Hajj reform and interethnic mobilization

Understanding the complexities of hajj reform in Nigeria during the 1950s requires consulting archives and newspapers from both the Western and Northern Regions. The impression of non-involvement (or even irrelevance) of Yoruba Muslims from the Western Region was occasionally voiced by Northern politicians and journalists.Footnote ³ Of course, Northern leaders played a crucial role in the Nigerianization of the hajj. Yet Yoruba Muslims – clerics, politicians, hajj agents and journalists – collaborated with Northern efforts or acted autonomously. This section examines how Muslim engagement with politics in the Western Region catalysed around the hajj, which helped foster ties with co-religionists in the North.

In the Western Region, starting in the 1940s, Islamic associational life instigated hajj reform as more Muslim horizons (or at least desires) expanded to include the Middle East. Zumratul Hujaj, a pilgrim society, petitioned (unsuccessfully) to replace the colonial government as the evaluator of hajj passport applications and fundraised to build a pilgrim hostel in Sudan.Footnote ⁴ The Society for Promoting Muslim Knowledge (SPMK), formed in 1947 in Lagos,Footnote ⁵ sought scholarships in Cairo (Lawal Reference Lawal1948: 4, 8)Footnote ⁶ and advocated for pilgrim safety.Footnote ⁷ Meanwhile, in 1948, the Muslim Congress began in Ijebu-Ode, with the intention of uniting Nigerian Muslims, strengthening ties with Muslim countries, and building a hotel in Jeddah for Nigerians.Footnote ⁸ Their meetings reflected these goals: though held in the Western Region, all Northern emirs received invitations. They discussed scholarships for study in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, hotels for pilgrims, and the need for Nigerian representation in Jeddah.Footnote ⁹ And they printed educational pamphlets for pilgrims.Footnote ¹⁰

Then, in 1953, the United Muslim Party (UMP) became the first Islamic political party based in the Western Region. With support from Muslim elites who felt disenfranchised by ‘the “discriminatory attitude of Christian politicians in the West”’,Footnote ¹¹ it initially focused on achieving parity with Christians in terms of education,Footnote ¹² representation in government ceremoniesFootnote ¹³ and programming on the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.Footnote ¹⁴ The backlash against the UMP was swift and leaned on global reference points. Some critics balked at what they saw as an attempt to make Nigeria a religious state, citing the partition of India as a troubling precedent.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, even those who dismissed the UMP feared its ability to make trouble.Footnote ¹⁶

In terms of the hajj, the mid-1950s proved pivotal for its politicization in the West. Evidencing the UMP’s global outlook, in 1955 the party expressed concern to the federal government over a Sudanese news report that Sudan planned to crack down on Nigerian pilgrims after Sudan’s independence.Footnote ¹⁷ As for regional politics, the deposition of the Alafin of Oyo in 1954 galvanized Yoruba Muslims. Although the conflict between the Alafin and Chief Awolowo (the AG’s leader) mostly resulted from intra-Yoruba tensions (Laitin 1986: 155),Footnote ¹⁸ several Muslim groups (including alhajis) interpreted the event as evidence of the AG’s hostility towards Islam,Footnote ¹⁹ though not all agreed.Footnote ²⁰

Regardless of conflicting interpretations, the politicization of Islam and the hajj in Yorubaland contributed to the controversy. Awolowo allegedly ‘rebuked’ the Alafin for attending a meeting wearing a Saudi-style headdress (Peel Reference Peel2016: 161), and, in 1953, the regional government demanded that the Alafin wear an Islamic headdress only at ‘Muslim function[s]’.Footnote ²¹ While colonial officials felt that religion and politics never overlapped,Footnote ²² the Muslim Welfare Association of Nigeria retorted that this ‘definition of religious and political functions’ as distinct was ‘not acceptable to the Muslim Community’.Footnote ²³ In a plea for his restoration two years later, the UMP similarly lamented the prejudice against the Alafin for wearing ‘the Meccan pilgrim head-dress’,Footnote ²⁴ and memories of elder members of the Zumratul Hujaj branch in Ibadan emphasize this sartorial censure.Footnote ²⁵ During the inquiry into the riots that broke out after Alafin’s removal, the hajj and Mecca became symbols and idioms of defiance. The Alafin appeared in the courtroom ‘fully clad in an Alhaji dress’ and brought up this identity in his defence.Footnote ²⁶ But perhaps most striking was this exchange between one of the Alafin’s supporters and the British prosecutor:

Clearly, by the mid-1950s, Mecca had become broadly intelligible as a symbol of piety and could be strategically referenced by Muslims or colonial officials. The removal of the Alafin also exposed a fault line between some Yoruba Muslims’ conception of political culture and that held by Yoruba Christians and the colonial state. Whereas Muslims saw the Mecca uniform as representing prestige and piety, others interpreted it as an attack on Nigeria’s political secularism. The hajj would continue to generate debates over the place of religion in politics, particularly as its government oversight increased throughout the 1950s.

