test of its validity is whether it effectively conveys the strategies and practices of discourse participants.35 The frame categories I’ve identified were developed inductively as part of a long-term process of attempting to find the “frequent, dominant, [and] significant” themes embedded in sharia debate and emerged only after reading hundreds of sources and engaging in dozens of conversations with academics, religious leaders, and ordinary Nigerians.36 (More information on the development of frame categories and the coding process is available in the appendix).

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Framing Sharia in Northern Nigeria How was sharia implementation linked to democracy and to Nigeria’s emerging democratic discourse? One of the most common political catchphrases circulating in the Nigerian public sphere during the early days of the Fourth Republic was the “dividends of democracy,” a powerful and suggestive metaphor about popular attitudes toward democratic government. The idea of the “dividends of democracy” instrumentalizes the value of popular rule, suggesting that for Nigeria’s transition to be deemed a success, it would need to “pay off” in the form of swift and concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary Nigerians. True to its financial origins, these “dividends” were most often understood to accrue through transactions with political elites, who provided them in exchange for political support. This logic was captured quite clearly in a 2008 blog post that appeared on the Nasarawa State website: “Since the return of civil rule in 1999, Nigerians, through the actions and utterances of their politicians, have come to ‘understand,’ in clear terms, the concept, ‘Dividends of Democracy’ . . . Democracy, as we all know, is about horse-trading (you give something for something). Consequently, the electorate give [sic] out their votes, for good governance.”37 In the right hands, the “dividends” language empowers ordinary citizens to demand accountability from political elites, who risk seeing their mandate withdrawn if they fail to offer constructive benefits to their supporters. However, it also empowers government officials to credit clientelist services as core democratic functions. Following the 1999 transition, politicians and the media characterized a range of actions as examples of “paid” democratic dividends, from official state development projects and pay raises to teachers and civil servants to the provision of bags of rice to poor constituents at political rallies.38 For a country with a long history of patronage politics, the “dividends” metaphor served to reinforce the idea that democracy could and should be understood as a direct exchange between political elites and their constituents. As the popular phrase “Na democracy we go chop?” (“Is it democracy that we will eat?”) expresses, Nigerians want to “touch and feel this thing called democracy,” even if it means sacrificing long-term improvements in good government for immediate patronage payouts, the benefits of which inevitably end up tilting in favor of those in power.39 The idea that the “real” dividends of democracy might be less concrete— found in the protection of rights and freedoms or the moral transformation of society, for example—is at the center of most prominent frames circulat-

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ing around the sharia debate. Muslim political leaders frequently praised democracy for giving “expression to the overwhelming wish of Muslims for democracy”—a wish that includes the ability to use the electoral machinery to implement sharia and to protect the religious and distributional rights of Muslims at the federal level.40 Nearly all the major sharia issue frames I identify during the implementation debate rely at least to some extent on “dividends” logic to suggest that, rather than serving as an alternative to democracy, sharia is a means of making democracy “work” for ordinary Muslims by addressing the moral rot and decay at the core of Nigeria’s decades-long struggle with poor governance, poverty, and corruption. Thus sharia is both a “dividend” in its own right and a means of creating the conditions necessary for economic and social development in accordance with Islamic principles, a development that offers the possibility of a more tangible payout. Frame Categories The media frames most frequently invoked to describe the sharia issue break down into three larger “meta”-level categories based on how they define the key problems faced by Nigeria’s new and struggling democracy (Table 6.2). The first category (“Protecting Muslim Rights”), which includes the frames Rights and Muslims and the Federal Character, relies on a language and logic of distributive rights to argue for the centrality of religious freedom in the hierarchy of rights and liberties protected under Nigeria’s democratic constitution. The second category (“Is Nigeria a Secular State?”) contains three frames—Unity in Faith, Unity in Secularity, and Preserving Authentic Islam—that position the sharia issue in terms of the now-familiar debate about the relationship between religion and state in Nigerian politics. The final category (“What Can Sharia Fix?”) positions Islamic law as a panacea for the inequality and moral decay engendered by years of corrupting military rule and as a means of ensuring that the transition to civilian rule will reap tangible rewards. The Economic Development and Social Justice (ED & SJ), Holding Elites Accountable, and Political Islam frames all speak, in slightly different ways, to fears that without genuine sharia implementation, the “dividends” of democracy will be “eaten” (to use a common Nigerian metaphor) by elites before they trickle down to the masses. Each asserts that sharia and its injunctions can be used to check runaway elites, who would hold back the material benefits of democracy by using their status and offices to violate the (Islamic) moral foundations of society.

Framing Sharia and Democracy / 165 Table 6.2

Frames and their key concepts

Frame

Key claims and symbols Protecting Muslim Rights

Rights

Sharia is necessary for Muslims to enjoy freedom of religion; in a democracy, majority rules—and where Muslims are the majority, they have a right to sharia.

Muslims and the Federal Character

Fairness in government means each ethnic group or religion gets its “share”; sharia empowers Muslims and helps them claim their share. Is Nigeria a Secular State?

Unity in Faith

Nigeria is a multireligious state; sharia unites Muslims for a common good; sharia and Christian “law” are part of a common heritage.

Unity in Secularity

Less public preoccupation with religious symbols, not more, is the path to peace; sharia must be about personal values, not public policy.

Preserving Authentic Islam

Sharia has “always” existed in the north; sharia is our means of fighting “Westernization” and the erosion of Islamic morality; secular culture is “Christian”/“British,” but Islam is authentically Nigerian. What Can Sharia Fix?

Economic Development and Social Justice

Sharia promises a new concern with the welfare of ordinary Muslims; sharia will pave the way for “Islamic development”—human development in accordance with Islamic principles of justice.

Holding Elites Accountable

Sharia applies equally to all; sharia’s most significant “dividend” will be to hold leaders who violate Islamic values and engage in corruption accountable for their actions.

Political Sharia

If sharia is merely implemented for political gain, it is illegitimate; sharia must be applied in its entirety and for all.

Protecting Muslim Rights through Sharia? As the second most common frame in my sample, Rights (21 percent) represents the long-standing development of constitutionally oriented claims for religious “rights” and recognition going back to the FSCA debate and the Report of the Political Bureau: The desire to practice one’s religion is a fundamental (and natural) human right, especially under a democratic government. This is especially true in regards to Islam, which is a comprehensive religion that guides adherents in all aspects of life. Thus, the (re-)introduction of sharia law in Muslimmajority states (or for Muslim communities anywhere in Nigeria) is a matter

166 / Chapter Six of freedom of religion. As the constitution protects the freedom of religion, the (re-)introduction of sharia law is perfectly legal. Muslims have a right to the public observance of all fundamental aspects of their faith. The democratic principles of majority rule also supports a Muslim’s right to live under the sharia. Politicians cannot fail to enact a policy that is so immensely popular, and which the people yearn for. Sharia is the will of the people—a will that has been suppressed for too long under military rule. The application of sharia law will not, however, impinge upon the rights of other in a plural society—especially not Christians, who also have a right to their practices and beliefs. There is no compulsion in religion. In fact, by being swift, efficient, and fair, sharia will enhance the rights of all. It will ensure peace and security (something the state has often failed to provide), and will allow all peoples to live in harmony.41

More than any other frame used by Muslim opinion leaders in the sharia debate, Rights was oriented outward, toward domestic and international critics who attempt to “name and shame” nations for adopting policies contravening international rights norms. To be sure, this tendency is not limited to Muslim activists. Indeed, Nigerian evangelical groups often use rights language to attract the attention of international actors (including the United States, with its 1998 International Religious Freedom Act) that are bound to name and sanction regimes that persecute religious minorities. The Christian Association of Nigerian Americans, for instance, has used its lobbying apparatus in the United States to portray Boko Haram primarily in terms of the persecution of Christians, a move designed to garner support from fellow evangelicals in the US Congress. Ultimately, though, in Nigeria it’s been Muslim activists who have leaned most heavily on “rights talk” to justify the expansion of religion in the public sphere. Whether it’s Yerima arguing that “Islam . . . has made respect for human rights central to all its adherents,”42 female protesters demanding sharia in Kano in order to force the state to help them find husbands in the name of “human rights,”43 or even the comparison of Muslims’ “rights” to sharia with the religious freedoms offered to Americans under the First Amendment,44 the rapid expansion of rights language into new areas of debate has had serious political ramifications. In legal terms, the Rights frame represents the definitive victory of section 38 (freedom of religion) over section 10 (antiestablishment) in Muslim constitutional thinking. Here, the freedom of religious conscience meant far more than the state’s neutrality; for many Muslims, anything less than the right to “manifest and propagate [one’s] religion or belief

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in worship, teaching, practice, and observation” across the public sphere was unacceptable.45 Rights was also the frame most likely to appear in official documents and pronouncements by organizations like Jama’at Nasr al-Islam (JNI) and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, many of which sought to provide an explicit constitutional grounding for sharia policies. It also dominated many of the sharia implementation committee reports, as in this example from Sokoto State: AND WHEREAS almost one hundred percent (100%) of the people of Sokoto State are Muslims and are desirous of being governed by Sharia law; AND WHEREAS by the provisions of S. 38 (1) of the Constitution every person is entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion amongst other fundamental human rights enshrined under Chapter IV of the Constitution.46

Not surprisingly, Rights appeared most frequently in the northern media in the immediate wake of Zamfara’s initial announcement (47 percent of the New Nigerian articles and letters discussing sharia in November 1999 made use of Rights) and in the weeks and months following riots or controversial court decisions—particularly the zina cases, where “alternative” rights language proved to be a most effective tool for Muslim activists. By presenting sharia as fully compatible with the constitution and as on the same moral terrain as those occupied by its opponents, the Rights frame helped establish the political battle lines in ways that were quite advantageous to Muslim pro-sharia forces. But in the long-term contest to shape attitudes toward sharia in the north, other frames would eventually emerge as more significant. A variant of the Rights frame, Muslims and the Federal Character (4 percent) draws on that other redoubtable Nigerian political value, the notion of fairness as equal distribution of government resources by regional/state/ ethnic/religious category. In the context of this frame, sharia implementation is justifiable despite the conflict it brings with Christians because it ensures Muslims will maintain their “fair share” of political power and resources. As Sheikh Ja’afar Adam worried after the May 2004 violence in Jos, “The state governor is a Christian, the police commissioner is a Christian, the brigade commander is a Christian. The director SSS [State Security Service] is also a Christian . . . These people just sit and plan how to eliminate Muslims in Plateau State.”47 Under this logic, sharia’s true political value is that it ensures that power over Muslims is exercised by other Muslims, who, unlike Christians, can

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be trusted to protect Islamic values and interests. Sharia strengthens the Muslim political community, empowering them to fight for their share of the “national cake” in other arenas, confidant that their fundamental (and highly objectified) spiritual needs are already met. Christians, so the argument goes, already have their own legal system—indeed, the whole existing constitutional and national legal structures are “Christian.” But if they want to implement canon law or some Christian equivalent to sharia (however unlikely this may seem), Muslims will support it—it is their due.48 Is Nigeria a Secular State? In Nigeria’s tumultuous political climate of the 1970s and 1980s, no issue proved more durably contentious than the secularity question. As the third most common frame in my sample (16 percent), Unity in Faith emphasizes two important potential outcomes of sharia implementation: (1) its value as a means of uniting the umma (and, by proxy, the north) behind a single identity and political cause and (2) its potential to highlight the affinity between the moral goals of the rapidly expanding (and politically empowered) evangelical Christian community and their equally pious Muslim neighbors: Muslims, irrespective of ethnic background or sect, need to come together to improve the lot of Muslims in Nigeria. Islam is a religion of peace, and the sharia can be a means to promote peace and understanding among Nigeria’s faithful by condemning religious and ethnic violence—all groups are equal within Islam, and Christians are accorded a special status within the sharia. It is also the duty of religious leaders of all faiths to promote harmony and “imbibe the spirit of dialogue.” Under the sharia, Muslims and Christians can live together in peace and justice, ensuring the preservation of our democratic dispensation. In fact, Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet, and much of what the sharia says is compatible with biblical injunction and “Christian” law. A sincere Christian should welcome sharia, unless they support prostitution, alcoholism, and other manifestations of our collective national immorality. Christians who hate the sharia do not understand it, and by fostering “secularism” and rejecting the use of state power and resources to reform societal values, they reject their own faith.

Unity in Faith walks a fine (and not always persuasive) line between caliphate nationalism and ecumenical moral revivalism. Sponsors of this frame often used modified versions of the old Sardauna-era Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) slogan (“One North, One People, Irrespective of Reli-

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gion, Race or Tribe”) to emphasize that the benefits of Islamic law (particularly law and order) would apply to all citizens in sharia states, even if its strictures would not.49 Perhaps the best known was Bafarawa’s “One North, One People, One Agenda,” which he relied on in public statements to suggest that the (largely hypothetical) economic benefits of sharia might serve as a force for rebuilding Middle Belt Christian support for a pan-northern political coalition.50 In a less productive vein, others expressed exasperation with Christian leaders over their inability to understand sharia’s compatibility with their own vision, citing passages from Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Matthew (i.e., Matthew 5:30: “and if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off”) as evidence that “devout” Christians had little to fear theologically from the hudud punishments.51 Unity in Faith appeared frequently after outbreaks of religious violence. Following the February 2000 and November 2001 riots in Kaduna, northern press coverage focused at great length on stories of Christians sheltering their Muslim neighbors (and vice versa), highlighting the “peaceful” central tenets of both faiths.52 These stories allowed members of the religious and political elites in both communities to argue (despite all evidence to the contrary) that the violence was not motivated by religious or ethnic rhetoric or in any way a response to tensions over the prospect of sharia. That this logic also exculpates them from any responsibility for the state of Muslim-Christian relations generally goes unmentioned. The Unity in Secularity frame, a much less common (3 percent) but still distinct “package,” turns the Unity in Faith logic on its head, suggesting that while sharia may be desirable for Muslims in their personal affairs, state intervention in recognizing religious symbols and enforcing public morality was unlikely to achieve the desired ends. The frame is best captured in an op-ed published in the summer of 1999 by a private citizen named Murtala Ibrahim from Kaduna. Ibrahim argued that in a multireligious society, lifting up one religion as the “father” of the others not only endangers equality but falsely treats individual religious morality as the government’s responsibility. In the real, imperfect world, “not every Muslim is good to fellow believers, and not every Christian is covered with the ‘blood of Christ,’” and before government can use religious values to combat social ills like poverty and corruption, individuals must first reform themselves. Ibrahim warned that simply Islamicizing the public sphere would not ensure a more honest and heartfelt faith among the people. As he put it, “Loyalty is to Allah, not the mundane, inconsequential tenets of world’s experience,” and to focus on political recognition at the expense of personal faith was to miss the core message of the faith.53

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Unity in Secularity was the frame most directly associated with opposition to sharia implementation, at least as it was proposed. Its sponsors were often intellectuals on the fringes of mainstream Islamic discourse in Nigeria, often members of a small group of politicians or religious leaders who feared a state-centric sharia campaign would lead to a potential loss of autonomy for religious actors. Unity in Faith, on the other hand, functioned as a sort of rallying cry to Muslim citizens, who were urged to put aside long-standing conflicts over doctrine in favor of cooperation on a national agenda in the name of Islam. Sharia presented an opportunity for Islamic organizations to present a united front in the political sphere, similar to the one effectively presented by the Christian Association of Nigeria since the 1980s, and for “nonaffiliated” religious leaders to capitalize on the rush to condemn intra-Muslim conflict. One particular beneficiary was the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, whose chairman for most of the period was Lateef Adegbite, a Yoruba Muslim not strongly associated with either Izala or a Sufi order. The final frame explicitly focused on the status of religion in the constitutional order, Preserving Authentic Islam (7 percent), was the most strongly aligned with the Ibrahim /Bugaje intellectual model emphasizing reconstruction of the caliphate tradition as a form of Muslim nationalism. It also offered the most aggressive criticism of secularism, adopting language like that used by Sulaiman and the Muslim Students’ Society (MSS) in the 1970s and 1980s to argue that the imposition of Western legal forms under colonial rule was at the root of Nigeria’s problems: Nigerian Muslims once had an Islamic state in the Sokoto Caliphate, but colonization destroyed it by trying to separate religion from politics. Sharia implementation will emancipate both Muslims and non-Muslims alike from “the tyranny of neo-colonialism.” Those who oppose it are “overloaded” with Western influences—lascivious dress by women, the mingling of the sexes in public, “free and uncontrolled sexual relationships,” and alcohol. Women in particular suffer from a loss of dignity in today’s Nigeria, as secular attitudes force them to give up their femininity. The loss of these values is at the center of our political and economic crises. The government must act to return these values to our society by enforcing the sharia—as Yerima said, “Zamfara state, as an Islamic state, should not allow its citizens to neglect prayer and other religious injunctions.”54 Christians have no place opposing the will of the majority who support sharia in a democracy, and those who do so are intolerant hypocrites. “Secularism means the tolerance of all religions except Islam.”

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Of all the frames within the sharia debate, Preserving Authentic Islam was the most ambivalent about the benefits of democracy to Nigerian Muslims. At various times, proponents of this frame were more or less likely to lump democracy in with other Western “innovations” that entrenched secularism as the dominant ideology in Nigeria. The sorts of arguments made by Islamist opponents of democracy—that democracy risks substituting the sovereignty of people for that of God55—sometimes appeared in the popular press. However, it was also widely acknowledged that without Nigeria’s democratic transition, sharia implementation would not have been possible. As a November 1999 New Nigerian editorial suggested, any attempts to deny Muslims’ democratic entitlement to preserve and restore their faith would have dire consequences: “This is a democratic era. Any attempt to suppress Islamic way of life will breed the type of violence we have in the Middle East with Algeria and Egypt as good examples.”56 Preserving Authentic Islam adopts a shallow understanding of democracy, defining it in purely procedural terms as the means by which Muslims can choose the leaders and defend the rights necessary to pursue their religious goals. As the submission of Malam Yakubu Ahmad to the Bauchi State sharia implementation committee in 2000 put it: “It is a clear falsehood to claim that Nigeria is not aligned to any religion. The principle of secularism itself is not religiously neutral, it is a concept that has been drawn from a Christian dogma—(Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God that is God’s) and this is deeply rooted in the Christian belief system. Any attempt to prevent any State in Nigeria that is predominantly Muslim populated to implement Sharia system is nothing short of injustice and an abuse of the concept of democracy and the Nigerian Constitution.”57 As Ali Mazrui has argued, for many Muslims, the turn to sharia in Nigeria and elsewhere represents an act of resistance against the pernicious effects of globalization. It was not so long ago, Mazrui reminds us, that Western democracies like Britain and the United States outlawed a wide range of “immoral” actions and relations in the public interest, and while these societies may have forgotten the value of preserving “authentic” culture, the Muslim world has not.58 But of course, defining “authentic” Muslim culture is a problematic endeavor. Indeed, William Miles has argued that, taken in the long-run perspective, sharia activism in Nigeria represents the rejection a long-standing tradition of “flexibility, adaptability, and syncretism” embedded in Hausa culture (and, at least in its Sufi form, the caliphate heritage) in favor of a “purer” (more Arab) version of Islam. By banning praise-singing and other traditional music performances, restricting “extravagance” in marriage and child-naming ceremonies, and discour-

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aging participation in the local bori spirit possession cult, sharia supporters are in fact engaged in a sort of intentional “de-Africanization,” rapidly and violently transforming northern Nigerian society into a form that more closely resembles a globalized Islamic ideal.59 What Can Sharia Fix? The third set of frames focused most directly on the material benefits of religious revival, linking the prospects of a material democratic dividend directly to sharia’s power to impose justice and accountability on the political class and Nigeria’s new civilian institutions. The most common frame across the sharia debate (26 percent), ED & SJ represents the core promise of elite sharia proponents to their citizen supporters: Muslim communities in Nigeria face serious underdevelopment and social injustice. Moral development is a prerequisite for economic and political development, and sharia is a divine guide for the moral rebirth of Nigerian society. Sharia will contribute to development and the provision of social justice because it promotes fairness in business and an ethos of helping those who are less fortunate. Muslims should be concerned with the welfare of the community, even as they pursue their own business. Muslim business leaders and tradespeople are called upon to be just in their dealings in the market (using fair measures, not trying to cheat with prices, not hoarding in times of scarcity), and to seek out business opportunities in line with Muslim principles (dealing with banks that offer interest-free loans and investment opportunities). Community leaders should provide for the poor by facilitating the collection and distribution of the zakkat (mandatory charitable giving) and performing other acts of Muslim charity. The state must also promote Islamic development by improving infrastructure (roads, water, electricity) to areas that lack it. It should promote educational advancements by finding ways to update and improve on Islamic education (for boys and girls). And it should assist in the moral uplift of the community as part of the practice of sharia by supporting mosques and their staffs—ensuring that they have the resources necessary to preach the true practice of Islam to the community. It will also be responsible for ridding society of moral undesirables who are a “drain” on community resources—prostitutes, drinkers, and hooligans will be expelled or reformed (at the state’s expense, if necessary).

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This is the core of the message Yerima conveyed in his sharia “launch” speech in October 1999. Because of the central place of morality in this storyline, “prostitutes,” consumers and venders of alcohol, and street hawkers often appear as bogeymen—symbolic evidence of the collapse of social institutions.60 Many of the stories and editorials that presented this frame emphasized what Philip Ostien calls the imperative to “sanitize society”—to literally clean it of the moral filth responsible for poverty and misrule. On March 25, 2000, the New Nigerian published a front-page story featuring a Christian couple from Kaduna State living in Gusau to illustrate sharia’s success. As the wife recounts, their marriage was being torn apart by the husband’s alcohol abuse—wasted money, late nights, violence. But with sharia came a ban on alcohol sales, and the husband “suddenly stopped staying out late and is [now] behaving like a true husband.”61 The popularity of these narratives (stories about reformed prostitutes and criminals who received government assistance were also quite popular) illustrates the vision many ordinary people had of how sharia might pay its “dividend.” ED & SJ also draws on the caliphate’s reputation for justice as a model for restoring Nigeria’s tarnished reputation. In the Kebbi State sharia implementation committee’s report, the authors encouraged state residents to “look back to the good old days when Sharia was in full operation,” comparing the moral status of the contemporary Nigerian state with the state of jahiliyya (ignorance) that many salafi thinkers use to characterize the pre-Islamic Arab world.62 In economic terms, ED & SJ provided the opportunity to turn nearly any development project into a religious one as well. The politicians and government officials who sponsored this frame clearly possess a stake in strengthening the power of state governments, a goal much more readily accomplished by positioning even fairly conventional economic development policies within a narrative of religious revival. In a self-promotional book published in 2004, Bafarawa described sharia as a fully articulated alternative to capitalism, one that “awakens a sense of social responsibility in man” and ensures that “alms seekers and destitute [sic] have their due rights in the wealth of the State and the well to do [sic] in society.”63 To highlight this relationship, he interspersed his account of sharia implementation in Sokoto with photographs of development projects—roads, hospitals, and a large cinema house converted into a mosque at state expense. Related to but distinct from ED & SJ, the Holding Elites Accountable frame (14 percent) speaks to the concern many citizens have with entrusting such

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power to the politicians and wealthy citizens who benefited from the very corruption sharia was intended to stamp out. Speaking at a public forum on child labor in Kano State, Sheikh Yahaya Faruk Chedi, the commandergeneral of the Kano State Hisbah Board, summarizes the main points of the frame: Nigeria is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of human and material resources. Unfortunately, the country has been cursed with leaders who failed to realize that their positions are trust from the Almighty Allah which they are accountable for at the Day of Judgment. Government should give free education and training to children. It should also be compulsory. In fact, allowances should be given to certain category [sic] of students. The rich and well-to-do in the society should also realize that their wealth is a trial and trust from the Almighty Allah. They should therefore assist the less privileged ones in the society. The children are the future leaders. They should be trained, fed, clothed and housed to get the best from them in the future.64

Sponsors of the Holding Elites Accountable frame relied on a mixture of religious and democratic symbolism to make their argument for sharia. Some invoke the symbolism of Islamic concepts like khalifa (viceregency) or the example of the rashidun (“rightly guided caliphs”) alongside the caliphate legacy to argue that sharia will provide a model for more just and effective leadership. Just as the “decadent” practices of Gobir and the other Hausa states justified Usman dan Fodio’s jihad against them, political leaders who act selfishly and flaunt Islamic injunctions risk being brought to account by sharia institutions.65 As the redoubtable author of “We Need Sharia’a on Bonny Road, Kaduna” put it, “Sharia does not distinguish between the rich and the poor, the ruled and the ruler.”66 Until the police, the civil servants, and the politicians meet the highest Islamic standards in their own lives, the promise of sharia cannot be shared by all. Perhaps surprisingly, many politicians (most notably Yerima) made extensive use of this frame. Zamfara State, for example, launched an anticorruption commission backed by the sharia legal system to prosecute bribe takers and other corrupt government officials to much fanfare in 2000. But in deploying this frame, politicians walk a fine line. When evidence of continued corruption or “inappropriate” behavior by elites has surfaced—as when the emir of Gwandu was embarrassed by the publicity he received for helping contract an illegal marriage for a wealthy supporter in 2000—public backlash has followed. Despite the efforts of prominent

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northern leaders (including several fellow traditional leaders and a sitting governor), the emir lost an embarrassing public trial in a sharia court. The final frame, Political Sharia (8 percent), was a powerful (if often marginalized) example of the continued distrust even many elites felt toward “official” sharia implementation. Sponsors of this frame—rarely high political officials, and more often religious leaders, journalists, and intellectuals—rarely opposed sharia in principle; rather, their concern was with political and religious leaders who seemed more concerned with scoring political points than ensuring authentic religious reform. Politicians who allowed mobs and private citizens to “enforce” sharia law—especially on Christians, as when beer parlors and hotels owned by non-Muslims were burned or destroyed—were not only violating the Prophet’s injunctions against applying sharia to non-Muslims but also scoring political points by allowing the passions of their supporters to run wild.67 When deployed, Political Sharia served as a reminder that the expansion of state power and consolidation of Muslim political identity came at a potential cost and that when elites failed to live up to the standards they held out to the community at large, it was effective to criticize them on Islamic as well as political grounds.

Interpreting Frames In her research on the development of feminist discourse around abortion rights in Germany and the United States, Myra Max Ferree argues that although activists have a wide-ranging repertoire of symbols, images, metaphors, and claims at their disposal, certain “packages” or “frames” are better “anchored” in local institutional contexts than others. Frame sponsors and other debate participants function within malleable (but often “sticky”) “discursive opportunity structures” that set bounds on what sorts of frames and arguments are likely to resonate not only with mass publics but with the institutions that actually set and shape policy. For example, the long-standing institutionalization of “liberal individualist” values and protections for “negative liberties” in American law helped push feminist discourse on the abortion issue in the direction of nongendered demands for freedom from state interference in private matters (indeed, Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion in the United States, was decided on the basis of a “right to privacy”). In Germany, however, liberal individualism plays a relatively small role in public discourse, which is dominated instead by values that frame the “protection of wives and mothers” as a

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positive state obligation. As a result, feminist discourse around abortion rights is far more gendered, focused on protecting the self-determination of women as women.68 In northern Nigeria, the transition to the Fourth Republic and the turn to the language of the “dividends of democracy” represented an important shift in the discursive opportunity structures available to Muslim political and religious leaders. Although sharia and Islamic religious values have long been central to popular conceptions of good governance, the popularity of democracy and the belief that democratic rule would “pay off” in tangible improvements in the lives of Muslim citizens meant that any “resonant,” persuasive account of how the ruling class would govern in the Fourth Republic would have to address both components. This shift was hardly without precedent, of course. Nigeria’s previous democratic experiences—particularly the NPC’s efforts to co-opt the caliphate heritage as part of mass democratic mobilization and the development of the federal character principle—laid significant groundwork during the independence era for an account of how to integrate demands for the protection of Muslim “rights” into a constitutional framework. Not surprisingly, after 1999, sharia has hardly ever been discussed in elite discourse or the mass media without reference to democracy. Through this lens, elite Muslim public discourse around the sharia issue starts to look like a strategic response to the democratizing context of the Fourth Republic, as well as to federal character logic and the constitutional emphasis on “balancing.” While most of the key frames make an effort to target ordinary citizens in the north, they also suggest an awareness of broader political contexts and are tailored toward resonance with the national and international elites that Muslim politicians in northern Nigeria must cooperate with in order to access power and make policy. Framing choices are embedded not only in cultural symbols but in power relations; the result is that “radical” reframings that challenge core cultural discourses are far more likely to be adopted by those on the outside of state power structures than by those within. In northern Nigeria, this dynamic is reflected in the public discourse’s emphasis on frames that adopt rights language and attempt to link sharia to established constitutional norms—two types of claims likely to gain recognition, if not immediate acquiescence, from non-Muslim audiences. As a result, although the stereotypes offered in southern Nigerian and international press accounts of the sharia “crisis” suggested Muslim framing of the issue would have revolved around a single, radical narrative justifying its implementation in terms of a “clash” between their political values and those of the rest of the nation, the re-

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ality was far more nuanced. A Nigerian Muslim encountering the debate within her own community would have found a wide range of arguments grounded in familiar metaphors and symbols drawn from common religious and political experiences. The most prominent frames—Rights and ED & SJ—justified sharia implementation as way of maximizing the “dividends of democracy,” of making democracy “work” for Muslims by ensuring that the benefits of democratic progress are colored in an Islamic palette (Figure 6.1). In both, sharia implementation is a boon made possible by democracy and a reason to support democratic institutions. Other frames (Unity in Faith, Preserving Authentic Islam) emphasize the importance of protecting and recognizing religious identity in a multireligious state like Nigeria, presenting sharia as compatible with an existing and acceptable social order in which Muslims and Christians live together and cooperate politically. These frames took a somewhat more skeptical approach to democracy’s value for Muslims but remained broadly in line with constitutional narratives centered on the importance of “balancing” Muslim and Christian voices and concerns in government. The most prominent criticisms of sharia implementation (Unity in Secularity, Political Sharia) didn’t attack it on religious grounds but suggested that its implementation endangered the careful multicultural balance on which Nigeria depended, or questioned the motives and integrity of the political class responsible for bringing sharia into the law. Different discursive communities sponsored different frames for different audiences. ED & SJ, Holding Elites Accountable, and Muslims and the

Figure 6.1. Frames, by Overall Usage

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Federal Character, for instance, often appeared in the language of politicians themselves. In their efforts to explain their policy goals and plans, sharia was often used to reassure their mass audience of their seriousness and credibility. Voters could trust that development projects would be carried out and that the specific needs of communities would be taken into account, because sharia would orient government toward justice and fairness. Ironically, Yerima’s use of Holding Elites Accountable in the context of his own efforts to stamp out corruption was itself interpreted by his political opponents as “political” sharia—merely an effort to make his regime appear pious while not endangering his allies. Rights and Unity in Faith, on the other hand, were often directed at a pan-Nigerian audience, meant to signal to sharia opponents the legitimacy of the sharia project in terms that would be difficult to reject outright. Preserving Authentic Islam and Political Sharia were both adopted most often by voices outside of or interested in challenging the political establishment—sometimes religious leaders, but more often political opponents of elites like Yerima who were clearly well positioned to benefit from sharia. Radical demands rooted in globalized Islamic discourse—for an Islamic state, for instance, or language linking the Muslim community in Nigeria to the Arab-Israeli conflict—were marginalized by these frames. As perhaps the best-known radical Islamist in Nigeria during the late 1990s, Zakzaky spoke out frequently in 1999 and 2000 against Yerima and his sharia implementation program, arguing that that sharia could not be implemented in the absence of an Islamic state and the establishment of true social justice. However, the most dominant issue frames around the sharia issue worked systematically to exclude voices (like Zakzaky’s) that rejected secular state authority or constitutional limits on sharia implementation, pushing them further to the margins. Perhaps even more important than the marginalization of radical voices, however, has been the sharia debate’s role in offering both a religious and political justification for what’s turned out to be a greatly expanded role for state action and intervention in the lives of ordinary citizens. By suggesting that sharia should add to the responsibilities of the state, ordinary Muslims are presented with a wide range of arguments that reinforce the power of those who already hold state office. Sharia implementation and the frames that defend and contextualize it suggest that it’s government’s job not only to provide economic development, security, and accountability but to take responsibility for the moral development of its citizens—a task that requires unprecedented power to regulate the lives of Muslims. While, as many elite voices suggest, the caliphate’s successes came from precisely this concern with preserving public values and promoting Islamic

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piety, the vision of sharia offered in frames like ED & SJ, Unity in Faith, and Muslims and the Federal Character is one in which the state is explicitly responsible for defining and enforcing what it means to be a “good Muslim” in Nigerian society. Given the strong association in the Muslim public sphere between sharia and the “dividends of democracy” and the mistrust in elite motives inherent in frames like Holding Elites Accountable and Political Sharia, it’s hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims have very mixed feelings about this radical expansion of state authority. And given the widespread (and growing) dissatisfaction with the Fourth Republic’s version of democracy in Nigeria, which has struggled to provide any political or economic benefits to its citizens, Muslim citizens have responded to these frames with a mixture of acceptance and abiding skepticism.

