When collectively brainstorming a theme for this special issue, the following ethnographic moments proved influential:
1. During the 2014 hajj season, a video of a group of Yoruba pilgrims singing and dancing to music went viral in Nigeria. One of us (Sara), then in Ibadan, first learned of the video from a Hausa money changer, Umaru. He had received the video from a business associate from Borno State who clearly ‘wanted to make [him] laugh’ by showing what ‘your’ people are doing in Saudi Arabia. A bit of friendly teasing, since although Umaru was Hausa, he was born in Ibadan, a predominately Yoruba city. Yet Umaru did not share his associate’s interpretation that the video confirmed the established stereotype that Yoruba Muslims are less devout and learned compared with Muslims from northern Nigeria. Rather, he argued that the difference was ‘culture’, not religion. Umaru understood such stereotypes as rooted in the past when there were ‘few [Yoruba Muslims] that go deep into Islam’, but he countered that, since the 1960s, ‘Yoruba people know Qur’an; now they go deep’.Footnote 1
Yoruba Muslims in Ibadan provided different perspectives. Professor Dawud Noibi, then executive secretary of the Muslim Ummah of South West Nigeria (MUSWN), admitted that he had seen such behaviour since his first hajj in 1968.Footnote 2 Unlike Umaru, he saw the video as evidence that much educational work was needed for Nigerian pilgrims. Similarly, a Yoruba Muslim who had undertaken the hajj that year found the video appalling, especially since they were still in ihram cloth; he went on to denounce other ‘cultural’ practices, such as wearing a sabaka cap.Footnote 3 Another Yoruba Muslim, yet to make the hajj himself, accused the Oyo State Pilgrims Welfare Board of not adequately screening out pilgrims who disgrace the reputations of Oyo State, Yoruba Muslims and the nation (even if he, like others, laughed at the video).Footnote 4 When Sara mentioned this video while in northern Nigeria the following August, most Muslims remembered it, revealing social media’s ability to transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries.
2. In the car of a University of Ibadan professor in 2015, one of us (Sara) witnessed a brief incident of religious tension.Footnote 5 The professor, whose attire that day visibly identified him as Muslim, offered a lift to a young woman waiting for an okada (motorcycle taxi). She gratefully accepted, but soon began to proselytize her Christian faith to the professor, much to his chagrin. She became quiet only after repeated attempts by the professor to make clear he found her efforts to convert him offensive.
3. In 2022, a video went viral of a Yoruba Muslim commenting on a twenty-one-storey building that collapsed in Lagos, killing many people. He mentioned: ‘I would have been a victim if not because of my faith.’ He accused the building owner, a Yoruba Pentecostal Christian, of refusing to employ him as a site engineer because he was Muslim. This ignited a national debate questioning the degree of religious tolerance in not just the south-west, but in the entire country. While the Lagos-based Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) took up the issue of religious discrimination, the debate scaled up, with both Christians and Muslims from across the country discussing how followers of different religions are treated professionally in their respective regions.
4. For the first time in the forty-four-year history of beauty pageants in Nigeria, a girl in a hijab was crowned 2021 Miss Nigeria. Through coordinated sermons, clerics condemned the Hausa girl, Shatu Garko of Kano, for her participation. To the surprise of many, MURIC backed the northern clerics. MURIC director Professor Ishaq Akintola, citing two Qur’anic verses (Chapter 24, Verse 31 and Chapter 33, Verse 59), claimed that participation in beauty pageants contradicted Islam. According to him:
These two verses emphatically insist that women should cover themselves and dress up decently and neither should display their body for the public. Being present in a beauty pageant even if she was in a hijab, she had done the catwalked [sic] with thousands of men eating her up with their eyes. It is not acceptable. (Oyero Reference Oyero2021)
Since its emergence, while based in Lagos, MURIC has often shared the same views with clerics from northern Nigeria and comments on religious issues across the country.