The impetus for government involvement in hajj reform partly resulted from news reporting, particularly a sixteen-part series in the Daily Times by journalist Babatunde Jose about his 1955 hajj. The series drew national and regional attention to the sufferings of Nigerian pilgrims, especially those who travelled overland in vehicles that were overpacked, provided no protection from the Saharan sun, and often broke down (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 162).Footnote ²⁸ Pilgrims who crossed the Red Sea illicitly risked falling prey to unscrupulous captains who robbed and then dumped them on islands to perish.Footnote ²⁹ Although pilgrims going by air fared better, multi-week delays could result in death if they ran out of money for food and housing.Footnote ³⁰ And regardless of how they travelled, hajj agents often overcharged pilgrims for passports and inoculations.Footnote ³¹

Once pilgrims arrived in Saudi Arabia, they faced another set of obstacles. The madinatul-hujjaj (pilgrims’ city) in Jeddah was overcrowded and unsanitary.Footnote ³² Housing outside Jeddah was no better. In 1955, the cheapest housing option in Mecca was outside and near all-night traffic that covered sleeping pilgrims with dust.Footnote ³³ Finally, the combination of rising costs and pilgrim numbers resulted in thousands of Nigerians stuck in Saudi Arabia without funds (Jose Reference Jose1955a: 1). When he toured Nigerian settlements in Saudi Arabia, Jose described ‘dilapidated buildings’, their ‘discomfort’ and the ‘unhealthy’ conditions that reforms initiated by the North would soon fix.Footnote ³⁴ Readers praised Jose for ‘informing the public’ (Akins Reference Akins1955: 4), and several called for reform and greater government oversight (ibid.).Footnote ³⁵

Muslim political ambitions and religious tensions heightened within the Western Region during the second half of the 1950s. In 1957, three Yoruba Muslim elites founded a political party, the National Muslim League (NML).Footnote ³⁶ Shortly afterwards, in a well-covered speech, Chief Awolowo requested ‘all lovers of united Nigeria’ to condemn ‘this new-fangled party [the NML]’.Footnote ³⁷ He then threatened that the AG ‘would carry the battle not only to the meeting[s] of the League, but also into the various mosques where the leaders of the organization worship’,Footnote ³⁸ which was not an empty threat.Footnote ³⁹

Not only did the AG target mosques, but at times Christian politicians dipped into anti-Muslim rhetoric. For example, not long after Awolowo’s biting speech, a minister for the Western Region accused the UMP of getting ‘inspiration from outside’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Whether the ‘outside’ referenced Saudi Arabia or Northern Nigeria,Footnote ⁴¹ his accusation points to a suspicion held by some Christians that Muslims were more loyal to Islam than Nigeria.

Although the AG remained the main party of the Western Region, its hostility to the NML and UMP backfired. For one thing, it supported both parties’ claims of Muslim persecution,Footnote ⁴² with the UMP even advocating for the ‘creation of a Muslim State’ within Western Nigeria.Footnote ⁴³ This sense of discrimination contributed to various regional Muslim organizations passing resolutions to support the UMP and NML.Footnote ⁴⁴ The situation (King Reference King1959; Balewa Reference Balewa1959) also served as an entry point for the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) to recruit support from the region’s Muslim population.Footnote ⁴⁵ And as the 1959 federal elections neared, the NML and UMP returned the favour by backing the NPC (Kukah and Falola Reference Kukah and Falola1996: 82–92; Post Reference Post1963: 71) and warning their fellow Muslims in the North against the AG (Ottun Reference Ottun1958; Reference Ottun1959).