SEVEN

Muslims Talking Politics

Islamism is the sharia plus electricity. —Olivier Roy1 Sharia is about justice. Where you have sharia, you have development. Nothing has changed. If one relied on tap water, one would die of thirst. We don’t even talk of electricity. —Salisu Saida, a trader in Kano2

Popular Voices in the Muslim Public Sphere During the early years of the Fourth Republic, mass media discourse in northern Nigeria framed sharia implementation and democracy as compatible goals, both oriented toward ensuring that citizens received the “dividends” of good government. But what, if anything, did these arguments’ intended audience make of them? Are popular attitudes and beliefs about the “compatibility” of Islam and democracy influenced by the sharia implementation debate and by the arguments circulating in the Muslim public sphere? And if so, how? In the American context, research on the heuristic devices citizens use to navigate the political world often focuses on voter choice as the ultimate “product” of these shortcuts.3 But choosing a presidential candidate based on limited information is a different sort of problem than forming durable beliefs about democracy’s compatibility or incompatibility with Islam. This is borne out by the fact that religiosity and personal piety seem to play surprisingly limited direct roles in determining how Muslims navigate the political system. Research on Indonesia, for example, shows

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that when Islamist parties in new democracies contest elections, they enjoy only a small, temporary advantage over their secular opponents in garnering the votes of committed Muslims. “Muslim” parties perform the best during founding elections and other times when competitors lack established track records or clearly identifiable policy platforms. Once voters gain access to better information and more nuanced heuristics, they become far less dependent on religious cues and far more likely to vote for non-Islamist parties whose platforms they find attractive for policy reasons.4 Just as religious elites no longer control the production of religious knowledge or public debate about religious meaning, political elites who use Islamic symbols or frames to control public opinion find that domination is not so easy. Using the voices of ninety-five Sokoto residents as my guide, I argue that the frames linking sharia and democracy described in chapter 6 had a significant influence on how Nigerian Muslims construct the relationship between Islam and democracy in their daily lives. Official frame packages that used the languages of rights, economic development, and elite accountability all helped citizens link the introduction of Islamic legal and social reforms with their hopes for (and sometimes, cynicism about) democracy. But despite their obvious debt to them, Muslims don’t passively accept these elite-driven narratives without question. In their conversations, my participants drew on popular media frames as part of a larger repertoire of personal experiences and “popular wisdom” to emphasize sharia’s potential for targeting corruption, economic and social mismanagement, and misbehaving elites in ways that were often unintended by elite frame sponsors. Where official frames offered vague, legalistic defenses of sharia, my interviewees sought to specify these arguments in terms of local, personal concerns. They demonstrated an abiding skepticism about the motives of elites but hopefulness with respect to sharia’s ability to force political and religious leaders to provide the “dividends of democracy.” Muslims view both sharia and democracy as means of enacting social reforms that target what they see as Nigeria’s greatest challenges—elite corruption and an absence of social justice—and this shapes what they expect from the democratic government. As I suggested in the opening chapter, most research on the “relationship” between Islam and democracy focuses on Islamist parties and participants in Islamic social and political movements, often at the expense of the people Michael Peletz refers to as “ordinary Muslims.” These Muslims aren’t ordinary because they represent some sort of coherent worldview, nor are they religiously uneducated or collectively lacking the necessary re-

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sources or skills to engage in effective “public reasoning” about religion and politics. Rather, they are ordinary in the sense that they are “not in the forefront of contemporary religious or political developments,” even though they are most likely to be the “targets” of religious and cultural reform projects like sharia implementation.5 In northern Nigeria, the idea of “ordinary” Muslims overlaps imperfectly with class and social status like talakawa, a term that once referred primary to rural peasants but has expanded since the 1960s to incorporate a vast range of urban class and occupational identities. As Paul Lubeck argues in his ethnography of urban Kano in the late 1970s, even though class- and status-based identities like talakawa and leburori (wage laborers) remained salient and visible in cities such as Kano during the “fast capitalist” era, religious modes of belonging—and with them, a newfound attention to public piety—came to play an even greater role in the social and political lives of most Muslim residents.6 If anything, this trend has accelerated, as middle-class, working-class, and poor Muslims alike continue to expand their circles of intellectual and personal engagement with national and global Islamic discourse, whether simply by viewing one of the many video CDs of Saudi imams performing tafsir that are available for purchase in local markets or even (for the well-off) by taking part in the state-sponsored hajj. But much as Peletz himself argues, popular familiarity with and even strong (and sometimes quite vocal) commitments to rationalized, objectified versions of public Islam don’t necessarily translate into unquestioning confidence in state-led social engineering projects like sharia implementation.7 Nigeria is a particularly important case for understanding how ordinary Muslims experience and participate in public debates at the intersection of Islam and politics because, unlike in most of the Muslim world, there are no Islamist political parties to dominate national discourse on the relationship between Islam and democracy. West Africa is something of an outlier in this regard. Between 1970 and 2010, Islamist parties competed in 64 percent of national elections held in the Middle East and North Africa and a staggering 97 percent in South and Southeast Asia, winning seats in nearly all of them. In West Africa, these parties contested a mere 8 percent (seven of eighty-three) of the time. One possible explanation for this difference is that the use of colonial languages in government poses a high entry barrier for Islamists educated in local languages and Arabic. A second is the impact of the ethnic party bans embedded in many African constitutions (including Nigeria’s).8 But whatever the reason for their absence, public narratives about the relationship between Islam and democracy

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across West Africa are fairly decentralized, with a great deal of space for contestation and debate.

Islam and Support for Democracy: Instrumental or Intrinsic? Another reason to be interested in the voices of my interviewees is that their conversations shed light on a question that has occupied political scientists for several decades, beginning with the dramatic surge in democratization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we saw in chapter 2, Muslims in countries with political systems as different as Yemen and Indonesia, Nigeria and Egypt, all exhibit strong support for democratic government—stronger, even, than in many nations across the former Soviet bloc and Latin America. But consolidated democracy remains elusive across the Muslim world, and there’s a great deal of skepticism that popular support for democracy alone is enough to overcome the authoritarian alternatives that remain on the table if and when post-transition regimes fail to deliver. The most pessimistic voices suggest that all nations’ political fortunes are ultimately determined by their underlying cultural makeup, particular their citizens’ orientations toward authority.9 As the argument goes, circumstances may occasionally conspire to produce temporary revolutions overthrowing authoritarian rulers in even the most illiberal societies, but unless those societies possess the necessary mass values emphasizing “individual autonomy and self-expression” at the expense of parochialism and deference, democracy is likely to prove illusive. And where do such values come from? As Ronald Inglehart argues, tolerance and interpersonal trust are the products of lifelong cultural socialization cultivated across generations, and national patterns of mass values are unlikely to be altered by anything short of massive social upheaval driven by economic modernization. Thus, outside of the Western world, popular expressions of support for democratic government generally represent little more than “lip service”—evidence of democracy’s “overwhelmingly positive image” and dissatisfaction with the status quo.10 A second (and more positive) perspective emphasizes the role of political experience in shaping democratic beliefs and values. Although even the most uninformed citizens in long-standing democracies have some basic understanding of the democratic process and its value, those living in nations with recent authoritarian pasts must learn to evaluate regime performance on a recalibrated scale, sensitive to the new possibilities of political freedom and the uncertainty of the transition process. Mass publics in new

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democracies must learn to evaluate actually existing regimes in both ideal and practical terms based on their ability to supply political “goods” like the rule of law and civil rights protections, as well as economic goods like development and reduced inequality. This “lifetime learning” model suggests that culture isn’t necessarily destiny when it comes to building popular commitment to democracy.11 In sub-Saharan Africa, a growing body of research supports the “lifetime learning” model, suggesting that although the continent’s cultural values might lag behind “civic culture” standards, widespread support for democracy is not merely “lip service,” either. Only a principled minority (48 percent across the continent, in data compiled by Michael Bratton and Robert Mattes) of Africans can be described as committed democrats, in the sense that they express a preference for democratic rule and clearly reject all authoritarian alternatives, including military rule, rule by a strong man, and single-party states. However, even skeptical democrats across Africa seem to value democracy for its procedures and political “dividends” rather than for the expectation that it will offer an economic quick fix or benefit their ethnic or religious group. Put simply, most evaluate democracy based on their experience with it, with positive assessments leading to the slow development of mass democratic values.12 This pattern holds for Nigeria in particular, where, despite the popularity of the “dividends of democracy” metaphor, Nigerians’ preferences for democracy are much more strongly associated with the demand for political goods (security, transparent government, and honest leadership) than with the belief that the Fourth Republic has “paid off” economically.13 It’s also clear that popular dissatisfaction with actually existing democracy and the government’s ability to manage the economy have both spiraled since the opening days of the Fourth Republic. Indeed, as a 2010 study found, perceptions of the quality of democracy in Nigeria had dropped to shockingly low levels by the end of the decade. Today, Nigerians are more pessimistic about the state of democracy in their country than even Ugandans and Zimbabweans, two countries with few reasons to celebrate their political freedoms.14 In all, merely 46 percent of Nigerians score as “committed democrats” based on 2008 Afrobarometer data, hardly a number to cheer about.

Why Groups? How do we know when something as amorphous and contested as public discourse shapes the thinking of ordinary citizens? Ideally, we know be-

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cause people tell us—by referencing particular sources of information or arguments easily attributable to specific antecedents. More often, we infer from context, looking for particular uses of symbols or images, the use of certain catchphrases, or references to exemplars that evoke common meanings. Just as with the frame analysis in chapter 6, this sort of inference is not without risk—of introducing bias, of over- or underanalyzing the texts, of seeing what is not there and missing what is. In political science, research on framing often consists of efforts to see if people can be pushed to alter their previously stated views on an issue by exposing them (within a survey or under experimental conditions) to information containing specific frames. These studies offer the advantage of easily quantifiable data. What they give up is the social aspect of frames, which are treated as though they descend upon the masses from on high and are, in the case of experimental studies, literally fictions invented by researchers.15 They also fix the process of making sense or reasoning out one’s beliefs using available frames into a single moment, captured in a single response to a single question. But, as William Gamson suggests, “people read media messages in complicated and sometimes unpredictable ways, and draw heavily on other resources as well in constructing meaning.”16 Even a well-designed experimental study of framing will be limited in its efforts to capture this process. My alternative is to use group-based discussion interviews, which produce data in the form of individual utterances by the interviewees and the conversational whole. Peer group interviews are defined by a desire to gain insight from the interactions of group members while retaining a measure of structure and control for the researcher. The advantage of group interviews is that while the researcher can dictate the questions asked and the direction of the conversation, the terms of the discussion are defined by the participants, offering an opportunity to see how “knowledge, ideas, storytelling, self-presentation and linguistic exchanges operate within a given cultural context.”17 Most group research is conducted in the United States or Western Europe, where the idea of the “focus group” as a marketing and political tool is part of the cultural landscape, but when conducted with care and in accordance with local realities, open-ended group interviews provide useful results around the world.

Group Interviews in Northern Nigeria My interviews in Sokoto were conducted following a model pioneered by the sociologist William Gamson, whose research on political talk among

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working-class Americans is a major touchstone in the debate over how elite-sponsored frames influence mass political attitudes and opinions. Gamson’s “peer group conversations” differ from more familiar focus group interviews in four important ways: (1) groups are slightly smaller (traditional focus groups often range from eight to twelve participants), fostering more conversation and interaction between members; (2) groups are held on “participants’ turf” (in homes, community gathering places); (3) groups involve people who are previously acquainted and thus less likely to engage in “public” speaking; and (4) the interviews feature a reduced role for the facilitator, who does not press for full or complete answers from every group member but merely seeks to keep the conversation on topic.18 The discussions they produce maximize conversation and debate at the expense of consensus-building or turn-taking responses, in which each group member responds to a question with minimal interaction with other participants. Gamson and his collaborators recruited participants from multiple sites, relying on snowball sampling techniques to identify “hosts” willing to hold interview sessions in their homes, inviting coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances to participate. The resulting sample wasn’t a random sample, but it represented a diverse cross section of the target population. Over four months in early 2008, my facilitators and I recruited ninetyfive total participants spread out over fourteen interviews (five to seven interviewees each). We began by making contact with a handful of potential participants, who then made additional invitations from their social and work circles. We targeted people from a wide range of employment backgrounds, from petty traders to motorcycle taxi drivers, laborers, health care workers, tailors, malamai (Islamic teachers), and the jobless (65 percent of the sample). We also included secondary or college teachers (22 percent) and students (13 percent), both large populations in greater Sokoto. Many participants would fit into the (perhaps problematically) broad definition of “middle class” offered by the African Development Bank, which includes individuals living on as little as $2–$4 on the basis that they are likely able to “save and consume non essential goods.”19 However, the majority worked in jobs outside the formal sector of the economy, and few (outside of the teachers) had the security of permanent employment. We spoke with roughly as many men (forty-four) as women (fifty-one). Their ages also covered a wide span (twenty to eighty-eight), although the median participant was thirty-five years old. Owing to an unsurprising participation bias (better-educated citizens were more willing to participate in a two-hour discussion on politics), my sample is somewhat more edu-

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cated, well-read, and politically engaged than the average northern Nigerian. Fifty-five percent of interviewees had secondary or university educations (compared to 37.5 percent of Muslims nationally). Only 36 percent reported Islamic education (mostly private Quranic schools) as their highest level of schooling, suggesting most participants were literate in English, Hausa, or Arabic. Fifty-one percent read a newspaper and 89 percent watched television at least once a week, and 96 percent regularly listened to radio news.20 The interview process wasn’t an unmitigated success. We arranged for the group interviews to be held in private homes (those of participants or those of the facilitators and their family members), mosques, and classrooms. With one exception, the interviews were gender segregated (women’s groups were conducted by a female facilitator) and (again, with a single exception) were conducted in Hausa. In exchange for participation, interviewees were given a small cash payment of 700 naira (~6 US dollars). However, despite our best efforts to create a comfortable environment, most of the interviews were marred by their artificiality. Groups were asked a series of general, open-ended questions about their experiences with sharia and democratic government since the 1999 transition, with the goal of allowing participants to discuss the issues at length, letting the frames they rely on to understand the sharia issue and its relationship with democracy to emerge in as natural a way as possible. Instead, individuals often presented long, rambling answers one after another, engaging with each other’s remarks to a very limited degree. Given that this kind of performance was so markedly different from the engagements I witnessed among my Muslim friends, it seems clear that, despite our efforts to describe the project and its goals, many participants thought policy makers would eventually hear their remarks. Indeed, at least a few interviewees indicated as much to us. But the sheer level of vitriol launched against local political elites during the interviews suggests that, at minimum, the results are untarnished by the fear of reprisals or other consequences for speaking out.

Talking about Sharia (I): What’s Wrong with Society? The most important task that media frames perform is to define and “diagnose” the central problem posed by political issue, identifying its key causes and suggesting a basis for moral judgment. One of the hallmarks of nearly all the major sharia-related frames was their insistence on the fundamentally moral nature of Nigeria’s economic, social, and political problems. Whether by invoking the language of “religious rights,” emphasiz-

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ing the need for transparency and accountability in the political sector, or suggesting sharia’s potential as an engine of economic development, these frames suggested that by demanding that the state enforce pious, ethical behavior, the Muslim community in Nigerian might finally realize its potential. I begin with a comment made during one of the first interviews by Aliyu,21 a college student in his late twenties training to become a primary school teacher: If sharia’s implemented in this state, there’ll be progress. Because, as someone said earlier, the non-Muslims living in Sokoto behave and dress wrongly—you can see them on the roads, schools, houses, and everywhere. This is because they [the non-Muslims] are now numerous in this state, and they’re the root cause of every evil. But even if you’re a sinner, if sharia is launched, you’ll have to be very careful in doing your business so that you won’t break the law. That’s the first step toward changing the lifestyle of the community, and the Muslims will be happy. And this happiness will draw the attention of the non-Muslims to join Islam. Even if they didn’t convert to Islam, at least they’ll reduce all those bad things they do. For example, everywhere you go you’ll see a beer parlor, a brothel, and so on. They’ve turned drinking alcohol into a game. All these things are happening because there isn’t sharia. But if there’s sharia, you won’t find alcohol anywhere, only at the “Mammy market.”22 But now it’s everywhere, and it’s mostly the youth that are drinking it, because of unemployment. They just spoil their discipline, some didn’t want to go to school, they become “Area boys,” [a term for local youths who take drugs and engage in petty crime] all because there is not sharia. But if there’d been sharia, the government would have had to provide something for the youths to be engaged in, and they’ll like it, and that will make them disciplined. And once you’re disciplined, there’s every hope that you’ll do what sharia says, but if there’s no discipline, no education, anything can happen. You can even commit murder.23

Aliyu’s notion of “progress” is grounded in the same narratives of Islamic renewal advanced in the 1970s and 1980s by Islamists like Bugaje and Sulaiman to suggest a path toward repairing the “damage” done to northern society by colonial rule. In every single interview we conducted, participants followed elite-driven narratives that highlighted the danger posed to northern society by immoral public behavior like drinking, prostitution, and gambling. Often, this logic seemed to reflect a “broken windows” theory of moral revival, in which tolerance for these sins invites larger problems, such as theft, banditry, and official corruption. These

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moral deficiencies have concrete economic consequences, so the argument goes, and Aliyu’s comments hew closely to the causal narrative of the Economic Development and Social Justice (ED & SJ) frame. Because sharia is “comprehensive”—because it touches all spheres and all people—it creates a social order that is compatible with progress and development. By fixing the spiritual problems through strict adherence to sharia, the conditions necessary for real “progress” toward economic self-sufficiency and development can begin, as suggested in this passage, taken from an interview conducted in a local mosque near my home in Gawon Nama: M A L A M U S M A N (an Islamic schoolteacher in his midforties): In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. Well, when we say sharia, we mean something to do with faith. And if sharia is truly implemented, in no time people will be educated; they’ll have faith. All those social vices like drinking, adultery, idleness will be a thing of the past, God willing. And if sharia’s implemented, the married women will be especially comforted, if their husbands understand sharia. In your house, when you sometimes go to work or out to do business, you might come back and find your wife absent. Why? Because she doesn’t know what sharia says. And sometimes you might go out—to look for food or to send your child to school. But he won’t go to school. He’ll hide somewhere smoking Indian hemp [marijuana], and before you know it he’s become an “Area boy.” That’s because there’s no sharia. Or your neighbor will climb his ruhewa [a building for storing grain] that he built in front of your house in the name of fetching food for his family, but it’s not true, he just wants to take a look at your wives, all because there’s not sharia. If there’s sharia, this won’t happen because you have your right, so a neighbor can’t come and build a ruhewa in front of your compound. Instead, he’ll go inside his compound and build it. And if he’s not careful, an “Area boy” will just go and open the ruhewa, take some food, sell it, and have money for his drugs. If there’s sharia, all these things won’t happen anymore.24

For Malam Usman, eliminating moral decay and enforcing higher standards for public conduct would have a direct, positive effect on the lives of Sokoto residents, creating greater certainty (for property, for family, for the future) and allowing Muslims to invest in improving their current condition through faith, education, and industriousness. But what’s the source of this moral decay in the first place? One possibility he broaches is that people don’t know sharia or otherwise lack proper guidance on how to live in its path. In classical Islam, knowledge—of the “Holy Writ and of

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worldly affairs”—was seen as a necessary first step in developing the moral and ethical capacity to follow sharia. People are endowed with the capacity for reason but require the help of the community to develop it.25 Because sharia is “comprehensive”—because it touches all spheres and all people— it creates a social order that is compatible with progress and development. Many participants (including Aliyu in the first excerpt) also equated sharia moral reform with the restoration of societal “discipline,” a military metaphor that gained broad currency during the 1980s. Buhari’s “War Against Indiscipline” (WAI) and Babangida’s “Mass Mobilization for Self Reliance, Social Justice, and Economic Recovery” (MAMSER) and National Orientation Agency were popular top-down, government-led efforts to target individual moral laxity as a response to growing crime and corruption. The WAI sought to create a “queuing culture,” in which citizens waited patiently to board public transportation, and mandated weekly “environmental cleanup” exercises, in which citizens were instructed to stay home and tidy up their homes and neighborhoods.26 MAMSER, which emerged from the findings of the Political Bureau report, sought to wipe out Nigeria’s “culture of helplessness, apathy, and indifference to the political process,” relying on elaborate programs of “social re-education” to create a new political culture more in line with the military’s vision of order.27 Although they had little impact on Nigeria’s larger political challenges, many Muslims remember these programs not as unwarranted government intrusions into their personal lives but as noble efforts to address serious public problems. This preoccupation with “indiscipline” echoes Peter Ekeh’s well-known description of the “two publics” in contemporary African life. Ekeh argues that as a result of colonial rule, African public life was bifurcated between the “primordial public,” in which moral obligations emerge from group membership to impose order and accountability on individual behavior, and the “civic public,” the realm of “modern” institutions like the bureaucracy, government, and the university system, and an amoral space in which there are no cultural sanctions for selfish or greedy behavior. Institutions functioning within the civic public, such as Local Government Area administrations, civil service departments, and courts applying “English” law, can all be legitimately treated as a vehicle for personal gain, as long as when the beneficiary enters into relations governed by the “primordial” public—spaces often defined by ethnic or religious obligations—the benefits are shared in accordance with that public’s norms.28 Ekeh’s account of corruption has become, at least in its broad strokes, something of an official narrative for many Nigerians, who most loudly

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condemn corrupt politicians and businessmen who engage in illegal enterprise (such as the infamous “419” e-mail scams) not when their actions damage the country as a whole but when they fail to meet their “obligations” to redistribute their gains within their own communities. The popularity of the indiscipline narrative also helps ordinary citizens frame public immorality as a problem that’s someone else’s fault—youth certainly, particularly the “Area boys,” but also the elite class, whose status allows them to flaunt the rules indiscriminately. In a 1997 essay, the Nigerian sociologist Chikwendu Christian Ukaegbu suggested a causal link between elite corruption and the general breakdown of social order in many Nigerian communities. He argued that citizens who have learned to “rush and scramble to secure [state] services” and civil servants who display a “negative work ethic exemplified in truancy, malingering, lateness, and hostility towards clients” are all students of the political class, who have trapped them in a cycle in which imitating their own corruption is the only way to access the basics of life: “The tendency is for the governed to imitate the governors. The poorly paid messenger in a ministry withholds a client’s file until he is bribed with N5.00. He justifies his action by reference to the minister or another higher official who embezzled millions. Individuals who would have ordinarily been good and law-abiding citizens are pressured into giving bribes in order to receive services.”29 The result of this “tendency” is that, as much as most Nigerian citizens decry the status quo, they “spend far more time working to have their patrons installed in high places and seeking the aid of those who have power than working politically to establish some sort of radically different social order.”30 This, more than any other reason, is why high-profile efforts to “rebrand” Nigeria by removing its international stigma as one of the most corrupt countries in the world have drawn such limited grassroots support. For every public protest, such as the one staged outside the US embassy following Nigeria’s inclusion on a list of countries from which US-bound travelers would be subjected to “enhanced security measures” in 2009, there’s a song or bit of popular art like the 2005 hit “I Go Chop Your Dollar,” in which Nigerians celebrate their own international reputations as criminals and scammers as a victory against the avarice of outsiders. For a few of my interviewees, the stakes of sharia implementation were even higher than the simple decay of public morality. For them, the allure of sharia is that by enforcing public piety, it might be possible to restore some sense of a boundary between “Islamic” and “non-Islamic” spaces, thereby addressing the vulnerability they feel as a result of the extraordinary speed of physical and social change across the region. One plausible

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explanation for the outsized popularity of sharia implementation in Kano is the fact that, of all the major northern cities, it long placed the strictest limits (starkly visible in the form of the city’s massive walls) on the intrusion of non-Muslims into Islamic communities; indeed, Europeans were officially prohibited from residing within the “old” city until the mid1960s. But with the late colonial era came massive urban immigration, fragmenting neighborhood bonds, transforming architectural norms that had created private spaces for Muslims families, and increasing the city’s population by as much as 1,000 percent in forty-five years. Similarly, the end of the Native Administration (NA) system significantly weakened the emir’s extensive surveillance network used to monitor “outsiders” throughout the community. The result, as Murray Last has described it, is a rising sense of insecurity—physical insecurity, in the sense that the city has suffered numerous riots since the 1950s and the state actors who replaced the NAs have proven to be far less effective at preventing crime, but also spiritual insecurity, driven by the intrusion of non-Muslim symbols and culture into “Muslim” spaces.31 As two participants put it: B E L L O (a motorcycle taxi operator in his twenties): Actually, if Islamic sharia’s implemented, we’ll see improvements, because right now, even on the playground, you cannot tell the difference between Muslims and non-Muslims. They [Muslims and non-Muslims] regard themselves as the same, and everybody does what he wishes. In reality, if you saw a Muslim strolling with a lady, you might not think he’s a Muslim, but later he’ll claim he is and attend worship. You see, with implementation of Islamic sharia, things will be easy, so one can distinguish between Christians and Muslims. A B U B A K A R (unemployed, in his thirties): Indeed, we’ll see many improvements with the sharia in Sokoto. The first improvement is that the dignity of Sokoto state will be increased. Also, almost all calamities that are happening, like fires and others, will be reduced, because lack of sharia is the root of all calamities in the country. Because everywhere where many sins are committed there is a tendency for calamities to happen there. Also, Sokoto was the center of Islam in this country. You see, it’s proper to see religion be strong here in comparison with other states. It’s now our leaders’ job to be strict in their adherence [to sharia] and be proud of our country and emulate our forefathers, and indeed Sheikh Usman Dan Fodio.32

Drawing on and expanding the narrative offered by the relatively minor Preserving Authentic Islam frame, these arguments cut against one of the most important themes in elite discourse—that the goal of sharia imple-

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mentation was not to create an Islamic state but simply to ensure the rights of Muslims and create a more favorable context for economic and social development. For these men, growing public immorality not only has economic consequences but endangers the very ability of the Muslim community to draw even a symbolic boundary between dar al-Islam (the “house of Islam”) and the rest of the world. Sharia implementation allows Muslims to restore some of that Islamic “space” while continuing to function within a multireligious, or even secular, society. Direct attacks on Western culture as the source of public immorality played a relatively minor role in official sharia narratives (only 7 percent of my media sample relied on the Preserving Authentic Islam frame), but a much larger proportion of my interviewees were willing to attribute the north’s moral challenges to outside influence. Although only five of the fourteen groups made explicit use of this frame by attributing the moral failings of Nigerian Muslims to exposure to Western culture, speakers during all the interviews criticized the skimpy clothing worn by some women (presumably influenced, although this generally went unsaid, by fashions from the south or from Western-style media). “Improper” dress, especially among women students at Sokoto’s two institutions of higher education, was a major concern among many people I spoke to during my fieldwork, and a stern lecture on the “evils” of revealing clothing was a central part of the orientation proceedings for new students at the Sokoto College of Education. Most of my female students wore hijab that covered them from their heads to below their waists, although I also often saw Muslim women in headties and shawls. Hijab were the mandatory uniform for girls at many schools in Sokoto, although none went so far as Zamfara, which mandated a “modest” dress code for National Youth Service Corps volunteers, many whom were Christians from the south.33 Occasionally, the hijab’s vast unused space is even deployed as a billboard for state agencies and political candidates, who distribute them at rallies.34

Talking about Sharia (II): Making Sharia “Pay” Another important way in which the interview discussions mirrored elite frames was their shared emphasis on top-down, state-centric solutions to these otherwise personal, moral problems. Both official discourse and popular narratives treated sharia in “objectified” terms, as a set of rules and guidelines to be laid down and followed, with nearly all participants taking on an active role in debating and defining what adherence to the “spirit” of sharia means. In this interview, one woman begins by making the connec-

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tion between personal immorality and perception that crime is increasing, suggesting that the state must take firm, even punitive, action in religion’s name to solve the problem. Cast Aisha (a trader and part-time student in her forties) Bilkisu (a student in her twenties) Umu (a trader in her fifties) Ummi (a hair braider in her twenties) Ramatu (a trader in her twenties)35 A I S H A : Sharia’s very important, but now most people don’t want to practice it. Just look at what’s happening in the university. Married woman will wear skimpy clothing to school, and men will chase them, because they cannot tell them apart from unmarried girls. Serious measures need to be taken. So sharia is important. Because so much has been said [in Sokoto] about girls who wear tight dresses to seduce the lecturers, and the campaign [a morality drive launched at a local college] is still on, but they can’t stop those [girls] that wear miniskirts with small veils. Theft is rampant. When we go to exam halls and bring our handbags, some students will go and steal [mobile] handsets or money. So measures have to be taken to stop this. It means sharia should be implemented to stop those girls from wearing tight dresses and those who steal or drink.

Whether it’s because some of her classmates are using their bodies to get ahead (and while I can’t directly testify to the frequency with which this sort of thing happens on Nigerian college campuses, I can say for certain that the vast majority of my students and fellow lecturers believed it to be commonplace) or because she’s constantly afraid that her hard-earned wages will be stolen from her, Aisha doesn’t see how these problems can be addressed unless the state government can be convinced to play an active role in regulating moral affairs. A few minutes later, Aisha and her fellow participants followed this reasoning to its logical conclusion, arguing that if the state takes the cumulative problem of lax morality seriously, it might also be more likely to tackle broad, structural inequalities in Muslim society: B I L K I S U : I think food prices will be controlled when sharia is implemented, because correct weights and measures will be used [in markets]. Scales like the ones they use in Saudi Arabia will be introduced, and that’ll bring success to the

Muslims Talking Politics / 195 people. So all this indecent dressing in our campuses and the high food prices will be fixed if there’s sharia. U M U : It’s necessary for the government to assist the poor, because nobody wants to live with poverty. A I S H A : The poor people should be helped, because nowadays you have children, but you can’t afford to send them to school, like what they show on RTV [Rima Television, the Sokoto State–owned television station] about lepers who live in a village, but nobody cares about them—they have no work, no income. They are just surviving. So you see, what is the use of this?

Each interview began (after a brief preamble and introductions) with three questions asking participants to describe what came to mind when they thought about sharia, to offer arguments for and against sharia implementation, and to describe what they expected or hoped for when sharia was implemented in Sokoto in 2000. Across all interviews, statements adopting the ED & SJ frame appeared ninety-two times—the most frequently of any frame. But in this conversation, we also see one of the first and most important ways in which my interviewees simultaneously adopted and pushed back against elite framings. While media coverage around the sharia question tended to focus on large, national questions— constitutionality, human rights, elite political wrangling—these women wanted an immediate end to immoral behavior that directly affected them as well as the assurance that sharia would “pay off” in ways that would be immediately visible in the lives of poor and working-class Muslims. The policies my respondents cited most approvingly were often the same championed in official discourse—half of the interviews featured positive nods toward state policies in Sokoto and neighboring Zamfara designed to lower marriage costs by banning “ostentatious” ceremonies and inflated bridewealth demands or by subsidizing dowry payments. However, my participants often made their point with thinly veiled cynicism by referring to sharia implementation in the future tense—“if sharia was to be implemented, this is what we would hope for.” While they understood that sharia had been tried in the opening years of the Fourth Republic, nearly all my interviewees argued that it had failed to deliver and could hardly be said to be present at all in their daily lives. In all, the Holding Elites Accountable frame was the second most popular among my interviewees, appearing seventy-three times during discussion of these three questions. Although in the media, this frame was often invoked in the context of the low-hanging fruit of swift and severe punishment for civil servants and judges, my participants applied it more specifically and

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to a much wider range of issues and behaviors. Indeed, participants in all fourteen interviews evoked narratives about rich and powerful Muslims who abuse their wealth and connections in daily life as a key justification for sharia implementation: B I L K I S U : No, there isn’t sharia in Sokoto, and even if there is, the rich have broken  it. It started from their homes, because after ceremonial activities were banned, the wealthy people take their children to hotels and do their ceremony there. And the poor people will also want to do so, even if they don’t have the means. U M U : When sharia’s implemented, all these social vices, like our youths that smoke Indian hemp [marijuana], huff “solution,”36 and rape married women or kill somebody, will be stopped. U M M I : Unless the government will catch them all. R A M AT U : Serious measures have to be taken if they want to implement sharia in Sokoto. F A C I L I TAT O R : Is it the leaders that must take the measures, or anybody who’s a Muslim? U M M I : Once the leaders agreed, the subordinates have no option. Whatever the leaders say, he will follow. But if you as a leader did not take measures, how can your follower take one? F A C I L I TAT O R : That means the leaders have a role to play in implementing sharia? B I L K I S U : The leaders won’t allow sharia to survive because they know that they will fall victim to it. We know when there was sharia in Sokoto, we heard a rumor that whoever wants to take the lehe [traditional gifts provided by a suitor to a potential bride] can do it in the night so that the authorities will not see them. Later on, all types of ceremonies were banned, but the rich people will go to hotel and do it there. The poor people will want to copy them just to have it themselves. With time, everything has come back. So if the leaders will  implement sharia, then it should start with them because “charity begins at home.” They have to correct themselves before they can correct others. I think that is the only way we can progress, when the leaders stand to be corrected.

Nigeria has long had a reputation for the outspokenness of its civil society activists, but the forthrightness with which many ordinary Nigerians eagerly criticized specific local politicians took me by surprise. Many reports on sharia implementation have remarked that although promises to

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investigate and prosecute elite corruption through sharia institutions have been plentiful, harsh punishments have fallen disproportionately on poor men and women. In particular, sharia regulations prohibiting drinking, ostentatious marriage ceremonies, and praise-singing hardly prevented elites from indulging in the privacy of their homes or in upscale hotels.37 And in a society where marriage is the only clear path to “social maturity,” the social tensions created by the cadre of young men who cannot accumulate the financial resources necessary to become adults have helped create an atmosphere of social insecurity.38 As many of my participants made clear, they understood this to be a problem requiring both a religious and a political solution. One woman, a teacher in her late forties, expressed this sentiment as directly as I ever heard it: The importance of religion in government is that by using sharia, people will know it’s an honest government. If we look at the three religions39 we have in Nigeria, none of them preach injustice and distrust. All religions know there’s deceit and cheating, and none of them gives you permission to cheat your brother. Therefore, what brings deceit is selfishness. If government can fight against selfishness and corruption among people and put the love of their country in their hearts, then government has involved itself in religion.40

Sometimes, these sentiments echoed the Unity in Faith frame so prominent in mass media discourse. As this woman argues, the truth is that whatever Nigeria’s public culture might sanction, none of the nation’s religious traditions endorse “injustice” toward those who are weak and unable to defend their own interests. However, unlike in official narratives, her concerns were not tempered by a conciliatory nod toward the Christian community. Others even went so far as to argue that sharia’s success might actually lead some Christians to convert to Islam—a sentiment rarely voiced directly in the mainstream press. But for most, the primary allure of sharia was the hope that it would extend a new moral and legal order across all aspects of society, providing a spiritual incentive and potential sanctions to Muslim elites who failed to look after the needs of their constituents. For them, the chaotic nature of Nigeria’s political system was not, as most research in political science and economics would suggest, a structural problem imposed by poor institutions41 but the result of the fundamental moral inadequacy of the political class. My efforts to lead a classroom debate at Usmanu Danfodiyo University on whether or not there were cultural prerequisites to democratiza-

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tion were met, perhaps not surprisingly, by this same insistence on the centrality of leadership values in determining a society’s fate. I responded by pointing to the pessimistic outlook on human nature held by the American framers, arguing that the government of the United States was built on the supposition that politicians would act selfishly (and even greedily) but that it was possible to use these flaws to help the system function. I talked about James Madison’s vision of “checks and balances,” known to American schoolchildren as the basis of the US political system: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.42

At least some of my students were impressed by this idea, but the majority concluded that Nigeria was past the point where “mere” institutional fixes would work. The most pessimistic argued that Nigeria was “sick” from its years of military rule and corruption and that only truly radical solutions could possibly have any effect. While their knowledge of sharia allowed them to see exactly how local circumstances had departed from Islamic values, they felt individually powerless to do anything. For them, nothing but the alignment of state and divine authority could provide the necessary incentives for good government. While sharia was often portrayed in official discourse as its own “democratic dividend,” my participants emphasized that Islamic legal reforms would only be deemed successful if they brought social justice and accountability in their wake.