5. One of us (Musa) grew up in northern Nigeria, yet some of his extended family married Yoruba Muslims. Some of these spouses have since invited their relatives (from the south-west) to join them and have easily integrated into his extended family, despite ethnic differences. These Yoruba relatives by marriage have maintained good ties with their maternal families. They regularly travel to the south-west, sometimes in the company of their northern family by marriage, to attend rituals including burials of Christian family members.
In recent years, Musa has invited friends and colleagues from southern Nigeria to visit him in Kano. None had ever been north of the Niger River. All expressed surprise at how different their experiences of northern Nigeria were compared with what they had gleaned from second-hand information mediated via the news, entertainment, sermons, rumours, etc. Musa’s guests noted that their visit to northern Nigeria had changed their views, and they held more hope for a united Nigeria, ideas they brought back with them when they returned home. Musa shares their sentiments because he had a similar experience the first time he travelled to southern Nigeria. Yet despite how normal this shift in perception appears to be, Musa has rarely seen such stories narrated.
We start with these vignettes because they illustrate the extent of religious change and complexity within Muslim Nigeria, particularly since the nation’s independence in 1960. This vibrant religious landscape is no doubt grounded in Nigeria’s unique position as the only former British colony in Africa to have relatively even Muslim and Christian populations at independence. Migration, business collaboration and competition for state resources at the national level have increasingly brought together Muslims and Christians – and different groups of Muslims – during the postcolonial period, resulting in new alliances, religious practices and cultural production. It is these developments that this special issue intends to begin to account for, historize and ‘map’, figuratively speaking. Each example brushes against established narratives around Islam in Nigeria, which, while true earlier in Nigeria’s history, no longer accurately describe the daily life of Muslims today.
For a long time, studies of Islam and Muslim cultures in Nigeria have tended to focus on a region, ethnicity or similarly bounded group. Often, Islam in northern and in south-western Nigeria are treated as isolated from each other. Worse, historically there has been an inclination to focus more on the ‘Muslim north’ as opposed to the ‘Christian south’, an inaccurate divide that occasionally still crops up within Nigerian studies more broadly. Of course, such studies have made important contributions to the field, providing detailed research on Islam within specific ethnic or geographic contexts. The danger, though, is that such studies sometimes reify ethnic categories as fixed, or regional boundaries as non-porous. Yet, as the vignette about Musa’s family and friends demonstrates, the meaning or boundaries of any given ethnicity keep changing, and, especially in postcolonial Nigeria, different regions are connected politically, economically and socially.
One key change in postcolonial Nigeria is demographic.Footnote 6 Between 1960, the year of independence, and 1967, the outbreak of civil war (Biafra), migrant workers and traders moved freely and lived side by side irrespective of their ethnic and religious identities in most parts of the country. For instance, even though under colonialism Muslims in Kano were segregated from the Nasarawa (European) township and Sabon Gari (New Town),Footnote 7 where migrants from southern Nigeria lived, after 1960 Nigerians of different ethnic and religious backgrounds became neighbours as Kano’s population mushroomed. Besides dislocations wrought by the war, interreligious and ethnic tensions and violence throughout the 1980s and 1990s, followed by anxieties and conflict following the re-implementation of sharia in twelve northern states from 1999 through to the early 2000s, witnessed mass relocations, in which Nigerians became increasingly self-segregated by religion (Musa Ibrahim, this issue).
