The current varieties of vigilantism in northern Nigeria are products of a wider, older set of concerns than simply the recent decline of law and order – and the rationale for them differs fundamentally from either such vigilante groups as the Bakassi Boys and the Oduduwa People's Congress (OPC) operating in the south of Nigeria or the older, more ‘traditional’ type of vigilante. At root, I suggest, is a widespread unease among Muslims, especially among those in the urban centres of northern Nigeria; there is a pervasive anxiety over insecurity felt on both a physical and a spiritual plane. Admittedly, it is easier to talk about a subjective phenomenon like ‘public anxiety’ than to prove it exists; in very different contexts the phenomenon has been framed by concepts like ‘moral panic’ or even ‘cultural paranoia’.Footnote ¹ Compared to ‘cultural paranoia’, moral panics are usually short-lived (as was, for example, McCarthyism in 1950s USA); but they could be diagnosed simply as acute episodes within an underlying condition that is chronic. Given the society's assumptions and its long-term concerns, these anxieties, seen as a ‘chronic condition’, may well be rational, with the acute episodes coming and going, set off by a range of confusing factors. In the Nigerian case one such factor was the heated debate over Obasanjo's quest for a third term as President and the 2007 elections.Footnote ² The danger of such an analysis, however, is that it tends to pathologize a social phenomenon which locally might be being seen as a sign of good political health, or at least as a positive, health-restoring response.

Anxieties in a Muslim community have a well-established intellectual basis, founded upon two distinct notions: the first is that every century a reformer (mujaddid) will appear among local Muslims and transform the Muslim jama‘a, ‘renewing’ it. The second is that towards the end of time a Mahdi will appear and himself lead Muslims to triumph over the enemies of Islam and mankind. The key assumption is that the end of time is due soon: the start of the fifteenth Islamic century (ca. 1980) was considered a possible date – hence the disturbances that year in Mecca and elsewhere; an earlier period could be dated as starting from ca. 1300 AH (ca. 1885), a time which was marked by Christian (‘colonial’) invasions of much of Muslim West Africa, invasions which provoked a massive exodus of Muslims eastwards towards Mecca.Footnote ³ Neither of these notions, then, are empty or indeed esoteric: most recently (in April 2006), the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, referred to the possibility of the Shi‘ites' Hidden Imam appearing as part of an impending showdown with the West (over nuclear power). In northern Nigeria explicit references to the apocalypse are usually more muted but can be heard among ‘ordinary’ people; it is not an extraordinary idea.Footnote ⁴ Indeed the appearance of a mujaddid now would be quite normal: some even referred to Ahmad Sani, the Zamfara politician who first reintroduced shari‘a in 2000, as ‘mujaddidi’. Nonetheless these ideas are only the background to more immediately pressing concerns. A good Muslim should not simply wait until ‘the revolution’ happens but instead should actively prepare him- (and her-) self and his/her community for the impending transformation, whatever it may be and whenever it may come (if indeed it is coming) – and it is this sense of the need for self-preparation that seems more marked than before. It is at root religious. Christians may express it in terms of being ‘born again’, and be quite open about it, but with them it takes on a more personal meaning: among Muslims, however, such ideas focus on the communal domain, on the Muslim jama‘a.

The salience, then, of so-called ‘vigilantes’ as an issue in contemporary northern Nigeria reflects a much deeper concern among ordinary people – and it is a concern over both physical and spiritual insecurity. The vulnerability they feel within their houses, the anxiety they show over their fate, both individually and as a jama‘a, on the Day of Judgement – these are the issues I wish to focus on here, in order to lay out the context for current debates. The data come primarily from metropolitan Kano, but I shall include historical and other material from Sokoto, Zamfara and Katsina as there is here, I suggest, both a common history and a common ‘map’ for the future, a map shaped much more by people's faith as Muslims than by party politics or politicians' manifestos.⁵

STRANGERS

First, simply on a mundane level, the sense of insecurity has grown with the huge rise in population within the Kano urban area – a rise due both to incoming strangers from beyond Hausaland and to young migrants from the Hausa countryside. The numbers of people housed within Kano metropolitan has increased by at least ten times in the last 45 years, from below 250,000 ca. 1961 to well over 2.5 million now (the March 2006 Census, the final results of which are yet to be released, should give us a more exact total; Kano State as a whole, provisionally, has 9.4 million). As a result, men daily pass your door who are unknown to you – as never before. Instead of a close-knit, almost ‘private’ quarter in which everyone was known to each other (possibly over several generations), you now live on a very public street. The presence of strangers allows the imagination to flourish: rumours about them spread, fears are fuelled over what they ‘really’ do in the privacy of their rooms, misinterpretations multiply about their intentions, their habits. The phenomenon is not peculiar to Hausaland, but it is easy to overlook the impact of such a simple fact as demographic growth and diversity. With its new suburbs and densely populated quarters in the older parts of the town (where, for example, old family houses have been divided up for multi-occupancy, and small rooms once reserved for washing have been converted into rooms to live in), there are conflicts with co-residents and fears over the presence of spirits, not to mention the new ‘tourist’ rats, larger and bolder than the local species, or mosquitoes as never before, and well water now too bitter, too polluted to use.Footnote ⁶ It is no longer the ‘home’ it once was.