Talking about Sharia (III): Rights, Community, and Democracy The resonance of the ED & SJ and Holding Elites Accountable frames in conversations about sharia implementation among “ordinary” Muslims suggests the influence of elite narratives in shaping how citizens think about

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and evaluate government’s responsibility toward them. But by pushing back against the vague promises of “development” in favor of more concrete improvements in their lives, my interviewees also suggest their accumulated mistrust of elite intentions and motives. Citizen and elite interests most clearly diverge, however, on their understanding and use of the Rights frame. The use of “rights talk” around the sharia issue in elite discourse tends to present living under Islamic law as a right in itself deserving of constitutional recognition. The value of democratic government, by this logic, is that it provides procedures (majority rule and federalism) that ensure this “right” to religious recognition is protected. However, very few interviewees evoked the claim that sharia benefited Muslims by helping them secure their rights; it came up only twenty-five times during those initial questions, less than a third as often as the other “major” official frames. And when rights language did appear, it was applied thinly, with participants often stating with little or no elaboration that when sharia was implemented, Muslims were given their “rights.” Ultimately, only two participants across all fourteen interviews explicitly asserted that sharia was a constitutional or human right. Why did my interviewees invoke classic “rights talk” so much less frequently than elites? For one, whether or not citizens adopt rights language to describe their problems or to demand redress depends on individual and institutional contexts. In the United States, “rights talk” pervades elite political and legal discourse about access to state services, but subaltern communities and their members seldom use rights language to describe their efforts to demand services or support from the government agencies tasked to serve them. Citizens may be familiar with or even conversant in rights language in theory, but unless they both feel empowered and are working within institutions they believe will be responsive to their demands, “the ideal of the autonomous and rights bearing individual  .  .  . remain[s] rather far from the tip of the tongue.”43 The moral language of Holding Elites Accountable, which links democratic institutions and procedures to religious values, seems to be a more powerful means for most participants to demand accountability and change than the more abstract language of rights. The fact that the interviewees rarely presented themselves as rightsbearing individuals in need of state protection didn’t mean that they avoided rights talk entirely, however. Take this conversation, based around a later interview question that asked participants to discuss the appropriate level of government support for religion:

200 / Chapter Seven Cast Aliyu Umar Kabiru Abdullahi Mohammed Shehu Bashir (all students in their twenties and early thirties)44 A L I Y U : Assalamu alaikum (peace be upon you). To be candid, anyone who becomes a leader shouldn’t be one-sided, because somebody, a leader—for instance, a governor, or head of state, or a chairman or a councilor—remember that you’re the leader of all the people, Muslims, Christians, pagans, and all in all, in your state, you’re their leader. You must give each his right according to his ratio. And you the leader, if you’re a Muslim, stay a Muslim, and don’t change from this position, and allow others to express their views. This is my view. U M A R : Assalamu alaikum. To me, on this discussion, to be honest, in my view, anybody that becomes a leader, and he is a Muslim, to me, he shouldn’t assist any religions except Islam. Why? Because if you said, “OK, these citizens are Christians, let me assist them and allow them to do all what they can do on Christianity,” you help the development of their religion, or you contribute to another religion. If we talk about religion, there’s only one religion known to God, since God said that Islam is the only religion. In another [Quranic] verse, it states that anybody who chooses a religion other than Islam will not be accepted, and on the Day of Judgment, he’ll be among the losers. So, to me, in my opinion, if Allah makes you a leader and you’re a Muslim, you should assist nothing more than your religion, Islam. The point of assisting a non-Muslim shouldn’t come up. You shouldn’t think that since these Christians are citizens, you’ll help both Muslims and non-Muslims. Yes, give them their rights according to their ratio, give them their rights. But don’t think of giving them anything because their religion says so. Just give them their rights, like food and their ratio from the federal revenue allocation, give them that. But don’t assist them with anything religious. As a Muslim leader, don’t do this. Candidly, as a Muslim leader, concentrate only on your religion, your wealth, your body, your knowledge. Everything should be concentrated only on your religion. This is what a Muslim leader will do, in my own opinion. As a Muslim, you only assist the religion of Islam. KABIRU: Assalamu alaikum. Well, on this issue, I don’t see any reason why a leader should be neutral on religious matters. Does “neutral” mean you don’t have re-

Muslims Talking Politics / 201 ligion? Well, as a leader, be firm in your position, take care of the people you’re governing. Leadership means to serve people. Give everybody his right. But emphasizing your religion of Islam is very important. Leadership should be a tool to encourage you to be a real Muslim. What I mean is that, whenever a problem arises on Islamic matters, use the opportunity to solve the problem. Then you’re a serious Muslim. But to be neutral? As a Muslim? This means Muslims have lost your leadership. Yes, you aren’t supposed to be neutral because you became a leader. No, be firm in your leadership. As my partner pointed out, give them their right in federal allocation, but be informed as a Muslim leader, if you attempt to assist any non-Islamic religion, then you are out of the religion. You’ve gone astray. You are among the “losers.” A B D U L L A H I : Assalamu alaikum. We’re discussing the religious neutrality of a leader. Is it right for a leader to be neutral? Neutrality means “constitution.” But what the constitution says, for example, is that it is not good for a man to have any religion, since the country is multireligious society. This is a constitutional statement. But as a Muslim, you shouldn’t go with the constitution as a leader. And as my partner said just now, if you agreed to assist any other religion apart from Islam, then this means you’ve embraced that religion, since you’ve improved that religion. Therefore, as a Muslim, it’s compulsory for you, we are begging you, to assist your religion; it’s mandatory to assist your religion. If it happens that you assist your religion, any Muslim will commend you. Especially if you can give him N100,000 [about US$650] that’s also partly religious assistance, and it will help the religion progress. Because if you assist a Muslim and you are a Muslim leader, in fact, you assist your religion. That assistance you give will solve many of his problems. Therefore, it’s better to assist your religion by assisting Muslims. However, as a leader, you must give each equal rights from the revenue allocation of the nation, since we are in a democracy now. Because you have to understand that many Christians voted for you. And they voted for you because they want you to assist them, too. Assist them with all their rights. It is good to do justice and assist them by giving them their rights. But as a Muslim leader, it’s mandatory to assist more, give emphasis on your religion, whether you like it or not.

Here, rights are defined not in the terms used by international activists but in the familiar language of the federal character language (and the Muslims and the Federal Character frame, which played a decidedly minor role in official discourse). All speakers acknowledged that, whatever their personal feelings, the reality of living in a multireligious democracy required that the Christian community be accorded their “rights” and given

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their “due” under the terms of the national bargain. But as each made clear, these rights extend no further than the minimum legal recognition afforded by Nigeria’s constitutional order. Far from adopting a “secular” outlook (which they equate with the rejection of all religion), these young men argue that Muslim leaders have a positive responsibility to ensure that state resources flow toward Muslim citizens—a responsibility that, they acknowledge, is easiest to fulfill through democratic institutions. They also take for granted that in a democracy, Muslims will be in a position to ensure that their coreligionists are accorded their “fair” share in Nigeria. And in communities where Muslims predominate, this share—including financial benefits and recognition for Islamic values and sharia—should be far larger than whatever is left to other groups. As Abdullahi put it, “If you assist a Muslim and you’re a Muslim leader, in fact, you assist your religion.” While it sometimes took different forms, this was a popular sentiment. Participants in eight groups invoked the “religious rights” of communities and individuals to demand government support for religious affairs, and in six, participants asserted that Muslim-majority communities Muslims ought to receive “preferential” government support (financially and in terms of policy adoption) for religious activities like sharia. This way of thinking about rights as benefits to be allocated along identity lines also cuts against the reassurances I was often given by my friends, neighbors, and colleagues about their commitment to ensuring that Sokoto (and indeed, the north more generally) was a safe, even welcoming, space for Christians and other “nonindigenous” minorities. One key piece of evidence, often cited to me in interviews and informal conversations, for Sokoto’s commitment to formal inclusion came in January 2008, when the state governor’s office announced that it would be officially discontinuing the practice (common in most other states) of charging higher school fees for nonindigene families. Indeed, the announcement gained national media attention, as it was taken as a sign of Governor Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko’s progressive social reform agenda. In the minds of many of Sokoto’s middle- and upper-class citizens, this was an indication that Christian claims of discrimination and marginalization in Muslim-majority communities were groundless and that so long as Christians understood not to rock the political boat by taking sides in “Muslim” affairs, they could be granted some (but not all) of the same rights as “real” citizens across the state. When it came to the interviewees, their ability to imagine Christians as “full” citizens of Sokoto was even more limited. Although nearly all the interviews featured at least one mention or acknowledgement of the fact

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that there was a substantial (if generally unmeasured) Christian community in Sokoto, not a single participant argued in favor of providing them with a say, formally or otherwise, in whether or not sharia should be extended across the state. Although Christians were understood to be equal members in the national polity, when it came to local affairs, it was simply taken for granted that only Muslims could be indigenes in Sokoto and that Sokoto and communities like it ought to be treated as Muslim spaces by the political process. Whatever this vision of government is, it isn’t exactly liberal democracy. None of my participants ever really acknowledged that sharia implementation might do harm to Christians or seemed to give much consideration to how sharia policies, even if they improved governance, would alienate Christians from social life. In particular, the logic of the federal character often shined through not only when discussing the “fair” distribution of resources and recognition but in thinking about membership in the political community. Here, the group continues their discussion, focusing this time on whether or not a Muslim should consider supporting non-Muslim candidates: M O H A M M E D : Assalamu alaikum. We’re discussing Nigeria’s multiple religious or ethnic groups and whether people of different religions should live together or apart. What I understand is that this political dispensation isn’t an Islamic political dispensation. It’s democracy; it’s a government elected by the people and to work for the people. So to me, there’s no point in making conflict [about religion] in society. There’s every possibility that a non-Muslim could embrace Islam during the campaign or during political meetings and so on. Even though you decided to meet on political grounds, still, as a Muslim, you must find an avenue to assist your religion in politics. For example, say two people are contesting [an election], a Muslims and a non-Muslim. To me, the Muslim should think about what will be better for him so that he shouldn’t be part of a group that might go astray, both in this world and in the hereafter. He should never allow the word “democracy” to confuse him and make him go to the wrong way. What I think here, in my own view, is wherever two people, a Muslim and a non-Muslim, come to you, no matter how lax and soft that Muslim is, to choose him is far better than to choose a non-Muslim. This is because, I swear to God, these nonbelievers, as you see them, no matter how they come near us politically, they will never agree with us in their minds. We were told that unless we follow them, they will never agree with us. Allah told us in the Quran that unless we follow them, they will not agree with us. Therefore, no matter how lax a Muslim is, if he

204 / Chapter Seven succeeds  in  that position, there’ll be at least a slight positive change in favor of Islam. But if conflict and hatefulness are encouraged, there won’t be unity in the country, or in the politics, since the politics isn’t an Islamic politics, in which only Muslims will be allowed to participate. Since it’s a democracy, whether we like it or not, we have to join the system. But whoever comes to you, between a Muslim and a non-Muslim, you must choose the Muslim, even if you don’t belong to the same party. If you vote non-Muslim, Allah said you will regret it later or sooner, because they will hate us. If you’re invited for some political campaign, you can join them, but your thinking must be geared toward Muslims. You have to be conscious of your religion so that you’ll live peacefully in this world and the hereafter. That’s my opinion. S H E H U : Assalamu alaikum. Sincerely, I think that if that’s the case, I’d strongly advise Muslims to shun non-Muslim contestants. This is because Islam does not give room to any Muslims to prefer a non-Muslim over a Muslim. As a Muslim, to take your hand and vote for a non-Muslim, why? As a Muslim, to take your right hand and vote for a non-Muslim isn’t right. If that’s the case, honestly, right now I can’t vote for any non-Muslim candidates. He can only lose my vote. That’s my opinion. B A S H I R : Assalamu alaikum. The question is whether to hate each other or to join hands together for the sake of democracy. Religiously, well, what I want you to understand is that these politics are not “religious politics,” so the question of hating each other doesn’t even come up. What you’ll ask is, “Who are the leaders? And what are their aims and objectives?” If you obviously understand the person who’ll lead you and you know he has positive aims and objectives, then you just vote for him. But if you understand that he has bad aims and objectives, then you shouldn’t vote for him. What I see here—yes, with all these—you’ve got to be conscious; no matter how lax a Muslim is, he’s better than a non-Muslim. But if things become ambiguous, like our condition now in Nigeria, where things get mixed up, maybe the party you are supporting here in the north is headed by a non-Muslim in the south. Nothing’s wrong with this. All that you really can see are your brothers in Islam here in the north. So no problem. But you still have to dislike non-Muslims. But you don’t have to be open about it, because if it’s open, there’ll be problems. You should only dislike them in the way that your religion says. You should show good intentions that make them understand your religion. By doing that, you might impress them to embrace Islam. That’s what I think.

These men are divided, as are most Nigerian Muslims, about both the wisdom and the practicalities of political collaboration with Christians at

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the national level. Nearly all of them acknowledged that as desirable as that may be, in a religiously divided nation such as theirs, democracy can’t be an “Islamic” political system. Democracy offers Muslims and Christians specific rights that originate not in the religious obligations of the rulers to the ruled but in the nature of the political institutions themselves. However, in practice, the contents of these rights are shaped by popular perceptions of what Muslims “need” from their government and by the fear that in the absence of constant vigilance, Muslim interests will be overrun. Thus when religious leaders like Sheikh Gumi argue that Muslims should vote only for Muslims, many northerners nod in agreement, understanding that “democracy” is their best path to a more pious society and a responsive government. Read this way, support for democracy among my interviewees can seem thin and instrumental, tied to the belief that Muslims should benefit by leveraging it to extract their “fair share” of recognition and resources from the federal government. But this doesn’t really do justice to the nuance with which my participants approached the question of whether or not Muslims were better off with democracy. For many, the real advantage of democracy was that it instilled accountability and created incentives for elites to listen and respond to the needs of citizens. Below, a group of women considers the merits of democracy and military rule. They argue that democratic governments are more likely to pursue policies of social justice and development for Muslims than military regimes, because locally elected (Muslim) politicians are more likely to be accountable to Islamic religious norms. In their words, democracy provides an opportunity to require politicians to act in accordance with the demands of their Muslim constituents to advance the faith and meet the needs of the faithful: M A R YA M (a teacher in her twenties): In a military regime, you have no right to talk. You don’t even see the [leader’s] room, to say less of telling the leader that he is not doing well or that he should act better. Therefore, democratic government is better for the Muslims than military government. A S A B E (a teacher in her midforties): Not only Muslims. Even the Christians know that democratic government’s better than the military. T A L AT U (a teacher in her late twenties): Because you can say your views, you can give advice, but in a military regime, you can’t give any advice to the leaders. But now even the religious malamai can preach to the leaders, and they [the leaders] understand them. The reason why you can’t give your advice under a military regime is because he [the local governor] is from another part of the country. But in a democracy, you elect him, you know him, he’s your

206 / Chapter Seven brother. Therefore, you have every right to tell him to be a better leader, and he’ll hear you. L A D I (a teacher in her forties): Therefore, democracy’s better than a military regime. That’s even why they say you don’t have any rights. But if you have rights, you can correct what is not good. But during military rule, you can’t go and lodge any complaints. Nobody will look at you. F AT I (a teacher in her twenties): Then we can say that we like democratic government better than the military government. Because as of now, like during fasting [Ramadan], things were given to the Muslims. Some centers were opened for the less privileged Muslims to go and break their fasting. They built so many juma’a [Friday] mosques in places where there weren’t any. Islamiyya schools [religious schools that also offer curricula in “Western” subjects] were built, and Islamic teachers were employed and paid salaries. All these things contribute to why the Muslims love democratic government more than a military regime. Z A I N A B (a teacher in her forties): And you see, in this present democratic government, centers are located at strategic places for the less privileged to go and break their fasting. But a soldier won’t do this gesture, and most of them aren’t Muslims. During a democratic regime, you get people that want to assist and uplift the religion, centers are opened where people are preachers, and people are enlightened, and people do understand what Islamic religion is all about. But during a military regime, they don’t care about all these [things]; they don’t care at all, and this is very important. Democracy shows how important the Muslims are, and they benefit more from it. L A D I : And honestly, in this regime, it’s our brother in Islam that’s elected, and he knows our needs and what the state needs. But a military leader, he is from another part of the country and may be a Christian. He may not know our problems and what we need. He doesn’t know what Nigeria needs, nor the state. But if an indigene is elected, he knows what the poor people need and what they don’t need.45

As each of these women suggest, Nigerian Muslims look to both democratic and religious institutions and values to make their needs known to state authorities and to ensure that these authorities will be held accountable if they are not met. In all, speakers in six groups argued that democratic leaders are more likely to respond to citizen demands when they are framed in religious terms. But while the language they use is instrumental, it is focused as much on political goods, even if wrapped in a thick layer of religious particularism, as on economic ones. To be clear, my interviewees didn’t universally praise democracy. Partici-

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pants in ten interviews pointed critically to a decline in physical security under civilian rule, praising the efforts of former military administrators to instill social order. Indeed, many believed that this tradeoff between security and responsiveness was inevitable, with neither type of government entirely able to address all their concerns. In the end, however, most came down emphatically on the side that democracy is “better” for Muslims. The opportunity to be able to be governed by Muslims with strong local ties (several pointed specifically to the fact that, under military rule, Sokoto State was once administered by a Christian naval officer) clearly outweighed the potential disorder democracy could bring. But the prospect of accountability, reinforced by both political and religious mechanisms, outweighed all other concerns.

Supporting Democracy in the Sharia Era? The tenor of the interviews suggests that, on the whole, elite framing deeply and significantly shapes mass discourse around the sharia issue. While this sort of analysis isn’t able to demonstrate a clear, causal link, the participants relied heavily on themes, symbols, and images drawn from official frames (particularly ED & SJ and Holding Elites Accountable) to make the case for sharia implementation and its basic compatibility with democracy in a multireligious society. Although my participants were less concerned with compromise or moderation in the face of Christian opposition, they adopted at least some of the moderated tone evident in elite frames, which sought to allay these fears by presenting sharia implementation as a project grounded in Nigerian constitutional law and consistent with broadly held national values. But frames that cut against what they see as their own interests don’t easily fool “ordinary” Muslims. Official discourse relied heavily on abstract rights claims and a passive understanding of sharia’s transformative effects to make its case for implementation. The elite focus on “enlightenment” campaigns, religious education, and public support for religious facilities often seemed to suggest that concrete economic benefits would arrive through the actions of an Islamic “invisible hand” rather than by direct effort. My participants invested the Rights, ED & SJ, and Holding Elites Accountable frames with a set of specific, tangible responsibilities and obligations on the part of northern governments, focused on direct intervention to improve their material welfare. Moreover, they insisted that elites must do more than simply acknowledge that sharia mandates apply to them—they must change their behaviors as well. To achieve these goals, sharia implementation dramatically expanded

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the field of state activity in daily life. Most of my interviewees seemed comfortable with this prospect despite their mistrust of elite motives. They are inviting the government into their homes, their wardrobes, their businesses, and their classrooms and asking them to enforce a moral code of behavior, without which long-standing social and economic problems cannot be addressed. But by agreeing to this expansion of state power, there seems to be an increasingly adamant expectation that elites adhere to the same standards and that for them not to do so endangers the very progress promised by these reforms. Despite the widespread belief that sharia implementation has failed to hold elites accountable, it remains resiliently popular among middle- and lower-class Muslims. According to the only reliable data we have, support for sharia with the lower socioeconomic strata actually increased from 2001 to 2007, declining only among members of the wealthiest one-third of northern society (Table 7.1). Sadly, the Afrobarometer survey has not asked about support for sharia since 2007, so it’s unclear how this trend has translated into the present. My return visits to northern Nigeria in 2012 and 2013 suggest that, at least impressionistically, the demand remains stable. Matthew Kirwin, who first reported this gap between the wealthy and the rest, found it puzzling, noting that, “due to reports of the way that Shari’a has discriminated against the poor[,] it is surprising that the lowest economic group would show increased support for Shari’a.”46 However, my interviewees offered a simple explanation. Most Muslims believe that the rich and powerful don’t play by the same moral and legal rules as everyone else. And although they don’t believe that sharia as it was implemented succeeded in changing this fact, they remain hopeful that it might yet. How has the continued popularity of sharia shaped perceptions of democracy among “ordinary” Muslims? Are Muslims who view democracy, at least in part, as a path to sharia and moral revival inevitably shallow, “con-

Table 7.1. Support for sharia implementation by economic group (in sharia states)

Upper level Middle level Lowest level

2001 (%)

2007 (%)

57 43 53

52 68 64

Adapted from Matthew Kirwin, “Popular Perceptions of Shari’a Law in Nigeria,” Afrobarometer Briefing Paper, no. 58, p. 8. Groups based on self-evaluation of comparative economic status. 2001, n = 726; 2007, n = 729.

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tingent” democrats? Nigerians, like most Africans, experience an enormous gap between their support for democracy as an ideal and their satisfaction with it in practice. Given how poorly the current regime has performed, this isn’t terribly surprising (even if, as I suggested earlier, Nigerians are even harder on their regime than citizens in more obviously authoritarian nations). But despite the widespread belief that democracy was performing poorly, overall “demand” for democracy remained fairly stable across the country. While there was some decline, citizens in sharia states and across the south registered roughly equal levels of support for democracy in principle throughout the first decade of the Fourth Republic (Figure 7.1). The puzzle, however, was the substantial difference in how Muslims perceived the “supply” of democracy they were receiving. Although overall satisfaction with democracy began to decline almost immediately following the 1999 transition, northerners remained, on the whole, far more likely to approve of how democracy was practiced than their southern counterparts (Figure 7.2). One possibility for this divergence is that, for cultural reasons, northerners are less critical of the existing system and more likely to remain satisfied and wait patiently for improvement than their neighbors, for example, in the Delta region, where popular antistate violence has been a common means of expressing discontent with the status quo.47 Another is that Muslims are more satisfied with democracy as it is simply because

Figure 7.1. Support for Democracy in Nigeria, Sharia vs. Non-Sharia States (2000–2008)

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Figure 7.2. Satisfaction with Democracy in Nigeria, Sharia vs. Non-Sharia States (2000–2008)

it has brought them sharia, and they are unwilling to criticize elites who have fulfilled such an important religious mission. The rise of Boko Haram, both as an expression of Muslim frustration and, more clearly still, as a source of immediate danger and anxiety, suggests that neither is particularly compelling. Certainly, both fail to accord with the experiences of my interviewees, whose cynicism about elites and the status of sharia came through clearly. Even a cursory glance at the letters to the editor, commentaries on radio call-in programs, and a host of other media outlets will find Muslims expressing critical perspectives on the current state of moral, economic, and political affairs. They weren’t letting their elites off easily. A third explanation, one that resonates with the ideas expressed by my interviewees, is that the sharia debate has broadened what Muslims are willing to view as the “dividends of democracy.” Pessimists who argue that satisfaction with democracy in the Islamic world hinges on instrumental “payouts” often observe that, when asked to define democracy, Muslims rank economic outcomes like reduced inequality or government efforts to provide jobs and redistribute wealth higher than the protection of civil liberties or fair elections. They are, to borrow a term from Doh C. Shin, “poorly informed” democrats, valuing populist, social outcomes in democracy’s name more than the rights and protections of civil liberties that form the “real” core of liberal democracy.48 But as Lawrence Rosen argues, the language of rights and freedoms isn’t the primary idiom in which

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Muslims think about their “place in the political and moral order.” Rather, their central concept is “justice,” a “term that suffuses every element of Islamic thought and culture from the Qur’an to the most commonsensical of aphorisms” and defines the parameters by which Muslims imagine the good society. And what is “justice” in Islam? Rosen quotes from a fatwa issued in 2005 by Dr. Muzzamil Siddiqi, the former president of the Islamic Society of North America, which defined justice as the combination of ‘adl (“equality and balance”) and ‘qist (“share, portion, allotment”). Sounding remarkably like a Nigerian, Siddiqi argued that justice exists when “every one and every thing [is given] its proper due.”49 While there’s certainly an instrumental component to my interviewees’ suggestions that for Muslim elites to give ordinary citizens their “due” required a package of populist economic policies, what they want most is a just society, one in which there is no contradiction among religious, political, and economic needs. Near the end of each interview, participants were asked to discuss what Muslims want from democracy. Two interesting findings emerged. First, what my interviewees said they wanted from government “as Muslims” was often only a little different from what Nigerians want generally—better infrastructure, security, education, improved employment prospects.50 There were references to specifically “Islamic” goods—mosques, salaries for malamai, new Islamic schools—but these demands were presented in the context of general moral revival, which they saw as an obvious prerequisite to all positive change. Second, in about half of the groups, participants demanded that the state undertake the direct provision of goods to needy individuals as a form of systemized, state-led Islamic charity. Ostensibly, this was to take the form of zakkat, the obligatory charitable giving required of all Muslims as one of the five “pillars” of the faith. Nine states set up official boards or agencies to collect and distribute zakkat, but in most cases, early enthusiasm and promises of substantial budgetary support soon evaporated. Instead, most have substituted some form of direct gifting from state officials and coffers to needy citizens, playing up the religious symbolism around even small-scale social welfare projects. Whether it was dowry assistance, the donation of motorcycles to young out-of-work men (for starting a business as a motorcycle taxi driver), or the distribution of foodstuffs, the spectacle of giveaways has proven impressive to many Nigerian Muslims. Often occurring during Ramadan or around other religious holidays, officials regularly spend millions of naira of state funds to distribute charity directly to select groups or communities. My interviewees associated this “charity” with both sharia and democracy—a “dividend” of responsive, elected governments responding to the needs of their people.

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The intersection of sharia and democracy, then, lies in the ability of both to contribute to the creation of the social requisites—public morality and elite accountability—necessary for the emergence of a just society. In expecting politicians to live up to their religious commitments, Nigerian Muslims argue that they lack the necessary resources (dowries, jobs, food, education) to live good Islamic lives and demand that the state help them achieve it by ensuring all receive their “fair” share. Sharia-inspired policies offer proof that elected officials care about protecting and serving Muslims as Muslims, even if the macrolevel results are not always satisfactory. Even though many Muslims are critical of democracy (especially of a democratic regime’s ability to provide security and order), frames like Rights and ED & SJ offer a ready-made logic for elites to transform sharia’s “dividends” into democratic ones. Because these frames endow even mundane policy changes with religious significance, political leaders who champion them are seen as not only defending the religious rights and prerogatives of the Muslim community but, brick by brick, constructing a more just society.

EIGHT

All Sharia Is Local: Islamic Law and Democracy in Practice

For all their interest to academics, the results of global public opinion surveys rarely generate more than fleeting media coverage. Most often, this coverage comes in the form of wry surprise at some odd statistic, a category in which Nigeria is a frequent player. Nigerians have been declared the “happiest” and “most optimistic” people on earth by the BBC and the Guardian, while Bloomberg and Forbes, using ever-so-slightly different indicators, number them among the “most depressed” and “stressed out.” In both cases, of course, the tone is mocking, with these numbers taken as either confirmation of Nigeria’s political and economic dysfunction or a window into the delusion of its citizens.1 As such, the whirlwind of international attention (and attendant controversy) around the Pew Research Center’s April 2013 report “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society” came as quite a shock. The reason? Pew found that in most Muslim-majority nations—including many with reputations for religious moderation and secularism—overwhelming majorities favored making sharia the official law of their land. For many observers, claims that 72 percent of Indonesian, 83 percent of Moroccan, and 86 percent of Malay Muslims supported the implementation of Islamic law were irreconcilable with the equally high numbers of those who expressed support for the freedom of non-Muslims to worship, rejected “extremism” (including suicide bombing) and harsh punishments for religious infractions, and favored the rights of women to choose for themselves whether or not they should veil in public.2 In Indonesia, self-proclaimed defenders of “moderate” Islam called for their countrymen and women to reject the survey outright, suggesting that it simply could not be trusted. For one feature writer for the Jakarta Post, Pew’s report amounted to an accusation that “the majority of Indonesians are Muslim radicals.” Their findings could only

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make sense, he argued, if the nearly 1,880 survey respondents were exaggerating in order to avoid appearing to be “bad Muslims.”3 Coverage in the West was similarly conflicted, although some stories made an attempt to dig a bit deeper by offering quotes from prominent Muslim academics like Princeton professor Amaney Jamal, who argued that the results reflected widespread demands for “social justice, equality and redistribution” rather than for strict, universalizing legal codes. The dominant journalistic tone, however, was confusion about what exactly these attitudes augured for future democratization and relations with the West.4 In this book, I’ve tried to offer a cure for some of this confusion by proposing a framework for making sense of the growing popularity of sharia and other Islamic legal principles in uncertain Muslim-majority democracies. The millions of Nigerians who insist that Islamic law and values must play a role in addressing the problems that plague their country are not fully “committed democrats,” at least not in the sense meant by most political scientists. But they should not be so easily dismissed as fundamentalists bent on theocratic rule or radicals desiring the destruction of their country’s tenuous multiethnic and multireligious bargains, either. The Nigerian sharia experience shows that popular beliefs and expectations about democracy in the Muslim world are far more flexible and contingent that we often assume, shaped by both long-standing social and institutional dynamics and local public reasoning. Nigeria’s sharia story shares a family resemblance with similar efforts in other uncertain Muslim-majority democracies by way of a pair of common historical experiences. First, new models of education, communication, and national identity opened the Islamic tradition to critical examination by millions of Muslims during the twentieth century, undermining hierarchies of religious knowledge and creating “Muslim public spheres” as new forums for debating the relationship between religious and political meaning. Second, colonial rulers and Muslim “reformers” dismantled the classical Islamic constitution in favor of top-down, codified Islamic legal systems that empowered political authorities to define sharia in ways that served their partisan interests. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, conflict over the institutional form and practice of Islamic law had become a mere facet of “normal” politics across northern Nigeria (chapter 3). When, following the long national nightmare of civil war and military rule, Nigerian elites came together to ensure ethnic and regional “fairness” and parity, the logic of the federal character principle was quickly picked up by religious elites as a powerful tool for demanding recognition and resources from the

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oil-rich federal state. In the hands of increasingly sophisticated, globally educated Islamic activists, the Nigerian state’s commitment to “balance” in public life became leverage to demand (and, during the 1980s and 1990s, to win) a greater role for Islamic values and symbols—including, ultimately, a renewed sharia—in the public sphere (chapter 4). In this sense, the emergence of “sharia politics” in countries like Nigeria is inseparable from the slow evolution of democratic politics across the Muslim world. The initial push for sharia seemed to have much more to do with partisan jockeying than a genuine commitment to religious revival, but the sharia question quickly became linked to broader concerns about the prospects for democracy as an engine of meaningful change. Popular aspirations for and suspicions of democracy within the Muslim community were reflected back in the elite-generated frames that dominated northern Nigerian media coverage of the sharia controversy. By portraying sharia as both a “dividend” and guarantor of democracy, the northern establishment argued that, whatever objections domestic Christian and international opponents might raise, the enshrinement of Islamic values in public life could be counted on to advance the needs of “ordinary” Muslims by ending corruption and elite impunity, spurring economic development and social justice, and ensuring a “fair share” of national resources (chapters 5 and 6). Ultimately, support for sharia seems to reinforce, rather than erode, support for democracy in citizens faced with evidence of poor regime performance (chapter 7). Perhaps the most important conclusion to draw is that if Muslims are going to define democracy for themselves, that definition is likely to reflect a great deal of the discursive traditions of Islam, including the centrality of God’s law in crafting a just society. In this final chapter, I have two primary goals. The first is to explore the normative and practical implications of thinking about the relationship between Islam and democracy as an ongoing negotiation rather than a given. The second is to reflect on the consequences of Nigeria’s national struggle over public religion—a struggle that, since 2009, has taken on an increasingly violence face with the rise of Boko Haram. The connection between Boko Haram’s emergence as an existential threat to the integrity of the Nigerian national project and the sharia controversy that preceded it isn’t as obvious as it looks to most observers, but they are hardly unrelated. By understanding why sharia implementation failed to yield the hoped-for “dividends of democracy,” we begin to see why it’s been so difficult to combat a radical insurgency that, even though it speaks for only a tiny minority, highlights a set of social, economic,

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and political grievances shared by nearly all ordinary Nigerian Muslims— grievances that are inseparable from the promises made by the northern political class about sharia’s transformative potential.