It was within this social space of rising religious tensionsFootnote ⁴⁶ that hajj reforms gained momentum in the Western Region. Although few Muslim politicians rushed to join either the UMP or NML (and some even opposed them),Footnote ⁴⁷ the vocal presence of these two parties evidenced the need to appeal to Muslim voters. The key development in hajj reform during this time was the formation of the Western Region Pilgrims Welfare Board, the result of a bill put forward in the Western House of Assembly by Chief Awolowo in 1958. The board was to arrange accommodation and help with immigration, medical requirements and currency exchange.Footnote ⁴⁸ Not surprisingly, Awolowo and the AG took full credit for the bill and presented it as proof that they cared for all of their constituents.Footnote ⁴⁹

While the AG contributed to the creation of the board,Footnote ⁵⁰ regional Muslim elites claim that this was the party’s tactic to quell regional Muslim political agitation. According to this counternarrative, Chief Awolowo sent his deputy, Chief S. L. Akintola, to the Muslim Congress, where he asked what the AG could do to get the Congress to disband. In response, the Muslim Congress lamented that most government scholarships went to Christians to study in the UK, whereas ‘our own Britain is Mecca’ (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 169–70).Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, once again, Yoruba Muslims affirmed their desire to be equal to their Christian peers in terms of cosmopolitanism. They agreed to support the AG in exchange for the ability to foster ties with the Middle East through study abroad and the hajj.

Although hajj policies of the 1950s developed differently in the Northern and Western Regions, they provided an impetus for inter-regional collaboration between Muslim politicians. The original Nigerian hajj mission in 1955 included two Northerners and one Westerner.Footnote ⁵² Although the mission leader judged that future representation from the West was unnecessary because Yoruba pilgrims constituted a minority,Footnote ⁵³ Yoruba Muslims participated in the 1956 and 1957 missions (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 163). By 1958, Northern civil servants took a more inclusive stance towards their Yoruba co-religionists; a report advised that while a Northerner should run the Nigeria office in Jeddah, a Yoruba Muslim ought to be secretary.Footnote ⁵⁴ It also recommended that a Muslim from the Western Region should remain in all future hajj missions. Besides bureaucratic collaboration, at times the hajj facilitated interethnic expressions of affinity between politicians. A prominent example is when Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the North, encouraged and financed the hajj of Adegoke Adelabu, then leader of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) opposition party in the Western House of Assembly (Jose Reference Jose1958: 5).

Such generosity fitted within Bello’s broader outreach efforts. Newspapers and the radio informed Muslims across Nigeria that they could apply for Bello to sponsor their hajj. Although most requests came from Northerners, a significant number came from the Western Region.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, as hajj reform nationalized, some Muslims began to think of themselves as not just Hausa, Fulani or Yoruba Muslims, but also as Nigerian Muslims.

Relatedly, travel itineraries connected pilgrims across the two regions. In 1950, the Shehu of Bornu honoured the Alafin of Oyo, during his stop at Maiduguri, with ‘Yoruba native dances’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The same held for non-elite pilgrims. Yoruba overland pilgrims had long passed through Kano, and Yoruba air pilgrims started departing from Kano’s airport in 1949 until direct flights from Lagos to Jeddah started in 1957 (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 135). Reporting on hajj reform circulated between the two regions via the press.Footnote ⁵⁷ Northerners commented positively on hajj reforms and Islamic policies developed in the Western RegionFootnote ⁵⁸ and vice versa.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus, despite the fact that strong regional divides between Muslims remained, Nigerian Muslims united in the 1950s around their shared interest in hajj reform.