Yet despite these religious and ethnic conflicts, as indicated by the opening vignettes, since independence Nigerians have increasingly encountered those beyond their own religious or ethnic identity. Governmental efforts have encouraged Nigerians to travel outside their ethno-linguistic home region,Footnote 8 and the federal capital moved in 1991 from Lagos to the central location of Abuja. Intranational trade routes, politics, national news (print, radio and television), higher education and the creative arts have all generated cross-regional and interethnic interactions. In terms of religion, the years following the civil war (1967–70) witnessed the founding of two major national organizations: the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) in 1973 and the Christian Association of Nigeria in 1976. Other religious organizations with more niche interests, such as the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN), have also established branches across Nigeria and hold national meetings (Balogun Reference Balogun2019; this issue). The recent explosive growth in internet access in Nigeria, from the proliferation of internet cafés to smartphones, has brought religious debates even to remote, religiously homogeneous towns. And as the opening vignettes demonstrate, debates concerning religious practice and daily life – whether a beauty pageant or employment discrimination – easily reach a national scale among Nigerian internet users.
Given how radically the social landscape of Nigeria has changed since independence, it is understandable that some recent scholarship has sought to expand our understanding of Islam and Muslim cultures in Nigeria. This includes research on connections between Muslims in the south-west and northern Nigeria, relations between Christians and Muslims throughout the nation, and the growth of minority groups and their position within the more mainstream Muslim population. At stake here is that some earlier ‘maps’, such as the one that keeps Yoruba and northern Muslims apart, risk eliding developments that defy such characterizations, and thereby affirm ethnic stereotypes. If one considers the religious and ethnic diversities within each of the regions in Nigeria, the urgency to understand Islam and Muslim cultures beyond such normative scales and boundaries is apparent.
By remapping, this special issue builds on the existing literature of Islam and Muslim cultures in Nigeria to understand shifting terrains, patterns and encounters in Muslim lives and cultures. The articles address questions of scale regarding region, ethnicity and bounded groups to expand the study of Islam in Nigeria. The contributors investigate divergent phenomena that cut across north–south, Christian–Muslim and majority–minority Islamic groups in order to affirm the productivity of these approaches to the study of Islam in postcolonial Nigeria and to suggest new directions for research. As some of the articles highlight, ‘remapping’ also involves ‘reconfiguring’ by showing how Muslims and their evolving cultures are eluding some of the typical categorizations we have often assigned to them. Terms such as ‘Sunni’, ‘Shia’, ‘Salafi’ and ‘Sufi’ are becoming slippery as analytical categories and demand careful historization. Since independence in 1960, Nigerian Muslims have become increasingly connected to the broader Muslim world – as readers, pilgrims, scholars and students – and this cosmopolitanism has fostered the expansion of religious practice and ideologies, and even the development of what might be termed an intellectually ‘eclectic’ style of scholarship (Thurston, this issue).
Muslim connections: north–south
The first ‘map’ this special issue confronts is the one that depicts the two main regional Muslim communities (northernFootnote 9 and south-western) as though they, like oil and water, do not mix. In the discipline of history, this is likely in part due to the regional division of the Nigerian National Archives, which has branches in Ibadan, Kaduna and Enugu. While no doubt most scholars working on Muslims in either region are aware of these interethnic and regional links, a casual reader of Nigerian Islamic studies could easily come away with the impression that distance – physical and cultural – divides northern Nigerian Muslims from their Yoruba co-religionists in the south-west (with Ilorin as an important exception).Footnote 10 This inadvertently risks giving more weight to certain ethnic stereotypes – primarily that northern Muslims look down on Yoruba Muslims for being superficial Muslims, and Yoruba Muslims look down on northern Muslims for being conservative to the point of being backward at best or violent at worst. Although one can easily find these stereotypes at play, whether in the archives or in the speech of contemporary Nigerians, this has not prevented meaningful collaboration and bonds between these two broad constituents, a fact that we feel deserves greater scholarly attention.
While a comprehensive study of the interplay between Yoruba Muslims and their northern co-religionists has yet to be written, recent scholarship has begun to untangle this history. Olaniyi’s work on Yoruba migration and settlement in the north, from the precolonial period to the present, reveals a range of potential avenues for research, such as the spread of Yoruba Muslim organizations (Ansar-ud-Deen, Nawairudeen, etc.) in northern Nigeria and intermarriage among Yoruba and Hausa Muslims in northern cities (Olaniyi Reference Olaniyi, Toyin and Salm2004; Reference Olaniyi2006). Ostien (Reference Ostien, Mustapha and Ehrhardt2018: 50, 74–5) likewise notes that while such Yoruba Muslim organizations had once been targets of scorn, northerners now generally tolerate them thanks to their efforts in promoting Islamic education and hajj reform.