The Local Fate of Muslim Democracy One central thesis running throughout this book is that for all the attention paid to the globalization of Islamic identity and practice, most Muslim politics—and particularly most “sharia politics”—remains staunchly local in their origins and orientations. Although the turn to sharia in new and uncertain democracies is a global phenomenon, implementation projects rely heavily on local narratives and symbols, all employed by political and religious elites motivated primarily by a desire to solve local problems. This argument is, in some respects, a deeply unfashionable one. Some scholars, like Bassam Tibi and other scholars of the “ideology” of Islamist theology  and movements, tend to see all demands for the primacy of Islamic law as roughly equivalent products of a coherent, globalized intellectual program in which “ordinary Muslims” play a decidedly minor role.5 Others, particularly critical anthropologists like Benjamin Soares, rightly point out that colonial-era scholarship on “local” Islamic cultures and practices was often a tool of European power, with constructs like l’Islam noir (“black Islam”) reinforcing tired tropes about the timeless, “rigid and militant” Islam of the Middle East and the syncretism and unorthodoxy of “African” Islamic practices like Sufism. Even today, remnants of this approach can be found in policy analyses conducted on the behalf of the US intelligence community, in which Sufi brotherhoods are held up as “African” (read: less doctrinaire) alternatives to globally engaged salafi communities.6 As Soares notes, it would come as a surprise to many West African Muslims to hear that their faith is somehow less authentic than what’s practiced in Saudi Arabia or that they are only marginal participants in global Islamic discourses.7 To be clear, I’m not arguing that sharia revivalism in northern Nigeria emerged out of a purely local “version” of Islam or that transnational conversations played no part. Rather, global processes and dynamics (colonial “reforms” of Islamic legal systems, the “objectification” of the Islamic tradition, the rise of Muslim public spheres) intersect with and are mediated by local political dynamics such as democratic openings and representational incentive structures, which play an equally significant role in shaping the ground-level ideas about important issues like the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Put a different way, although the question of Islam’s

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“compatibility” with democracy is almost always debated among Muslims in terms of a globally shared “discursive tradition,” the answers—and particularly those offered in specific times and places by ordinary Muslim citizens—reflect the same sorts of political reasoning processes that take place in communities around the world. Nigerian Muslims clearly value sharia and want to preserve a place for Islam in political decision making. Yet their views on policy questions, and even general thematic concerns, emerge not out of rote appeals to theology but from a combination of personal experience, private values, and arguments, ideas, and narratives circulating out in the public sphere. Certainly, others have argued forcefully against the “Islamic exceptionalism” narrative that attributes unchanging, essentialist values to huge, diverse communities of people (my favorite is Olivier Roy’s condemnation of the “school of thought that considers politics among Muslims to be governed by some unchanging Koranic software implanted in their brains”), but few go so far as to offer an account of what this public reasoning process actually looks like.8 By arguing that Muslims form their ideas and opinions about the compatibility between Islam and democracy the same way that citizens form political opinions everywhere else, it becomes even more apparent that Islamic exceptionalism is a dead letter. Where does this story get us with respect to the future of democracy in the Muslim world? To be clear, the evidence that Muslims in states like Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan—all of which have recently experimented with sharia—are deeply or universally committed to a vision of liberal democracy is quite thin. Indeed, sociologist Amitai Etzioni has argued that whatever the survey data might say about Muslims’ views on democracy, the qualitative evidence from nations like Afghanistan suggests that many also support or condone illiberal social practices—child marriage, hudud punishments, and even so-called honor killings. For Etzioni, the realities of political life in the Muslim world simply fail to pass the “eyeball” test that many analysts apply to evaluate a region’s democratic prospects. Much like those Indonesian “moderates” quoted above, he concludes that the only explanation that accounts for both these survey findings and what he knows to be true about Muslim political life is that their data and presentation must be dishonest or politically motivated, skewed to make Muslims look “good” in the eyes of the international community.9 Nigerian Muslims hold many of these same illiberal values—values that, not surprisingly at all, are widely echoed in the national mass media. In addition to their notorious intolerance of homosexuality, Nigerian Muslims have periodically endorsed a husband’s right to strict control over his

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wives, including the “right” to beat them.10 The 2012–13 controversy over the northern political class’s staunch, almost taunting unwillingness to endorse a federal ban on child marriage in the name of “religious freedom” added more fuel to the fire of critics who see Muslim culture as fundamentally incompatible with liberal values. More than a decade after his rise to prominence in Zamfara, Yerima remains at the center of this controversy. It was, after all, his marriage to a thirteen-year-old Egyptian girl that brought the country’s long-standing failure to domesticate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child back into the public eye. But is it the existence of particular clusters of liberal public values that makes democracy “democratic,” or is it something else? Even in the United States, critical scholars have long known that the so-called consensus around the liberal ideals said to define American political life is a myth and that democratic institutions can function quite successfully without widespread agreement about core values like tolerance toward dissent.11 As Giuseppe DiPalma once argued, what separates democracy from its authoritarian alternatives isn’t the collective beliefs of its citizens but the tolerance for uncertainty it demands from its elites and political activists. By eschewing fixed outcomes for constant (if sometimes unsteadying) competition, democracy forces political actors to defend procedural equality over and above their own short-term interests.12 And although many of the policies that Nigerian sharia advocates fought hardest for would have closed off future political competition by demanding guaranteed recognition of the northern states as Islamic spaces, Muslim voices have also acknowledged the need to negotiate a balance between their own religious entitlements and those of others. By admitting (sometimes begrudgingly, but often quite willingly) that life in a multireligious state imposes limits on the scope of their Islamic legal ambitions, sharia activists in Nigeria offered an affirmation of democracy grounded much more in the peculiar discourse of the federal character principle and its insistence on fairness and balance than on genuinely “civic” values. Ultimately, I don’t have much to say on the subject of whether or not anyone’s particular version of “Islam” can produce mass values compatible with a deep commitment to liberal democratic principles. I do find strong evidence, however, that demands for sharia shape the terms in which Nigerian Muslims think about, and ultimately demand, democracy. Citizens engage in dialogue with elite-generated frames, adjusting how they interpret their messages in terms of their personal knowledge, experiences (individual and shared), and preferences. They also turn the long-standing trend toward the objectification of the Islamic legal tradition—the growing

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belief that the state should play a role in setting and enforcing the “rules” of good Islamic behavior—into a reason to value democracy as well. My interviewees saw sharia and democracy as means of addressing the moral failings that have undermined both civilian and military governments in Nigeria by viewing the Holding Elites Accountable frame in terms of their own personal behaviors and their commitment to fair and equitable development. But despite these hopes, and despite the justly celebrated news of a peaceful electoral transfer of power in the spring of 2015, most “ordinary” Nigerians—Muslims and Christians alike—remain skeptical about the prospects of democracy actually paying “dividends.” Even more than the violence of Boko Haram, it’s this popular discontent, and a growing unwillingness to accept the claim that political elites have their citizens’ best interests (religious and otherwise) at heart, that directly endangers Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.

Nigeria’s Sharia Paradox Another important theme has been the relevance of what I call the “sharia paradox” in shaping sharia aspirations in new and uncertain Muslim democracies. The tendency for expanded public participation in conversations about how to create a just Islamic society to coincide with growing popular support for narrow, state-centric versions of Islamic law is one of the most confusing aspects of the global sharia resurgence, and one about which there’s little scholarly agreement. Not surprisingly, some simply view the rise of state-sponsored sharia as an atavism representative of the real nature of Islamic theology. Others dismiss it as the misguided attempt of zealots to impose their misreadings of Islamic legal and political history onto millions, advocating instead for an Islamic “reformation” that liberalizes the religion–state relationship.13 A viewpoint I find more useful is the one advanced by Hussein Ali Agrama, discussed in chapter 3. Agrama’s account of sharia’s place within the contemporary Egyptian legal system (and in the imaginations of Egyptian Islamists) puts secular state power, rather than Islamist political ambitions, at the heart of the story.14 In his telling, contemporary sharia movements are products of the secularization of political power in Muslim communities, a long-term process that’s transformed religious values and practices into objects of state supervision and control. In Nigeria, the legal transformations of the colonial era and the crafting of the post–civil war power-sharing structure politicized religious identities, creating them as fields for contesting access to the benefits of state recognition. Gaining

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this recognition meant acceding to the rationalization and codification of historically contested, even contingent, religious practices such as the administration of sharia, bringing them fully into the arena of state authority. Contemporary Nigerian Muslim demands for “complete” Islamic law, which invites a dramatic expansion of state power to regulate religious affairs in the lives of citizens, are unthinkable outside the context of sharia’s previous placement in the hands of political authorities under colonial rule or the organization of Muslim “interest group” movements inspired by the incentives of the federal character to make religious demands in the names of “fairness” and “balance.” As Olivier Roy has argued decisively, contemporary top-down Islamist movements (and northern Nigeria’s sharia implementation process is no different, even if it was the political class rather than religious activists who got the ball rolling) represent not the victory of religion over politics but “political precedence over the religious in the name of religion itself.”15 The result is a top-down version of sharia with few opportunities for citizen engagement or feedback, even as more feel qualified to participate in judging its performance. How has the sharia paradox played out in Nigeria? The energy behind the sharia campaign that once regularly drew thousands of Muslims into the street has given way to popular disappointment and resentment toward a political class that many Muslims believe were never fully committed to the project in the first place. But are they right to be disappointed? What’s left of sharia in northern Nigeria in 2016, nearly two decades after it was first “reintroduced”? The laws remain officially on the books in all twelve “sharia states,” but their enforcement has become little more than a matter of local preference. Similarly, in most jurisdictions, the sharia courts established during the initial wave of enthusiasm continue to operate, but many Muslims still find their way before the Magistrates’ Courts, which quietly but openly apply the old penal code. The Kano hisbah, by far the most prominently state-sanctioned (and well-funded) sharia enforcement agency, continues to operate as an arm of the state government. Their occasional raids on beer parlors, however, serve only to highlight their more ordinary role as traffic cops. Zakkat boards, religious affairs ministries, and other official sharia-related offices remain intact in some states, but for the most part, the grand proposals offered by the implementation committees or hastily enacted into state law simply never got off the ground. Women are more likely to wear the veil now than they were in 1999, but outside of Kano and a few other areas, dress codes or bans on mixed-gender transportation have rarely been enforced for long. In retrospect, even the initial sharia “gains” advertised so eagerly by

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Yerima and others are hard to quantify or even verify.16 For example, in 2006, Yerima claimed that sharia implementation in Zamfara had closed down more than 2,800 brothels and 3,800 bars, figures that would seem to wildly overinflate the baseline rates of prostitution and alcohol consumption in his state in the first place. As I once pointed out to a visiting Nigerian colleague who defended Yerima’s achievements, these numbers suggest that at the dawn of the Fourth Republic, sleepy Zamfara State possessed a greater number of drinking establishments per capita than Madison, Wisconsin, an American city with friendly zoning laws permitting taverns in residential neighborhoods and a notorious national reputation as a haven for drinkers. Yerima’s more generic claims of a reduced crime rate and “greater respect for human rights and the entrenchment of such rights” are more probable but equally unverifiable. What drives this sense of failure, and what does it mean for the possibility of consolidating democracy in states that experiment with Islamic law? It would be easy to dismiss the grand, unrealized plans of sharia advocates as straightforward evidence of the incompatibility of Islamic law and democracy, but it would also be misleading. Where sharia “failed” in Nigeria, it was rarely because Muslim activists were unwilling to allow the democratic process to circumscribe their goals. As we have seen, the national controversy over sharia’s extension yielded a set of imprecise but meaningful political and constitutional limits that, for the most part, Muslim elites chose to respect. Indeed, the unwillingness of politicians to explore the criminalization of apostasy or (at least, after about 2003) to carry out hudud punishments for theft and zina went basically unremarked upon by the general Muslim public. Another possible story is the one so often invoked by my interviewees (and unsurprisingly, far less frequently by elite framers)—that sharia implementation really was a ploy on the part of certain members of the northern political elite and that its failure was preordained. Certainly, much of the enthusiasm for sharia among local political elites in the early days of the Fourth Republic seemed to owe to the possibility (itself a product of democratization) that it might be used to gain leverage and influence at the national level. As I argued in chapter 5, sharia opponents have long accused Muslim politicians of using sharia’s popularity (and the threat it poses to non-Muslims) as a form of political blackmail. The ascension of Umaru Musa Yar’adua, formerly the governor of Katsina State, to the position of Obasanjo’s anointed successor in 2007 was widely interpreted in these terms, even if doing so ignored the durable family ties between the two (Yar’adua’s brother had been Obasanjo’s closest advisor and deputy

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as military ruler in the late 1970s). More important, however, were the ways in which sharia policies—in particular, control over the new sharia institutions—offered incumbent politicians tools for expanding their local electoral appeal. Politicians and patrons cast the “dividends” of sharia as products of personal charity—rewards to devout (and loyal) citizens that could be repaid at the ballot box. This cooptation of sharia as means of local political advancement during a democratic opening isn’t unique to Nigeria. In Indonesia, local political elites used the popular demand for the adoption of “perda shari’a” (local ordinances and regulations inspired by sharia) in the early 2000s to expand state-led zakkat collection, only to turn around and use the funds to support their reelection campaigns. In one community in South Sulawesi, incumbent politicians advocated for and then used zakkat revenues to dramatically increase their district payroll, bringing more than 1,300 new religious teachers, imams, and local scholars into the fold with the expectation that, come election time, they would eagerly serve as “vote brokers” with their followers.17 Of course, it’s hardly scandalous—or even surprising—to learn that politicians find ways to act in what they perceive to be their best interests. A more interesting way to think about the popular perception that sharia “failed” Nigerian Muslims is in terms of the long-term consequences of institutionalizing state control over Islamic law. Even if state efforts to control and channel religious reform and revival sometimes boost a regime’s legitimacy, they also impose unexpected political costs. Gregory Starrett, for example, describes the ultimately futile efforts of colonial and postcolonial Egyptian regimes to use their control of the Islamic educational system to influence the direction of religious discourse toward support for their autocratic ambitions. By emphasizing an objectified, systematic system of religious knowledge and undermining the credibility of the traditional ulema, these projects contributed to the fragmentation and diffusion of religious authority. In the long run, this empowered nonstate (and antiregime) elites such as the Muslim Brotherhood to “challeng[e] the moral judgment and legitimacy of official religious institutions,” ultimately empowering them in the political arena as well.18 My Nigerian interviewees’ cynicism about the ability, or even the desire, of politicians to fulfill sharia’s promise as a source of justice and development suggests that their experiment with state-sponsored sharia has begun to have a similarly corrosive effect on the religious authority and prestige of the Muslim political elite, who have long looked to religious symbolism as a means of buttressing their public

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image. As Rotimi Suberu suggests, most Nigerian Muslims place the blame for sharia’s failure squarely on the backs of the political class, for their decision to emphasize “the punitive dimensions of Sharia at the expense of the welfare-oriented aspects,” all the while “leaving corrupt and greedy political elites unpunished.”19 By struggling to live up to the expectations of “ordinary” Muslims with respect to the transformational power of sharia, the political class has seriously damaged its credibility, opening the way to more and greater public outcry against their venality. One important example of this trend, alluded to in the introduction, was the wave of violence that followed the April 2011 presidential election, in which the leading northern Muslim candidate (current president Muhammadu Buhari) lost to the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) Jonathan, a Christian from Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta. The election was seen by many northerners as a referendum on the country’s increasingly tenuous informal “zoning” system, in which key national positions (president, vice president, speaker of the assembly, and senate president, among others) were informally expected to rotate among each of six regional “zones.” The PDP’s rise to power in 1999 and its successes in 2003 and 2007 owed to its ability to publically stick to this zonal system, allowing it to easily recruit new members into its coalition in the belief that they too would someday have the chance at national power. But with the death of President Yar’adua in 2010 after only three years in office, many northerners—elites and ordinary citizens alike—argued that their “turn” to hold the nation’s highest office had been unfairly truncated and that Jonathan, the vice president who had inherited Yar’adua’s place, ought to have stepped aside. Shortly after it became clear that Buhari was going to lose despite carrying all twelve “sharia states,” riots instigated by his supporters began to break out across the north. By far the worst violence took place in Kaduna State, where, in the fashion of Kafanchan, Zangon Kataf, and a host of previous instances, an initial series of Muslim attacks on Christians quickly spiraled into uncontrolled violence and retaliation (Muslim victims eventually outnumbered Christians according to some estimates), with the total dead approaching one thousand. But while most killings played out according to this now alltoo-familiar playbook, attacks by Muslims in Kano, Zaria, and Kaduna targeted traditional leaders and PDP politicians (including Namadi Sambo, Jonathan’s own running mate), who were accused of complicity in what amounted to a southern plot to “steal” power away from northerners. Across the country, photographs of palaces in Kano, Zaria, and Sokoto “on

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fire” (in reality, most of the incidents involved burning cars and tires rather than the actual palaces themselves) circulated in the national press— shocking images highlighting the depths of popular anger only a decade after the same generation of leaders had trumpeted sharia implementation as a definitive victory for the “rights” of Nigerian Muslims. More than perhaps anything else, Nigeria’s sharia failure demonstrates the dangers that emerge when a regime promises both Islamic revival and democratic dividends but is unable to fully deliver on either. One positive note, then, is the peacefulness of the 2015 election cycle, which once again pitted Buhari against Jonathan. What was different this time? In no small part, the decline in violence seems have been driven by overall improvements in the electoral process. Despite the enormous logistical and political challenges put before them (including a six-week election delay pressed upon them by the military in order to launch a “surge” against Boko Haram), the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and its chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega, managed to conduct the most credible and fraud-free elections recent Nigerian history. The result was a decisive and quickly announced victory for Buhari, in which he carried not only the “sharia states” but nine others across the southwest (home of his running mate, former Lagos State attorney-general and evangelical pastor Yemi Osinbajo) and the Middle Belt. Of course, nearly immediately after the results came in and Jonathan made his landmark concession call to Buhari, critics began to whisper that this calm was the product not of more credible electoral processes but of the simple fact that the “north’s man” had won. Of course, it’s impossible to know if a free and fair Buhari loss would have triggered violent protests (and it very well might have), and religious tensions—driven not simply by faith differences but by the institutional rules of Nigerian politics—remain a major problem across the country. Yet the 2015 results revealed a far less polarized electoral map than many expected, with both candidates easily meeting the requirement of winning at least 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds (twenty-four total) of the states, suggesting that ethnic and religious differences are hardly the only consideration for most voters. They also suggest—particularly the scenes of voting in internally displaced peoples’ camps in Borno as well as those of thousands of voters waiting patiently for the results to be announced in Kano and elsewhere across the north—that Nigerian Muslims do indeed appreciate, and even cherish, the importance of democratic participation. In the end, politics in Nigeria are rarely as simple as “north vs. south” or “Muslim vs. Christian,” a reality that is far too often forgotten by foreign analysts and domestic political strategists alike.

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Does Nigeria Have a Radical Islam Problem? Sadly, the potential for a meaningful debate over sharia—its successes, failures, and compatibility with democracy—in today’s Nigeria has been largely subsumed by concern over the spectacular rise of Boko Haram, whose campaign of violence represents the utter failure of the Nigerian state to secure meaningful democracy, effective economic development, and basic human security. In the years since Yusuf’s murder, Boko Haram has transformed itself from a fairly small (and, by most accounts, ragtag) group of core followers, capable of little more than staging prison breaks and raids on rural police stations, into a seemingly unstoppable military force capable of taking thousands of square miles of territory from what was once one of the continent’s best-regarded militaries. Growing speculation about links between Boko Haram’s Nigerian operatives and transnational jihadi groups began as early as the summer of 2010, when, in his first message as commander, Yusuf’s former deputy Abubakar Shekau called out to key figures and organizations in the global jihadi community, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). By 2011, the chaos in northern Mali seems to have provided the opportunity for Shekau and others to travel abroad for training with members of AQIM and other Sahel-based radicals, while Ansaru, a group of Boko Haram defectors reportedly unhappy with Shekau’s willingness to target Muslims, forged even closer links with these groups throughout 2012. By mid-2014, Boko Haram had even succeeded in introducing a heretofore locally unknown form of violence—the suicide bombing—into the Nigerian lexicon, often relying on young women to deliver their deadly payloads. This process of radical globalization culminated in March 2015, when Shekau appeared in an audio message offering bayat (allegiance) to the Islamic State, a move that’s mattered more in the international media and the boardrooms of Washington than on the battlefield. The current phase of the conflict began in May 2013, when President Jonathan declared a “state of emergency” in three northeastern states— Yobe, Adamawa, and Borno—in order to deploy troops to fight the insurgents on their own ground. The result, which went quickly downhill following an initial push, was nothing short of a debacle. News about supply problems, soldiers going unpaid and unfed, and corruption in the command ranks began to trickle out almost immediately from military installations in the northeast. Growing dissatisfaction within the ranks culminated in a series of highly embarrassing attempted mutinies (most notably in May 2014, when soldiers stationed in Maiduguri shot their

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commanding officer) and defections (in August 2014, nearly five hundred soldiers fled across the border into Cameroon following a firefight with Boko Haram forces) that have shaken popular and international confidence in Nigeria’s ability to win this war. These challenges have been magnified by mounting evidence that Nigerian troops and their civilian adjuncts (the “Civilian Joint Task Force,” a semiorganized vigilante group based in Maiduguri) engaged in systematic and often brutal violence against civilians—including the extrajudicial execution of hundreds of detainees—that went unprosecuted, and even uninvestigated, by national authorities. The Chibok kidnappings in April 2014 were, in retrospect, a fundamental turning point. As leading members of Jonathan’s cabinet fumbled their way through interviews with Al Jazeera and CNN, clearly unaccustomed to being pushed to explain themselves to the public, a wave of protests across Nigeria (more successfully) and a hashtag campaign on Twitter (less successfully) demanded both international intervention and greater accountability from the Nigerian government regarding their counterinsurgency plans. Sadly, an initial wave of foreign assistance (in the form of US intelligence cooperation, military aid from a handful of countries, and promises from Niger, Cameroon, and Chad of a “Multinational Joint Task Force”) accomplished little immediate good, and by November 2014, Nigeria had temporarily suspended joint exercises and training with US forces. In August, with Nigerian military effectiveness at its nadir, Shekau officially declared that Boko Haram intended to carve an Islamic state out of northeastern Nigeria. Over the next six months, he proved true to his word, as Boko Haram extended territorial control across parts of all three “state of emergency” states (one January 2015 estimate put the total at as many as twenty thousand square miles), often executing local residents as they went. Facing mounting public pressure and an increasingly difficult political landscape, the Jonathan administration took advantage of the six-week election delay announced in February 2015 to take aggressive but belated military action. Working loosely with the newly engaged militaries of Chad and Niger (themselves facing growing economic costs associated with the insurgency’s impact on regional trade), the Nigerian army was able to roll back many of the group’s territorial holdings, allowing civilians trapped behind enemy lines to flee to safety and freeing Maiduguri (Borno’s capital city of more than a million residents) from imminent danger. But while this “surge” proved to be too little, too late for Jonathan and the PDP to salvage an election victory, the Nigerian government appeared to

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be, for the first time in more than a half-decade, on the path to winning this long war. How should we understand the astonishing rise of a radical Islamist group like Boko Haram in light of northern Nigeria’s Islamic past and present? Not surprisingly, given that Boko Haram’s stated agenda is to extend “full” sharia across Nigeria, it has been widely assumed by academic and policy analysts that there must be a direct connection between last decade’s sharia controversy and today’s Islamist insurgency. Indeed, many discussions of Boko Haram’s origins in academic journals and policy memos directed at the antiterrorism and counterinsurgency audience go so far as to situate it alongside the Sardauna’s Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC), Maitatsine, Izala, and Zamfara’s sharia implementation scheme as part of a continuous narrative of “militant religiosity” driven by a perverse combination of revivalist spirit and bottom-up protests by ordinary Muslims against their poverty and the encroachment of Christianity and Western influences.20 From this perspective, there’s little else to conclude but that northern Nigeria does indeed have a “radical Islam” problem—one that, in the minds of many southerner Nigerians, is directly fostered by northern elites in furtherance of their agenda of national domination. Certainly, Boko Haram didn’t emerge sui generis. Intellectually and symbolically, it represents a long-standing distrust of Western education and cultural influences among northern Muslim intellectuals, as well as an offshoot of the growing influence of salafi ideology in Nigerian Islam.21 Moreover, as Murray Last and others with deep knowledge of the history of local Islamic social movements have suggested, Boko Haram’s actions often fit within familiar “pattern[s] of dissent.” While no reasonable analyst could argue that Yusuf and Shekau ever possessed even a modicum of the Shehu’s credibility and respect, Last argues that Yusuf’s career nonetheless fits a narrative with a long local history, in which “an Islamic scholar ‘on the make’ attracts a small following” and temporary endorsement from local political elites looking to co-opt his religious authority for their own purposes.22 Indeed, as I noted in the introduction, during the contentious 2003 Borno State gubernatorial campaign, candidate Ali Modu Sheriff recruited Yusuf’s followers to participate in his campaign (primarily as thugs) in exchange for financial support and future cooperation, and following Sheriff’s victory, Buji Foi, a member of Yusuf’s circle, was appointed state Commissioner of Religious Affairs. Next comes the inevitable falling out, often driven by fear that the scholar’s community has grown too large to be controlled. Clashes generally follow, building eventually to all-out war. Most of the time, it’s the

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scholar’s community that loses, liquidated—often with great violence—by state power. Such was the fate met by Maitatsine in Kano and by the Mahdists of Satiru. But rarely—with the jihad as the principle exception—the scholar wins, fundamentally transforming the political and religious order across the region. In Yusuf’s case, the backlash first came in December 2003, when a group of his supporters who had retreated into the countryside in protest against what they saw (already) as the failure of state-led sharia picked up arms against local officials who had harassed them, eventually staging a weeklong running battle with the police across rural Yobe State. Over the next half-decade, the Yusufiyya were alternatively courted and violently repressed by members of the political class, while Yusuf himself was arrested multiple times but never taken to trial. Finally, in June 2009, following a violent confrontation that began as a quarrel over the enforcement of a new mandatory motorcycle helmet law and ended with fourteen Boko Haram members dead, Yusuf threatened massive reprisals. During the last days of July, the military and police responded to rumblings of the expected uprising with a massive, violent crackdown that killed perhaps eight hundred group members over several days, including Yusuf. By all accounts, most Borno officials and military commanders imagined that this would be the end of things. These parallels aside, I think it would be a mistake to conclude that Boko Haram represents the culmination of “normal” Muslim politics in Nigeria. Arguably, the defining fact of Boko Haram isn’t its ideology, or even its more recent turn toward shocking displays of violence, but the fact that, in the face of a playbook in which Nigerian political elites and security forces have had confidence for generations, the group survived to fight again. This survival says much more, I think, about this strategy (and about those who have wielded it for so long) than it does about Boko Haram itself. Boko Haram’s rapid ascent from small-scale religious protest movement to major insurgency must be understood not simply in light of the appeal of its ideology but in terms of the failure of the Nigerian state to offer an effective strategy for combatting it. What do I mean by this? As former US ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell has argued, Boko Haram, particularly in its early incarnations, obviously has its origins in the frustrations and anger that many northerners feel at their region’s impoverishment and lack of social services, as well as in the corruption of the very political class they entrusted with the implementation of sharia.23 Yet, as I’ve suggested throughout the book, neither Boko Haram’s radical, salafi-inspired rejection of all “Western” institutions (including the Nigerian state) nor its years’ long murder spree

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(much of it directed at coreligionists) seems to hold much appeal for the millions of Muslims who championed state-run Islamic law in a democratic society. Boko Haram’s wholesale rejection of the legitimacy of the Nigerian state and its democratic institutions is a major departure from the language used by nearly all Muslim participants in the sharia implementation debate. If the frames used by Muslims to justify the sharia project had anything in common, it was that they regarded the Nigerian state as a key source of recognition, rights, and economic resources. Far from rejecting the secular state apparatus, sharia supporters embraced it—and even more important, its democratic potential—as a means of achieving their broader goals. Even in their anger at the failure of sharia to achieve what was promised, my interviewees rarely attacked the state itself, focusing instead on the leaders who either were unable to channel federal resources for their home communities or, more likely, kept far more than their “fair” share for themselves. As a result, and although the survey data are sparse, the vast majority of northern Muslims seem to reject Boko Haram’s public ideology and its implications.24 Similarly, and despite the fears of many Nigerian and Western observers, there’s little evidence that masses of Nigerian Muslims, or even members of vulnerable populations like the almajirai, are being radicalized or recruited to Boko Haram’s cause in any numbers.25 Nor is there indication of a floating mass of quiet supporters in the countryside or the urban neighborhoods of Kano willing to provide shelter and succor to antistate insurgents—a point brought into stark focus by the bloody execution of thousands of Muslim residents of towns and villages in Boko Haram territory in December 2014 and January 2015. Put another way, although Boko Haram’s core ideological commitments (salafism and fear of Western cultural influences) have a measure of resonance with many ordinary Nigerian Muslims, few indeed seem to believe the movement to be a worthy alternative to the status quo. Does Nigeria have a “radical Islam” problem? Obviously, even if Boko Haram represents only an extremely limited subsection of Nigerian Muslims, its ideology and actions pose major challenges to the “mainstream” Islamic community.26 Yet even more pressing, I think, is Nigeria’s state capacity and security problem. Whether or not the shadowy rumors of Boko Haram receiving support from high-ranking Nigerian political and military elites are true (perhaps a few are, most probably are not), the group’s ability to directly confront and win pitched battles against what was, until recently, regarded as one of the continent’s most professional and competent armed forces is deeply disturbing, suggesting deep decay in the state’s

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ability to project its authority. And even before its run of military successes, Boko Haram’s ability to strike at police stations, armories, barracks, banks, and prisons—all obvious targets—demonstrated a striking lack of organization and logistical capacity within the security services. One key aspect of these failures is almost certainly the isolation many Nigerians outside the northeast have maintained from the realities of the war, which has not (with the exception of a failed June 2014 car bombing at the Apapa port complex in Lagos, which Shekau later took credit for) impacted them directly. But as the displacement of people (1.5 million as estimated by the UN in December 2014) and economic activity continues to grow, it seems to be only a matter of time until the rest of the country is faced with the hard choice of coming together or falling further apart. Here, as they have for several generations, the underlying political tensions over the “fair” distribution of state resources and recognition implicated in nearly all Nigerian discussions about religion and ethnic identity will likely play a major role.

The Sharia Legacy In all, despite a great many setbacks in harnessing the power of religious revival to improve governance, most Nigerians—Muslims and Christians alike—seem committed to finding a “divine blueprint” that might rescue their nation from poor governance and stalled development.27 Perhaps the most enduring consequence of sharia implementation in Nigeria was its role in institutionalizing an objectified, rule-bound vision of Islam that, at least in principle, many Muslims would like to see the state take a hand in administering. Sharia supporters, including many “ordinary” Muslims, invited the government into their homes, wardrobes, classrooms, and places of business and worship, demanding that they apply a set of fixed moral rules that might, if administered fairly but strictly, create the conditions necessary for social progress and prosperity. And even when these policies have visibly failed to live up to expectations, they remain popular. In 2008, the National Assembly took up consideration of a bill to regulate “Public Nudity, Sexual Intimidation and Other Related Matters,” proposing what would have, in effect, been a federally mandated dress code for women. It did not pass, but it received enthusiastic support from both Muslim and Christian activists, both of whom cited the 1999 constitution’s section 45(1)a, which allowed the federal government to abridge certain rights in the “interest of . . . public morality.”28 The passage of a brutal antihomosexuality bill in January 2014 met with wide praise from both sides of the

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religious aisle, evidence, as Rudi Gaudio has argued, of a growing popular desire to make the punishment of putative immorality into a “spectacle,” lest others be “lured into thinking that Christian and Muslim sexual morality is as fractured and negotiable as it appears.”29 What democracy is possible under such circumstances? The optimistic approach would be to argue, as Alfred Stepan has in a series of influential essays about religion, toleration, and democracy, that although such “divine blueprints” don’t represent the ideals of secular, universalizing “liberal arguing,” they might yet serve as the basis for “democratic bargaining” between communities that respect each other’s fundamental right to exist and tolerate the affirmation of each other’s values in the public sphere.30 This is the bargain that, as Stepan argues, characterizes today’s most successful Muslim-majority democracies, including Indonesia and Nigeria’s West African neighbor, Senegal. In these countries, Islamic civil society organizations, including Senegal’s Sufi brotherhoods, serve as engines of accommodation and political collaboration, bridging ethnic and religious divides and serving as a check against demands that might swing the legal or institutional pendulum too far in favor of any particular community. Of course, there are limits to the ability of these informal arrangements to actually produce tolerance. In Indonesia, for example, the minority Ahmadiya community has been singled out for persecution since the early 2000s by leading members of the mainstream ulema and, increasingly, by state authorities under the terms of the 2009 “Blasphemy Law,” which permits the Indonesian state to ban religious groups it identifies as “deviant.”31 But on the whole, Stepan concludes that Muslim-majority states that stick to this “Respect, Policy Cooperation, and Principled Distance” model of religion-state relations have an outstanding record of democratic success.32 With Nigeria’s long-standing legal and discursive commitment to recognizing the “rights” of its religious communities to participate fully in public life and the vibrancy of its religious civil society, Stepan’s model would seem to offer a real glimmer of hope for the eventual accommodation of some form of sharia with a consolidated democratic political system. Yet for all these efforts, the scope and intensity of religious conflict and violence in Nigeria have only grown since the 1999 democratic transition, with no clear end in sight. From the north’s dominance of the First Republic to the extension of the federal character principle in nearly all aspects of life, Nigeria’s political institutions too often encourage religious actors to view their demands for state resources and recognition in zero-sum terms. In a society where political elites and ordinary citizens are less likely to regard the state as the primary path to personal wealth, these conflicts might

232 / Chapter Eight

be less vicious and destabilizing. But with Nigeria’s long history of statecentric economic development and rent seeking, the results have been crippling. One sad result of this “do or die” political mentality is that even if many Nigerian Muslims might be willing to privately admit that statesponsored sharia has failed to achieve its social and political goals, very few would be willing to negotiate away their right to enact it, or to legally define their communities as “Muslim spaces,” in the name of compromise. As Leonardo Villalón, another astute scholar of Islam and democracy in West Africa, has suggested, the negotiation and activism that led to the democratic openings across the Muslim world during the 1990s and 2000s were the “beginning of a process of reform” rather than its conclusion.33 Arguably, the sharia debate itself was an important first step in constructing a religion-state relationship in Nigeria that leaves real space for democratic values and practices. One important outcome, then, is that the vast majority of Nigerian Muslims now seem to believe that it’s possible to embrace both sharia and democracy, even if the results so far haven’t been entirely promising. Now more than ever, their optimism is relevant for those of us who hold out hope for democracy, good governance, and above all peace, even if we remain a bit uncertain about mechanics of it all. And as John Paden, another longtime Nigeria watcher, has argued, there are a great many untapped resources available to Nigerian policy makers and politicians interested in building interreligious tolerance and cooperation, particularly within the “traditional” leadership and among the clergy.34 Given that religious conflict in Nigeria is often as much the product of the institutional incentives provided by the federal character principle and the indigeneship system of citizenship as of any real theological division, these resources might yet prove decisive. And if, as seems increasingly possible, the Boko Haram insurgency is finally ended (or at least contained) under the Buhari administration, there will be all the more need for a national dialogue on religion that breaks from the political status quo of procedural “balancing” in favor of deeper, more substantive reconciliation. It’s less clear, however, that the vision of “democratic bargaining” that Nigerian Muslims bring with them into public life is up to the task of making sharia and democracy compatible in practice. In northern Nigeria, citizens follow the lead of political elites who define democracy in terms of the “fair” allocation of state resources, promising a “democratic dividend” that, by its very definition, excludes non-Muslims from their political community. Despite their reliance on the language of social justice and accountability to argue for a “democratic sharia,” their insistence on distributional rights (including the “right” to sharia for the Muslim community) is

All Sharia Is Local / 233

corrosive to the mutual respect, tolerance, and cooperation that all multireligious communities depend on. So too is their continued belief that public morality can best be instilled by the long arm of secular state power rebranded as state-led sharia, a move that places singularly misplaced trust in a set of institutions (the Nigerian state) that have earned none at all. For all the hope my interviewees expressed in the power of sharia to “make democracy work,” there was surprising naiveté about the possibility that moral imperatives could and would turn the state around. As sincere as I believe it to be, their abiding desire for sharia and democracy to be compatible may not be enough to make it so.