Politicians and the Mecca uniform

As Nigerian politicians in the Northern and Western Regions tackled hajj reform, like the ex-Alafin, they began to publicly link themselves to the prestigious alhaji title. Technological progress in transportation and photography made this possible. Starting in the late 1940s, air travel allowed elites to leave professional duties for weeks rather than months to complete the hajj. Politicians and traditional authorities took advantage of this, and the press began reporting their departure and arrival.Footnote ⁶⁰ In news photographs, a new aesthetic of power emerged in both regions. The entanglement of these developments became explicit in 1956 when each member of the Nigerian mission to Saudi Arabia received from King Saud a ‘complete Saudi outfit comprising of ‘iqāl … the black coil worn on the head by Saudi nobles’ (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 164).Footnote ⁶¹ The adoption of Saudi styles by Nigerian pilgrims was not new: while the exact start is unclear, Nigerian pilgrims had dressed like Saudi royalty since at least the 1920s (Jose Reference Jose1955b).Footnote ⁶² Although depictions of men sporting Saudi styles were more common, women, too, dressed like Saudi royal men,Footnote ⁶³ a fact that led one reader of the Nigerian Citizen to argue that women ought to be allowed to wear other forms of male clothing.Footnote ⁶⁴ Initially less common was the sight of a politician in Meccan garb, and even then it appears to have been almost exclusively worn by members of the NPC.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, starting in 1955, more politicians began to don this distinctive attire,Footnote ⁶⁶ as well as Nigerian officers in the government hajj missions.Footnote ⁶⁷ This visible link between the prestige of the alhaji title and political authority greatly increased as the decade progressed, not only in the NorthFootnote ⁶⁸ but also in the Western Region.Footnote ⁶⁹ This occurred in a number of contexts where previously either suits or so-called native attire would have been the dress code: carrying out official government business, political party organizing, and in the stock images paired with news articles. When Alhaji Adegoke Adelabu died in 1958, the press ran with images of him in Saudi-style clothingFootnote ⁷⁰ and a commemorative cloth design adopted a similar depiction.Footnote ⁷¹ But perhaps no visual image was as striking as the front page of the Lagos-based Daily Times the day after Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was elected prime minister in 1957; Balewa’s face, topped with a Saudi cord, took up almost the entire page (Figure 1). Complementing this sartorial display, several politicians declared that the hajj, as a source of moral uplift, improved their ability to govern.Footnote ⁷²

Figure 1.

‘Nigeria’s first prime minister’, Daily Times, 31 August 1957.

This is not to suggest that the move was merely instrumental. In the first half of the 1900s, the rare achievement of becoming an alhaji – and safely returning home – prompted jubilant communal celebration throughout the Yoruba south-west (Katz Reference Katz2019: 110–17). Family, friends and the curious would pack into the port or railway station to glimpse the arriving pilgrim. Horses, and later cars, could be hired for the day to give the pilgrim an elevated perch above the crowd of well-wishers, and musicians would accompany the procession to the central mosque for a special thanksgiving prayer.Footnote ⁷³ No doubt, politicians who could now finally, thanks to air travel, undertake the hajj in weeks rather than months were genuinely proud of their ability to join the ranks of their fellow alhajis, and the Mecca uniform provided an easy way to repeatedly celebrate.Footnote ⁷⁴

The 1950s also marked the first time that the Mecca uniform sparked a national discussion and concern over its authenticity. Babatunde Jose, the Yoruba journalist who chronicled his hajj in 1955, reported how he was ‘amazed’ when he spotted a hawker outside an airline office in Kano selling the ‘Mokawiya (popularly regarded as the official headgear of Alhajis)’. He explained that this was because he grew up learning that if a non-alhaji wore the mokawiya, he ‘would suffer acute headache until death overtook him’ (Jose Reference Jose1955b). Two years later, a Northern journalist accused people who put on ‘Mecca Wears’ without having gone to Mecca as being ‘supremely irresponsible’ and the type of person ‘you see in the pubs’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Given the mythical threat (at least among Yoruba Muslims), the concern over limiting the Mecca uniform to bona fide pilgrims was already decades old; what was new was the blatant dismissal by some. Still, compared with the mid-1960s onwards, in the 1950s the Mecca uniform retained its prestige.

Debating the hajj and the rise of the ‘corrupt’ pilgrim

At the same time as many Nigerian Muslims built ties with Middle Eastern nations, many non-Muslims in the Western and Northern Regions began voicing fears of a potential Muslim takeover of the country. These anxieties often referenced the hajj. While non-Muslims by no means viewed all Muslims with suspicion, the orientation of some Muslims towards the Middle East instead of the colonial metropole, especially among political and cultural elites, caused concern. Some started rumours predicting a nightmarish Muslim-ruled Nigerian state, based on an imagined oppressive and backward Middle East. This initial distrust of Muslims’ connections with the Middle East became the basis for religious tensions to come.

One of the most widespread rumours concerned the Islamic Congress, founded during the 1954 hajj by Egypt, with financial support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.Footnote ⁷⁶ The self-proclaimed ambassador to Nigeria for the congress, a title the congress would later deny, was Alhaji Deke, a Nigerian from Benin Province in the West.Footnote ⁷⁷ Although he succeeded in courting interest in the Western and Northern Regions,Footnote ⁷⁸ he dramatically quit his post in 1956, claiming that the congress had been ‘using him’ to spread ‘Egyptian communistic propaganda throughout Northern Nigeria’. He alleged that Ahmadu Bello and the NPC intended to build ‘a Muslim Empire’ with Abdel Nasser, with support from the UMP.Footnote ⁷⁹ Regardless of Deke’s questionable reputation, the event provoked concern in the Western Region and among Northern Christians,Footnote ⁸⁰ even if most Northerners dismissed Deke’s allegations.Footnote ⁸¹

