 1970s and 1980s, but Muslim activists did not succeed in restoring criminal penalties, or establishing a federal shari’a courts, at these junctures.
The third important date is 1999, when the Zamfara State government reintroduced “full” shari’a. Zamfara’s decision took advantage of Nigeria’s federal framework. Nigeria’s regions were dissolved in 1967, and the country was broken into states. The current political system partly resembles that of the United States. This meant, under some interpretations, that Zamfara could implement shari’a within its own borders. Eleven other Northern states followed suit, though some governors proved more eager to bring back criminal penalties than others. Especially in the early stages, shari’a re-implementation received major grassroots support in Northern Nigeria. Muslims hoped the reform would end corruption, improve public morality, reduce crime, and restore accountability to government.
The re-implementation of shari’a, however, caused conflict. Muslims and Christians clashed in several Northern states. Shari’a became a campaign issue in 2003. At least one governor (Rabiu Kwankwaso, of Kano State) lost re-election in part due to perceptions that he had not pursued shari’a with enough zeal. The federal government brought legal challenges to shari’a implementation, including charges against individual personnel in Kano State’s Hisbah Board, a body dedicated to enforcing shari’a. The federal government, wary of state-level initiatives that would subvert its authority, was deeply suspicious of the shari’a project. Yet, unwilling to provoke serious unrest in the North, the federal government refrained from forcing the issue of shari’a’s constitutionality; state-federal conflicts, such as the appeals of the accused adulteresses and the imprisonment of Kano Hisbah personnel, resulted in compromises, and not necessarily in legal clarity.
The Shari’a Question Has Never Been Settled
These dates mark important events and symbolize important decisions, but equally important is what happened between them. Neither dan Fodio’s conquest, nor the Settlement of 1960, nor restoration of shari’a in 1999 resolved debates over the scope and meaning of shari’a in Nigeria. At each of these dates, “shari’a” became an object of political contestation. The compromises, changes, and reforms of each period pleased some parties and angered others. Even after dan Fodio applied shari’a in the Sokoto Caliphate, there were some who said that later rulers lowered the standards of public piety. After the British reformed the practice of shari’a, dissent and dissatisfaction lingered. After the Settlement of 1960, resentment grew among Islamist intellectuals and activists regarding the abrogation of criminal shari’a. The restoration of shari’a in 1999 drew attacks from the “spiritual left” of secularist Muslim intellectuals and human rights campaigners in the Western mold, but also brought complaints from hardline Islamists who felt shari’a was meaningless without a broader Islamic state as its guiding framework. Other Muslims argued that the personnel chosen to oversee shari’a were corrupt and ineffectual. Some still hoped to see all of Nigeria adopt shari’a.
Throughout these debates, shari’a courts have settled and mediated disputes, performed divorces, adjudicated inheritances and, when they have had the authority, meted out penalties for criminal convictions. Yet courts themselves have also at times become sites of political struggle – for example, when party politics heated up in the North during the independence period, Muslim leftists in the Northern Elements Progress Union sometimes strategically claimed Christian identities in order to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of what they regarded as shari’a courts controlled and subverted by the more conservative, and more powerful, Northern People’s Congress. More recently, higher courts’ decisions to overturn stoning sentences against accused adulteresses was likely a response to political pressure. The exercise and administration of shari’a in Northern Nige