APPENDIX

Methodology

This appendix offers additional detail about the methodologies used in chapters 6 and 7 and a discussion of how these choices impacted my analysis. My approach is indebted to William Gamson’s essential study of framing effects in political discourse, Talking Politics, and I’ve borrowed heavily from his work in designing this part of my project. Yet, as I discussed in chapter 7, my final product differs from his in several important respects, most notably in the outcome of my interview process, which often produced conversations that were less natural and more stilted than I had originally hoped. Nonetheless, they provided a bevy of interesting and analytically useful information.

Some General Thoughts on Causality With projects like this, questions about causality abound. It’s difficult to establish both the direction of influence and the nature of the relationship between elite and mass discourse, even when large and diverse quantities of data are available. Experimental designs that explore how individual attitudes shift in response to encountering specific issue frames have advantages with respect to internal validity, but as I discussed in chapter 7, their artificial settings don’t reveal much about how citizens process frames in real life. Surveys offers the advantage of random selection and thus generalizability, but short-form surveys offer only limited leverage for examining how individuals use frames, and longer, interview-based surveys present logistical challenges that often restrict their use to pilot projects.1 Participant-observation research can also be useful, but again such projects are quite rare, in no small part because they are enormously resource intensive.2 Peer group interviews are a compromise that offers the prospect

236 / Appendix

of cautious generalizability and a quasi-natural setting for observing real interaction and conversation. Some methodologists argue that because group interviews are rarely built on random samples, they cannot serve as the basis for generalization and are best left as supplements (ante or post hoc) to survey research.3 Ultimately, though, my goal, much like Gamson’s, wasn’t to “estimate the frequency of some characteristic in the population” but to discover how individuals thought about and processed different sorts of political issues and arguments.4 I can’t estimate precisely how representative the conversations that took place in my interviews are of those that might have taken place among all “ordinary Muslims” across northern Nigeria, but it’s also virtually impossible to imagine how a random sample of ordinary conversations might even be built. Borrowing insights from the grounded theory tradition, my interviewee recruitment process focused on sampling purposively and theoretically, recruiting a broad cross section of the community of theoretical interest (“ordinary Muslims”) and paying attention to key axes of potential variation within this population (occupation, age, and gender).5 What this sort of research aims for isn’t lawlike generalization but rather “transferability” or, as some sociologists describe it, “modest generalization.”6 Modest generalizations depend on hypothesis testing and attention to research design and sampling and must generally be the product of an intentional process sensitive to the possibility of other explanations. They also depend on providing the reader with the opportunity to see and evaluate both “thickly described” evidence and the assumptions that went into its interpretations. Finally, they rely on caution, moderation, and precision in claiming transferability, suggesting a clear range of applicability—in my case, other “ordinary Muslims” across Nigeria and, to a more limited extent, those in other new and uncertain democracies.7 My choice to present large blocs of interview text in chapter 7 was informed by my desire to permit readers to judge for themselves how exactly interviewees made use of and challenged elite-generated frames. Lastly, group interviews are compromises between the more natural environments of participant-observation research and the highly artificial ones of surveys and structured interviews. While observing “natural,” free-flowing conversations is obviously ideal (even if the presence of a researcher might have already created an artificial environment), the problem is finding such conversations in the first place. As many of my interviewees remarked informally, while they had often discussed politics (including the sharia issue) with friends and family prior to sitting down for the group

Appendix / 237

discussion, they had rarely done so in a concerted way for an hour or more, and fewer still had been challenged or pushed to be clearer or more articulate about how they felt. Interviews smaller than the typical focus group and held on familiar or at least “neutral” ground split the difference between entirely spontaneous conversations and more structured and guided ones in a way that, while clearly tipping the scales toward the needs and interests of the investigator, at least maintains the promise of spontaneity and comfort.8 For this to work, the moderators (I employed two, a woman and a man, both native Hausa speakers and Sokoto indigenes) must offer a careful balance, intervening to keep participants on topic while simultaneously widening the scope of perspectives being offered and avoiding “leader effects” or heavy-handed and poorly timed interjections.9 I trained both moderators and guided them through the question script (they also participated in its translation), and they had the opportunity to witness at least one group I conducted. That said, some combination of cultural expectations of deference toward group leaders (on the interviewees’ part) and personal exasperation toward interviewees who rambled or strayed from the questions script (by the moderators) occasionally surfaced. Combined with the problems of turn taking and stilted engagement with fellow participants I described in chapter 7, the interviews didn’t always live up to the ideal. Nonetheless, as I believe the excerpts reveal, it’s very possible to trace interviewee reasoning and their use (or challenging) of media frames throughout.

Sampling and Coding the Media As Matthew Miles and Michael Huberman argue in a widely cited guide to qualitative methodology, “coding is analysis.” Coding isn’t a neutral process in which data are simply sorted, and it’s better understood as the act of “assigning meaning,” often under ambiguous circumstances.10 I began by constructing an initial universe of frames, working inductively from a wide range of “out of sample” sources. I drew in particular on polemical works (pamphlets and self-published books; Internet discussion boards; websites hosting political essays, like Gamji.com; and the speeches and promotional materials published by many northern state governments) written by sharia advocates as well as academic conference papers and talks by Nigerian Muslim academics. I analyzed these sources inductively, following an “open coding” method to create a long list of potential frame categories, and then com-

238 / Appendix

bined and narrowed until I’d arrived at the shortest possible list of frames that overlapped as little as possible.11 Finally, I applied them to a small subset of New Nigerian articles drawn from outside my sampled time frame and made several more small adjustments before creating a codebook. I drew up short passages (“gestalts,” as Gamson described them) summarizing the main points, key symbols, and lines of argument invoked in each (some examples are reproduced in chapter 6) and identifying potential points of confusion among the frames.12 The final list was tilted in favor of “visible” or “active” frames—those with obvious sponsorship constituencies and that appeared in the widest possible array of sources. The frame I retained that appeared least frequently in the final analysis—Unity in Secularity—was the one that also most clearly captured Muslim opposition to sharia and was thus substantively and theoretically necessary, even if rarely invoked. I did the final coding myself, following a process of scanning each issue for relevant articles (those that at least mentioned sharia) and then reading all of those for both the presence of relevant symbols, metaphors, and examples and their overall deployment of frame-specific logics, causal claims, and narratives. I excluded articles that invoked or discussed sharia only in passing (often, these were summaries of government press releases or announcements that contained only a sentence or two about some specific sharia policy) or that offered “factual” reporting only (for example, articles that simply announced the enactment of some sharia policy but offered no quotes, analysis, or other “codeable” material). The unit of analysis was the whole article, so in the (surprisingly rare) instances in which articles contained more than one frame, I coded both. I also recorded both the type of story (op-ed, editorial, letter to the editor, interview, news article) and the framer’s identity (columnist, letter writer, interviewee). Because the materials were only available in hard copy in specialized archives, I wasn’t able to produce complete intercoder reliability scores. I was able to have a second coder evaluate a subset of the overall sample (~40 articles), and matches were above 90 percent. In discussing the frames, I occasionally present frequencies from my media sample for illustrative purposes. The percentages I reference have obvious limitations. Specifically, I have a complete set of sharia-relevant articles from the New Nigerian, but only a sample (and a nonrandom one at that) of all northern media discourse on sharia. While the numbers are useful for the comparative context they provide, skeptical readers should understand them as situated within bands of error that (despite my efforts to limit them) are difficult to quantify.

Appendix / 239

Interview Coding Coding and analysis of the interview data proceeded along roughly the same lines as the media sample. As I noted in chapter 7, all but one of the interviews were conducted in Hausa. Based on complete audio transcripts, I commissioned translations that were completed and rechecked by members of the Hausa language faculty at the Sokoto College of Education. Where possible, I worked with them to retain the flow and idiomatic usage of Nigerian English, which means that in more than a few places, the language may appear foreign or stilted to American eyes and ears. I’ve also attempted to be as transparent as possible about the assumptions and biases introduced in the conversations by “researcher effects”—most notably, the assumption that some authority figure must have been the ultimate audience. I approached the interview transcripts with the same codebook and universe of frames as the media sample. The key difference was with respect to unit of analysis. Whereas in the media sample the relevant unit was the article, here it was more ambiguous. Generally, I coded passage by passage, with either each speaker’s “turn” or (when individual “turns” were short enough that they were clearly embedded in a larger conversation) the group’s discussion around a question as one unit. However, in a number of instances, I’ve also identified the whole transcript as the unit, particularly to compare the use of particular frames across interviews.13 Reporting frequencies drawn from group interviews is a controversial practice. Nonetheless, as a way of judging how often particular frames were invoked relative to each other on specific questions or in what proportion of the interviews a particular point came up, I believe they can be useful. Given the nature of my sample, the same caveats that applied to the percentages described in the media sample apply here.

NOTES

P R E FA C E

1.

Soyinka, “Psychopaths of Faith vs. The Muse of Irreverence,” 13–16. CHAPTER ONE

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

“Religious Crisis Was Major Threat to My Govt—Obasanjo,” Daily Trust, August 13, 2007. Large parts of southwestern Nigeria, described memorably for political scientists in David Laitin’s work on identity politics among the Yoruba, also possess Muslim majorities. See Laitin, Culture and Hegemony. Although these areas have important historical links to northern Nigeria, they are culturally (and politically) distinct. None have implemented state-run sharia institutions, although Muslim activists have attempted to craft private sharia courts in a few jurisdictions. For an insightful summary of Obasanjo’s response to sharia implementation, see Illiffe, Obasanjo, Nigeria, and the World, 191. Whether or not Nigeria is a “Muslim-majority” nation is a matter of dispute. Most sources cite the population distribution as roughly 50 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian (with various other religious communities, including “indigenous faiths,” accounting for the rest). But because the 2006 census did not include questions on religious identity, these estimates are based on extrapolations of much earlier census data (1952 and 1963) or on survey research with limited coverage in rural communities. While it seems likely that Muslims are in the majority in Nigeria, by what percentage (particularly in any given locale) is quite literally anyone’s guess. See Ostien, “Percentages by Religion of the 1952 and 1963 Populations of Nigeria’s Present 36 States.” Numbers derived from the Round 4 Afrobarometer survey, 2008. Accessible at afrobarometer.org. See, inter alia, Hefner, ed., Shari’a Politics, and Otto, ed., Sharia Incorporated. On Indonesia, see Buehler, “Subnational Islamization through Secular Parties,” as well as Feener, Shari’a and Social Engineering. On the use of sharia rhetoric in electoral campaigns by both “secular” and “Islamist” parties in Pakistan, see Ullah, Vying for Allah’s Vote. Noueihed and Warren, The Battle for the Arab Spring, 119. See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, “Learning to Live with Radical Islam,” Newsweek,

242 / Notes to Pages 3–9

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

March 9, 2009, and Paul Marshall, “Radical Islam in Nigeria,” Weekly Standard, April 15, 2002. Their “official” name for most of the period in question, Jama¯’a Ahl al-sunnah li-da’wa wa al-jiha¯d, translates (again, roughly) to “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” The name Boko Haram has its origins in Maiduguri in the late 2000s, where it appears to have been used as both shorthand for the group’s beliefs about the incompatibility of Western science, education, and politics with “true” Islam and a slur, a means for their opponents to mock them for their radicalism. Since their announced merger with the Islamic State in the spring of 2015, the group has used the name Wila¯yat Gharb Ifrı¯qı¯yyah, or the “West African Province” of the Islamic State. Hudson, Arab Politics, 47. See Robbins, “Bound by Recognition.” On the American “more for less” paradox, see Sears and Citrin, Tax Revolt. See Fair, Littman, and Nugent, “Pakistani Conceptualization of Shari’a and Support for Militancy and Democratic Values.” Masoud, Counting Islam, xiii. See Steve Kull et al., “Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians, and al Qaeda,” WorldPublicOpinion.Org, PIPA, University of Maryland–College Park, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr07/START_Apr07_rpt.pdf; and Pew Global Attitudes Project, “Most Embrace a Role for Islam in Politics; Muslim Publics Divided on Hamas and Hezbollah,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2010, http:// www.pewglobal .org/ files/ 2010/ 12/ Pew -Global -Attitudes -Muslim -Report -FINAL-December-2–2010.pdf. These statistics are discussed in detail in chapter 7. See, for example, Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering; Peletz, Islamic Modern, and Rosen, Anthropology of Justice. Hefner, Shari’a Politics, 4–5. On the notion of Islam and democracy as “mobile ideas,” see Feldman, After Jihad, 31–50. Bell et al., “The World’s Muslims,” 41–58. See Lewis, “Islam and Democracy.” For the counterargument that democracy is best understood in terms of universal, humanist values, see Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Washington Post, March 29, 1989, and Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1985, cited in Schaffer, Democracy in Translation, 2. Ibid., 13. Eickelman and Anderson, “Redefining Muslim Publics.” Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Bowen, Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia, 19. See Huntington, The Third Wave. Marshall, Political Spiritualties. Wedeen, Peripheral Visions, especially 103–47. Walsh, Talking about Politics. Schaffer, “Political Concepts and the Study of Democracy,” 46. Ferme, The Underneath of Things. “Text of a Radio and Television Address by Engr. Abdulkadir Kure, FNSE Governor of Niger State on the 13th day of January, 2000 at Government House, Minna,” published in New Nigerian, January 21, 2000, 6.

Notes to Pages 10–27 / 243 34. Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy. 35. This theme is developed in Harnischfeger, “Sharia and Control over Territory,” and documented in Tertsakian, “Revenge in the Name of Religion.” 36. The connection (documented by interviews with local actors) between the politics of sharia implementation in Borno State and the radicalization of Yusuf and his followers is proffered by Onuoha, “Boko Haram and the Evolving Salafi Jihadist Threat in Nigeria,” and Mohammed, “The Message and Methods of Boko Haram.” 37. This death toll estimate for the conflict up to March 2014 comes from the Nigeria Security Tracker, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, accessible at http:// www.cfr.org/nigeria/nigeria-security-tracker/p29483. 38. One such figure was the “National Woman Leader” of the PDP, Kema Chikwe. See “As Women Nationwide Weep, Kema Chikwe Insults Grieving Nation,” Leadership (Lagos), May 1, 2014. 39. These events were reported in Michelle Faul, “Nigeria Group Threatens to Sell Kidnapped Girls,” Associated Press, May 6, 2014. 40. Krämer, “Islamist Notions of Democracy,” 72. 41. Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics. 42. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” 43. Chaves, “Rain Dances in the Dry Season,” 2. 44. See, for example, Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit; Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media; and Schultz, Muslims and New Media in West Africa. 45. An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 49. 46. Hallaq, The Impossible State, 2. 47. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, 6. 48. Gamson, Talking Politics, 3; and Entman, “Framing,” 52. 49. Peletz, “‘Ordinary Muslims’ and Muslim Resurgents in Contemporary Malaysia,” 231. 50. Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, 6–7. 51. “Sharia Lite,” The Economist, February 1, 2007. 52. Most scholarly research on Nigerian political Islam focuses on Kano and its vigorous application of sharia. See Thurston, “Muslim Politics and Shari’a in Kano State, Northern Nigeria”; Olaniyi, “Hisbah and Sharia Law Enforcement in Metropolitan Kano”; O’Brien, “La charia contestée”; and Casey, “Marginal Muslims.” 53. See Blessing Anaro, “Inequality Gap—96 Million Citizens Scramble for a Living,” Leadership (Lagos), February 15, 2012. 54. Williams and Guttschuss, Spiraling Violence. C H A P T E R T WO

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Tim Arango, “Bottoms Up for Democracy,” New York Times, April 17, 2011, WK1. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 167. Warner, Prohibition, 196. Williams, “Visions of the Good Society.” De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 33. Tessler, Moaddel, and Inglehart, “What Do Iraqis Want?” Monroe, Hellfire Nation, 245. Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” 89. Lewis, The Political Language of Islam. Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture, 5. Gellner, Muslim Politics, 2.

244 / Notes to Pages 27–33 12. See, for example, Almond, “The Christian Parties of Western Europe.” 13. On Smith’s campaign and the prohibitionist response, see Curtis, “The Fundamental Faith of Every True American.” Smith’s political affiliations with Tammany Hall, the notorious political machine with deep links to saloon culture in New York, were a special source of ire for his Protestant opponents. As one opponent said of Smith, “No Klansman in a boob legislature, . . . cringing before a kleagle or a wizard, was more subservient to the crack of the whip than was Al Smith—ambitious and effective and smart as chain lightning—in the Legislature when it came to a vote to protect the saloon, to shield the tout and to help the scarlet woman of Babylon, whose tolls in those days always clinked regularly in the Tammany Hall” (William Allen White, cited in Curtis, 520n4). 14. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 91. 15. See Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters, as well as Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. A more empirically driven example is Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. 16. Philpott, “The Catholic Wave.” 17. Gill, Rendering unto Caesar. 18. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. 19. Karatnycky, “Muslim Countries and the Democracy Gap,” 103. Authoritarian stability in the Arab world is discussed in Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East,” and Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East.” 20. Stepan with Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Democracy Gap.” 21. Kurzman and Browers, “Comparing Reformations,” 4. 22. al-Qaradawi, “Islam and Democracy,” 236. 23. El Fadl, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, 5–6, 30–31. 24. Hashimi, “Change from Within,” 49–54. 25. See An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State. For an account of the 2004 conference, see Harniet-Sievers, “Encounters and No-Go Areas in the Nigerian Debate about Sharia.” 26. Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 344. 27. Bernard, Civil Democratic Islam, especially 32–34. 28. This point is made in the introduction to al-Qaradawi’s thought offered by Euben and Zaman in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, 224–29. 29. See Feldman, “Shari’a in the Age of Al-Jazeera,” 118–19. 30. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, 14. 31. Tessler, Jamal, and Robbins, “New Findings on Arabs and Democracy.” The most systematic look at Muslim attitudes toward democracy globally is Fish, Are Muslims Distinctive? 32. Tessler, “Do Islamic Orientations Influence Attitudes toward Democracy in the Arab World?,” 241. 33. See, inter alia, Tessler and Gao, “Democracy and the Political Culture Orientations of Ordinary Citizens”; Tessler, “Islam and Democracy in the Middle East”; and Shapiro and Fair, “Understanding Support for Islamist Militancy in Pakistan.” 34. Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, 268. 35. Bratton, “Briefing: Islam, Democracy, and Public Opinion in Africa,” 496. 36. Recent scholarship casts some doubt on the democratic commitments of “Muslim democrats.” See Collins and Owen, “Islamic Religiosity and Regime Preferences.” 37. Tessler, “The View from the Street,” 188–89.

Notes to Pages 33–40 / 245 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Tessler, Jamal, and Robbins, “New Findings on Arabs and Democracy,” 93. Sadowski, “Political Islam.” See, for example, Broeker, Policing Morality. On the Ontario sharia conflict, see Korteweg and Selby, eds., Debating Sharia. Brown, “Egypt,” 111. For the survey results, see “What Do Egyptians Want? Key Findings from the Egyptian Public Opinion Poll,” Brooking Institution Report, http://www .brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/05/21-egyptian-election-poll-telhami. Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?, especially chapter 2, “Democracy or Theocracy?,” 29–63. Mujani and Liddle, “Indonesia’s Approaching Elections.” Jay Loschky, “Malians’ Faith in Their Government Plummeted in 2012,” Gallup World, January 18, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/159884/malians-faith -government-plummeted-2012.aspx. The original letter is available at “Mali-al-Qaida’s Sahara Playbook,” Associated Press, http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/_pdfs/al-qaida-manifesto .pdf. Feldman, The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State, 9. Davis and Robinson, “The Egalitarian Face of Islamic Orthodoxy.” See C. Christine Fair, Clay Ramsay, and Steve Kull, “Pakistani Public Opinion on Democracy, Islamist Militancy, and Relations with the U.S.,” WorldPublicOpinion.Org, PIPA, University of Maryland–College Park, 2008, http://www.worldpublicopinion .org/pipa/pdf/jan08/Pakistan_Jan08_rpt.pdf. A second round of surveys asking more fine-grained questions about attitudes toward sharia is discussed in Fair, Malhotra, and Shapiro, “Islam, Militancy, and Politics in Pakistan,” and Fair, Littman, and Nugent, “Pakistani Conceptualization of Shari’a and Support for Militancy and Democratic Values.” The Hudood Ordinances and their political and social consequences are well documented by Kennedy, “Islamicization in Pakistan,” and Lau, “Twenty-Five Years of Hudood Ordinances.” Fair, Malhotra, and Shapiro, “Islam, Militancy, and Politics in Pakistan,” 515. An excellent review of the controversy surrounding the Zina Ordinance is Khan, Zina, Transnational Feminism, and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women. Zaman, “Pakistan,” 218–20. Fair, Malhotra, and Shapiro, “Islam, Militancy, and Politics in Pakistan,” 517; and Fair, Littman, and Nugent, “Pakistani Conceptualization of Shari’a and Support for Militancy and Democratic Values.” Mohamad, “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization of the Sharia in Malaysia,” 523. Moustafa, “Islamic Law, Women’s Rights, and Popular Legal Consciousness in Malaysia.” Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 37–38. Hallaq, The Impossible State, ix. Jackson, “Shari’ah, Democracy, and the Modern Nation-State,” 102–3. Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 37–38. Hefner, “Public Islam and the Problem of Democratization,” 495. Mandaville, “Globalization and the Politics of Religious Knowledge,” 102, as well as Gambetta and Hertog, “Why Are There So Many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?” On the continued relevance of the ulema, see the excellent study by Zaman, The Ulema in Contemporary Islam.

246 / Notes to Pages 40–49 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92. 93.

Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape, 116–17. See Calhoun, “Introduction,” 35–36; and Benhabib, “Models of Public Space,” 91. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 3, 9–10. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 57. See Lynch, “Beyond the Arab Street,” 58. On the centrality of the notion of an Islamic “common good” in the development of these public spheres, see Salvatore and Eickelman, Public Islam and Common Good. Anderson, “New Medias, New Publics,” 899. Kraidy, “Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Changing Arab Information Order,” 145–46. Dunn, “Unplugging a Nation.” Hefner, Civil Islam, 218. See Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam. Feldman, The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State, 6. The literature on the historical separation between political and jurisprudential authority (or, put crudely, “church and state”) in Islamic history is vast. See Lapidus, “The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society”; and Hallaq, “Juristic Authority vs. State Power.” Vogel, Islamic Law in the Modern World, 5. Messick, The Calligraphic State, 3. Hallaq, Shari’a, 85. Noah Feldman, “Why Sharia?” New York Times, March 16, 2008. Mamdani, Define and Rule, 28. Strawson, “Islamic Law and English Texts,” 25. On Snouck Hurgronje’s overwhelming importance in shaping the direction of Islamic jurisprudence in Indonesia under colonial rule see Laffin, The Makings of Indonesian Islam. Feldman, The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State, 110. Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 28–29. Hallaq, Shari’a, 550. Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, 197. See, inter alia, Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy; Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town; and Schulz, Muslims and New Media in West Africa. See Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, 173. Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 212, 237. On the rise and fall of the UCM, see Amselle, “Le Wahabisme à Bamako (1945–1985).” See Soares, “Islam in Mali in the Neo-Liberal Era,” 86–87. Soares, “The Attempt to Reform Family Law in Mali,” 405; and Schulz, “Political Factions, Ideological Fictions,” 139–41. Schulz, “(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice.” Schulz, “Charisma and Brotherhood Revisited.” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Tolerance and Tension, 2010, http://www .pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Practices/sub-saharan-africa-full -report.pdf. Cited in Brian Peterson, “The Other Ansar Dine, Popular Islam, and Religious Tolerance,” African Arguments (blog), April 25, 2013, http://africanarguments.org/2012/ 04/25/confronting-talibanization-in-mali-the-other-ansar-dine-popular-islam-and -religious-tolerance-brian-j-peterson/. Schulz, “Charisma and Brotherhood Revisited,” 147. Cited in Hannah Armstrong, “A Tale of Two Islamisms,” Latitudes: Views from around

Notes to Pages 49–58 / 247 the World (blog), New York Times, January 25, 2013, http://latitude.blogs.nytimes .com/2013/01/25/another-kind-of-islamism-gains-ground-in-southern-mali/. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

From Infaq al-Maysur, cited in Hiskett, The Sword of Truth, 96. “Shehu” is the equivalent of the Arabic “Sheikh” and the title by which Usman dan Fodio is most commonly known in northern Nigeria. Watts, Silent Violence, 49. Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 10–17. Ibid. 14. On the influence of secularism on religious revival in the contemporary public sphere, the classic work is Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World. Moosa, “Colonialism and Islamic Law,” 158. Hiskett, “Review of A Revolution in History,” 637. Bugaje, “Forward,” xi. In defense of Islamist scholars, this has often been true of work done by Western historians as well. See Bivins, Telling Stories, Making Histories. Hiskett, “An Islamic Tradition of Reform in Western Sudan from the 16th to the 18th Century,” 585–86. Usman dan Fodio, Kitab al-farq, in Hiskett, “Kitab al-farq,” 569–70. Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano, 214–16. Usman dan Fodio, Kitab al-farq, in Hiskett, “Kitab al-farq,” 568–69. The Shehu’s justifications for war can also be found in Bivar, “The Wathiqat Ahl al-Sudan.” On the “character” of the jihad, see the differences between Johnson, The Fulani Empire of Sokoto, and Last, The Sokoto Caliphate. While both works appeared in the same year, Johnson (a former colonial officer) and Last (an academic historian trained at the University of Ibadan) reflect quite opposite attitudes toward the intellectual origins of the jihad. The odd fact that a pair of European scholars had such outsized influence was remarked upon (and criticized) by Christelow, “Islamic Law and Judicial Practice in Nigeria.” Anderson, who chaired the Department of Law at SOAS from 1953 to 1971, focused on the development of Islamic law in East and West Africa and on the possibility of “reform” in Islamic legal systems in line with Anglo-American norms. His influence on Nigerian sharia was magnified by his role as a member of the Panel of Jurists (1958 and 1962) that crafted the revised Northern Nigerian Penal Code that replaced uncodified Islamic law. Schacht published The Origins of Mohammadan Jurisprudence (1950) and An Introduction to Islamic Law (1964), both of which have had a profound and complicated influence on the development of the field of Islamic legal studies. Schacht is responsible for the argument that, by the late ninth or early tenth centuries CE, the “gates” of ijtihad (independent legal reasoning) had been “closed” to contemporary scholars, resulting in a stagnation of the fiqh’s development. In Nigeria, his work was limited to three months of fieldwork in 1950, published as a Colonial Office Library Pamphlet and as “Islam in Northern Nigeria.” Anderson, Islamic Law in Africa, 171. Christelow also provides the closest thing we have to actual records of court practice under the caliphate, taken from records compiled in the first several decades after British rule began. See Christelow, Thus Ruled Emir Abbas. Pierce, Farmers and the State, 187–95.

248 / Notes to Pages 58–64 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers, 42. Last, “‘Injustice’ and Legitimacy in the Early Sokoto Caliphate.” Smith, Baba of Karo, 70–71. See Lugard, Dual Mandate, particularly page 232, as well as the official correspondence between Lugard’s office and the sultan of Sokoto, reprinted in Backwell, The Occupation of Hausaland, 1900–1904. These events and the evidence surrounding them are discussed in Muffett, Concerning Brave Captains, 34–61. Murray, “Education under Indirect Rule,” 228. In Colonial Reports—Annual, Northern Nigeria Report for 1902, 105–7. The Waziri is the sultan’s chief advisor. Buhari’s response is reproduced in Adeleye, “The Dilemma of the Wazir.” Other responses taken up by the ulema, including calls to violence, withdrawal, and prophecies of the end-times, are discussed in Umar, “Muslims’ Eschatological Discourses on Colonialism in Northern Nigeria.” Lugard, Political Memoranda, 297. Lovejoy and Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate,” 225. The official British accounts are Northern Nigeria— Correspondence Relating to Sokoto, Hadeija, and the Munshi Country, 7–56, and Colonial Reports—Annual, Northern Nigeria, Report for 1905–6, 365–74. See Tukur, “The Imposition of British Colonial Domination in the Sokoto Caliphate,” passim; and Tahir, “Scholars, Sufis, Saints, and Capitalists in Kano,” 321–32. The literature on the transformation of the emirate political and administrative orders under colonialism is vast. See Smith, Government in Zazzau and Government in Kano, as well as Fika, The Kano Civil War and British Over-Rule, 1882–1940, and Tibenderana, The Administration of Sokoto. Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 53–82. Barnes, Making Headway. Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria, 48–49; and Colonial Reports—Annual, Northern Nigeria Report for 1902, 25. Echoing the imperial hubris of the American government in Iraq a century later, Lugard noted in this same report that “the people have welcomed our advent”—a welcome that included the murders of at least four colonial officials and the Satiru uprisings over the next four years. Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers, 37. Pierce, “Looking like a State,” 902. Lovejoy and Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery, 160–62. Umar, “Muslims’ Eschatological Discourses on Colonialism in Northern Nigeria,” 71. Pierce, Farmers and the State. 31–34. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 46–55. The debate between Alhaji Mahmood Yakubu (a Nigerian academic) and A. Trevor Clark (a former colonial administrator) regarding the abdication of the emir of Bauchi in 1954 offers a window into issue of British intentions regarding corruption in the NAs. See Yakubu, “Coercing Old Guard Emirs in Northern Nigeria,” and Clark, “Eye-Witnesses of the Coercion of the Old Guard Emir Yakubu III of Bauchi.” Smith, “Historical and Cultural Conditions of Political Corruption among the Hausa,” 175. Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims.” For a practical example of how these fears were perceived by a prominent Nigerian Muslim intellectual, see Gumi with Tsiga, Where I Stand, 64–65. This mistake is evident in Tomlinson and Lentham, History of Islamic Political Propa-

Notes to Pages 64–72 / 249

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

ganda in Nigeria, a compilation of British intelligence reports on “radical” Islamic movements linked to northern Nigeria. Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 28–29, 73–74. I came across colonial dossiers in the Sokoto State History Bureau that provided detailed intelligence reports of the Tijaniyya associations and leaders well into the 1950s. Mamdani, Define and Rule, 23. Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry, 117. Even after independence, Nigerian courts continued to recognize sharia’s role in the national legal system as stemming from its status as “customary law” for Muslims. See Woodman, “Moslem Law in Nigeria.” For a thoughtful account of the “invention” of customary land tenure law in northern Nigeria, see Pierce, Farmers and the State, 80–110. See also Meek, Land Tenure and Land Administration in Nigeria and the Cameroons. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 547–48. Anderson, “Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India,” 211. Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed,” 282. Nicolson, The Administration of Nigeria, 1900–1960, 132–33, citing a letter from Lugard to Flora Shaw, February 1906. Keay and Richardson, The Native and Customary Courts of Nigeria, 23. Tibenderana, The Administration of Sokoto, 242–44; and Umar, Islam and Colonialism, 47–49. On the increased role of flogging, see Pierce, “Punishment and the Political Body.” These are the terms used in a 1933 confidential memorandum prepared by T. C. Mewton, resident of Bauchi Province, cited by Umar, Islam and Colonialism, 205. Ibid., 190. Pierce, “Farmers and ‘Prostitutes’.” Shankar, “Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland.” See also Keay and Richardson, The Native Courts and Customary Courts of Nigeria, especially 164–73. Effiong Ekpo v. Kano Native Authority, 1957 NNLR 129, http://www.elawnigeria.com/ JSHmsdk232n23/REGINA%20v.%20AGBEZE%20ONUEGBE%20.pdf. See Anderson, “Conflict of Laws in Northern Nigeria,” as well as Ostien, A Study of the Court Systems of Northern Nigeria, with a Proposal for the Creation of Lower Sharia Courts in Some Northern States, 35–36. Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry, 122–23. Ibid., 123. This program and its intellectual impact on northern Nigeria’s Muslim intellectual community are discussed in detail in Thurston, “The Era of Overseas Scholarships.” Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry, 130. Umar, Islam and Colonialism, 48–49. On one such instance, the deposition of Sultan Mohammadu Tambari of Sokoto in 1931, see Tibenderana, “The Making and Unmaking of the Sultan of Sokoto.” Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry, 185. Abun-Nasr, “The Recognition of Islamic Law in Nigeria as Customary Law,” 38. Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry, 185–86. Ochowu, Colonialism by Proxy, 21. For the definitive study of Niass, see Seesemann, The Divine Flood. The classic work on the development of Tijaniyya as a political identity in northern Nigeria is Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano, 94–117. On Muhammad

250 / Notes to Pages 72–80

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Sanusi’s political project in Kano and his use of Tijaniyya authority, see Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 76. See the reproduction of a manuscript (“’Yan Tande,” the “Exploiters”) by Aminu Kano used as the basis of his public speeches in the 1940s and 1950s in Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano, 282. See Kano’s speech at the Nigerian Constitutional Conference, July 31, 1953, in Abba, ed., The Politics of Mallam Aminu Kano, 81. Kano, “Application of Islamic Law in Nigeria as It Affects Muslims,” in Jega et al., eds., Malam Aminu Kano, 282–95. Gumi with Tsiga, Where I Stand, 33. See also Chamberlin, “On the Development of Islamic Education in Kano City, Nigeria.” Schacht, “Islam in Northern Nigeria,” 132. Umar, “Changing Islamic Identity in Nigeria,” 159. For general autobiography of this era, see Gumi with Tsiga, Where I Stand, 28–71. Sardauna is a title traditionally held by the chief of the palace guards. Balewa’s speech and its consequences are summarized in Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition, 96–111. Sule’s remarks, published in the Daily Comet on June 1, 1950, are reproduced by Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition, 61n36. Yakubu, An Aristocracy in Political Crisis, 153. Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition, 427, 451. Dudley, Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria, 143. Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano, 312. Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition, 394. Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano, 290–97. Mulukiya was the contemporary term for the existing and established system of emirs and chiefs within the context of the NA or other central regional government. See Hiskett, History of Hausa Islamic Verse, 109n15. Sipikin, “Arewa Jamhuriya Kawai,” 31–41. “Memorandum of the NEPU on the Declaration of Fundamental Rights, at the Nigerian Constitutional Conference, 15th August, 1953,” in Abba, ed., The Politics of Mallam Aminu Kano, 84–85. See Reynolds, The Time of Politics (Zamanin Siyasa), 105–30. for extensive citations from Wali’s newspaper essays. On Nana Asma’u, see Mack and Boyd, One Woman’s Jihad. Dudley, Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria, 176–90. Kuna, “Violence and State Formation,” 36. Ibid., 317–18. See Colonial Office 554/1069, “Confidential Note for the Minister of State on the Arrest of N.E.P.U. Adherents,” reproduced in Abba, ed., The Politics of Mallam Aminu Kano, 90–92. “Letter to N.B.J. Huijusman of the Colonial Office from Peter Stallard, 4th September, 1954,” reproduced in Abba, ed., The Politics of Mallam Aminu Kano, 93–95. Hiskett, History of Hausa Islamic Verse, 111. The quote is from Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith, lieutenant governor of the Northern Region from 1954 to 1957. See Sharwood-Smith, But Always as Friends, 222. Described by Dudley, Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria, 188–89. Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allaying Them, 100–101.