Nor was this the first or last time Ahmadu Bello and the NPC faced accusations of conspiring with Nasser to transform Nigeria into an Islamic state. Shortly before the Deke affair, Bello had visited Egypt before travelling to Saudi Arabia. While in Cairo he met with Nasser and invited him to visit Nigeria, at least according to a couple of front-page reports.Footnote ⁸² Although the story got little to no attention in the Northern press, in the south-west it stoked concerns that Bello held greater allegiance to Islam than to Nigeria. One editorial in the Daily Times mused that one couldn’t know ‘where the private pilgrim ends and the Premier begins’.Footnote ⁸³

As the 1959 federal elections approached, apprehensions of the foreign resurfaced. In 1958, the political secretary to Chief Awolowo alleged that the NPC and Nasser planned ‘to install a pro-Arab government in an independent Nigeria’, with Egypt ‘bankrolling’ the NPC. He further claimed that Nasser would send political agents, disguised as Arabic teachers, ‘for the purpose of indoctrinating’ Northerners ‘with Arab nationalism’.Footnote ⁸⁴ He emphasized that it was ‘under the pretext of “Holy Pilgrimage” that the NPC met Nasser’s representatives’.Footnote ⁸⁵ With this language, the AG amplified anxieties of a Muslim-led Nigeria and questioned the motives of Northern politicians undertaking the hajj. Two newspapers reported the story, as did the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote ⁸⁶ In response, Bello accused the AG of ‘again seeking to bring the faith of Islam into disrepute and to insult the Holy Pilgrimage’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The NPC similarly asked the governor-general of Nigeria to investigate the AG’s allegations to protect the reputation of the party, Islam, and the hajj.Footnote ⁸⁸

These attacks by the AG confirmed Yoruba Muslims’ suspicions that the party was anti-Islam. The UMP used the controversy as a chance to reiterate the AG’s past anti-Muslim hostility and to affirm its own solidarity with Northern Muslims. For example, in a letter to the editor published in a Northern newspaper, the UMP’s president pleaded for south-western Muslims still supporting the AG out of ‘fear’ to switch to the NPC (Ottun Reference Ottun1958). And after Awolowo toured the North in 1959, the UMP president gleefully declared that Awolowo’s failure to win votes ‘has gladdened the hearts of all true sons and daughters of Islam in Western Nigeria’ (Ottun Reference Ottun1959).

For its part, the NPC presented itself as a party of all Northerners, regardless of faith. However, in the Western Region, some Muslim elites emphasized Muslim dominance in the NPC when encouraging Muslims there to support them.Footnote ⁸⁹ Meanwhile in the North, some Christians worried about what might happen if the NPC took over. In 1958, the president of the Geoman Youth Movement in Jos voiced ‘strong rumours’ among his people ‘that non-Muslims in the North would be sent to do menial jobs in Saudi Arabia after Nigeria had attained independence’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thus, while, for Muslims, increased ties and travel to the Middle East represented an alternative prestige to that offered by scholarships to the UK (which mainly benefited Christians), the implications of these links haunted some of the Christians living among them.

Beyond concerns about Middle Eastern meddling, as the government at the federal and regional level became more intimately involved in orchestrating the hajj and underwriting pilgrim welfare, some non-Muslims began to perceive this use of taxpayer money as unfair. For example, after the government repatriated destitute Nigerians from Jeddah and Khartoum in 1958, although a Northern newspaper claimed that all opponents were eventually ‘satisfied’ that the scheme was necessary,Footnote ⁹¹ some articles in the Lagos press disagreed (e.g. Eual Reference Eual1958). One author wondered aloud ‘whether the Muslim faith has become State religion where all its needs must be provided by the Government’ at the expense of taxpayers (ibid.).

Despite these concerns, Nigerian Muslim politicians continued to wear the Mecca uniform into the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁹² And yet images of traditional authority and politicians wearing the uniform disappear from the pages of the Nigerian daily newspapers after this time. At the same time, the scale of the Nigerian hajj exploded, thanks to the reduced cost of air travel and increased national wealth brought by Nigeria’s oil boom in the 1970s. The number of Nigerian pilgrims to Mecca almost doubled between 1968 and 1973, and then doubled again in 1977 (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 199). The discourse surrounding the Mecca uniform reflected a suspicion that not all of these pilgrims deserved the prestige of the alhaji title.

