ri’a is a comprehensive legal system that structures society and regulates criminal acts, social interactions, and individual practices.
Most Northern Nigerian Muslims follow the Maliki School of law, which looks to the eighth-century legist Malik ibn Anas as its founder and is the most widespread Islamic legal school in West Africa. Many Northern Nigerian Muslims who undertake a religious education grow up studying classical Maliki texts. Several state shari’a codes in Northern Nigeria explicitly proclaim adherence to Malikism.
Shari’a is not simply a code that legal scholars compose or that political authorities impose from above. It is also a set of institutions, practices, and negotiations that believers attempt to follow in everyday life, including as part of worship (washing oneself before prayer, for example, falls under the rubric of shari’a).
The rise of modern states has raised new questions about who has the authority to enforce shari’a, and how shari’a is to be enforced. Contests over the place of shari’a in modern societies have made it a plank in political platforms, a symbol for Muslim identities and values, and an object of intellectual debate. In Northern Nigeria it is all of these things. And since Northern Nigeria is part of a larger nation, these have become national questions in Nigeria.
Three Key Moments for Shari’a in Nigeria
One major moment in the history of shari’a in present-day Nigeria occurred in 1804. In that year, Sheikh Uthman dan Fodio, a Fulani preacher, began a jihad against Hausa Muslim kings whose Islam, he believed, was deficient. Sheikh Uthman’s initially self-defensive war became one of conquest. The empire he established, the Sokoto Caliphate (so named for its capital, a city located in present-day Northwestern Nigeria), endured until the British conquered Northern Nigeria between 1897 and 1903. Dan Fodio and his heirs attempted to rigorously apply shari’a. The administrative structures of the Caliphate provided the basic institutions upon which the British built Indirect Rule; the application of shari’a continued, in a modified form, under colonialism.
Dan Fodio and his circle not only criticized the practice of Islam among Hausa kings in the Northwest, but also charged that the Muslim rulers of the empire of Kanem-Bornu, located in present-day Northeastern Nigeria, were insufficiently Muslim. This made the two empires rivals. The two regions have each retained distinct ethnic and political characters to the present day, and the heirs of Sokoto, rather than the heirs of Bornu, have been the dominant voices in setting patterns of Muslim authority in colonial and postcolonial Northern Nigeria. The Northeast’s marginalization, not only in political and economic senses but in the Islamic domain as well, may partly explain why Boko Haram arose there and not elsewhere. The relationship between Boko Haram and the Northeast’s traditional Muslim authorities is ambivalent – sometimes the sect has spared the lives of traditional leaders, but it has also assassinated royals whom it saw as enemies – but it is noteworthy that the movement has been slower to take hold in the Northwest, the former core provinces of the Sokoto Caliphate.
A second key date is 1960, when Nigeria became independent. British administrators had “amalgamated” Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914, but they ruled the country’s two halves separately afterwards. Nigeria entered independence with a federal system that gave autonomy to the country’s three (later four) regions. As part of the political compromises that the North and South made with each other and with the British on the road to independence, Northern politicians devised the “Settlement of 1960.” Under this agreement, the criminal side of shari’a was abrogated, while in exchange a special Shari’a Court of Appeal was established for the Northern Region. The Settlement of 1960 limited legal application of shari’a to family matters, such as divorce and inheritance, during the next four decades. The Settlement was tested during constitution-making episodes in the