Even when Muslims from different regions do not migrate, material objects intrinsic to their religious practice do. Tracing veiling styles in northern and southern Nigeria, Renne (Reference Renne2013: 55–81) uncovers several intriguing parallels and intersections. In each region she finds that tensions with local Christian communities motivate Muslim women to visually demarcate and affirm their religious identity (ibid.: 68–9). But perhaps most interesting is the circulation of styles between the two regions. For example, Yoruba traders translated the Hausa mayafi (stole) covering to gele (head tie) in Yoruba. Then, ‘eventually, the diaphanous stole-like head covering that they brought from Ibadan to sell [in the north during the 1940s] came to be known as gyale’ (ibid.: 60). Renne also finds mutual awareness between Muslim women in the two regions, such as how some Yoruba women feel anxiety over whether adopting the hijab – as opposed to the iborun and gele styles of veiling – would link them with Hausa culture and gender norms (ibid.: 70). And yet, despite these concerns, hijab fabrics and styles continue their circulation between the regions (ibid.: 72). Balogun (this issue) finds that migrating veiling styles can also bring with them anxiety and ethnic stereotypes, such as that Yoruba Muslims worry that adopting the hijab might link them to the ‘religious extremism’ of northern Nigeria.
The formation of national Islamic organizations in postcolonial Nigeria provides another opportunity for scholarly exploration of interethnic Muslim collaboration. Perhaps most significant in terms of institutional influence is the history of the NSCIA. The genesis for the NSCIA was a meeting in the early 1970s between Dr Abdul-Lateef Adegbite, a prominent Yoruba Muslim from the south-west (Balogun, this issue), and Sir Siddiq Abubakar III, then the Sultan of Sokoto. At the meeting, Adegbite advocated establishing a truly national organization that could speak for all Nigerian Muslims, rejecting the sultan’s suggestion that Yoruba Muslims simply join the existing, entirely northern, Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI). Despite Adegbite’s central role in its creation, at its founding in 1973 all top positions went to northerners (with Adegbite merely the legal adviser) (Rufai Reference Rufai2011: 285–6; Shittu Reference Shittu2011; Peel Reference Peel2016: 159). However, since then southerners have gained much more influence, with the second deputy president-general always being a southerner, even if the top two spots belong to northerners (automatically the Sultan of Sokoto and Shehu of Borno) (Shittu Reference Shittu2011). Regardless, Adegbite recently lamented that, even fifty years since independence, ‘we are still talking today of northern and southern Muslims’ (ibid.).
Yet if perfect unity and equality among Nigerian Muslims has remained elusive, research on the Federation of Muslim Women Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN) suggests that women are leading the way towards this goal (Kurfi Reference Kurfi2018; Sarumi et al. Reference Sarumi, Faluyi and Okeke-Uzodike2019). Not only was their founding in the Middle Belt a strategic signal that the organization would not be dominated by any ethnicity or region, but the annual national meeting and presidency are rotated between a northern and a south-western location and member (Kurfi Reference Kurfi2018: 59, 113–16).
Building on these approaches, a couple of the articles in this special issue consider links, historical and current, between Muslims in the north and in the south-west. Adeyemi Balogun turns to the development of the MSSN, a group founded in the south-west that soon gained traction in northern Nigeria through northerners who had been educated in the south-west. Similar to FOMWAN, the MSSN decides policies and agendas at their national headquarters, labour that requires interethnic collaboration. Yet Balogun’s article also grapples with the limits to this, which are discussed in the next section of this introduction. Sara Katz, meanwhile, finds collaboration between northern and south-western Muslim elites and politicians through the nationalization of the hajj in the 1950s–60s; in the 1970s, she argues that Muslims in both regions were impacted by media-perpetuated stereotypes of ‘corrupt’ pilgrims. Both Balogun and Katz point to the growing tendency within postcolonial Nigeria for Muslims of different locations and ethnicities to be in dialogue, even if divides and ethnic stereotypes remain.