There is a danger in romanticizing the security of the past (whether colonial or pre-colonial) but I would argue there was then a sense of order even in disorder. You knew whom to fear – he wasn't a stranger: you knew who were thought to be practising witchcraft in the house or neighbourhood, you knew who was known to be mai dodo (using a ‘tame’ spirit at the expense of others), and there were ways to keep him at bay. I would argue, too, that the colonial period saw security at its highest when the Emir was all-powerful and his NA (the ‘Native Authority’) – and NA police – were ubiquitous. The palace could know by noon where everyone (and I mean everyone) had slept the night before; the chain of daily intelligence ran from the ward head up to the Emir – and that applied to the (European) Government Residential Area (the ‘GRA’) too. In Sokoto, for example, there was still in the 1960s a deaf-mute man who reported daily which European slept where and how many bottles of liquor had been consumed the previous evening. In the 1950s there were also sanitary inspectors, going around in teams of two – a man and a woman (she'd be the one to enter inside a house however private) – and making their weekly reports on each building. The degree of surveillance was astonishing, with even the head of thieves reporting to the palace along with the heads of the deaf-mutes and the blind; beggars were organized too. In the past, any complainant could expect to see the Emir (or his local headman) personally any day after the dawn prayer; thus even people's complaints served to feed into governmental intelligence. The British colonial authorities depended on this system, as did the regional governments once independence came. Today the system has long been abolished, and the current levels of population density would make it hard to reinstitute even were there the political will to do so. Even a rural village area (one well known to me) that had some 1,500 taxpayers in 1955 has today, I was told by the aged village head, over 75,000 people – no one pays tax now, so such records as there are are informal. But a corollary of this new-found freedom for the individual to be invisible is for the general public a new sense of insecurity: no longer is anyone in charge.

The NA police were abolished soon after the coup in 1966. The current police force is purely a federal institution; no local or state-wide police are allowed under the 1999 constitution. Furthermore, even local police stations are not manned by local men: the federal police are drawn specifically not from the locality but from elsewhere in the Federation. The riot police, too, are from outside the state.Footnote ⁷ This may help to prevent the police from being influenced by local allegiances, but it adds to the feeling that law-abiding local citizens have no local protection.

Burglars and thieves have always been a problem – at night, in the old city, a burglar might come in over the flat roofs.Footnote ⁸ Traditionally there were often neither doors nor gates to a house's entry hall (zaure) where young boys and men slept – unlike, say, Timbuktu with its locks and padlocks, or the great gateways of a compound in Muslim China. Houses in cities like Kano were walled, with only a single entrance way (palaces, however, had a back entrance for their slaves). Nonetheless, in some parts during the nineteenth century rich men would sleep in tents erected within their houses so as to confuse would-be assassins; others might keep a pistol under the pillow (assassins used knives or swords, though poison may have been more common than one knows).Footnote ⁹ Security was a personal matter. In the countryside large farmhouses generally had, leading into the centre of the house, just a single passageway, at most barred at night with a log (which a mounted raider could leap at a canter) and guarded by a dog or two – alert to hyenas as much as to burglars.

Thieves and robbers lived in known settlements outside the walls of the main cities, and did so until the 1970s (and in some areas maybe still do). Traditionally, if an item was stolen from your lodgings you went along to the thieves' village and saw their headman or sarkin baraye, who would recover the item for you; you then gave him a substantial present, of course. The system of a sarkin baraye was not confined to big cities, but was less formal outside: thieves were still part of an ordered system. But even in the countryside till recently, incoming robbers found it hard to make their getaway. If they were strangers they were instantly recognizable, and within an hour or two would be caught (sometimes killed) after a hue and cry by the local youths. Only the frontier ‘bush’ (often on a watershed, and therefore high ground and waterless), where few people lived, afforded shelter to ‘outlaws’.

Separation, then, also afforded a degree of closure, especially at night. Thus the Emir of Kano forbade Europeans from sleeping within the walled city, a prohibition that was in force formally until the mid-1960s. Hence, the GRA was separated from the city by a patch of open land. Similarly outside the main walls were Fagge (which, surprisingly, got permission to wall itself only in the early colonial period), Bompai and Sabon Gari – these were for ‘strangers’ who were alien in varying degrees; even the birni was divided by the river Jakara, with residents from the Dalla side being restricted in their access to the palace side of the city.Footnote ¹⁰ Servants and former slaves might not ‘count’ in this policy of separation; certainly servants might have their own quarters within the GRA, and (incidentally or not) provide useful intelligence to the Emir's officials. Having separate living quarters suited the European officials who may have also justified it on grounds of health (if not security), but at least in early colonial Kano it was the Emir's decision, not just the new Resident's, to keep Christians (Nasara) and Muslims apart.Footnote ¹¹ Strangers were better kept outside.

