The quest by Nigeria's politically dominant northern Muslim community for an appropriate accommodation for Sharia (Islamic) law within the constitutional architecture and judicature of the Nigerian state has been a flashpoint of ethno-religious strife in this deeply divided multinational country since its independence from Britain in 1960. The issue attained new incendiary heights after Nigeria's return to civilian rule in 1999, when twelve Muslim majority states of the old Northern Region, beginning with Zamfara, extended Sharia from mainly personal status issues into the domain of the criminal justice system. Aside from igniting lethal sectarian violence, the extension has spawned an unprecedented debate regarding the constitutionality, political viability and social sustainability of Sharia implementation in northern Nigeria.
In this impressive multi-volume work funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany and Cordaid in Holland, Philip Ostien, a Nigerian-American academic lawyer, brings together for the first time a rich corpus of documentary sources, supplemented with fine scholarly and practitioner analyses (notably by Ibrahim Sada, Jamila Nasir, Aliyu Yawuri, and Ostien himself), on Sharia in Nigeria. The first volume in the collection revisits the ‘historical background’ to current conflicts over Sharia implementation. It documents the complex compromises and difficult negotiations between the British colonial authorities and the northern Muslim elite that led to the ‘settlement of 1960’ on the northern Nigerian Penal Code, which substantially secularised and harmonised the criminal justice system in this multi-ethnic and multi-religious, but Muslim-majority, region. The second volume includes a selection of reports of the committees set up by the northern Muslim governors elected in 1999 to examine the modalities of Sharia extension in their respective jurisdictions, and the related government white papers on those reports.
The next volume consists of compilations and extensive analyses of selected laws enacted by the Sharia-practicing states (and their local governments) with the aim of ‘sanitising society’, including the criminalisation of sexual immoralities, gambling, drinking, nudity, un-Islamic cinematography, music and dances. Volume Four is devoted to the documentation of the Sharia Penal and Criminal Procedure codes enacted by the Sharia-implementing states after 1999. Using the harmonised Sharia Penal and Criminal Procedure codes crafted by Ahmadu Bello University's Centre for Islamic Legal Studies as a template, the volume provides extensive annotations of the variations between the provisions of the harmonised codes, the 1960 Penal and Criminal Procedure codes, and the new Sharia codes.
The fifth and final volume includes the court proceedings (translated into English from Hausa and sprinklings of Arabic) of the ‘two famous cases’ of Safiyatu Hussaini and Amina Lawal, who were initially sentenced to death by stoning for adultery by lower Islamic courts, but were later discharged and acquitted by the Sharia Court of Appeal in Sokoto and Katsina states, respectively. As announced by Ostien (vol. i, p. xv), proposed future volumes of this ambitious project of Sharia documentation and analyses will focus on the effects of Sharia implementation on crime rates, and on the composition and organisation of various Sharia institutions, including the courts and vigilantes.
This collection deepens and advances the literature on Nigeria's Sharia experiences in many respects. First, it documents the partial roots of current Sharia conflicts in northern Muslims' reluctant acquiescence to the settlement of 1960, which was aggravated by further retrenchment of Sharia law implementation since the 1979 Constitution for the Second Nigerian Republic. Writing in April 1962, for instance, the then British Attorney-General of the Northern Region, H. H. Marshall, acknowledged the ‘lingering objections’ to the 1960 Penal Code ‘in conservative quarters’ in the ‘form of quiet, passive resistance and an obstinate determination to apply Moslem law in the old way … whenever this can be done without interference’ (vol. i, p. 80). Second, it confirms the persistence of significant diversity in Sharia perspectives, strategies and practices across the northern Muslim states, despite their common commitment to the Islamic law paradigm. In essence, Sharia has been implemented ‘differently from State to State, and with different degrees of enthusiasm, persistence and effectiveness on the part of the State Governments, each with its own ethnic and religious mix of peoples to appease’ (vol. i, p. viii; vol. ii, pp. 99–100).
Third, there is a significant hiatus between theory and practice in the Sharia states. This gulf is particularly evident in the non-enforcement of the stringent Sharia sanctions against the consumption of alcohol and sexual immoralities. In spite of a 2004 law imposing ‘a total ban on consumption of alcohol’ in Kano state, for instance, ‘no serious attempt at enforcement had been made up to mid-2007, and drinking in Kano … continued more or less unabated’ (vol. iii, p. 41). Similarly, although ‘homosexuality and same-sex marriages are outlawed and considered very serious offences’ under the various Sharia codes, ‘the gay and lesbian communities in the Sharia States apparently continue to thrive’ (vol. iii, p. 54). There are several reasons for such non-enforcement, including the centralised control of the police by Nigeria's secular Federal Government, the country's weak rule of law culture, and the non-commitment or moral hypocrisy of the Sharia governors themselves, nine of whom were among the serving governors indicted for financial embezzlement by the national financial crimes commission in 2006.
This collection also documents the significant dissonances between the current Sharia codes and the Nigerian Constitution, despite the attempts made by the writers of the codes (many of whom have a legal background) to ‘make sure that at least substantial conformity with the provisions of the Nigerian Constitution of 1999 was achieved’ (vol. iv, p. 24). Examples include the conferment of unlimited jurisdiction on the Sharia Court of Appeal, and the insertion of a section on general offences in many of the Sharia codes (vol. iv, p. 17). Both violate key provisions of the 1999 Constitution.
Finally, for all the contradictions and conflicts that have plagued the enactment and enforcement of Sharia law in northern Nigeria, there can be little doubt that the adoption of Islamic law enjoys broad support in the region, even among those who have fought heroically against specific aspects of its implementation. This comes out very powerfully in a contribution to Volume Five by Aliyu Yawuri, a defence counsel for Hussaini and Lawal.
This collection is not without some flaws, including the widely divergent lengths of the analytical essays, the absence of a glossary of technical terms used in all but one of the volumes, the confusing references to each volume of the work as a ‘chapter’, and the non-inclusion of key critiques of Sharia implementation by noted Nigerian Muslim and non-Muslim figures, including Ibrahim el-Zakzaky of the Muslim Brothers and Federal Attorney-General Kanu Agabi. These minor blemishes notwithstanding, there can be little doubt that this collection substantially accomplishes its goal of being a valuable record of an important phase in Nigeria's history and ‘a resource for scholars’ (vol. i, p. xiii).