In the mid-1960s, critical voices against the Mecca uniform emerged in the press. Several commentators, both clerics and ordinary Muslims, framed wearing the Mecca uniform as separate from if not the opposite of pious behaviour. For example, in 1966, one Islamic column critically noted: ‘The shining head-gears are beautiful indeed. They made a man or a woman wearer look dignified, but unless the heads that wear them are filled with the fear of God … unless they abhor all evils’ then they ‘are meaningless, worthless adornments’ (Olatunde Reference Olatunde1966). By the 1970s, such warnings became more hostile. The president of a Yoruba Muslim association lamented to the crowd at the University of Ibadan that: ‘We have become Alhajis and Alhajas whose faith is measured by the amount of gold we can smuggle during pilgrimage and how many “Makawiya” and “Aga-Sheriff” [headgear] are on display in our showglass cases.’Footnote ⁹³ Similarly, one prominent Muslim sternly reminded Muslim readers of the Nigerian Tribune that ‘God does not ask you to go and buy Mecca Wears’ (Mohammed Reference Mohammed1976). Occasionally, this criticism compared Nigerian pilgrims with other nationalities: for example, one radio journalist noted that ‘in the Middle-East and North Africa’ returned pilgrims neither wore a Mecca uniform nor took the alhaji title (Azeez 1973: 16–17). Other Muslim leaders suggested that some now used the Mecca uniform to ‘disguise’ nefarious activities;Footnote ⁹⁴ relatedly, the Nigerian Association of Al-Hujaj [pl. alhaji] appealed to law enforcement ‘to treat as criminal impersonation anyone caught wearing designs and colors of the[ir] registered caps’ without an association ID.Footnote ⁹⁵

Even the courts in the 1970s felt compelled to establish rules on the uniform’s use. The chief magistrate in Ibadan warned that nobody ought to enter his court wearing an alhaji’s headgear. He claimed: ‘It is an insult on Islamic religion for any alhaji to wear his full robes when coming to answer to any criminal charges.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Somewhat different sartorial tensions arose in the Oyo senior magistrate’s court, where its magistrate forbid alhajis to wear turbans in the court ‘without the traditional Mecca cap’ when he ejected an alhaji from his court because ‘he was not properly dressed’.Footnote ⁹⁷ These judges – along with the other clerical and Muslim commentators – shared a sense that the category of pilgrim, once prestigious, risked degradation at the hands of ‘fanciful’ or alternatively ‘untrained, unqualified’ pilgrims.Footnote ⁹⁸

At the same time that criticism against the Mecca uniform emerged in the press, the behaviour of Nigerian pilgrims also garnered negative publicity. The most common accusation launched against pilgrims in the 1970s concerned smuggling – particularly of pharmaceutical drugs that were illegal in Saudi Arabia.Footnote ⁹⁹ The public link between pilgrimage and smuggling was so strong by this time that it is striking that, as late as 1964, the very notion that pilgrims would commit such a crime provoked humour. A cartoon accompanying the article ‘Pilgrims ruffled and insulted!’ illustrated the insult for readers (Figure 2). In the cartoon, the customs officer – shown with rather exaggerated features – expresses incredulity that the bearded pilgrim (suggesting piety) is not hiding any illicit goods in his luggage, which has prayer beads spilling out. The accompanying article accused customs officials of being ‘over-zealous’ and an editorial claimed: ‘It would be certainly out of place to suggest that some people go on pilgrimage to cover up an illegal deal abroad.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet the following year Saudi Arabia arrested twenty-two Nigerians for smuggling kola nuts and pharmaceutical drugs,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and an editorial lamented that those who ‘hide under the deceptive cloak of pilgrimage’ to commit crimes were ‘tarnishing the good name of this nation’ and of Islam.Footnote ¹⁰² Similar incidents surfaced in the latter half of the 1960s,Footnote ¹⁰³ and in 1966 a Northern paper noted that ‘in recent years’ the hajj appeared to have ‘taken on significance other than religious’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ On the whole, these reports framed such crimes as the actions of a few errant Muslims. Nonetheless, the Nigerian government promised more meticulous luggage searches by customs officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Figure 2.

Muhammadu Maigari, ‘Pilgrims ruffled and insulted!’, Nigerian Citizen, 2 May 1964.