Notes to Pages 80–92 / 251 100. The documents produced by this committee, both in 1958 and in their second tour in 1962, have been in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria. 101. Essien, “The Northern Nigerian Penal Code,” 94–96. 102. See, for example, Isyaku Dikko and Tanimu Usman, “Sardauna Was Deceived— Dr. Datti Ahmed,” Weekly Trust 3, no. 31 (September 15–21, 2000). 103. On Bello’s modernizing policy priorities, see Paden, Ahmadu Bello, especially 496– 528. On the educational and intellectual backgrounds of Bello and his NPC associates, see Whitaker, “Three Perspectives on Hierarchy,” as well as Hubbard, Education under Colonial Rule, a History of Katsina College: 1921–1942. 104. Reproduced in Amune, Work and Worship, 221–22. 105. The best is Diamond, Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria. 106. Cited in Reynolds, “The Politics of History,” 59. CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Ado-Kurawa, Shari’ah in Nigeria, 35. See Thurston, “Abubakar Gumi’s Al-‘Aqida ai-Sahiha bi-Muwafaqat al-Shari’a,” and Brigaglia, “Two Recent Hausa Translations of the Qur’an and Their Doctrinal Background,” 424–49. Brigaglia, “The Radio Kaduna Tafsir (1978–1992) and the Construction of Public Images of Muslim Scholars in the Nigerian Media,” 188. On the growth of African Pentecostalism, see Kalu, African Pentecostalism, as well as Ojo, The End-Time Army. On the political influence of these movements in Nigeria, see Marshall, “God Is Not a Democrat,” and Smith, “The Arrow of God.” See Ostien, “An Opportunity Missed by Nigeria’s Christians,” 238. Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, Official Report, vol. 1, 47. Clarke, “Islamic Reform in Contemporary Nigeria,” 528–29, 535. Anthony, Poison and Medicine, 86–118. Omenka, “Blaming the Gods.” The best available analyses of the FSCA debate are undoubtedly Laitin, “The Sharia Debate,” and Kukah, Religion, Politics, and Power in Northern Nigeria. Laitin, “The Sharia Debate,” 413. Kumo, “Judiciary under the Draft Constitution,” 212. Kumo, “The Application of Islamic Law in Northern Nigeria,” 46–47n18. Later estimates, most notably by the 1976 Area Courts Reform Committee, found that in some northern states the percentage of cases (criminal and civil) tried before Area Courts was as high as 99 percent. See Report of the Area Court Reform Committee. Ostien, “An Opportunity Missed by Nigeria’s Christians,” 232–33. Odinkalu, Justice Denied, 74–78. Kumo, “The Application of Islamic Law in Northern Nigeria,” 47. Mahmood, ed., Sharia Reports of Nigeria, Vol. 1, xviii–xix. Pierce, Farmers and the State, chapter 5, passim. Carter, “Prospects for the Administration of Justice in Nigeria.” Personal communication, Phil Ostien, April 25, 2014. Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, Official Report, vol. 1, 342. See, for example, the exchange between Nuhu Bamali and Shehu Shagari, ibid., 60. Ibid., 343. Cited in Kukah, Religion, Politics, and Power in Northern Nigeria, 120. Sulaiman, “The Sharia’ah and the Nigerian Draft Constitution,” 23. Laitin, “The Sharia Debate,” 424–30.

252 / Notes to Pages 92–105 27. The book is Shagari and Boyd, Uthman Dan Fodio. On the role of religious symbolism in political campaigning in the Muslim north, see Miles, Elections in Nigeria. 28. Cited in Kirk-Greene, “Ethnic Engineering and the ‘Federal Character’ of Nigeria,” 457–58. 29. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria, 148. 30. Kirk-Greene, “Ethnic Engineering and the ‘Federal Character’ of Nigeria,” 465–67. 31. For a fuller discussion of Nigeria’s “citizenship troubles” and their origins in the country’s postwar power-sharing efforts, as well as a general critique of the federal character in Nigeria, see my “Citizenship, Federalism, and Powersharing.” 32. Suberu, “Prebendal Politics and Federal Governance in Nigeria,” 79. 33. Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 48–49. 34. Paden, Muslim Civic Cultures and Conflict Resolution, 127n31. 35. Ekeh, “The Structure and Meaning of the Federal Character in the Nigerian Political System,” 38. 36. Cited in Falola, “Christian Radicalism in Nigerian Politics,” 270. 37. Suberu, “Religion and Politics,” 405–9. 38. Cited in Suberu, Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria, 134. 39. Cited in Christelow, “Three Islamic Voices in Contemporary Nigeria,” 232. 40. Ibid., 233. 41. See Sule and Starratt, “Islamic Leadership Positions for Women in Contemporary Kano Society,” and Renne, “Educating Muslim Women and the Izala Movement in Zaria City, Nigeria.” 42. Yusuf, “Hausa-Fulani Women,” 98–99, 102. 43. Lewis, Growing Apart, 136–38, 150, 152–59. 44. Barber, “Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira,” 435. 45. Lubeck, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria, 133. 46. Watts, “Islamic Modernities?,” 268–71. 47. The role of Islam in shaping class-based identity among Kano’s working class is memorably documented by Lubeck, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria, 150–60. 48. Lubeck, “Islamic Protest under Semi-Industrial Capitalism,” 380. 49. Watts, “Islamic Modernities?,” 262. 50. Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria, 135–36, 145–49, 162–65. For an estimate of the number of clashes, see Falola, Violence in Nigeria, 230–46. 51. Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 305–8. 52. Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria, 225. 53. Ibrahim, “The Politics of Religion in Nigeria,” 73. 54. Ibid. 55. Sulaiman, “The Shari’ah and the 1979 Constitution.” For biographical background on Sulaiman, see Christelow, “Three Islamic Voices in Contemporary Nigeria,” 237–44. 56. Sandberg and Doe, “The Strange Death of Blasphemy,” 973. For an example of how Nigerian Muslim activists deploy Bowman v. Secular Society, see Orire, “Shari’ah and English Law,” 85–95. 57. Miles, “Muslim Ethnopolitics and Presidential Elections in Nigeria,” 235. 58. Sulaiman, “A Fresh Constitution Required,” 9. 59. See, for example, Falola, “Christian Radicalism and Nigerian Politics,” and Bako, “Muslims, State, and the Struggle for Democratic Transition in Nigeria,” 283–302.

Notes to Pages 105–116 / 253 60. “Leadership in Nigeria,” 1, 70–72. 61. Ilesenmi, “Constitutional Treatment of Religion and the Politics of Human Rights in Nigeria,” 542. 62. Umar, “Education and Islamic Trends in Northern Nigeria,” 138. 63. See Bunza, “The Iranian Model of Political Islamic Movement in Nigeria (1979– 2002),” 299. 64. See Sulaiman, “Shiaism and the Islamic Movement in Nigeria 1979–1991,” 13. Whether or not Zakzaky’s movement is properly Shi’a is a matter of some confusion. His own statements going back to the early 1980s have been cagey, and the website of the Islamic Movement does not specify the group’s affiliation with Shi’a Islam. 65. Krings, “Conversion on Screen.” Ironically, Krings notes that movies about conversion to Islam (including Shaheed) did not sell particularly well, even at the height of the sharia frenzy. 66. Representative works include Smith, A Little New Light, and Usman, The Transformation of Katsina, 1400–1883. 67. Sounaye, “Heirs of the Sheikh.” 68. Sulaiman, The Islamic State and the Challenge of History, 6. 69. Sulaiman, A Revolution in History, xiii–xiv. 70. See Usman Bugaje, “Education, Values, Leadership and the Future of Nigeria,” 1995, http://www.webstar.co.uk/~ubugaje/value.html, and Bugaje, “Towards a Viable Islamic Political System: What Options for Nigeria?,” n.d., http://www.webstar.co.uk/ ~ubugaje/options.html. 71. Bugaje, “The Sakkwato Model.” 72. Abdullahi, On the Search for a Viable Political Culture, 5, 116. Emphasis added. 73. Tukur, Leadership and Governance in Nigeria, 525. 74. This point is made by Thurston, “Interactions between Northern Nigeria and the Arab World in the Twentieth Century,” 67–73. 75. Bugaje, “The Caliphate in Modern Nigeria: Ending It, Mending It or Reinventing It? [II],” 1997, reprinted in Weekly Trust, August 23, 2003. 76. See, for example, Taib’u, “Controlling the Crime Rate in Nigeria,” 187. 77. Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 305–6. See also Ojo, “Pentecostal Movements, Islam and the Contest for Public Space in Northern Nigeria.” 78. Oyediran, “The Political Bureau,” 88. 79. Cited in Kenny, “Sharia and Christianity in Nigeria,” 348–49. 80. Report of the Political Bureau, 183–88. 81. The statement is reproduced in Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change, 378–79. 82. Report of the Political Bureau, 45–46. 83. Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 24. 84. See Yadudu, “Constitution-Making and the Politicization of Sharia in Nigeria,” “Colonialism and the Transformation of the Substance and Form of Islamic Law in the Northern States of Nigeria,” and “Colonialism and the Transformation of Islamic Law in the Northern States of Nigeria.” 85. Yadudu, “We Need a New Legal System,” 6. 86. Mahmud, A Brief History of Shari’ah in the Defunct Northern Nigeria, 25–26. 87. Ibid., 59. 88. See, for example, Bayart, The State in Africa. For a Nigerian case study, see Omobowale and Olutayo, “Chief Lamidi Adedibu and Patronage Politics in Nigeria.”

254 / Notes to Pages 117–128 CHAPTER FIVE

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Harnischfeger, Democratization and Islamic Law, 112–54. Roughly, “prince” of the emirate of Bakura in Zamfara. See Maier, This House Has Fallen, 185–87. Advertisement in author’s possession. See also “The Man behind the Sharia Controversy,” Tempo (Lagos), November 3, 1999, and an interview from the Nigerian weekly Tell published November 15, 1999, cited by Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 1, vii. Cf. Amara, “The Izala Movement in Nigeria,” 331–39, who cites interviews conducted in 2006–7 with leading Izala officials who claim to have inspired Yerima’s sharia plan prior to the 1999 elections and thus that Izala “initiated” the sharia movement. He presents no other confirmatory evidence, however, including no public statements by Izala leaders from the late 1990s advocating reforms along the lines proposed by Yerima in 1999. Last, “Notes on the Implementation of Shari’a in Northern Nigeria.” 2. Stephen Oladipupo, “Zamfara Governor Attacked,” P.M. News (Lagos), October 28, 1999. As reported by Last, “La charia dans le Nord-Nigeria,” 142. Sambo’s address is reproduced in Sambo, Shari’a and Justice. “Our Position,” Tempo (Lagos), November 3, 1999. “Speech Delivered by His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Zamfara State, Alh. Ahmad Sani (Yerimin Bakura) at the Official Launching of Sharia in Zamfara State on Wednesday 27th October, 1999,” published in New Nigerian, November 5, 1999, 14–15. Emmanuel Aziken, “Zamfara PDP Asks Gov to Caution Wife, Others for Partying, Dancing,” Vanguard (Lagos), January 20, 2006. Bashir Sanda Gusau and Yakubu Mohammed Tsafe, “Understanding Zamfara’s Sharia Policy,” New Nigerian (Kaduna), October 1, 1999. Bala Abdullahi, “Yar’adua Softpedals,” New Nigerian, February 5, 2000. “Interim and Final Reports of the Committee Set up to Advise the Sokoto State Government on the Establishment of Sharia,” October 13 and December 16, 1999, in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, supplemental materials, http:// www.sharia-in-africa.net/media/publications/sharia-implementation-in-northern -nigeria/vol_2_7_chapter_2_supp_sokoto_pre.pdf. “Report of the Bauchi State Sharia Implementation Committee,” in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, especially 10–21. All are cited in ibid., 23–97. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 54. “We Need Sharia’a on Bonny Road, Kaduna,” New Nigerian, November 5, 1999, 4. This is confirmed by an interview with Rotimi Williams in Ostien, “An Opportunity Missed by Nigeria’s Christians,” note 60. See, for example, Office of the Executive Governor, Zamfara State, Development of Zamfara State, 85–86. Cited in Sada, “The Making of the Zamfara and Kano State Sharia Penal Codes,” 22. The original trial and appeals process (including translated court records) is documented in “Proceedings and Judgments in the Safiyatu Hussaini Case,” in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 5, 17–51. While a great deal has been written about the cases, the most detailed account is certainly Yawuri, “On Defend-

Notes to Pages 128–136 / 255

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

ing Safiyatu Hussaini and Amina Lawal,” 129–39. For yet another perspective, see Tudu with Masto, I, Safiya. Peters, Islamic Criminal Law in Nigeria, 13. “Report of the Committee for the Implementation of Sharia in Kebbi State,” January 18, 2001, in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, 208. Yadudu, “Colonialism and the Transformation of the Substance and Form of Islamic Law,” 38–40. Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 4, 6–7. Field notes, May 18, 2008. The states with “official” hisbah are Bauchi, Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Niger, Yobe, and Zamfara. In two states (Katsina and Sokoto), hisbah groups have been active since the early 2000s with the knowledge but not the sanction of state government. See Attorney-General of Kano State v. Attorney-General of the Federation, SC 26/2006, available at http://www.nigeria-law.org/Attorney-General%20of%20Kano%20State %20v%20Attorney-General%20of%20the%20Federation.htm. Fatima Adamu, “Gender, Hisbah and Enforcement of Morality in Shariah Implementing States of Zamafara and Kano in Northern Nigeria,” Africa Gender Institute, http://web.uct.ac.za/org/gwsafrica/african%20feminist%20thinkers/adamu/adamu %20publication.htm. Vogel, “The Public and Private in Saudi Arabia,” 753. Language from the law creating the Kano State Hisbah Board, reproduced in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 6, online supplement, chapter 10, p.  34, http://www.sharia-in-africa.net/pages/publications/sharia-implementation -in-northern-nigeria-1999-2006-a-sourcebook---volume-vi-ulama-institutions.php. Olaniyi, “Hisbah and Sharia Law Enforcement in Metropolitan Kano,” 87–89. See Gaudio, Allah Made Us. “About 9 in 10 Nigerians Support the Proposed Anti-Same-Sex Marriage Bill,” NOI Polls, June 11, 2013, http://www.noi--polls.net/index.php?s_id=3&p_id=247&p_pt= 1&parent=11#.UchRT_asgXw. Haruna Gimba Yaya, “1000 Couples Tie Knot in Kano Mass Wedding,” Daily Trust, April 28, 2013. On the Bollywood influence in northern Nigerian popular culture, see Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers.” Kano State Censorship Board Film Censorship Guidelines, document in author’s personal possession. Downloaded in 2010 from the board’s former website, now inactive. On the Kannywood industry’s tribulations under sharia, see McCain, “Nollywood, Kannywood, and a Decade of Hausa Film Censorship in Nigeria.” See, for example, Mabera, Intra-Religious Imbruglio and the Historic Monumental Islamic Achievements of his Excellency Alh. (Dr.) Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa, 57–72. “Understanding Zamfara’s Sharia Policy,” New Nigerian, October 1, 1999. Oba, “Islamic Law as Customary Law,” 833. For a general overview of the constitutional questions, see Iwobi, “Tiptoeing through a Constitutional Minefield.” Ostien and Dekker, “Sharia and National Law in Nigeria,” 369–74. Haruna, “The Application on the Shari’a Penal System,” 152–53. Suberu, “Religion and Institutions,” 553. Quoted in “Supreme Court Decision Not Final,” Tempo (Lagos), March 22, 2001. Modirzadeh, “Taking Islamic Law Seriously,” 202. Ibid., 223.

256 / Notes to Pages 137–143 51. Reported in Weimann, “Islamic Law and Muslim Governance in Northern Nigeria,” 415, and Tertsakian, “Political Sharia?,” 37–39. 52. “Safiya’s Case: Nobody Can Stop Us—Sokoto,” ThisDay (Lagos), December 7, 2001. 53. Stephanie Nolan, “The Twisted Tale of Bariya Magazu,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 2001. See also Howard-Hassmann, “The Flogging of Bariya Magazu.” 54. See “Saving Amina Lawal.” For a broader criticism of this tendency, see Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” 55. Somini Sentgupta, “When Do-Gooders Don’t Know What They’re Doing,” New York Times, May 11, 2003. 56. Human Rights Watch, “Nigeria: Debunking Misconceptions on Stoning Case,” October 27, 2003, http://www.hrw.org/news/2003/10/26/nigeria-debunking-mis conceptions-stoning-case. 57. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, “Sharia and the Woman Question,” Weekly Trust (Abuja), September 18, 2000. 58. See “Safiya to Know Fate on Monday,” New Nigerian, March 22, 2002; and Ramatu Ali, “So, Safiya Is Real,” New Nigerian, April 2, 2002. 59. Yerima’s comment to this effect is cited in Tertsakian, “Political Shari’a?,” 39. 60. “Human Rights Groups Flayed for Criticizing Sharia,” New Nigerian, January 2, 2002. 61. Mayer, Islam and Human Rights, 66. 62. Ibrahim Shekarau, “Shari’a, Nigeria, and the West: Issues on Human Rights,” New Nigerian, May 29, 2004. 63. “Rights Body Okays Flogging of Teenage Mum,” New Nigerian, February 2, 2001. 64. Office of the Executive Governor, Zamfara State, Development of Zamfara State, 101. 65. Parts of this section are expanded on in Kendhammer, “Islam and the Language of Human Rights in Nigeria.” 66. Adamu, “A Double-Edged Sword.” 67. See, for example, Bilkisu Yusuf, “The Veil and Male Chauvinists,” Weekly Trust (Abuja), April 5, 2002; and Yusuf, “Women and Empowerment in Islam,” Weekly Trust (Abuja), December 13, 2002. 68. Ayesha Imam, “Fighting the Political (Ab)use of Religion in Nigeria: BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, Allies, and Others,” WLUML Publications, 2004, http:// www.wluml.org/sites/wluml.org/files/import/english/pubs/pdf/wsf/15.pdf; and Ayesha Imam et al., eds., “Women’s Rights in Muslim Laws,” BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, 2005, http://www.baobabwomen.org/publications_womenshr.htm. 69. “Sharia Implementation in Nigeria: The Journey So Far,” BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, http://www.baobabwomen.org/publications_womenshr.htm, 9. 70. Ibrahim Nalya Sada, Fatima Adamu, and Ali Ahmad, “Promoting Women’s Rights through Sharia in Northern Nigeria,” Report of the Centre for Islamic Legal Studies, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and the British Council, 2005, http://www.dfid.gov .uk/Documents/publications/promoting-women-sharia.pdf. See also Adamu, “Gender, Hisbah and Enforcement of Morality in Northern Nigeria.” 71. Rosen, “Why Do Muslim Women So Often Win in Court?” 72. This claim was made by to me by leaders in several Nigerian human rights organizations that assist Muslim women pursuing court cases. Field notes, September 28 and October 5, 2012. 73. It’s also worth noting that although the Sokoto jihadists did not claim the right of ijtihad, they did permit the use of non-Maliki law and sources. 74. Oba, “Islamic Law as Customary Law,” 838–40.

Notes to Pages 143–157 / 257 75. See Ostien, “Jonah Jang and the Jasawa.” 76. Tertsakian, “Jos,” 5. For an academic treatment of the causes of and participation patterns in sharia-related violence, see Scacco, “Who Riots?” 77. Tertsakian, “Revenge in the Name of Religion.” 78. Quoted in Tertsakian, “The ‘Miss World’ Riots,” 7. 79. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa, 78. CHAPTER SIX

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

These broad concerns are documented by the Afrobarometer survey in “Performance and Legitimacy in Nigeria’s New Democracy.” See the “Nigeria Media Use 2012” conducted by Gallup and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, http://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2012/08/gallup-nigeria-brief .pdf. For a continental overview, see Michael Bratton, “Citizens and Cell Phones,” African Affairs, 112/447 (2013): 304–319. One important exception is Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public. Lippman, Public Opinion, 18. Kinder, “Pale Democracy,” 105. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy. Converse, “The Nature and Belief System of Mass Publics.” See, for example, Popkin, The Reasoning Voter. Gamson and Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion,” 1–2. See Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” Goffman, Frame Analysis, 25. Gamson and Modigilani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion,” 4. Johnson, “Equality, Morality, and the Impact of Media Framing.” Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, 6. More broadly, the importance of elite, expert communities in “manufacturing” political news was first broached in American politics by Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy. See, for instance, Sklar, “The Nature of Class Domination in Africa”; and Diamond, “Class, Ethnicity, and the Democratic State.” Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition. This point was reinforced to me by conversations with nearly every academic I met with in Sokoto, Zaria, and Kano. For an important counterpoint describing the rise of talakawa, “bourgeoise” merchant interests during the colonial era, and their incorporation into elite political and religious life, see Tahir, “Scholars, Sufis, Saints, and Capitalists in Kano.” Page, Who Deliberates? Described notably in Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News. Conroy-Krutz, “Information and Ethnic Politics in Africa,” 349. See Broadcasting Board of Governors, “Contemporary Media Use in Nigeria,” Broadcasting Board of Governors Research Brief Series, 2014, http://www.bbg.gov/wp -content/media/2014/05/Nigeria-research-brief.pdf. For a general overview of Nigeria’s media history, see Uche, Mass Media, People, and Politics in Nigeria. On the media’s political struggles under military rule, see Ekpu, “Nigeria’s Embattled Fourth Estate.” On the colonial origins of northern print journalism and Hausa literature, see Furniss, “On Engendering Liberal Values in the Nigerian Colonial State.” On northern colonial radio, see Larkin, Signal and Noise, 48–72. Okwori and Adeyanju, “African Media Development Initiative,” 20.

258 / Notes to Pages 157–168 24. Ibid., 8. 25. See Reporters Without Borders, “2013 World Press Freedom Index: Dashed Hopes after Spring,” http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html. 26. Hasty, “Performing Power, Composing Culture,” 72. 27. See Ben Colmery et al., “There Will Be Ink: A Study of Journalism Training and the Extractive Industries in Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda,” Columbia University Initiative for Public Dialogue, 2009, http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/ipd/files/ ThereWillBeInk.pdf. 28. Interviews with Sokoto journalists, staff, and management, Rima TV, Field notes, June 2, 2008. 29. NBC Station Audit Report Form (January–March 2008), in possession of author. 30. Gamson et al., “Media Images and the Social Construction of Reality,” 385. 31. From the New Nigerian’s first editorial, quoted in Isiah Abraham, “New Nigerian in the Eyes of Sardauna’s Aide,” New Nigerian, February 4, 2001. 32. Howarth, “Discourse Theory and Political Analysis,” 281. 33. See Johnston, “Verification and Proof in Frame and Discourse Analysis.” 34. Laver, Benoit, and Garry, “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data.” 35. Compare, for example, Hopkins and King, “A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science,” and Hardy, Harley, and Phillips, “Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis.” 36. See Thomas, “A General Inductive Approach for Analyzing Qualitative Evaluation Data.” 37. “Seat of Power: Assessing the Dividends of Democracy in Nigeria,” Nasarawastate. org, 2008, http://www.nasarawastate.org/articles/375/1/Seat-of-power-Assessing-the -Dividends-of-Democracy-in-Nigeria/Page1.html. 38. See, for example, Sai’du Mohammed Sanusi, “TSS as Democracy Dividend,” Leadership, July 28, 2008. 39. The quote is from “Lipread” (weekly column), New Nigerian, July 7, 2001. 40. Ahmad, “Extension of Shari’ah in Northern Nigeria,” 11. 41. Following Gamson and Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion,” the convention when describing frames is to present them as block quotations, even though they are the researcher’s own paraphrases and summaries from a range of sources. 42. From interview in Tell Magazine, October 14, 2002, cited in Harnischfeger, Democratization and Islamic Law, 225. 43. “Sharia: Women Protest KNSG’s ‘Nonchalance,’” New Nigerian, December 14, 2000, 1. 44. “Sharia: Test of True Federalism,” New Nigerian, November 17, 1999, 5. For a scholarly comparison of US legal doctrine of the protection of minority religious rights with the Nigerian case, see Reitz, “Freedom of Religion and Its Limitations.” 45. See, for example, “Relevance in Islamic Law,” New Nigerian, October 3, 1999, 15. 46. Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, supplementary materials to vol. 2, “Interim and Final Reports of the Committee Set up to Advise the Sokoto State Government on the Establishment of Sharia,” 9. 47. “Ulama Demands Security Changes in Plateau State,” New Nigerian, May 12, 2004, 1. 48. “Al-Bishak”; “Re: Thisday—Comment on Botman’s,” New Nigerian, January 2, 2003, 10.

Notes to Pages 169–182 / 259 49. “Work and Worship Is North’s Foundation, Says Dikko,” New Nigerian, October 30, 2001, 1. 50. Included in The Living Legend in Sokoto State, 180–90. 51. “Re: Sharia Is the Devil Agenda,” New Nigerian, September 28, 2001, 19. 52. See, for example, “Sleeping with the Enemy,” New Nigerian, March 5, 2000, 11–13. 53. Selected quotes drawn from Murtala Ibrahim, “Of Constitution and Sharia: Which Way?,” New Nigerian, August 27, 1999, 5. 54. “Zamfara Bans Mini-Skirts,” New Nigerian, May 5, 2001, 2. 55. A discussion of this issue in a context near to Nigeria can be found in Moussalli, “Hasan al-Turabi’s Islamist Discourse on Democracy and Shura.” 56. Editorial, “A Revolution in Zamfara,” New Nigerian, November 4, 1999, 1. 57. Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, 45. Emphasis added. 58. Mazrui, “Shariacracy and Federal Models in the Era of Globalization.” 59. Miles, “Shari’a as De-Africanization.” 60. For a depiction of the actual practice of prostitution, drinking, and gambling in Sokoto prior to sharia implementation, see Buba and Furniss, “Youth Culture, Bandiri, and the Continuing Legitimacy Debate in Sokoto Town.” 61. “Sharia Saves Marriage,” New Nigerian, March 25, 2000, 1. 62. “Report of the Committee for the Implementation of Sharia in Kebbi State,” January  18, 2001, in Ostien, Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, supplementary materials, 3. 63. The Living Legend in Sokoto State, 390. 64. Baffa Aliyu Umar et al., eds., “Proceedings of Public Forum (Zauren Shawara) of the Directorate of Societal Re-Organization (A Daidaita Sahu),” Kano State Government Directorate of Societal Re-Organization, 2006, 41, report in possession of author. 65. See, for example, Ibrahim A. Ayagi, “Public Trust and Accountability in Islam,” New Nigerian, June 4, 1999, 20; and “How Much Should a Public Official Be Paid?,” New Nigerian, June 13, 1999, 48. 66. “We Need Sharia’a on Bonny Road, Kaduna.” 67. “Fear and Worry,” New Nigerian, October 31, 2001, 5. 68. See Ferree, “Resonance and Radicalism.” CHAPTER SEVEN

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, 52. Quoted in Karin Brulliard, “In Nigeria, Sharia Fails to Deliver; Vows of Accountability, Equity under Moderate Islamic Law Are Unmet,” Washington Post, August 12, 2009, A10. This line of research is well summarized by Bullock, “Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate.” See, inter alia, Liddle and Mujani, “Leadership, Party, and Religion”; and Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani, “Testing Islam’s Political Advantage.” Peletz, Islamic Modern, 5. Lubeck, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria, particularly 82–90 and 147–63. The old NEPU-era language of class is still occasionally used in public debate, usually by opposition-minded intellectuals invoking the “political sharia” frame to suggest that Islamic values have been coopted by a corrupt political class that cares relatively little for the interests of most northern Muslims. See, for example, Mohammed, Adamu, and Abba, The Living Conditions of the Talakawa and the Shari’ah in Contemporary Nigeria.

260 / Notes to Pages 182–200 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Peletz, Islamic Modern, 223–27. Patel and Bleck, “Out of Africa.” See Eckstein, “Congruence Theory Explained.” Inglehart, “How Solid Is Mass Support for Democracy—and How Can We Measure It?,” 52. Mishler and Rose, “Political Support for Incomplete Democracies.” See Mattes and Bratton, “Learning about Democracy in Africa”; and Bratton and Mattes, “Support for Democracy in Africa.” Bratton and Lewis, “The Durability of Political Goods?” Mattes and Logan, “Democratizing the Measurement of Democratic Quality.” One exception is Druckman and Nelson, “Framing and Deliberation,” which adds conversations among testees into an experimental setting. Gamson, Talking Politics, 6. Kitzinger and Barbour, “Introduction,” 5. See Gamson, Talking Politics, 193. African Development Bank, “The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa,” Market Brief, April 20, 2011, http://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/ uploads/afdb/Documents/Publications/The%20Middle%20of%20the%20Pyramid _The%20Middle%20of%20the%20Pyramid.pdf. Comparison to Afrobarometer, Round 4 data (2008 survey). All names have been changed to protect participants’ confidentiality. This is a market, commonly conducted by women, found in most northern Nigerian cities inside the army or police barracks. Because these areas are under federal authority, alcohol can bought and consumed there. Group interview #3, February 24, 2008, conducted at a private home in Sokoto. Group interview #6, March 24, 2008, conducted at a mosque in the GRE, Sokoto. Rosen, The Justice of Islam, 48. Agbaje and Adisa, “Political Education and Public Policy in Nigeria,” 27. Cited in Edeani, “Value Orientations in Press Coverage of a National Mobilization Campaign,” 67. See also Directorate for Social Mobilization [MAMSER], Political Education Manual. Ekeh, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa.” Ukaegbu, “Indiscipline in Nigeria,” 63. Smith, “Ritual Killing, 419, and Fast Wealth,” 801. Last, “The Search for Security in Muslim Northern Nigeria.” Group interview #12, March 24, 2008, conducted in a private home in Sokoto. “Zamfara’s Dress Code,” Daily Champion (Lagos), February 14, 2004. Field notes, February 29, 2008. Group interview #5, March 1, 2008, conducted at a private house in Sokoto. This is a reference to the solvents used in motorcycle and tire repair. Miles, “Shari’a as De-Africanization,” 67–68. Masquelier, “The Scorpion’s Sting.” Here, she means to include “indigenous” religions alongside Islam and Christianity. Group interview #13, April 27, 2008, conducted at the Sokoto College of Education. See, for example, Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail. Madison, “Federalist #51,” 319–20. Emphasis added. Gilliom, Oveerseers of the Poor, 111. Group interview #3, February 24, 2008. Group interview #2, February 23, 2008, conducted at a private home in Sokoto.