In the past there were physical as well as symbolic barriers against unauthorized strangers. Even during the early years of colonial rule, Kano city was walled, as were almost all settlements (if only with a stockade and ditch); and there were gates, each with its gatekeeper, which were formally closed soon after sunset. The gates were narrow, the passageway was designed with a dog's leg, so that a loaded camel, for example, could not pass. The walls rose to a height of 20–30 feet behind a thorn-filled ditch – in all, too hard and high to clamber over. Today, the gates and walls have all but gone; only police checkpoints block the main approach roads, but they are permeable and sited beyond the town's limits. No barriers, symbolic or physical, now close the metropolis.

CLOSING THE BORDERS

The sense of closure, I suggest, is central to Islamic culture. Not only is the interior of a house strictly private (in law not even an Emir can enter though he can hear a crime, such as music making, being committed inside;Footnote ¹² only access to water from a well inside a house is allowable and that only in a crisis); so too, in a sense, is the territory of the jama‘a. Not for nothing is the land of the Muslim umma called dar al-Islam, the ‘house’ of Islam. Though the jihad that established the Sokoto Caliphate was completed in 1808 (with the fall of Birnin Zazzau on Saturday morning, 31 December), there still remained the task of closing the frontiers militarily. To do this, a stronghold (ribat; cf. thagr) was built at several key points on the borders and manned by young men.Footnote ¹³ Initially these strongholds were quite close to the ‘capital’ of each emirate as the core area of each jama‘a was quite small – Sokoto, for example, was only some 15 miles wide and 25 miles north–south. The area within these borders was then close-settled, with Fulɓe families and their slaves occupying new farmsteads. By the 1820s, when the Caliphate's charismatic Shaikh ‘Uthman had died and the surrounding countryside had then risen in rebellion against the new ruler, even this core area came under attack from raiders, and defensive campaigns had to be fought and the frontier re-established as ‘closed’. The same policy was implemented in other new emirates, and, as the nineteenth century wore on, a whole frontier emirate such as Kontagora can be seen as a ribat – protecting now the core emirates and facing out towards a ‘pagan’ borderland from which the emirate armies could ‘harvest’ captives or extract tribute (in other words, receive payments in return for a temporary ‘peace’ or amana). These ‘pagans’ were not encouraged – not permitted, say some local historians – to convert to Islam even if they so wished; they belonged to a different dar and should stay there.Footnote ¹⁴ But those ‘pagans’ brought in as captives and sold in local markets were expected at some point to become Muslims – or if not themselves, then their children – and to be assimilated as household slaves (cucanawa) or freedmen-clients (barori). Though the colonial regime in the twentieth century formally abolished both raiding and slavery,Footnote ¹⁵ the implicit boundary between free and ex-slave, between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, remained; certainly the antagonism between the two worlds persists even to this day, some would say in a new, fiercer form than before as the creation of well-financed local governments (LGAs) has sharply raised the value of being ‘indigenous’, as against the old value associated with ‘becoming Hausa’.¹⁶

Though the twelve shari‘a states of course contain peoples who have never been Muslim and whose status and rights as full citizens of Nigeria remain unchanged, the very way people now speak of these twelve as the ‘core North’; only emphasizes the notional existence of a boundary surrounding this ‘core’: the boundary may not be ‘closed’ but the definition of ‘core’ has now been made all the sharper by its being where shari‘a law has been implemented and where its restrictions (on, say, alcohol) are in force. I would go so far as to suggest that the repeated rioting against southern Nigerian Christians in Kano is seen as a way of keeping those ‘strangers’ in their place, reminding them that Kano is not theirs and reasserting the right of Muslim dominance in a Muslim city. Whatever the case, the ‘Sokoto Caliphate’ and dar al-Islam are now no longer just a matter of history; they are apt to be more a source of long-lost but currently very significant ideals than products of accurate, detailed memory.

Of course, even in the nineteenth century, ‘closure’ was not always effective. There were panics over infiltrators (with ‘2,000’ being executed in Sokoto on one occasion); traders from outside dar al-Islam (and hence illegal) nonetheless came into markets, not to mention raiders who regularly entered dar al-Islam via the strips of no-man's-land or camped in forests where they were safe from Muslim cavalry (low branches were lethal to horsemen).Footnote ¹⁷ The kidnapping of farmers (including women) as they were working on their fields continued into the 1890s;Footnote ¹⁸ ransoms paid by families for their kinsfolk became a more valuable source of income for outlaws (and their dealers), especially once the value of slaves for sale on the open market had fallen so sharply that cattle were more marketable targets of a raid than people. Such threats to security as these only emphasized the importance of ‘closure’, of closing the frontier, militarily as well as symbolically – notional though that closure might in practice have been for many of Sokoto's citizens. So too, today, it is a notional ‘closure’ that is once again important, an ideal that might just possibly be realized if the right political actions, with Allah's aid, are carried out.