Muslim–Christian encounters
The second ‘map’ this special issue seeks to challenge is one that presents tolerance and mutual appreciation between Yoruba Muslims and Christians as existing in direct opposition to Muslim–Christian violence, rooted in ‘a jihadist tradition’, in northern Nigeria (Peel Reference Peel2016: 2). This is not to suggest that this current map is inaccurate so much as incomplete. Particularly in the last decade, scholars working within both regions have begun to draw attention to histories and dynamics that push against these narratives of tolerance or violence, which this special issue affirms as a necessary move to understand the full complexity of religious practice in Nigeria.
Given that the predominately Yoruba south-west has long contained relatively even Muslim and Christian populations, this region has dominated the study of Muslim–Christian encounters in Nigeria, which has largely been described as averse to conflict (Laitin Reference Laitin1986; Peel Reference Peel2016). One common topic in this literature is how different Muslim associations in the south-west bear the influence of Christianity in their approach to education and religious reform (Janson Reference Janson2021; Ibrahim Reference Ibrahim2017; Adetona Reference Adetona2012; Soares Reference Soares, Ellis and Van Kessel2008; Reichmuth Reference Reichmuth1996). Other scholars have focused on Muslim–Christian relations at the personal level, finding that relations between Yoruba Muslims and Christians go beyond tolerance in that they admire, intermarry, borrow and befriend each other (Nolte Reference Nolte2020; Jones and Nolte Reference Jones, Nolte, Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017; Nolte and Akinjobi-Babatunde Reference Nolte, Akinjobi-Babatunde, Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017). The fact that Islam in the south-west has long interacted not only with Christianity but also with Oriṣa worship has given way to scholarship that places all three in conversation (Peel Reference Peel2016), and at times has fostered novel religious movements, such as Chrislam (Janson Reference Janson2021; Reference Janson and Meyer2016; Reference Janson and Uchendu2012; Janson and Meyer Reference Janson and Meyer2016; Nolte et al. Reference Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017; Williams Reference Williams2019; Reference Williams2015).
Yet, as the opening vignette of vehicular proselytization suggests, much of this recent scholarship acknowledges the limits to religious harmony in the south-west. For example, Abubakre finds that, somewhat contrary to Laitin (Reference Laitin1986), it is not uncommon for Yoruba Muslims to politicize religion, causing much ‘apprehension’ among Christians (Abubakre Reference Abubakre and Olupona1992). Nolte and Ogen (Reference Nolte, Ogen, Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017), meanwhile, note that several chapters in their edited volume (Nolte et al. Reference Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017) reveal the production of religious boundaries and low-level conflict, promoting their call for ‘more detailed research on Muslim–Christian relations in relation to the areas of competition’, especially education, ‘public presence’ and conversions (ibid.: 263). Janson has likewise recently warned that, given reformist trends in the south-west, ‘we should be careful not to idealize Yorubas’ religious tolerance’ (Reference Janson2021: 24; Balogun Reference Balogun, Nolte, Ogen and Jones2017).
Building on this, this special issue finds that competition for government resources, at the federal and local level, has the capacity to generate not just conflict and tension, but also national grass-roots organization, political mobilization and expanded bureaucracy. Adeyemi Balogun examines the history of the MSSN, an organization founded in the 1950s in response to decades of Muslim exclusion and anti-Islamic harassment in missionary schools throughout the south-west. On a similar timeline, Sara Katz examines how the Western Region Pilgrims Welfare Board, founded in 1958, was the culmination of political mobilization by Yoruba Muslims to equal their Christian peers in terms of global connections financed by government resources. Yet each article also finds that local Christian views and interests constrain what is possible.