In the 1970s, the scale and discourse surrounding smuggling escalated and registered in state regulation of the hajj. Annual government notices warned of customs officials’ strict measures against smugglers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Federal and regional officials and ‘traditional’ authorities likewise publicly warned pilgrims not to engage in smuggling.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Commentary by ordinary Muslims and clerics echoed these official warnings. A Muslim op-ed writer from Ibadan claimed that the ‘majority’ of pilgrims went to Mecca to trade or smuggle (Bhadmus Reference Bhadmus1973), and an Islamic news column decried the ‘smuggler alhaji’ (Dada Reference Dada1973). Another column by the same cleric chastised readers that to be an alhaji required ‘much more than mere dressing’ and that pilgrims who focused on displaying their alhaji identity negated the spiritual value of their hajj (Dada Reference Dada1972a); an ordinary Muslim citizen made a similar argument in a letter to the editor (Mohammed Reference Mohammed1971). Christians also weighed in, with one remarking that the alhaji title meant ‘there goes a smuggler’ (Johnson Reference Johnson1974).

The emergence of a new convention of news reporting amplified these critiques. In the 1970s, headlines concerning anonymous alhajis committing crime became commonplace in the south-west. Although this genre of headline had existed in the 1960s,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ it appeared rarely compared with the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In fact, almost as common in the 1960s were articles concerning criminal alhajis that did not include their title in the headline.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But by the 1970s, even an occasional reader of south-west newspapers would be greeted with headlines such as ‘Cattledealer loses N4,350 to trickster: alhaji absconds’ or ‘“Psychedelic alhaji” weeps to jail’,Footnote ¹¹¹ much to the chagrin of at least one prominent Muslim (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 304–5).

Popular culture helped spread the idiom of the ‘corrupt pilgrim’. Fela Kuti, who considered Christianity and Islam as harmful foreign ideologies, not surprisingly joined the chorus against the hajj (Olaniyan Reference Olaniyan2004: 59–61). In 1978, the song ‘Shuffering and shmiling’ framed elite Christians and Muslims as greedy with wealth and power, and criticized the masses for carrying their money to Mecca (ibid.: 62–3). Rounding off the decade, ‘Coffin for head of state’ conspiratorially suggested that businesses directors were either alhajis or friends of a bishop. Beyond music, alhaji characters in fiction and plays were depicted as wealthy, greedy and morally reckless (Rotimi Reference Rotimi1977; Yari Reference Yari1978; Sule Reference Sule1977; Katsina Reference Katsina1982; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2001: 80).Footnote ¹¹²

Although critiques against ‘corrupt’ pilgrims often lumped alhajas (female pilgrims) together with alhajis, some criticisms unique to alhajas replicated broader contemporary invectives against Nigerian women. Clerics and ordinary citizens claimed that women went to Mecca because it ‘enhances their prestige in the call girl or husband hunting business in Nigeria’ (Johnson Reference Johnson1974), or it helped them in ‘propagating concubinage’ (Bannerman Reference Bannerman1978), or even that alhajas were the most active smugglers.Footnote ¹¹³ Alhajas often bore the brunt of complaints that pilgrims were increasingly instrumentalizing the hajj for personal gain rather than devotion to God (Lamidi Reference Lamidi1978). These critiques accused women of viewing the hajj as a mere ‘status symbol’ (Dokee Reference Dokee1972),Footnote ¹¹⁴ ‘just after the wearing of the pilgrim’s dress’ without knowing its ‘true meaning’ (Dada Reference Dada1972b), leading some to conclude that the hajj had ‘been turned into a silly-looking picnic by notorious women who have found Mecca and Medina as the new target of their ungodly activities’ (Olatunde Reference Olatunde1969).

With the hajj under increased scrutiny, and ‘corrupt’ pilgrims symbolized by someone who was enamoured more with the sartorial accoutrements of their journey than with pious devotion to God, it is likely no coincidence that government officials appear to have stopped carrying out official duties adorned in pilgrim regalia. Additionally, the habit of national newspapers using stock images of politicians in pilgrim regalia also stopped.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Who instigated this latter sartorial rejection is unclear, but given that corruption, crime and oil wealth loaded these symbols of hajj with contradictory meaning, it is not hard to imagine why Nigerian Muslim politicians would distance themselves from these symbols.