Here the reader needs to go back briefly to mid-March 1903 and imagine the full shock of having Christian colonial rule suddenly imposed upon you, with the vast, century-old Sokoto Caliphate defeated within the space of a few months. Dar al-Islam was no more; the legacy of Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio and his son the Amir al-mu’minin Muhammad Bello come to naught. And it was Muslim Hausa troops recruited in Kano, under a few ‘white’ Christian officers, using bigger and faster-firing guns more professionally than the Sokoto or Kano armies could muster, that did the damage. My personal view is that some, perhaps most people will have seen the catastrophe as Allah's will. We know that dispersed families came together that dry season to decide what to do: some were to leave for Mecca, others would stay behind and care for the elderly (who could not travel) and the livestock.Footnote ¹⁹ Defeated senior officials like the Vizier of Sokoto decided to stay behind (he was old and nearly blind) and try to help run the new jama‘a, whatever that would be.Footnote ²⁰ Their priority must have been to establish some kind of dar al-Islam even with the Christians (temporarily?) present as overlords. Full closure was not possible, but a degree of closure was feasible, whether through dissimulation or social distance; one solution, widely adopted, was to turn to Sufism and to reforming the Sufi brotherhoods, another was to expand Islamic education for the young.Footnote ²¹ Mental ‘closure’ stood in for physical, territorial closure. It worked.

Now come forward some 55 years, to the excitement of impending independence. The acute trauma of Christian colonization is a matter of the past, though there are still a few alive who remember the trauma; and many more memories thrive in the Sudan, among children of the emigrants who failed to reach Mecca. The re-establishment of a better kind of dar al-Islam, if not a complete dar al-Islam, now seemed a real possibility some time soon.Footnote ²² It is this dream that shari‘a and hisba ‘vigilantes’ are parts of; a dream that includes the radicalism of reformers like the yan Izala who motivated a new generation of young Muslims, girls and boys, from the 1970s onwards.Footnote ²³ Politically the notion of dar al-Islam retains a powerful appeal to all those still troubled by the shame of colonialism and the pervasive cultural changes labelled ‘modernity’ (zamani) with all its non-Muslim trappings. Furthermore, there is a real urgency to act now, if the end of time is as near as signs suggest it to be. In this context, seeking closure again is a logical response that is both politically and religiously ‘healthy’.

Today, however – now that most of the old Sokoto Caliphate, especially its core, lies within a secular Nigeria – realistically this concept of ‘closure’ can scarcely be operative. Earlier colonial restrictions, which simulated closure, have been cancelled along with the tight colonial surveillance. Dar al-Islam exists in the mind, not on the ground. Nonetheless it is the consequences of living in a territory that is not dar al-Islam that can cause anxiety. It is not a problem, of course, confined to Muslims in Nigeria. Muslims have emigrated all over the globe, and may no longer be living under a Muslim government, let alone an Islamic one; for many, it is a matter of choice, not necessity. It does raise questions, however, about the legality, in strictly religious terms, of choosing to live under non-Muslim regimes, and what might be the consequences, in the afterlife, of having done so willingly when on earth. The different schools of Islamic law vary in the strictness with which they regard the injunction on Muslims to live within dar al-Islam; clearly merchant communities involved in foreign trade have long sought a dispensation to do so, but traditionally in Maliki law (the school that has always been current in West Africa) goods that derive from non-Muslims in dar al-harb could not legally be bought or sold within dar al-Islam.Footnote ²⁴ Few Muslims today bother about such bans (what would life be without motor vehicles, radios, watches, mobile phones?) but some in Kano's recent past did object strongly: the yan tatsine, the followers of the scholar Maitatsine, rejected such items and sought to impose their rejection on other Muslims in the city.Footnote ²⁵ In the deep countryside there are still reclusive groups such as the Digawa and Salihawa that take a similar stance and refuse to compromise – rejecting modern government, too, and not just its goods.

The Day of Judgement is not a light matter here, any more than are Hell and Paradise mere rhetorical tropes: Judgement Day is central to the purpose of life, to everyday behaviour and morality. Muslims – men and increasingly women – are more learned in Islamic matters than ever before: education comes through the radio and television as well as local evening classes – a wide range of books are available in Hausa (including two slightly different interpretations of the Holy Qur'an),Footnote ²⁶ whereas before it was necessary to master Arabic. Looking back over the 45 years that I have been in or visiting northern Nigeria, I am struck by today's new piety; before, it was Sufi practices (dhikr, for example) that seemed to dominate overtly religious life; now it is knowledge of the Holy Qur'an and the tenets of shari‘a law, not only among men but especially among women, young and old.

If, for most Muslims in northern Nigeria today, some compromise is inevitable, there nonetheless remain the problems of where to draw the line: what really matters, what will really matter on the Day of Judgement? What happens within the privacy of the house is a matter for the family – but the public sphere, especially what happens in the street, is for the Muslim community to regulate. Hence the focus on clothing, on transport, on the interactions in public between adults of different gender. The key issue is the separation of the genders, but critical, too, are the consumption of alcohol, the playing of music. For our homeland, people say, to be dar al-Islam, at least these minimal conditions should be met. Conversely, if men and women mix and drink without restraint, then clearly it is not dar al-Islam that we live in. These are not mere symbols of Islam but crucial criteria of the religious status of our community. Prayer, fasting, the pilgrimage, public mosques are essential to the life of a Muslim, but the Muslim jama‘a needs more than public mosques; it needs the shari‘a law to bring proper order to the public interactions of Muslims, a shari‘a judge (qadi; in Hausa Alkali) to implement that law, and people to enforce it.