Notes to Pages 201–228 / 261 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Kirwin, “Popular Perceptions of Shari’a Law in Nigeria,” 8. Lewis and Alemika, “Seeking the Democratic Dividend,” 42. See Shin, “Is Democracy Emerging as a Universal Value?,” 68. Rosen, “Islamic Concepts of Justice,” 69–72. See NOI-Gallup Results, First National Survey, February 2007, http://www.noi-polls .net/Data/governance.html. CHAPTER EIGHT

1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

See, for example, Bim Adewunmi, “Nigeria: The Happiest Place on Earth,” The Guardian, January 4, 2011. Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, April 30, 2013. The report is available at http:// www.pewforum .org/ files/ 2013/ 04/ worlds -muslims -religion -politics -society -full -report.pdf. Ary Hermawan, “Commentary: Is Pew Really Saying Most Indonesians Are Muslim Radicals?,” Jakarta Post, May 3, 2013, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/ 05/ 03/ commentary -is -pew -really -saying -most -indonesians -are -muslim -radicals .html. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Report: Muslims Back Islamic Law, Disagree on Meaning,” USA Today, May 1, 2013. See, among others, Tibi, The Sharia State; and Fradkin, “Arab Democracy or Islamist Revolution?” See, for example, Hill, Sufism in Northern Nigeria. Soares, “Notes on the Anthropological Study of Islam and Muslim Societies in Africa.” Roy, “There Will Be No Islamist Revolution,” 18. Etzioni, “Will the Right Islam Stand Up?” See Oyediran  and Isiugo-Abanihe, “Perceptions of Nigerian Women on Domestic Violence.” For three classic examples, see Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy; McCloskey, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics”; and Smith, Liberalism and American Constitutional Law. DiPalma, To Craft Democracies. For this second view, see Tibi, The Sharia State, especially chapter 3. Agrama, Questioning Secularism. Roy, Globalized Islam, 3. These claims can be found in, among others, Ahmed Sani Yerima, “The Challenges of Sharia in a Democratic Setting,” paper prepared for an annual seminar organized by the Youth Christian Association of Nigeria (YCAN) Northern Forum at Arewa House, Kaduna, on January 21, 2006. Paper in author’s possession. Buehler, “The Rise of Shari’a By-Laws in Indonesian Districts.” Starrett, Putting Islam to Work. Suberu, “Religion and Institutions,” 556–57. See, for example, Agbiboa, “The Ongoing Campaign of Terror in Nigeria” and “The Nigerian Burden.” Anonymous, “The Popular Discourses of Salafi Radicalism and Salafi CounterRadicalism in Nigeria.” Last, “The Pattern of Dissent,” 7–11. Campbell, Nigeria, 129–42.

262 / Notes to Pages 229–239 24. See Magali Rheault and Bob Tortora, “Northern Nigerians’ Views Not in Line with Boko Haram’s,” Gallup Poll Report, February 20, 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/ 152780/northern-nigerians-views-not-line-boko-haram.aspx. 25. Hoechner, “Traditional Quranic Students (Almajirai) in Nigeria.” 26. Yusuf’s ideological background and his relationship with the Islamic intellectual community in northern Nigeria is discussed at length in Anonymous, “The Popular Discourses of Salafi Radicalism and Salafi Counter-Radicalism in Nigeria”; and Mustapha and Bunza, “Contemporary Islamic Sects and Groups in Northern Nigeria.” 27. For a discussion of the Christian view, see Marshall, Political Spiritualties, 240–44. 28. Pereira and Ibrahim, “On the Bodies of Women,” 932. 29. Gaudio, “Dire Straits in Nigeria,” 68. 30. Stepan, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” 45. 31. See Menchik, “Productive Intolerance.” 32. Stepan, “Rituals of Respect.” 33. Villalón, “From Argument to Negotiation,” 377. See also Villalón, “Negotiating Islam in the Era of Democracy.” 34. See Paden, Muslim Civic Cultures and Conflict Resolution; and Paden, Faith and Politics in Nigeria, passim. APPENDIX

1.

See, for example, Chong, “How People Think, Reason, and Feel about Rights and Liberties.” 2. See, for example, Walsh, Talking about Politics. 3. See, for example, Harrell and Bradley, Data Collection Methods, 10. 4. Gamson, Talking Politics, 189. 5. Morse, “Sampling in Grounded Theory.” See also Morgan, “Focus Groups,” 143–44, for a discussion of sampling issues within snowball-style recruiting processes for group interviews. 6. Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 124–25. 7. O’Reilly, Key Concepts in Ethnography, 84–85. 8. Gamson, Talking Politics, 191–96. 9. The classic work is Merton, Fiske, and Kendall, The Focused Interview, especially 135–69. 10. Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, Qualitative Data Analysis, 72. 11. See Strauss and Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research, 61–74. 12. Gamson, Talking Politics, 216–18. 13. As David Morgan suggests, there’s an inherent sense in which the group is the key unit of analysis. In particular, he warns against trying to disaggregate individuals within groups as the unit, something I’ve avoided by focusing on “turns” and conversations around specific questions. See Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, 60–62.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A NOTE ON REFERENCES

Complete references to newspapers and magazines, archival or privately held materials, government reports, online sources, and interviews (including the group interviews) are provided in the notes. N I G E R I A N N E W S PA P E R S

Daily Independent (Lagos) Daily Times (Lagos) Daily Trust/Weekly Trust (Abuja) Guardian (Lagos) Leadership (Lagos) New Nigerian (Kaduna) Nigerian Tribune (Lagos) The Punch (Lagos) The Sun (Lagos) Vanguard (Lagos) BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND OTHER SOURCES

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INDEX

Abacha, Sani, 94, 109, 114–15, 118–20, 156 Abdullahi, Umar, 107–8 Abiola, Moshood, 115, 118–19 accountability, 25–26, 36, 188, 190, 199; community and, 205–7; compatibility and, 32; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 23, 208, 212; elites and, 178–79; public discourse and, 181 A Daidaita Sahu (“directorate of social reorientation”), 10 Adam, Sheikh Ja’afar, 21, 139, 167 Adamawa State, 90, 123, 225 Adamu, Fatima, 142 adat (customary law, Indonesia), 45 Adegbite, Lateef, 170 administration, 127, 129, 146–47, 190, 220, 230; authority and, 61–64; Britain and, 67; caliphate and, 56, 58–59, 83; colonialism and, 65–66, 68–71; federal character and, 93, 95; First Republic and, 73; human rights and, 142; media and, 156; military rule and, 113; NEPU and, 78–79; NPC and, 75; penal codes and, 80–81; public discourse and, 54; revivalism and, 107; secularism and, 104; sharia and, 39, 44–45, 124, 126; Sokoto Caliphate and, 51. See also colonialism; governance Afghanistan, 3, 37, 144, 217 Afrobarometer surveys, 32, 184, 208 Agrama, Hussein Ali, 52–53, 219

Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), 84, 91, 128; military rule and, 111; revivalism and, 107–8; secularism and, 103–4, 106 alcohol, 10, 24–25, 126, 129–31, 194, 220–21; democracy and, 48–49; elites and, 197; human rights and, 140; morality and, 172–73, 188–89; penal codes and, 80; regulated markets and, 260n22; secularism and, 103, 168; Sokoto and, 259n60; US Prohibition and, 244n13; women and, 136 Al Jazeera, 41, 150, 226 alkalai (court), 44, 63; caliphate and, 58; colonialism and, 66–69, 71; military rule and, 112; NEPU and, 79; penal codes and, 80–81 All People’s Party (APP), 2, 119, 124 almajirai (Qur’an students), 100, 126; Boko Haram and, 229; “fast capitalism” and, 101; revivalism and, 108 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 30–31 amputation, 58, 67, 128, 137, 139 Anderson, Norman, 57–58, 70, 247n16 an-Na’im, Abdullahi, 30 Ansar Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”), 36, 48–49 Ansaru (Boko Haram offshoot), 225 apostasy, 53, 57, 107, 135, 221 AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), 36, 225 “Arab Spring,” 3, 29, 33, 152

286 / Index Area Courts, 126, 128; FSCA and, 89–90; military rule and, 114; 1976 reform committee for, 251n103; penal codes and, 82; transition and, 118 Asad, Talal, 13 Asma’u, Nana, 78 authoritarianism, 3, 33, 222; compatibility and, 27–28, 32; democracy and, 183–84, 209; exceptionalism and, 31; federalism and, 86; local politics and, 218; public discourse and, 41; reform and, 29 authority, 43–44, 130, 146, 220, 222; accountability and, 178–79; Boko Haram and, 230; British and, 65–69; caliphate and, 56–58; colonialism and, 65–69, 71; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 3, 21, 23, 46, 49–50, 183; federalism and, 85; First Republic and, 72–74; framing and, 13; media and, 156–57; methodology and, 239; NPC and, 74–76; public discourse and, 41, 53–55, 148; public reasoning and, 6–7, 14; reform and, 30–31; secularism and, 105; sharia and, 9, 12, 34, 38; Tijaniyya and, 249n71; violence and, 143 Awolowo, Obafemi, 88 Baba (of Karo), 59 Babangida, Ibrahim, 94, 109, 190; federal character and, 97; media and, 156–57; military rule and, 110–11, 115; transition and, 119 Bafarawa, Attahiru (governor of Sokoto State), 124, 132, 146, 173; public discourse and, 149; secularism and, 169 Balewa, Abubakar, Tafawa, 75, 81, 250n79 BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, 137, 141–43 Bauchi State, 56, 58, 123, 125–27, 131; Cow Market and, 125; FSCA and, 90; hisbah and, 255n30; military rule and, 114; secularism and, 171; violence and, 143 Bayelsa State, 223 Bayero University-Kano, 103, 107, 114, 120, 135 Bello, Ahmadu (Sardaunan Sokoto), 56, 58, 82–84, 145–46, 227; assassination

of, 82; federal character and, 95; First Republic and, 74; FSCA and, 88; modernization and, 251n103; NEPU and, 79; New Nigerian and, 157; NPC and, 75–77; penal codes and, 80–81; Second Republic and, 92; secularism and, 104, 168; Sokoto Caliphate and, 52; title of, 250n78; voting and, 98 Bello, Muhammad (sultan), 51, 76 Boko Haram, 11–13, 166, 224, 232; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; democracy and, 21–23, 210; identity and, 230; international jihad and, 147; local politics and, 215, 219; media and, 151– 52, 157–58; new democracies, 3; official name of, 242n10; radicalism and, 225– 29; radicalization of, 243n36 Borno State, 11, 21, 123, 127, 224–26; Boko Haram and, 228, 243n36; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; criminal law and, 134; media and, 151; 2003 gubernatorial campaign of, 227 Bowman v. Secular Society, 104 British Empire, 11, 44–45, 65–66, 68–70; administration and, 67; authority and, 60–64; caliphate and, 58–59, 82–83; democracy and, 50; First Republic and, 72–74; frame categories and, 165; FSCA and, 89–91; media and, 156; military rule and, 113; NA corruption and, 248n41; NEPU and, 79; NPC and, 75, 77; penal codes and, 80–81; public discourse and, 55; public reasoning and, 15; radicalism and, 249n44; Second Republic and, 92; secularism and, 104, 171; Yadudu and, 128; Zamfara and, 121. See also colonialism Brooke Report (Report of the Native Courts [Northern Provinces] Commission of Inquiry), 69–71 Bugaje, Usman, 107, 109, 122, 170, 188 Buhari, Muhammadu, 12, 60, 190, 223– 24, 232; democracy and, 21–22 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990), 96, 139 caliphate, 54, 56–60, 133, 145–46, 173; accountability and, 178; authority and, 63–65; colonialism and, 66–68, 71; fed-

Index / 287 eral character and, 95; federalism and, 87; First Republic and, 72–73; FSCA and, 89; legitimacy and, 82–84; NPC and, 76–78; opposition to, 61; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 55, 148; revivalism and, 106–9; secularism and, 104, 168, 170–71; symbolism and, 174, 176; transition and, 116–17; Zamfara and, 121–22. See also Sokoto Caliphate Cameroon, 22, 226 capitalism, 25, 28, 173, 182; counternarratives to, 55; “fast” form of, 99–101; military rule and, 113; revivalism and, 108 censorship, 10, 21, 42, 132 Chad, 22, 226 checks and balances, 198 Chibok kidnappings, 12, 226 Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), 96–97, 105, 144, 170; military rule and, 110, 112 Christian Association of Nigerian Americans, 166 Christians, 123–24, 130, 166–68, 173, 200–202, 223–24; Boko Haram and, 227; colonialism and, 69; community and, 203–5, 207; compatibility and, 32; criminal law and, 134–36; democracy and, 49; distribution and, 241n4; elites and, 197; federal character and, 95–96, 230–31; federalism and, 87; First Republic and, 74; frame analysis and, 160; frame categories and, 165; framing and, 17; FSCA and, 88–91; homosexuality and, 131; human rights and, 140–41; journalism and, 160; local politics and, 215, 219; military rule and, 111–12, 115–16; narratives and, 192– 93; NPC and, 76; public discourse and, 149; public reasoning and, 7; religious journalism and, 159–60; revivalism and, 103, 107; secularism and, 103–5, 169–70; sharia and, 1–3, 10–13, 25, 61, 97; symbolism and, 175; transition and, 117; violence and, 133, 143–45; women and, 136; Zamfara and, 121 citizenship, 11, 32, 232; compatibility and, 27; dual form of, 141; human

rights and, 140; military rule and, 112; postwar power-sharing efforts and, 252n31; public discourse and, 40. See also indigeneship class, 155–56, 186, 208; group interviews and, 186; identity and, 252n47; NEPU and, 259n6; Zamfara and, 122 classical Islam, 42–46, 89, 128, 130, 189; caliphate and, 58, 83; colonialism and, 65–67; federalism and, 87; FSCA and, 90; local politics and, 214; military rule and, 113–14; public discourse and, 53; transition and, 116, 118. See also tradition codification of law, 35, 44, 125, 128, 220; colonialism and, 66, 68, 70; democracy and, 3; FSCA and, 89; human rights and, 143; local politics and, 214; penal codes and, 80–82; women and, 136 colonialism, 127, 188, 190, 220, 222; authority and, 60–64; British and, 65–69; caliphate and, 57–58, 60, 83; democracy and, 46–47, 49–50; emirate literature and, 248n31; emir of Bauchi’s abdication and, 248n41; First Republic and, 71–74; FSCA and, 91; Hurgronje and, 246n78; jihad’s character and, 247n15; justice and, 67–69; languages of, 182; local politics and, 214, 216; media and, 156; military rule and, 113; narratives and, 192; NEPU and, 79; NPC and, 77–78; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 54, 148; public reasoning and, 14–15; reform and, 30; revivalism and, 107–9; Satiru uprisings and, 248n34; secularism and, 104–5, 170; sharia and, 11, 39, 44–45, 65–66, 70–71; talakawa and, 257n16; Tijaniyya intelligence reports and, 249n45; women and, 137; Zamfara and, 121. See also administration; British Empire compatibility (between sharia and democracy), 26–29, 32–33, 38, 221; Boko Haram and, 225; democracy and, 3–4, 20; local politics and, 216–17; military rule and, 113; public discourse and, 149–50, 180; public reasoning and, 5; secularism and, 169; women and, 138

288 / Index Constituent Assembly (CA) of 1977, 87, 90–91 Constitutional Drafting Committee (CDC), 82, 87–88, 91, 93 constitutional drafting process (1987–89), 115 constitutional law, 134–36, 165–68, 199, 201–2, 221; accountability and, 178; compatibility and, 27; democracy and, 3, 207; Egypt and, 34; federal character and, 93; federalism and, 87; First Republic and, 71–74; framing and, 17; FSCA and, 87–91; human rights and, 140, 142; local politics and, 214; military rule and, 109–15; 1953 conference and, 77; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 53; public reasoning and, 16; reform and, 30; secularism and, 104–5, 171; sharia and, 1, 9–10, 33, 43–46, 124–27, 130; symbolism and, 176–77; transition and, 116, 118; United States and, 198; violence and, 133–34; women and, 138, 139; Zamfara and, 121 corruption, 126, 130, 188, 190, 223; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 225; caliphate and, 57–58; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 4, 48; elites and, 174, 197; “fast capitalism” and, 99–101; First Republic and, 73; frame categories and, 165; framing and, 17, 19; FSCA and, 90–91; local politics and, 215; media and, 156, 158; narratives and, 191; NAs and, 248n41; northern Nigeria and, 164; NPC and, 75; penal codes and, 81; political sharia frame and, 259n6; public discourse and, 55, 148–49; public reasoning and, 5; reform and, 29; revivalism and, 109; secularism and, 169; sharia and, 1, 8, 11, 25, 36, 38; symbolism and, 174; transition and, 115; Zamfara and, 120, 122 Council of Ulema, 112, 121, 125 counter-insurgency, 226–27 courts, 5, 34, 38, 67, 127–28. See also specific types of courts criminal law, 10, 126–28, 131, 134, 194, 221; FSCA and, 89

customary law, 44–45, 128; colonialism and, 65, 68; FSCA and, 89; land tenure’s invention and, 249n48; military rule and, 114; penal codes and, 80, 82; post-independence and, 249n47; public reasoning and, 15 dan Fodio, Abdullahi, 51, 56, 58, 77, 108, 138, 148, 174 dan Fodio, Usman (Shehu), 45, 83, 146, 192; authority and, 61, 64; Boko Haram and, 227; caliphate and, 56–58; framing and, 18; NPC and, 75–78; public reasoning and, 14; revivalism and, 107; secularism and, 106; Shehu title of, 247n2; Sokoto Caliphate and, 51–52 Daniel, Isioma, 144 democracy, 46–50, 91–94, 100–104, 110– 14, 123, 172–73; accountability and, 178–79; community and, 203–7; compatibility and, 26–29, 32–33; constitutional law and, 87–91; elites and, 174– 75; emergence of, 2–5; federal character principle, 92–96; federalism and, 85–89, 95–99, 105–9, 115–17; First Republic and, 71–74; Fourth Republic and, 8–12; frame analysis and, 160–62; framing and, 13, 16–20, 152–55; group interviews and, 184–87; implementation and, 126–30; justice and, 198; local politics and, 215–19; media and, 150–52, 156–59; morality and, 187–90; northern Nigeria and, 163; NPC and, 74–75, 77; public discourse and, 39–42, 148–49; public reasoning and, 5–8, 14–16; radicalism and, 213–14; reform and, 29–31; religious journalism and, 159–60; rights and, 198–202; Second Republic and, 96–99; secularism and, 168–72; sharia and, 1–5, 24–26, 33–39, 42–46; sharia paradox and, 219–24; sharia’s future and, 20–23; Sokoto Caliphate and, 51–52; support for, 183– 84, 208–12; symbolism and, 174–77; transition to, 115–19. See also dividends of democracy; federalism; governance de Tocqueville, Alexis, 25 Directorate for Social Mobilization, 112 discursive opportunity structures, 175–76

Index / 289 distributional rights, 167, 203, 230, 233; federal character and, 96–97; military rule and, 112; northern Nigeria and, 164; public discourse and, 15, 149; secularism and, 105; transition and, 117. See also fair share; federal character dividends of democracy, 172–73, 184, 222, 224, 232; accountability and, 179; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 23, 210–12; frame categories and, 165; local politics and, 215, 219; northern Nigeria and, 163–64; public discourse and, 180–81; symbolism and, 176–77. See also democracy dress codes, 193, 220, 230 economic development, 43, 133, 173, 188–89, 222, 230, 232; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 225, 229– 30; community and, 205–6; compatibility and, 32; democracy and, 21–23, 46, 184, 207–8, 210–11; “fast capitalism” and, 99–101; framing and, 17, 19; narratives and, 193; penal codes and, 81; public discourse and, 181; reform and, 29–30; sharia and, 1, 8–9, 12, 26, 35–37; Zamfara and, 120–22 Economic Development and Social Justice (ED & SJ) frame, 172–73, 189, 198; accountability and, 179; democracy and, 207, 212; frame categories and, 164–65; poverty and, 195; symbolism and, 177 education, 132, 172, 189, 222; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; democracy and, 21, 46–47, 211–12; elites and, 174; federal character and, 95; First Republic and, 72–73; framing and, 13, 19; human rights and, 142; local politics and, 214; military rule and, 111; public discourse and, 41; reform and, 31; revivalism and, 107–8; secularism and, 103; sharia and, 8, 39, 43; voting and, 99 Egypt, 2, 34, 218–19, 222; colonialism and, 70; democracy and, 4, 20, 183; public discourse and, 52–53; secularism and, 171; 2012 presidential election in, 35; Yerima and, 122 Ekpo, Effong, 69–70 elections and electoral politics, 12, 22, 25,

35, 37–38, 77, 86, 103, 111, 115, 132, 147, 219, 222, 224, 226; community and, 203–6; compatibility and, 32–33; democracy and, 3–4, 210; federal character and, 93; NEPU and, 79; northern Nigeria and, 164; NPC and, 74–76; public discourse and, 180–81; public reasoning and, 7–8, 15; reform and, 29; Second Republic and, 92; voting and, 97–99; Zamfara and, 122 elites, 188, 193, 199, 221–23, 231–32; accountability and, 178–79; authority and, 61–62, 64; Boko Haram and, 227– 29; caliphate and, 59, 84; community and, 205; corruption and, 197; criminal law and, 134; democracy and, 21, 23, 49, 207–8, 210, 212; “fast capitalism” and, 100–101; federal character and, 94; federalism and, 86; First Republic and, 73; framing and, 16–20, 153–56; group interviews and, 186–87; human rights and, 143; local politics and, 214–16, 218; manufacturing news and, 257n14; media and, 158; methodology and, 235–36; military rule and, 116; narratives and, 191–92; NEPU and, 79; northern Nigeria and, 163; NPC and, 76; poverty and, 195; public discourse and, 148–49, 181; public reasoning and, 7; religious journalism and, 159; secularism and, 169; sharia and, 35, 124, 130, 145, 172, 174–75; symbolism and, 174–76; talakawa and, 257n16; transition and, 117, 119; voting and, 98; Zamfara and, 122. See also masu sarauta emirate system, 58, 124, 133, 146; authority and, 60–64; Bauchi and, 248n41; caliphate and, 57–59, 83; colonialism and, 67–71; democracy and, 21; First Republic and, 71–74; FSCA and, 89; literature on, 248n31; media and, 158; mulukiya as term for, 250n87; NPC and, 75, 77–78; penal codes and, 80, 82; revivalism and, 107; surveillance networks of, 192; symbolism and, 174– 75; violence and, 143; women, 138; Zamfara and, 122 ethnicity, 15, 57, 87, 107, 182; federal character and, 92–93, 95–96

290 / Index evangelicalism, 1, 24, 166; compatibility and, 28; military rule and, 110; secularism and, 168 Fadl, Khaled Abou El, 30 fair share, 220, 229, 232; Boko Haram and, 230; democracy and, 211–12; federal character and, 96; local politics and, 214–15, 218; public reasoning and, 15; secularism and, 105. See also distributional rights; federal character family law, 34, 36; caliphate and, 57; criminal law and, 134; democracy and, 3, 47; FSCA and, 89; human rights and, 142; inheritance and, 48 fatwa, 31, 44, 211; media and, 152; public discourse and, 41; revivalism and, 108 federal character, 92–97, 220, 231–32; community and, 203; local politics and, 214, 218; military rule and, 109–10, 112–14; postwar power-sharing efforts and, 252n31; public discourse and, 148–49; revivalism and, 101–2; secularism and, 105; symbolism and, 176; transition and, 116–17, 119; violence and, 143; women, 139; Zamfara and, 121; zonal strategy and, 93, 223. See also fair share; federal character Federal Character Commission (FCC), 94–95 Federal Character frame, 164, 167, 201; accountability and, 179; frame categories and, 165; symbolism and, 177 federalism, 9, 34, 91–94, 100–104, 110– 14, 199; caliphate and, 84; failure of, 83–84; frame analysis and, 161; public reasoning and, 15 Federal Sharia Court of Appeal (FSCA), 82, 87–91, 165; constitutional law and, 87– 91; media and, 157; military rule and, 112, 115; revivalism and, 109; secularism and, 103–4; transition and, 116–17 Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN), 99, 141 Feldman, Noah, 5, 36 feminism, 142, 175–76 fiqh (opinions of scholars), 43–44, 58; colonialism and, 68–69; democracy and, 47; FSCA and, 89; human rights and,

143; ijtihad and, 247n16; women and, 137; Yadudu and, 128 First Republic of Nigeria, 71–74, 131, 231; caliphate and, 82–83; federal character and, 92, 95–96; federalism and, 86–87; military rule and, 113; transition and, 117; voting and, 97–98 flogging, 67, 137, 140, 249n54 Fourth Republic of Nigeria, 1, 8–13, 221; accountability and, 179; democracy and, 5, 50, 184, 209; federalism and, 86; frame analysis and, 161; framing and, 17, 19–20; local politics and, 219; media and, 157; northern Nigeria and, 163; poverty and, 195; public discourse and, 148–50, 180; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 103, 107; sharia politics in, 145–47; symbolism and, 176; transition and, 116, 119; Zamfara and, 120 frame sponsors, 155, 175, 181 framing, 25, 156, 172–73, 187, 221; analysis of, 160–62; Boko Haram and, 229; categories of, 164–65; class and, 259n6; coding and, 239; democracy and, 13, 16–20, 152–55, 207, 212; description of, 258n41; elites and, 174; group interviews and, 185–86; interpretation of, 175–79; local politics and, 215, 218; media and, 150–52, 156–59; methodology and, 236–38; northern Nigeria and, 163–64; poverty and, 195; public discourse and, 148–49, 180–81; religious journalism and, 159–60; secularism and, 168–72; symbolism and, 175 Freedom FM Radio Kano, 157 Freedom of Information Act (2011), 157 Fulani people, 56, 62; caliphate and, 57, 59; federal character and, 93; First Republic and, 73; military rule and, 111 gambling, 10, 47 Gamson, William, 16, 153, 185–86, 235– 36, 238 Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo (newspaper), 85, 98 Gawon Nama neighborhood, 20, 189 globalization, 51, 152, 171–72, 178, 225; local politics and, 216–17; public discourse and, 15, 41, 148, 150

Index / 291 Gombe State, 101, 123, 127 governance, 38–39, 193–94, 219–20, 222, 230, 233; accountability and, 178–79; Boko Haram and, 228; caliphate and, 56–60, 64; compatibility and, 27, 32; constitutional law and, 198; creation of new states and, 94; criminal law and, 134; democracy and, 20–22, 46–48, 208; exceptionalism and, 31; “fast capitalism” and, 99, 101; federal character and, 94–96; framing and, 17, 19; hajj and, 182; media and, 133; military rule and, 113–14, 116; Muslimmajorities and, 4–5; new states created and, 119; NPC and, 75; public discourse and, 42, 52–55, 148, 180; public reasoning and, 5, 7, 14–16; reform and, 30; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 102–3; secularism and, 104–5; separation of church and, 27; sharia and, 10, 24–26, 33–37, 42–46, 123, 126–27; Sokoto Caliphate and, 52; symbolism and, 175; violence and, 209; Zamfara and, 121–22. See also administration; colonialism; sharia Gowon, Yakubu, 82 Gumi, Abubakar, 73–74, 85, 250n77; caliphate and, 84; community and, 205; federalism and, 86; military rule and, 110; public discourse and, 148; revivalism and, 102–3, 108; voting and, 98 Gusau (capital of Zamfara), 120, 140, 145, 173 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 40 hadith (accounts of the Prophet), 128 Haidara, Chérif Ousmane Madani, 48–49 hajj (pilgrimage), 64, 74, 97, 100; media and, 159; public discourse and, 182 Hallaq, Wael, 14, 43 Hausa people, 9, 54–55, 131–32, 145; caliphate and, 56–57, 59; federal character and, 93; federalism and, 85; First Republic and, 71–72; group interviews and, 187; journalism and, 160; media and, 151, 156; methodology and, 237; military rule and, 111; NPC and, 76, 78; religious journalism and, 160; revivalism and, 107; Second Republic and, 92;

secularism and, 106, 171; symbolism and, 174; transition and, 117 heuristics, 153, 180–81 hijab (veil), 142, 193 hijra (migration), 60, 147 hisbah (sharia police), 10, 36, 53, 129–31, 220; human rights and, 142; states with, 255n30 Holding Elites Accountable frame, 173, 198– 99; accountability and, 178–79; democracy and, 207; elites and, 174; frame categories and, 164–65; local politics and, 219; poverty and, 195; symbolism and, 177 homosexuality, 46, 131, 136, 217, 230 hudud punishments, 125–26, 169, 217, 221; caliphate and, 58; colonialism and, 67; Hudood Ordinances (Pakistan) and, 37, 245n49; penal codes and, 80; women and, 136, 139; Zamfara and, 121 human rights, 2, 34, 139–43, 165, 167, 221; compatibility and, 28; democracy and, 21; federal character and, 96; framing and, 17; NPC and, 77; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 53; public reasoning and, 8, 16; violence and, 133; voting and, 99; women and, 136–39. See also rights Human Rights Watch, 21, 138, 144 Husseini, Safiya, 137–38 Ibadan, University of, 107 identity, 39, 45, 131, 202, 219; Boko Haram and, 230; class and, 252n47; democracy and, 23, 46, 49; distribution and, 241n4; “fast capitalism” and, 99–101; federal character and, 95; federalism and, 86; First Republic and, 71; local politics and, 214, 216; military rule and, 111; NPC and, 75; public discourse and, 40, 149, 182; public reasoning and, 6, 8; religion and, 2; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 109; secularism and, 168; symbolism and, 175, 177; Tijaniyya and, 249n71; transition and, 116; violence and, 143 Igbo people, 87–88, 93, 106 Ige, Bola, 135

292 / Index “I Go Chop Your Dollar” (2005), 191 ijtihad (independent legal reasoning), 43, 143, 247n16, 256n73 Imam, Ayesha, 137, 141 imperialism, 44, 75, 131; hubris of, 248n34; reform and, 30; women and, 136–37 Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), 224 India, 44, 65–66, 132 indigeneship, 10–11, 95, 125, 202, 232; community and, 203, 206; federal character and, 94; human rights and, 140– 41; methodology and, 237; military rule and, 111–12; violence and, 143. See also citizenship indirect rule, 61–65, 68, 71, 94 Indonesia, 35, 44, 213, 217, 222, 231, 246n78; democracy and, 3–4, 183; public discourse and, 180; reform and, 29 inequality, 36, 194; caliphate and, 59–60; compatibility and, 32; democracy and, 184, 210–11; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federal character and, 94, 96; frame categories and, 164; framing and, 17, 19, 154; local politics and, 214, 218; military rule and, 113, 116; public discourse and, 42, 149; public reasoning and, 5; reform and, 31 inheritance, 48, 58; colonialism and, 65; democracy and, 47; human rights and, 142; voting and, 99 international law, 96, 99, 133, 136, 139, 166; treaties of, 140. See also human rights; rights internet, 44, 106, 153, 237; Islamic Movement and, 253n64; media and, 152; public discourse and, 53; usage of, 151 interviews, 190–93, 221–22, 235–37; Boko Haram and, 229; coding and, 239; democracy and, 183, 208, 211; framing and, 18, 20; group basis for, 184–87; local politics and, 219; morality and, 187–91; narratives and, 193 Iran, 20, 37, 106 Iraq, 3, 24–25; American hubris in, 248n34 Iraqi Writers’ Union, 24 Ironsi, Johnson Aguiyi-, 82, 93

Islamic Movement of Nigeria (‘yan Shi’a), 106, 253n64 Islamic State, 3, 242n10; Boko Haram and, 225; Chibok kidnappings and, 12 Islamism, 33, 35–36, 42, 180, 188, 219– 20; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 225–29; criminal law and, 135; democracy and, 3–5, 20, 48; First Republic and, 72–73; framing and, 18; local politics and, 216; mainstream movements of, 36; public discourse and, 52–53, 181–82; public reasoning and, 8, 14–15; reform and, 31; secularism and, 104, 106, 171; sharia and, 9, 18; Western historians and, 247n10 Islamiyya schools, 206 Izala, 86, 124, 132, 146–47; Boko Haram and, 227; military rule and, 110, 113; 1999 elections and, 254n5; revivalism and, 102–3, 108; secularism and, 103, 170; voting and, 99; women, 139 jahiliyya (state of ignorance), 153, 173; NPC and, 77 Jama’at Nasr al-Islam (JNI), 74, 124, 146, 167; federal character and, 95 Jama’t Izalat al Bid’a Wa Iqamat as Sunna (Society for the Removal of Innovation and the Reinstatement of the Sunna). See Izala Jangebe, Buba Bello, 137 Jigawa State, 123, 127, 255n30 jihad, 42, 56, 145; authority and, 61, 64; Biafra and, 88; Boko Haram and, 225, 228; caliphate and, 57–60, 83; character of, 247n15; federalism and, 86; First Republic and, 72–73; international groups for, 147; Maliki law and, 256n73; NPC and, 76–78; public discourse and, 55, 148; revivalism and, 101, 107–8; secularism and, 104–6; Sokoto Caliphate and, 52; symbolism and, 174 Jonathan, Goodluck, 12, 223–24, 226; Boko Haram and, 225; democracy and, 22; media and, 157–58 Jonathan, Patience (first lady), 12 Jos, Nigeria, 30, 72, 95, 167; federal character and, 95; First Republic and,