The Mecca uniform’s gendered afterlives

To return to male accusations that women instrumentalized the hajj, in some respects in the 1970s women did gravitate more towards material markers of being a pilgrim, like the Mecca uniform. In the south-west, Yoruba women increasingly linked their pilgrimage to a wide range of advocacy and accomplishments. By the late 1960s, Yoruba alhajas had transformed celebrations at mosques for their safe return from Mecca into opportunities to speak on the importance of Muslim morality,Footnote ¹¹⁶ or to encourage others to vote for their political party.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The experience of the hajj could prompt alhajas to engage in service work. For example, Alhaja Alaga claimed that, while in Mecca, she conceived of the idea for what would become the first Muslim grammar school for girls in Ibadan.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Alhajas also entered the public domain through active engagement in post-independence politics, such as when alhajas in Oyo State adorned themselves in the Mecca uniform en masse to march on behalf of a political party in 1978.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yoruba women’s societies also embraced the uniform, with alhaja members wearing it while attending meetings, or modifying it to use as their aso egbé (uniform dress) to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday (Maulud Nabiyy) (Gbadamosi Reference Gbadamosi2014: 10–11, 40). Alhajas and the Mecca uniform also entered the public sphere through music. For example, the musician Alhaja Salawa Abeni, ‘alias “Hadja Londoner”’, was consistently photographed wearing the sabaka cap and in 1979 issued an album Irohin Abo Mecca that narrated her journey to Mecca via London.Footnote ¹²⁰

The predominance of Yoruba women publicly embracing the Mecca uniform more than men after the mid-1960s is illustrated by obituary practices. Once perhaps more frequently practised by alhajis,Footnote ¹²¹ by the 1960s onwards, obituaries for alhajas Footnote ¹²² were significantly more frequently paired with photographs of the deceased in the Mecca uniform. This suggests that, for alhajas, a studio portrait of themselves in the Mecca uniform usually represented their most prestigious photograph, whereas families of alhajis frequently chose portraits that emphasized the deceased’s status as a titled ‘big man’.

In the 1970s, gendered usage of Mecca uniform becomes clear when examining news photography of various Eid prayer grounds throughout the south-west. Photographs of male sections rarely depict men in the Mecca uniform;Footnote ¹²³ in contrast, those of female sections in the late 1960s and into the 1970s typically show a row of women proudly displaying their alhaja status with their Mecca uniforms.Footnote ¹²⁴

This difference continues today, particularly in discussions on the ‘Mecca tooth’, a practice dating back to at least the 1970s of pilgrims getting a gold or silver plated tooth while in Saudi Arabia (Oloso Reference Oloso1984: 299). In contemporary Nigeria, many south-west Muslims, both men and women, framed the practice as fashionFootnote ¹²⁵ for the uneducated, ‘nominal’Footnote ¹²⁶ Muslim who wants to ‘show off’,Footnote ¹²⁷ and they accused women of indulging in this the most.Footnote ¹²⁸ While male commentators have suggested that these varied practices revealed that women have a more superficial relationship to Islam, these visual displays of piety were perhaps simply the most accessible means for Muslim women in the 1960s and 1970s (and perhaps even today) to gain communal prestige and make political claims upon the state.

Of course, not all women adopted this social strategy. The public perception that most women became alhajas for selfish reasons encouraged women to police their own behaviour and prompted internal struggles. When asked if women gained prestige by going on the hajj, Alhaja Bushra Bisi Oloso, who went in 1975, carefully distinguished between ‘serious’ and ‘ceremonious’ alhajas.Footnote ¹²⁹ Alhaja Sururah Oyero recalled her initial unease with her new identity as an alhaja in 1983. Her fear of being labelled an opportunist caused her to not buy the Mecca uniform, and she had to be persuaded to allow others to call her ‘alhaja’:Footnote ¹³⁰

Nor has this tension ceased. Alhaja Musilimot Balogun first went to Mecca in 1993, fully sponsored thanks to being one of three female winners of a Qur’anic recitation contest in Lagos. During her hajj, she purchased a Mecca tooth, but later removed it. When I asked her why, she replied: ‘Because I used to laugh; if I laugh some will be thinking, ah, because you went to Mecca, that is why you are doing this,’Footnote ¹³¹ referring to the common notion that people with Mecca teeth smile and laugh unnecessarily to show off their status.Footnote ¹³² And yet, Alhaja Balogun admitted that she found herself longing for a Mecca tooth again, and found it ‘very attractive’ on recent alhajas.