ENFORCEMENT OF SHARI‘A LAW

If the reintroduction of shari‘a law was to have real meaning, it had to be enforced. What is new, then, is not so much the reintroduction of shari‘a law per se (the 1959 Penal Code, based on shari‘a, was still in force), as its enforcement. Although the shari‘a sentences of stoning, amputation and execution have attracted worldwide publicity, they have very rarely been carried out.Footnote ²⁷ Instead it is the new men and methods of shari‘a enforcement – the hisba, the vigilantes as they might be called by outsiders – that affect everyday lives in northern Nigeria, the lives not merely of Muslims but also of Christians and other residents in the twelve shari‘a states.Footnote ²⁸ Only three domains are seriously affected: women in public (their dress, their proximity to unrelated men – in conversation, for example, or in public transport); alcohol and non-military music and singing. This last affects praise singing, at weddings for example (where dancing may also occur), or at sports such as boxing or wrestling, as well as songs used for spirit possession whether done in ‘play’ or in divination and diagnosis. Technically no shari‘a enforcer can enter a private house, nor can he act upon suspicion or rumour. He cannot carry any weapons other than a stick or a rope; he cannot himself punish an offender but must hand him over to a local shari‘a committee or to the police. The shari‘a-enforcers are, in effect, acting as concerned citizens, not as a police force. We may categorize the hisba as vigilantes but they are not considered so in Hausa society. Locally, the difference is this: the hisba operate by day, often in uniform, and often get on badly with the Nigeria Police; vigilantes operate late at night (midnight to about 5.30 a.m.), often armed with bows, and generally have good relations with the local police. In this context, hisba can sometimes be seen as busybodies, whereas vigilantes protect the community from thieves. Indeed hisba can elicit a violent response from local residents if they try to break up a wedding ceremony with its traditional music, or if they interfere with traffic over-officiously and fine all motorcycle taxi drivers for carrying a woman passenger. Villagers have injured and driven off a busload of hisba men who had come from the nearby town to burn out the local sarkin bori just as, a decade earlier, Muslim villagers have told yan Izala preachers to leave off harassing their Christian-Hausa neighbours. Such ardent young men confidently coming en masse from the city are very different from vigilantes living locally and known to all, risking their lives in order to keep thieves away and let their neighbours sleep soundly.

The hisba was initially a wholly volunteer ‘force’ composed of young men and run by local committees of ‘elders’.Footnote ²⁹ Once these groups were up and running, state governments stepped in, financed them and sought to control the hisba, giving them uniforms, vehicles and offices. Local committees were retained but official guidelines were issued by the state governments. Though hisba men are not armed, they did sometimes take direct action, for example intimidating and threatening, or beating and abusing the offender. Initially the effectiveness of hisba groups varied greatly from quarter to quarter. They were strongest in parts of Kano where the population is most mixed – for example, Kofar Kabuga or Panisau – and least effective in the inner quarters of the birni where there has always been a tradition of local youth groups acting as vigilantes. But even today their influence can be patchy. Hisba have only a notional presence where brothels and bars are so numerous that any attempt to interfere would be met with counter-force.Footnote ³⁰ This applies not just to particular sites but also to occasions (such as weddings) where music was traditionally played. It is said that anti-hisba gangs are available for hire.³¹

Hisba's ambiguous constitutional position and its poor relations with the Nigeria Police in Kano was recently (in 2005–6) brought to a head – I assume deliberately – by the state government. Once the Kano Governor had appointed 9,000 hisba personnel (of which 900 were women) and ordered them to stop all motorcycle taxi drivers (yan acaba or okada) who were carrying as passengers women unrelated to them, he was in effect challenging the Inspector-General of the Nigeria Police over its monopoly of policing Kano. Not merely were the hisba to fine the drivers but they could confiscate the motorcycles. Normally it is the traffic police who handle traffic offences, but who has a right in Nigerian law to confiscate private property in this way, whether it is on the roadside or anywhere else? Not surprisingly, the Nigeria Police headquarters in Abuja promptly ordered the arrest of the head and deputy-head of Kano's hisba and took them both to Abuja to charge them with ‘subversion and promoting subversion of the Federal Government by managing, assisting in the management and membership of an unlawful society known as the Hisbah Board Organisation’.Footnote ³² (Ironically, perhaps, the two immediately counter-sued the federal government on the grounds that their human rights had been abused.) The case took almost a year, and ended as effectively a stalemate under a Christian President unwilling to force the issue, with the charges of treason (for links with Libya) being dropped, and compensation being paid for wrongful detention (but their arrest was lawful). While the case was sub judice, actions by hisba on Kano's streets seemed less aggressive. But still more recently (July 2007) it is reported that hisba has destroyed 6,000 cartons of beer belonging, presumably, to Christians. The owners of the beer were arraigned before a shari‘a court, where the beer was to be destroyed. If the owners, if not the potential consumers, were indeed Christian (or claimed to be), it is not clear under what Nigerian law hisba can impound non-Muslim property even within a shari‘a state, but it seems that the police were party to the procedure in this instance. This new action by hisba may once more bring the whole constitutional issue to a formal decision, but I doubt it: my personal guess is that again the entire matter will be dropped eventually. I think it is a way of testing how far, under the country's new Muslim President, a state government could run its own shari‘a personnel as a formal police force. Had hisba remained an informal, locally run, volunteer vigilante group that was more active in some places than in others, it might not have drawn attention to itself. But in classical Islamic law, hisba is a governmental task and any claim to be re-establishing dar al-Islam and the shari‘a would imply that the government had responsibility for enforcing it through hisba personnel.³³