Meanwhile, scholars of Muslim–Christian encounters in northern Nigeria tend to adopt a crisis model that depicts both religions in the region as increasingly extremist. Some of these studies trace contemporary Muslim–Christian conflicts in northern Nigeria to the 1979 controversy over sharia at the federal level (Laitin Reference Laitin1982; Opeloye Reference Opeloye1998; Suberu Reference Suberu2009; Taiye Reference Taiye2013). Meanwhile, Ibrahim (Reference Ibrahim1989), Omotosho (Reference Omotosho2003) and Opeloye (Reference Opeloye1998) have argued that the major religious crisis that has continued to impact Muslim–Christian relations in the north is the 1987 Kafanchan riot,Footnote 11 the memories of which made ethno-religious disturbances widespread in northern Nigeria during the 1990s (Mukhtar Reference Mukhtar1992; Falola Reference Falola1998). The reintroduction of sharia in twelve northern states from 1999 further split Muslims and Christians and amplified divisive language peddled by elite politicians and religious leaders.
While one cannot ignore these instances of tension and violence, several scholars have productively examined the non-violent connections between Muslims and practitioners of other religions in northern Nigeria, finding similarities with the south-west in terms of mutual curiosity and admiration between Muslims and Christians (Anthony Reference Anthony2000; Last Reference Last2007; Shankar Reference Shankar2014; Larkin and Meyer Reference Larkin, Meyer and Akyeampong2006; Mustapha and Ehrhardt Reference Mustapha and Ehrhardt2018). Kate Meagher has found that competition within the same occupation often gives rise to collaboration, rather than conflict (Meagher Reference Meagher, Mustapha and Ehrhardt2018: 195). For example, Hausa and Igbo tyre dealers in Kano engage in cooperative practices such as ‘extension of credit, training and other forms of business assistance across religious lines, as well as emulation’, including Igbo dealers using sharia courts (ibid.: 198–9). Such research highlights that alongside religious tensions, interfaith marriage, conversions, mutual influence and curiosity have all informed Muslim–Christian encounters in northern Nigeria since the colonial period. Finally, Judith Byfield’s research on women’s activism in Abeokuta notes that Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, after a successful tax revolt in 1948, received letters from women throughout Nigeria seeking political advice, including northern Muslims (Byfield Reference Byfield2021: 215); one of these women, Hajiya Gambo Sawaba, would later be an apprentice to Ransome-Kuti (Tukur Reference Tukur2022). Thus, communication technologies have long allowed northern Muslims to productively engage with Christians outside and within the region.
One development that this special issue explores is the tendency of Muslim groups who have felt vulnerable since the implementation of sharia to creatively borrow and remake Christian symbols and practices. Thus, similar to what scholars have found in the south-west, some of the articles find that, particularly in moments of political duress, Islam in northern Nigeria can allow for ‘new religious formations, fusing diverse religious elements without unifying them, [to] emerge and transform’ (Janson Reference Janson2021: 186). Yet, unlike the borrowing and fluidity that are observed in the south-west, which typically occur due to the close proximity in which Muslims and Christians live (often within the same household), such borrowing in northern Nigeria is often a politically strategic move.Footnote 12 For example, Murtala Ibrahim finds that tensions between Sufis and the Salafi Izala group in Jos have led Sufis to combine Christmas lights and wreaths with images of Shaykh Ibrahim Nyass in their mawlid (celebration of the birth of Muhammad) as a public critique of Izala. Thus, Ibrahim complicates the dominant narrative of Jos as a city with protracted conflict between Christians and Muslims. Similarly, Musa Ibrahim finds that Shia Muslims have increased their outreach to Christians in some northern states such as Kano and Kaduna, where Shaykh el-Zakzaky’s Islamic Movement in Nigeria has been banned. Together, they have created hybrid rituals such as Jesus’s and Virgin Mary’s mawlid (birthday celebration), attended by the adherents of both religions. Finally, Carmen McCain finds similarities between the way in which a Kano-based Muslim filmmaker responds to censorship following sharia implementation and how a Jos-based Christian musician responds to religious extremism, thus revealing ‘shared communal sensibilities’ between Hausa Muslim and Christians creative artists.