Index / 293 72; frame analysis and, 161; violence and, 143 journalism, 151, 157–58; framing and, 155–56, 159–60 judicial councils, Emirs’, 67; caliphate and, 58; colonialism and, 69, 71 jurisprudence, 34, 43, 45; caliphate and, 58; democracy and, 47; Hurgronje and, 246n78; public discourse and, 54 justice, 26, 36–38, 129–30, 172–73, 201, 222, 233; accountability and, 178; caliphate and, 56–59; colonialism and, 67–69; community and, 205; compatibility and, 28, 32; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 21, 198, 211–12; elites and, 197; First Republic and, 72; framing and, 17, 19; FSCA and, 91; local politics and, 214; military rule and, 113–14; public discourse and, 180–81; reform and, 30; revivalism and, 107–8; secularism and, 168, 171; women, 138–39; Zamfara and, 122 Kaduna Mafia, 84, 119 Kaduna State, 11, 123–24, 126–27, 173, 223; authority and, 61; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federalism and, 85; FSCA and, 90; military rule and, 110–11; “Miss World” riots in, 144; riots in, 169; symbolism and, 174; transition and, 115; violence and, 143 Kafanchan, 97, 111–12, 223 Kannywood (films and industry), 132 Kano, Aminu, 73–75, 77, 84, 250n72; arrest of, 78; public discourse and, 148 Kano School for Arabic Studies (SAS), 73–74 Kano State, 10, 36, 56, 77, 123–24, 127, 129, 131–33, 146, 166, 220, 223–24; Boko Haram and, 228–29; caliphate and, 55–57, 59; class and, 252n47; colonialism and, 68–69; democracy and, 21–22; ethnography of, 182; “fast capitalism” and, 100–101; federal character and, 95; federalism and, 85; First Republic and, 72–74; frame analysis and, 161; FSCA and, 88, 90; hisbah and, 255n30; Hisbah Board of,

130; human rights and, 141; media and, 158; narratives and, 192; NEPU and, 79; 1953 riots in, 87; political Islam and, 243n52; public discourse and, 180; revivalism and, 102; riots in, 106; secularism and, 103; Sharia Implementation Advisory Committee of, 30; talakawa and, 257n16; Tijaniyya and, 249n71; transition and, 118; violence and, 144; women and, 138 Kano State Censorship Board (KCSB), 132 Katsina State, 56, 123–24, 127–28, 221; caliphate and, 55, 59; hisbah and, 255n30; military rule and, 111; penal codes and, 81 Kebbi State, 123, 127–28, 173; hisbah and, 255n30 kulle (female seclusion), 97–98 Kure, Abdulkadir (governor of Niger State), 9 Kuti, Fela, 7 Kwankwaso, Rabi’u (governor of Kano State), 124, 132, 147 Lagos, Nigeria, 157, 224, 230; authority and, 61–62; media and, 151; NEPU and, 79; violence and, 144; Zamfara and, 120 Lake Chad, 55 land tenure law, 58, 65, 249n48 Lawal, Amina, 137–38 legislation, 3, 8, 18, 35–36, 38–39, 43–45, 127; compatibility and, 27; democracy and, 21 legitimacy, 43, 45, 222; accountability and, 178; authority and, 62–63; Boko Haram and, 229; caliphate and, 57–58, 82–84; colonialism and, 65; democracy and, 23; First Republic and, 72; frame categories and, 165; human rights and, 141; military rule and, 114; NPC and, 76; penal codes and, 81; public discourse and, 54–55, 148–49. See also governance Lewis, Bernard, 26–27 liberalism, 25–26, 34, 217–19, 231; community and, 203; compatibility and, 27–28, 32–33; democracy and, 210; public discourse and, 40, 42, 53; public

294 / Index liberalism (continued) reasoning and, 5–6, 8; reform and, 30; symbolism and, 175 Libya, 33–34 lifetime learning model of democratization, 183–84 local politics, 78, 95, 150, 162, 227; democracy and, 20, 215–19; military rule and, 110; perda shari’a and, 222; radicalism and, 213–14; revivalism and, 103, 109 Lugard, Frederick, 59, 61–62, 66, 248n34 Magistrate’s Courts, 66, 82, 129, 220; colonialism and, 68, 70–71 Mahmood, Yahaya, 90 Mahmud, Abdulmalik Bappa, 114 Maiduguri, 101, 141, 147; Boko Haram and, 225–26, 242n10 Maitatsine, 101, 147, 227–28 malamai (Islamic teachers), 186, 205, 211 Malaysia, 38, 213 Mali, 35–36, 225; compatibility and, 32; democracy and, 3, 46–49 Maliki law, 43, 58, 137, 143; colonialism and, 67–69; ijtihad and, 256n73 Mamdani, Mahmood, 65 Markafi, Ahmed (governor of Kaduna State), 127, 143 marriage, 46, 130, 132, 189; affordability of, 19; children in, 217–18; democracy and, 47; divorce law and, 99; elites and, 197; framing and, 154; homosexuality and, 131; human rights and, 142; poverty and, 195–96; women and, 194; Yerima and, 122 “Mass Mobilization for Self Reliance, Social Justice, and Economic Recovery” (MAMSER), 190 masu sarauta (elites), 59–60, 62–64, 82, 148; colonialism and, 71; First Republic and, 73–74; framing and, 155; NPC and, 74–78; revivalism and, 102, 109; secularism and, 104. See also elites Mazrui, Ali, 171 media, 33, 123, 132–33, 167, 187; Biafra and, 88; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; coding and, 237–38; democracy and, 4, 21, 46–48, 210; elites and, 197; elites

manufacturing of, 257n14; federalism and, 85; frame analysis and, 160–61; frame categories and, 164; framing and, 13, 16–17, 150–59; group interviews and, 185; interviews and, 239; local politics and, 213, 215, 217; military rule and, 111; narratives and, 193; northern Nigeria and, 163; poverty and, 195; public discourse and, 41, 53, 180–81; reform and, 30; religious journalism and, 159–60; sampling and, 238; secularism and, 106; symbolism and, 176; violence and, 144; women and, 137 Mejelle (Islamic legal code), 44, 127 Middle Belt region, 10–11, 72, 110, 224; FSCA and, 88; NPC and, 76; secularism and, 169; violence and, 134 military rule, 38, 166, 190, 222; community and, 205; constitutional law and, 110–14, 198; democracy and, 46–48, 184; federal character and, 92–94; frame categories and, 164; FSCA and, 90; local politics and, 214, 219; penal codes and, 82; public discourse and, 148; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 108–9; transition and, 117–18; transition from, 115; voting and, 98; Zamfara and, 121 minorities, 34–35, 131, 202, 231; democracy and, 184; First Republic and, 71; FSCA and, 91; human rights and, 140; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 40; reform and, 29; US protection of, 258n44 “Miss World” riots, 144 modernization, 37, 39, 44, 46, 190; authority and, 65; Bello and, 251n103; colonialism and, 70–71; compatibility and, 28; democracy and, 3, 183; “fast capitalism” and, 101; framing and, 153; NPC and, 75; penal codes and, 81; public discourse and, 40, 53; public reasoning and, 5, 16 morality, 130–33, 172–73, 190–93, 230–31, 233; accountability and, 178; democracy and, 24–26, 46–49, 208, 210–12; elites and, 197; First Republic and, 73; interviews and, 187–91; local

Index / 295 politics and, 219; marriage and, 194; narratives and, 191, 193; northern Nigeria and, 164; poverty and, 195; public discourse and, 40, 42, 55; revivalism and, 108–9; secularism and, 103, 105, 169; sharia and, 10, 37–39; transition and, 115; Zamfara and, 122 mosques, 9–10, 132–33, 172–73; caliphate and, 56, 84; democracy and, 211; federal character and, 95; Friday mosques and, 100; group interviews and, 187; Kano Central, 125; revivalism and, 102 Mugazu, Bariya, 137, 139 multireligious society, 2–3, 201, 203, 233; frame categories and, 165; framing and, 17; human rights and, 140; local politics and, 214, 218; narratives and, 193; public discourse and, 149; symbolism and, 177 Murtala, Mohammed, 93 Muslim Students’ Society (MSS), 102, 108, 111, 113, 170; secularism and, 103–6 narratives, 132, 173, 188–90, 199; Boko Haram and, 227; counternarratives and, 158; elites and, 197; federal character and, 94; framing and, 17, 153; local politics and, 216–17; NPC and, 76–77; poverty and, 196; public discourse and, 149–50, 181–82; reform and, 92; revivalism and, 101, 109; symbolism and, 176–77; women and, 136; Zamfara and, 121 Nasarawa State, 123, 163 National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), 157, 159 nationalism, 54, 72, 74, 77, 168, 170; colonialism and, 71; FSCA and, 88 National Party of Nigeria (NPN), 92–93, 98–99, 103–4 Native Administration system (NAs), 60, 67, 79, 83; authority and, 61–64; Britain and, 248n41; colonialism and, 69–71; FSCA and, 89–90; mulukiya and, 250n87; narratives and, 192; NPC and, 74–75, 77–78; penal codes and, 80, 82; revivalism and, 102; voting and, 97 Native Courts, 67–71, 129; First Republic and, 73; NPC and, 78; Ordinances of

1900 and 1906, 66–67; Ordinance of 1948, 70; penal codes and, 80, 82 New Nigerian (newspaper), 126, 167, 173; frame analysis and, 161; military rule and, 112; sampling and, 238; Sardauna and, 157; secularism and, 171; Zamfara and, 120 newspapers, 9, 129, 151; elites and, 158; frame analysis and, 161; framing and, 153; group interviews and, 187; public discourse and, 41; religious journalism and, 159; women and, 137 Niass, Ibrahim, 72, 249n70 Niger, 3, 22, 226 Nigerian Civil War, 15, 82, 219; Biafra and, 88; federal character and, 93 Nigerian Constitution of 1960, 97–98 Nigerian Constitution of 1978–79, 95, 104, 112, 115, 126; article 10 of, 103; revivalism and, 103; section 135(5) of, 94; transition and, 116, 118; voting and, 98 Nigerian Constitution of 1988 (aborted), 115 Nigerian Constitution of 1999, 95, 116, 126, 135; section 45(1) of, 230; section 277(1) of, 134 Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), 96–97, 144, 146 Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), 151 Nigeria Police Force (NPF), 90, 129–30 Niger State, 9, 123, 127, 134, 255n30 1999 transition (Nigeria), 111, 115–19, 147, 183, 209, 231; Zamfara and, 119–22 non-Muslims in Nigeria, 34, 42, 129–30, 188, 200, 221; authority and, 62; caliphate and, 56; colonialism and, 67–70; community and, 203–4; First Republic and, 71; FSCA and, 89, 91; human rights and, 140, 143; local politics and, 213; narratives and, 191–92; NPC and, 76, 78; penal codes and, 80–81; public discourse and, 55; secularism and, 105; sharia and, 10–11; symbolism and, 175–76; transition and, 118; voting and, 98–99; women and, 136, 139 Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), 78–79, 83, 97, 143, 259n6; FSCA and, 87–88; NPC and, 74–79

296 / Index northern Nigeria, 125, 127, 145–47, 167, 188, 202; Area Courts reform and, 251n103; authority and, 61–62; Boko Haram and, 227–29; British intelligence in, 249n44; caliphate and, 84; colonialism and, 65–66; community and, 204– 5; criminal law and, 135; democracy and, 5, 20–22, 49, 207–9; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federal character and, 93, 95, 97, 231–32; federalism and, 85; First Republic and, 71–74; frame analysis and, 160–62; framing and, 19, 155–56, 163–64; FSCA and, 87–89, 91; human rights and, 140–42; identity and, 241n2; intellectual community of, 249n63; land tenure law’s invention in, 249n48; local politics and, 214–16, 218; media and, 151; methodology and, 236; military rule and, 110–11, 114; narratives and, 192–93; NEPU and, 78–79; NPC and, 75–77; penal codes and, 80–81; political sharia frame and, 259n6; public discourse and, 52–55, 148–50, 180, 182; public reasoning and, 7, 15–16; regulated markets and, 260n22; revivalism and, 107–8; Second Republic and, 92; secularism and, 103, 106, 168–69, 172; sharia and, 2, 8–9, 11, 14, 43–44, 123; sharia paradox and, 220–21, 223–24; Sokoto Caliphate and, 51–52; symbolism and, 175–76; Tijaniyya and, 249n71; transition and, 115, 117, 119; violence and, 133, 143; voting and, 98; Yusuf’s ideological background and, 262n26; Zamfara and, 120–22 Northern Nigerian Penal and Criminal Procedure Code, 80, 247n16 Northern People’s Congress (NPC), 78–79, 227; caliphate and, 83–84; federal character and, 95; FSCA and, 87–88; intellectual background of, 251n103; NEPU and, 74–79; Second Republic and, 92; secularism and, 168; symbolism and, 176; voting and, 97 Northern Region government, 81, 99, 157, 161 Northern Region Sharia Court of Appeal, 80, 89

Obasanjo, Olusegun, 1, 9, 122, 221; transition and, 117, 119 objectification of Islam, 39, 45, 193; authority and, 61; democracy and, 46, 48–49; federalism and, 86; First Republic and, 73; local politics and, 216, 218; military rule and, 113; public discourse and, 52, 54, 182; revivalism and, 101–2; secularism and, 105 Ogun State, 1, 117 oil revenues, 1, 99–100, 215; federal character and, 94–95; federalism and, 86; public reasoning and, 15; transition and, 116 Oodua Peoples’ Congress, 117 “ordinary” Muslims, 198, 223, 230, 236; accountability and, 178–79; democracy and, 207–8; “fast capitalism” and, 101; frame categories and, 165; framing and, 18; local politics and, 215–16; northern Nigeria and, 164; public discourse and, 40, 149, 181–82; public reasoning and, 14; sharia and, 13, 38, 129 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), 97, 110–12 Pakistan, 3, 37–38, 217; colonialism and, 70; compatibility and, 27, 32; democracy and, 3–4; penal codes and, 81 Panel of Jurists, 81, 247n16 Peletz, Michael, 18, 149–50, 181 penal codes (Nigerian), 2, 129–30, 220; caliphate and, 83; colonialism and, 68, 70; FSCA and, 88; military rule and, 114; of 1960, 80–82, 89, 104, 114, 129 Pentecostalism, 7, 86 People’s Democratic Party (PDP), 1, 12, 124, 127, 223; Boko Haram and, 226; democracy and, 22; transition and, 118– 19; Zamfara and, 120, 122 Perham, Margery, 62 piety, 36, 43, 45–46, 145; accountability and, 178; community and, 205; compatibility and, 32; FSCA and, 91; military rule and, 113; public discourse and, 42, 53, 180, 182; voting and, 98; Zamfara and, 120, 122

Index / 297 Plateau State, 11, 123, 167; federal character and, 95; FSCA and, 88; violence and, 144 pluralism, 9, 39, 45, 166; colonialism and, 68; compatibility and, 32; democracy and, 20, 46; public discourse and, 42, 53; public reasoning and, 5 Political Bureau, 111–12; military rule and, 113; Report of, 112, 165, 190; Section Four of, 113; transition and, 116; Zamfara and, 121 Political Sharia frame, 165, 175, 177–79, 259n6; frame categories and, 164 populism, 22, 122–24, 210–11; public discourse and, 40, 53 post-colonialism, 127, 155, 222; democracy and, 47; public discourse and, 55 poverty, 8, 12, 126, 147, 172–73, 195; Boko Haram and, 227–28; caliphate and, 57; compatibility and, 28; democracy and, 208; elites and, 197; “fast capitalism” and, 100–101; framing and, 19; human rights and, 142; media and, 151; military rule and, 113; narratives and, 196; northern Nigeria and, 163–64; public discourse and, 41, 182; revivalism and, 102; secularism and, 169; symbolism and, 174; women, 139; Zamfara and, 120 prebendal politics, 93 Preserving Authentic Islam frame, 164–65, 178, 192–93; secularism and, 170–71; symbolism and, 177 Prophet Muhammad, 11, 43, 76; “Miss World” riots and, 144; NPC and, 77; secularism and, 106; symbolism and, 175; women and, 137, 139 prostitution, 10, 126, 130–31, 172–73, 221; human rights and, 142; kurawai label for, 97; secularism and, 168; Sokoto and, 259n60 Provincial Courts, 66–67. See also Magistrate’s Courts public discourse, 125, 130–31, 166–67, 180–83, 230–33, 235; accountability and, 179; authority and, 61; Boko Haram and, 229; caliphate and, 84; compatibility and, 32; criminal law and,

135; democracy and, 3, 22–23, 39–42, 46, 48–49, 207; elites and, 197; federal character and, 94; framing and, 16–19, 148–49, 153–56; group interviews and, 184, 186; human rights and, 142; local politics and, 214–17; media and, 152, 158; military rule and, 113; narratives and, 191, 193; northern Nigeria and, 163; primordial nature of, 190; public reasoning and, 6; reasoning and, 14–16; reform and, 29–30; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 247n6; secularism and, 104–5, 169; sharia and, 2, 10, 13, 26, 35, 37–39; state power and, 52–55; symbolism and, 175–76; transition and, 116; women and, 137, 139; Zamfara and, 122 public reasoning, 5–8, 38, 217; democracy and, 14–16, 20; frame analysis and, 160; local politics and, 214; public discourse and, 149–50, 182 punishment, 35–37, 194, 223, 231; caliphate and, 58; colonialism and, 70; criminal law and, 135; democracy and, 4–5, 48; elites and, 197; local politics and, 213; military rule and, 114; poverty and, 195; women and, 137 Qadiriyya (Sufi order), 44, 64, 76, 99; First Republic and, 72; military rule and, 110; revivalism and, 102 queuing culture, 190 Qur’an, 3, 128, 200, 203, 211, 217; caliphate and, 56, 58; “fast capitalism” and, 100–101; NPC and, 77–78; public discourse and, 40; secularism and, 106; sharia and, 30, 43, 73, 85; women and, 136–37 Qutb, Sayyid, 85 radicalism, 2, 12, 24, 146–47, 232; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 230, 243n36; British intelligence on, 249n44; colonialism and, 67; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 22; local politics and, 213–15; reform and, 31; secularism and, 103; symbolism and, 176

298 / Index radio, 9, 142, 156, 187; democracy and, 210; framing and, 153, 160–61; Hausa language and, 151; private ownership of, 157 Ramadan, 36, 146, 206; democracy and, 47, 211; public discourse and, 41 recognition, 33, 165, 199, 202, 219–20, 231; Boko Haram and, 229–30; community and, 203, 205; criminal law and, 134; federal character and, 95–96; FSCA and, 90; human rights and, 141; local politics and, 214; military rule and, 109–13, 116; public discourse and, 148–49; public reasoning and, 15; revivalism and, 103; secularism and, 105, 169; transition and, 115; Zamfara and, 121. See also governance religious freedom, 9, 166–67, 187; frame categories and, 164–65; FSCA and, 91; human rights and, 140; women, 139; Zamfara and, 121 religious revivalism, 131, 172–73, 188, 222, 224, 230; authority and, 61, 64; Boko Haram and, 227; caliphate and, 56–57, 83, 106–9; democracy and, 47, 49, 208, 211; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federalism and, 86–87; First Republic and, 74; framing and, 18; local politics and, 215–16; military rule and, 111, 113; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 54; public reasoning and, 14; religious journalism and, 159; secularism and, 103–6, 168, 247n6; sharia and, 37–38, 101–2, 107–9; Sokoto Caliphate and, 52; transition and, 115, 117; Zamfara and, 122 rights, 9, 34–38, 165–68, 187, 224, 231; abortion and, 176; authority and, 62; Boko Haram and, 229; community and, 203–7; compatibility and, 32; constitutional law and, 198; democracy and, 3, 184, 198–202, 207, 210, 212; framing and, 19, 154; FSCA and, 90–91; local politics and, 213; NPC and, 78; public discourse and, 42, 53, 148, 181; public reasoning and, 7; reform and, 29–30; symbolism and, 175–76; US minorities and, 258n44; voting and, 97–99. See also human rights; rights language

Rights frame, 164–66, 177–78, 199, 212 rights language, 135, 166–67, 199, 210; federal character and, 96; reform and, 30; symbolism and, 176; voting and, 99; women, 139 Rima TV and Radio, 151, 158–59; frame analysis and, 161; poverty and, 195 riots, 21, 106, 144, 192; Kaduna 2000–2001 and, 169; Kano 1953 and, 87 Robocop 3 (film), 150 Roe v. Wade, 175 Roy, Olivier, 46, 180, 217, 220 rule of law, 1, 36, 109, 184 sabon garis (new towns), 68–69, 87, 140 Sahara Reporters (website), 158 Salafism, 34, 146–47, 173, 216; Boko Haram and, 227–29; democracy and, 21, 48–49, 85 Sallah (Eid al-fitr) celebrations, 146 Sambo, Mohammed Bashir, 121 same-sex marriage, 154 Sani, Alhaji Ahmed (Yerima). See Yerima Sanusi, Sanusi Lamido, 138, 158, 249n71 sarakuna. See masu sarauta Sardauna (Ahmadu Bello). See Bello, Ahmadu Satiru uprisings, 60–61, 63–64, 248n34; Boko Haram and, 228 Saudi Arabia, 42, 74, 127, 194, 216 Schacht, Joseph, 45, 57–58, 70–71, 74, 247n16 Schaffer, Frederic, 6, 8 School for African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), 70 Second Republic of Nigeria, 84, 96–99; federal character principle, 92–96; federalism and, 87; public reasoning and, 7; revivalism and, 109; secularism and, 104; voting and, 97, 99 secularism, 147, 202, 219, 231, 233; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 229; colonialism and, 66, 68–70; compatibility and, 28, 32; criminal law and, 134–35; democracy and, 3, 46–49; frame categories and, 164; framing and, 168–72; FSCA and, 91; human rights and, 141; local politics and, 213; methodology and, 238; military rule and,

Index / 299 110, 112–14; narratives and, 193; NPC and, 77; penal codes and, 81; public discourse and, 40, 52–54, 148, 181; public reasoning and, 14; reform and, 29–31; revivalism and, 107–8, 247n6; sharia and, 24–25, 44, 130; transition and, 116; Zamfara and, 121 security, 9–11, 25, 36, 38, 147, 166–67; accountability and, 178; Boko Haram and, 225, 229–30; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; community and, 207; democracy and, 4, 21, 184, 211–12; elites and, 197; “fast capitalism” and, 100; media and, 157; narratives and, 191–92; public discourse and, 149; revivalism and, 109; secularism and, 106; violence and, 143 Senegal, 29, 72, 231 separation of church and state, 27, 32, 91, 104 sexuality, 42, 46, 131, 230–31 Shagari, Shehu, 92–93, 252n27; administration of, 94, 98, 104 sharia, 42–46, 91–94, 100–104, 110–14, 125, 193–97; accountability and, 178– 79; authority and, 60–64; Boko Haram and, 225–29; British and, 65–69; caliphate and, 56–60; colonialism and, 65–66, 70–71; community and, 203–7; compatibility and, 26–29, 32–33; constitutional law and, 87–91, 134–36; democracy and, 1–5, 8–12, 20–23, 46–50, 208–12; democratic transition and, 117–19; elites and, 174–75; “fast capitalism” and, 99–101; federal character principle, 92–96; federalism and, 85–89, 95–99, 105–9, 115–17; First Republic and, 71–74; Fourth Republic and, 145–47; frame analysis and, 160– 62; frame categories and, 164–65; framing and, 13, 16–20, 152–55, 165–68; human rights and, 139–43, 198–202; implementation strategies for, 126–30; interviews and, 190–93; justice and, 67– 69; legacy of, 230–33; legitimacy and, 82–84; local politics and, 215–19; media and, 150–52, 156–59; military rule and, 110–14; morality and, 24–25, 130– 33, 172–73, 187–91; NEPU and, 74–78; northern Nigeria and, 163–64; NPC

and, 78–79; paradox of, 36–39, 219–24; penal code of 1960 and, 80–82; politics of, 33–36, 133; popularity of, 123–24; public discourse and, 39–42, 52–55, 148–49; public reasoning and, 5–8, 14–16; radicalism and, 213–14; reform and, 29–31; religious journalism and, 159–60; revivalism and, 101–2, 106–9; Second Republic and, 96–99; secularism and, 103–6, 168–72; Sokoto Caliphate and, 51–52; symbolism and, 174–77; transition and, 115–16; violence and, 143–45; voting and, 97–99; women and, 136–39; Zamfara and, 119–22 sharia courts, 125, 128–29, 134, 220, 241n2 Sharia Courts of Appeal, 81, 126, 128, 134, 143 Shekarau, Ibrahim (governor of Kano State), 132, 139, 146–47; 2003 campaign and, 146; democracy and, 21; public discourse and, 149 Shekau, Abubakar, 12, 225–27, 230 Sheriff, Ali Modu (governor of Borno State), 11, 227 Shittu v. Biu, 89 Simlin, Wendell, 158 Sipikin, Mudi, 77 siyasa (policy), 44, 67, 78, 130 slacktivism, 138 slavery, 55, 59–63, 77 Sokoto, Nigeria, 132, 145–46, 173, 188– 89, 202, 223; authority and, 61, 64; colonialism and, 66; community and, 203; federal character and, 96; federalism and, 85–86; First Republic and, 74; framing and, 20; FSCA and, 90; group interviews and, 185–86; human rights and, 141–43; Maliki law and, 256n73; marriage and, 194; media and, 150– 52, 158–59; methodology and, 237; military rule and, 110; narratives and, 193; NPC and, 75; poverty and, 195– 96; prostitution and, 259n60; public discourse and, 181; religious journalism and, 159; revivalism and, 101, 107; Second Republic and, 92; sharia and, 124–25, 129; Sharia Courts of Appeal and, 128; talakawa and, 257n16; transition and, 119–20

300 / Index Sokoto Caliphate, 14–15, 45, 51–52, 54; colonialism and, 70; framing and, 18; secularism and, 170. See also caliphate Sokoto State, 10, 123, 127, 167; community and, 207; framing and, 18; hisbah and, 255n30; narratives and, 192; poverty and, 195; women and, 137 southern Nigeria, 8, 123–24, 129, 223–24; authority and, 61; Boko Haram and, 227; community and, 204; criminal law and, 134–35; democracy and, 209; First Republic and, 72; frame analysis and, 160; FSCA and, 87–88; media and, 156–57; narratives and, 193; NEPU and, 79; NPC and, 74, 76–77; penal codes and, 80; public reasoning and, 7; religious journalism and, 159; secularism and, 103; symbolism and, 176; transition and, 115, 117, 119; violence and, 133; women and, 138; Zamfara and, 120 state government. See administration; governance Sudan, 3, 55, 74, 80–81; colonialism and, 68, 70 Sufism, 64, 124, 147, 231; democracy and, 47; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federalism and, 86; First Republic and, 74; local politics and, 216; military rule and, 110; revivalism and, 102–3, 107; secularism and, 170–71 suicide-bombing, 31, 225 Sulaiman, Ibrahim, 113, 148, 170, 188; revivalism and, 107, 109; secularism and, 104–5 Sule, Maitama, 75 sunna (sayings of the Prophet), 43, 78, 85 Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, 167, 170 tafsir (public preaching), 77, 85, 152, 182 Tahrir Square, Egypt, 3, 42 talakawa (commoners), 61–63, 182; First Republic and, 73; NEPU and, 79; NPC and, 75, 77; rise of, 257n16 Tanko Yusuf, Jolly, 97 Tanzimat reforms, 44–45 taqiyya (dissimulation), 60 Taraba State, 123; violence and, 143

technology, 41–42, 44, 106, 159 television, 9, 151, 160–61, 187; framing and, 153; private ownership of, 157; public discourse and, 42, 53; reform and, 31; religious journalism and, 159 Temple, C. L., 62 ThisDay (newspaper), 144 Tijaniyya, 64, 79, 95, 99, 110; First Republic and, 72; identity and, 249n71; intelligence reports on, 249n45; revivalism and, 102 tolerance, 8, 32, 183, 217–18, 231 tradition, 34–35, 37, 39, 42–46, 145; authority and, 61–62, 65; caliphate and, 56–57; colonialism and, 68; compatibility and, 26–27; democracy and, 3–4, 20–21, 48; federal character and, 95; First Republic and, 72–73; framing and, 13; local politics and, 217; military rule and, 114; NPC and, 75–76; public discourse and, 40, 42, 52–53, 55, 148; public reasoning and, 14; reform and, 30; revivalism and, 108; secularism and, 103, 105, 170. See also classical Islam Tsofo Gubba v. Gwandu Native Authority, 70 Tudu, Safiya Husseini Tugur, 128 Tukur, Mahmud, 107–9, 113, 122 Twitter, 158, 226 ulema (scholarly class), 37, 43–44, 125, 146, 222, 231; authority and, 60–61; caliphate and, 56, 58, 83; colonialism and, 66–67, 70–71; continued relevance of, 245n61; First Republic and, 73; military rule and, 110, 112; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 54; secularism and, 103; women, 138 umma (community of believers), 27, 146, 152, 168 United Nations, 230; Conference on Women, 47; Convention on the Rights of the Child, 218 United States, 33–34, 46, 166, 185–86, 199; Afghanistan invasion by, 144; alcohol and, 221; Biafra and, 88; Boko Haram and, 226, 228; compatibility and, 27; constitutional law and, 198;

Index / 301 democracy and, 4; framing and, 16, 154–55, 160; hubris of, 248n34; local politics and, 216, 218; manufacturing news and, 257n14; minorities and, 258n44; narratives and, 191; 1928 presidential campaign in, 27; primary elections in, 150; prohibition and, 24; public discourse and, 150, 180; public reasoning and, 6, 8; reform and, 31; secularism and, 171; symbolism and, 175; women and, 138 unity, 83, 93, 146, 156; FSCA and, 90; methodology and, 238; religious journalism and, 159; transition and, 117 Unity in Faith frame, 164–65, 168–70, 177–78, 197 Unity in Secularity frame, 164–65, 169–70, 177 urbanization, 39, 46 Usmanu Danfodiyo University (UDUS), 20, 142, 150, 197–98 values, 32, 35, 38, 45, 113; alcohol and, 26; democracy and, 4, 46; framing and, 16, 18; public discourse and, 40; public reasoning and, 5; secularism and, 104; symbolism and, 175; violence and, 133; women and, 136. See also morality; tradition veiling, 35, 45, 49 violence, 35, 127, 143–45, 209, 223–24; Boko Haram and, 225–29; caliphate and, 59–60; compatibility and, 32; criminal law and, 135; democracy and, 21, 49–50; “fast capitalism” and, 101; federal character and, 95, 97; federalism and, 87; First Republic and, 71; frame analysis and, 161; human rights and, 141; local politics and, 215; media and, 156; military rule and, 110–11; non-Muslims and, 136; politics of, 133; public discourse and, 55; reform and, 31; revivalism and, 102; secularism and, 106, 168; sharia and, 1–3, 10–11, 13; transition and, 115, 117–18 WACOL (Women’s Aid Collective), 141 Wahabbism, 47 Wali, Isa, 77–78

Wamakko, Aliyu Magatakarda (governor of Sokoto State), 202 “War Against Indiscipline” (WAI), 190 Warner, Harry S., 25 Waziri (sultan’s advisor), 60, 78, 248n27 Weber, Max, 28 welfare programs, 36, 125; democracy and, 21 “We Need Sharia’a on Bonny Road, Kaduna” (New Nigerian article), 126, 174 West Africa, 231–32; authority and, 63; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; democracy and, 46; Islamic State and, 242n10; law’s development in, 247n16; local politics and, 216; media and, 156; public discourse and, 182–83; revivalism and, 107; Salafism and, 49; Sokoto Caliphate and, 52 Wila¯yat Gharb Ifrı¯qı¯yyah (West African Province of Islamic State), 242n10. See also Islamic State Williams, Rotimi, 87–88 Willink Commission, 80 women, 10, 34–37, 126, 130–32, 189, 220; abortion and, 176; authority and, 62; Boko Haram and, 225; caliphate and, 58; Chibok kidnappings and, 12; colonialism and, 68; community and, 205; democracy and, 3–4, 47; dress codes and, 230; family law and, 48; group interviews and, 186–87; human rights and, 136–43; local politics and, 213; marriage and, 194; narratives and, 193; NPC and, 78; PDP and, 243n37; penal codes and, 80; public discourse and, 40, 55, 148; reform and, 29, 31; regulated markets and, 260n22; secularism and, 170; voting and, 97–99 Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA), 142–43 Yadudu, Auwalu Hamisa, 114, 125, 128 Yar’adua, Umaru Musa, 119, 124, 221, 223 Yemen, 7, 32–33, 183 Yerima (Alhaji Ahmed Sani, governor of Zamfara State), 1–2, 8, 10, 123, 133, 145, 166, 173, 221; accountability and, 178; human rights and, 140; local politics and, 218; 1999 elections

302 / Index Yerima (continued) and, 254n5; presidential campaign of, 122; public discourse and, 149; public reasoning and, 15; secularism and, 170; symbolism and, 174; Zamfara and, 120–22 Yobe State, 123, 127, 147, 225, 228, 255n30 Yorubas, 92–93, 117, 119, 170, 241n2 Yusuf, Mohammed, 11, 21, 147, 225, 227– 28; ideological background of, 262n26; radicalization of, 243n36 Yusufiyya (Yusuf’s followers), 11, 228 zakkat (charity), 63, 133, 172, 222; boards for, 133; democracy and, 211 Zakzaky, Ibrahim al-, 106, 178, 253n64 Zamfara State, 123–27, 133, 147, 167, 221; Boko Haram and, 227; criminal law and, 135; frame analysis and, 161;

framing and, 18; hisbah and, 255n30; human rights and, 140; local politics and, 218; narratives and, 193; poverty and, 195; religious journalism and, 159; secularism and, 170; sharia and, 2, 10; symbolism and, 174; transition and, 117, 119–22; women and, 136–37 Zangon Kataf riots, 115, 144, 223 Zaria, Nigeria, 56, 78, 124, 145, 223; Bello University and, 91; caliphate and, 84; colonialism and, 68; human rights and, 141; military rule and, 110–11; secularism and, 103, 106; talakawa and, 257n16 zina (adultery), 37, 131, 138, 167, 189, 221; democracy and, 48; frame analysis and, 161; penal codes and, 80; women and, 136–37 Zungur, Sa’ada, 73–75, 77, 148