It may seem strange to make such a major issue out of motorcycle taxis and women passengers – not least as it affects the poor and leaves, yet again, the rich to ignore, if they wish, the provisions of the shari‘a. Historically, however, the issue of women's places in public transport is at least 50 years old. In the early 1960s, for example, a wife, even in a car driven by her husband, would not sit beside him in front: she'd sit by herself in the back. But if there were men in the back seat, she could sit àlone' in the front (the driver not counting as a man). Were there two women they would be sent in their own separate car, in the back. In public transport, women sat at the back. But in recent years, before shari‘a, the shortage of taxis and buses at peak times meant women might have (or might simply be willing) to sit anywhere. Motorcycle taxis are relatively new (cheap Chinese imports have transformed the pattern of ownership), and driving one is one of the few jobs open to young men who have left their farms and come to town. Neither driving licence nor insurance are required. The fare is cheap, and they deliver the passenger right to the door – the service is unparallelled. Initially a town like Gusau, the capital of the shari‘a state Zamfara, tried to ban women on motorcycles unless the driver was her husband,Footnote ³⁴ but husbands found it impossible to get their wives to their places of work (especially if these were on the edge of town). With no alternative transport available at a similar price, the ban whether in Gusau or in Kano gradually yielded to necessity. Until recently it was possible to see women riding behind men on motorcycle taxis, despite stories that it is only harlots who ride thus. The recent deployment of extra hisba personnel to stop this was thus a backlash against a growing laxity on Kano's streets. Similarly, though women-only buses are being made available, they are too few to meet the demand; women complain of having to wait longer in the heat than men.

The Hausa text which is widely distributed in the shari‘a states to explain the rules governing hisba goes back to 1788 AD, well before there was public transport to worry about. The text is a short book written originally in Arabic by ‘Abdullahi dan Fodio, the younger brother of Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio, before their great jihad was successful.Footnote ³⁵ He wrote it, it seems, in Zamfara where the Shaikh was successfully preaching and teaching; as a result, new Muslim communities were setting up properly Islamic administrations there. Once the Caliphate was established, some twenty years later, so too was the institution of hisba: we know the name of the first muhtasib, the judge responsible for enforcing proper observance of shari‘a in public spaces, but nothing of his actual work is recorded. It was clearly different from the ‘police’ (shurta) and from the role of gaoler (yari).Footnote ³⁶ But eyewitness accounts from visitors to Kano and Sokoto in the 1820s suggest that the muhtasib overlooked much improper behaviour taking place in areas of town where transport workers and off-duty servants or slaves found their relaxation. There is no suggestion there was a public hisba force out on the streets day or night looking for miscreants. Instead it was, I suspect, retainers from the major political houses who acted as peacekeepers in town as, when and where required.

OTHER WAYS OF KEEPING THE PEACE

Vigilantes and hisba are not the only groups of men who might use violence within the urban milieu. There are traditional gangs of hunters (yan farauta) with their dogs, and extra-strong men (yan tauri) fortified by charms; there are ‘lairs’ of young marginal toughs (yan daba) – all these tend to live on the edges of urban society.Footnote ³⁷ But almost every ward of the old city (birni) had its own group of young men who would raid or fight their ‘traditional’ opponents from another ward – fights, with swords, that resulted in wounds and sometimes deaths. From these young men's gangs were recruited in the 1950s and 1960s the ‘party supporters’ or thugs (yan banga; the name comes from the word ‘vanguard’) that protected their politician from the thugs of politicians from the rival party. These thugs travelled round to their party's rallies in lorries and were frankly intimidating. Consequently, if there was a riot to be organized at short notice, these were the men – from city and village alike – who could be bussed in: loot was their ‘pay’.

Finally, there is of course the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) – and, before 1966, the Native Authority police as well; the NPF is formally recruited, trained and uniformed, under discipline.Footnote ³⁸ But it is undermanned (and underpaid) and lightly armed (if they have ammunition, it would only be two bullets), and short of transport. The police posts are usually only open in daylight. As a federal nationwide force, their immediate effectiveness is compromised by their not being stationed in their home areas. The strongly armed, specialized component of the NPF is the Mobile Police, while army units are regularly deployed in times of civilian unrest or inter-communal strife: people fear the appearance of both these types of force as they readily open fire on civilians. Thus in Kano during the millenarian crisis of December 1980 the army's tanks were sent into a rather run-down part of the birni (Kofar Mata ward) and crushed some 4,000 yan tatsine and their families as they hid in their houses; the police had been unable to cope with radically critical Muslims wielding weapons.³⁹

A central dilemma for the police is that, as a federal institution, their remit is to enforce federal law: shari‘a law should be enforced, then, not by members of the Nigeria Police Force but only by the states. Given that the legality of the shari‘a vis-à-vis the federal constitution is itself a contested issue, the police are reluctant to get involved in any action the hisba may get up to. Similarly, prisons and hospitals are federal institutions; prisons therefore are unwilling to house prisoners found guilty of crimes under shari‘a law, just as doctors are unwilling to amputate limbs as the shari‘a requires. Fines and floggings at the order of the shari‘a courts raise fewer questions; the court staff can carry out the sentences. Death by stoning is unlikely ever to be carried out; it requires burying the prisoner up to the neck, and then young children (‘innocents’) throw relatively small stones until the prisoner dies. One governor has said he'd be willing to cast the first stone in such a case, implying such an awful death would be used by him primarily as an occasion for pious, political pronouncements. Other governors have discreetly delayed, failing or refusing to sign the final order for an execution.

But prisons should not be a problem in the shari‘a system. A shari‘a court run by an Alkali normally does not sentence the convicted to serve a term in prison; shari‘a sentences punish the convict financially or physically.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was the colonial government that introduced custodial sentences as punishment and therefore built new prisons; pre-colonial prisons held arrested people until their cases were heard – but a hearing (especially before the Emir) might be long-delayed.Footnote ⁴¹ Hence, the new shari‘a system might need a prison only to hold the accused until his case came up – that is, the prison has a custodial rather than a punitive or coercive role (‘coercive’ in the sense of forcing the convicted to pay his fine, for example): currently hearings cannot be delayed indefinitely, as the shari‘a system does not have the facilities for holding prisoners. Thus the shari‘a courts are considered to work fast (non-Muslims of my acquaintance sometimes prefer to use the shari‘a system for getting justice simply because it is faster than the magistrate's court), but the problem is relative: Nigeria's ordinary prisons are currently filled with prisoners awaiting trial, some for as long as 50 years or so (because their files have been lost; usually, however, every five years a judge releases those prisoners whose time awaiting trial has exceeded any possible sentence for the crime of which they are accused). However, Zamfara State has recently announced that it intends to build shari‘a prisons, thus challenging head-on the Nigerian constitution on this issue. Presumably those on shari‘a charges have been absconding from the state before their case came to court; without a shari‘a police force with cross-state powers, absconding offenders cannot be retrieved.

As under neither Nigerian nor Islamic law are the hisba meant to act as a conventional police force, their exact role in everyday life within Kano still needs to be defined. They cannot be seen to be insignificant or ineffective, however, for that might bring shari‘a and the political programme it stands for into disrepute. And they are not ‘vigilantes’ in the conventional sense – there are other informal groups in operation that also concern themselves with law and order. Purely local, voluntary vigilantes exist and have existed since before colonial rule. Indeed had state governments not taken over hisba, its status – as local, voluntary, ad hoc – would have matched similar groups. Local, night-time vigilantes are run by a local committee, which equips them and gives them expenses. Even older than the current fashion for these vigilantes are the private security firms such as Nigerguards, set up in 1967 by a former NPF officer on his retirement. He kept his links to the police and provided protection for firms and for private homes; he tended to recruit retired policemen, so his staff were already trained. The government later regulated such private guards by a decree in 1986. Universities ran (and run) their own security services, too, usually with close links to the Nigeria Police who would normally only enter university premises by invitation from the university authorities; hisba activists, in the early days of shari‘a, tended to ignore such protocol.Footnote ⁴² University security men on night-time patrol might be armed with bows but, faced with a serious disturbance or a mob that broke in from outside, could do little to stop it – perimeter fences were inadequate, too: so Nigeria Police would have to be called in as soon as possible. Occasionally a group of soldiers, with guns and live ammunition, might be used to launch a night attack against an important house, in which case the householder would defend himself and his family with the weapons they had (usually revolvers); if it was a small settlement under attack, it was up to the vigilante bowmen to scare off the soldiers – in some instances with success, as a silent, possibly poisoned arrow from an unseen source proved too unexpected and frightening even for a soldier off-duty.⁴³

In short, physical security in Kano (as elsewhere) is provided by a variety of agencies willing and permitted to use force. But the public's feeling of security in a spiritual, Islamic sense, at the level of community and people's behaviour out on the street, remains more problematic. It is here that public anxiety has driven politicians into searching for possible solutions; both the initial impetus and the continuing pressure come from below, however, not from the top.

SOLUTIONS?

Physical insecurity and a ‘mixed-up world’ are themselves signs for many Muslims of a world coming close to the end of time. Attempts to manage this disorder may alleviate anxieties but not necessarily cure them. It is as one such attempt that I have suggested we should understand both the reintroduction of full shari‘a law and now the deployment of an enlarged hisba corps with a more intrusive remit. It is, I would add, an attempt to re-establish as proper a dar al-Islam as is possible. Living in dar al-Islam is still for many conservative Muslims in northern Nigeria a legal requirement of Islam, with ultimately serious consequences for those who deliberately fail to do so. But there is in Muslim political thinking a further dimension to this requirement: putting things right in the jama‘a will lead Allah to aid the jama‘a significantly, albeit in His own time. Calling the jama‘a to order is thus a serious political act ensuring, for some time in the future, that radical changes will be brought about for the good of the jama‘a. An instance of an intervention by Allah was the final removal of the Christian colonial rulers in 1960; some might cite the even more recent removal of both Abacha and Abiola in 1998. Allah responds to a community that is showing it is truly determined to follow His way. Manifest piety, then, is not just a personal stance but also a conscious political act. Piety can be collective too.

The problem for politicians, at work in the wider Nigerian arena and making a good living within the constraints of nationwide political parties, is how to build a ‘local’ dar al-Islam for their insistent constituents within a secular, oil-rich Nigeria. For politicians and people, despite the rhetorics they use, relate to two different planes, planes that in recent years are drifting apart rather than converging. I suggest that many, perhaps most Muslim northern Nigerians increasingly have a ‘dual citzenship’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The first is their citizenship as loyal Nigerians, one necessary for all practical matters in modern Nigeria; the second is a more notional citizenship within the worldwide Muslim umma. Though technically the latter citzenship has been theirs for several centuries, what is new is ordinary people's acute awareness of that umma. Three factors have been at work: the first is simply the greater volume of news about the Middle East, both via various media such as radio and television (which are available as never before) and through the pilgrimage (thanks to mass travel by air); the second is the arrival of Muslim visitors – Sudanese or Pakistanis, for example – come to work as teachers. A third factor is said, by Nigerians, to be flows of cash from Iran, the Gulf states and elsewhere. A sign of this wider awareness is the adoption by some radicals of Shi‘ism as a political stance, or the use of the label ‘Taliban’ by radical ex-students; pictures of Osama bin Laden adorn the back windows of buses, and boys are now named Osama as once they bore the name ‘Yasir’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Iran and Iraq (along with Palestinians) are foci for this surrogate nationalism, with the USA as the foe along with its client Israel. Though the policy of ties eastwards is not new (remember the row over Nigeria's membership of the OIC),Footnote ⁴⁶ the intensity of feeling over them is indeed new. Then, the impetus for an eastwards policy came overtly from the elite; this time it comes from the grassroots. It is important to recall that the political and religious elite were initially opposed to the reintroduction of the full shari‘a, if only because it seemed to them both unconstitutional and unworkable. Even al-Zakzaki, as leader of the extreme Muslim Brothers, initially opposed it on the grounds that the shari‘a could not be implemented properly until there was a truly Islamic state in which it could be applied.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Yeriman Bakura, Ahmad Sani, adopted shari‘a as a vote-winning tactic in Zamfara State in a gubernatorial campaign which he seemed otherwise likely to lose – and the tactic worked. Other governors were then forced to follow suit by sometimes violent public pressure. Although the introduction of shari‘a law is probably against (the spirit of) the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, the Supreme Court has never been required to pass judgment upon it: it is a political, not a juridical issue. There would be populist pandemonium were the court now to declare shari‘a null and void under the constitution; not even the colonising Christian British did that.

Another consequence of the new knowledge of the Middle East is the campaign to strip the practice of Islam in Hausaland of its Hausa cultural accretions and modifications. The move for reform seeks to make even the minutiae of Muslim practice in northern Nigeria the same as those in the (classical) Middle East; it is reaffirming full membership in the umma (there are similar campaigns in Indonesia and Malaysia today, too).Footnote ⁴⁸ The reassertion of even a notional Islamic citizenship, however, weakens one's identification with other Nigerians, especially if those other Nigerians, by their very identity as non-Muslims, call into question the validity of Muslims' claim to be living in a dar al-Islam. At best, in this view, Muslim northerners are thus on dar al-Islam's frontier, with fellow Nigerians on the other side of that frontier; the frontier is not ‘closed’, but it exists nonetheless.

In this discourse, then, shari‘a and hisba are proof to the wider umma that ‘we Muslimsrsquo; in northern Nigeria are serious members of the umma; that ‘we’ are not to be pigeon-holed by foreigners simply as ‘Nigerians’ and associated with doubtful dealings. It proves, too, that ‘we’ are not aligned with the USA against ‘our’ Muslim brothers and sisters in Iraq, Iran or indeed Afghanistan. But while I argue that we should interpret hisba and the shari‘a as aspects of this reaffirmation of a Muslim citizenship, I would argue also that it is not about cancelling Nigerian citizenship; it is just an attempt to develop and articulate a second nationality. As such, I am confident that a modus vivendi that allows for this ‘dual citizenship’ will be reached. It is not, of course, a problem unique to Nigeria: the large Muslim communities in the various countries of Europe (not to mention those, say, in India or China) are all similarly struggling with this ‘dual citizenship’ – so no doubt solutions to this dilemma will differ. My point here has been to bring to the fore the deeply religious, often millenarian dimension in northern Nigeria that is so easy to overlook or to greet with embarrassed silence.