Minority–majority relations within Islam
A third key approach taken in this special issue to reconfigure the study of Islam and Muslim cultures in Nigeria is that we ‘map’ the place of minority Muslim groups within the broader Islamic community in northern Nigeria. It is generally agreed in the literature on religion in Nigeria that the meteoric rise of Pentecostalism in the 1970s–90s was the ‘impetus’ for the development of Islamic reform movements beginning in the late 1970s (Obadare Reference Obadare2018: 26; Janson Reference Janson2021; Vaughan Reference Vaughan2016), although certainly the growth in the numbers of Muslim students studying abroad in the Middle East, starting in the mid-1950s, and the broader increased connectivity with global Muslim cultures also contributed to this trend (Thurston Reference Thurston2014; Larkin Reference Larkin2002). While Pentecostalism has largely taken hold throughout southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt, as articles in this special issue address, the increased religious pluralism in its wake has transcended these geographic boundaries since Muslims in northern Nigeria have become more factionalized since 1980. Studying minority groups within this divided milieu highlights the dynamism and fluidity of the Islamic landscape of northern Nigeria, aspects that get elided in descriptions that paint the region as conservative and religiously homogeneous.
New media has provided novel terrain for Nigerian Muslims to connect and exchange religious knowledge and materials, and has made a broad audience accessible to minority groups. In this issue, Kabiru Isa finds that, for marginalized groups such as ‘Yan haƙiƙa, music – easily digitally recorded, downloaded and shared – allows members to reach an ecstatic state in private prayer, not insignificant for such a maligned group. Furthermore, the ability of some ‘Yan haƙiƙa songs to go viral has extended the group’s song lyrics and sounds far beyond its limited membership. However, as will be discussed, as in the opening vignette of the viral video of Yoruba pilgrims dancing, the capacity of social media to fuel Nigerians’ awareness of religious pluralism carries the risk of backlash and critique.
Another element of dynamism revealed by a focus on Islamic minorities is their ability to divide the Sunni majority. In this issue, Musa Ibrahim finds that Sufis – previously united in the face of the anti-Sufi reform movement Izala – diverged over how to respond to Shia Islam. While they disagreed with Shia Muslims intellectually, not all supported attacks against them by Salafi activists since the adoption of sharia. Thus, Ibrahim’s article reveals that intolerance is not the only response to Islamic diversity in northern Nigeria, which has given rise to factions among mainline Sunnis.
The study of Muslim minorities in northern Nigeria is relevant to the goal of remapping the study of Islam and Muslim cultures in postcolonial Nigeria since this topic remains marginal in the extant literature. While Islam and Muslims in the Yoruba south-west are, rightly, recognized as being tolerant of minority groups, Muslims in northern Nigeria are often depicted as predominantly conservative and given to violence (Peel Reference Peel2016: 2, 170). We do not wish to minimize past sectarian conflicts; rather, we would echo Philip Ostien’s analysis that an increasing number of northern Muslims ‘identify as “just a Muslim”[,] suggest[ing] that … the increasing pluralism of the religious environment is giving rise to increasing toleration’ (Ostien Reference Ostien, Mustapha and Ehrhardt2018: 76). One outcome of this perception of northern Nigeria as largely intolerant is that studies on religious pluralism and minority voices tend to focus on the Yoruba south-west. In other words, outside conflict studies, scholarship on Muslim minorities and religious pluralism in the north remains uncommon since independence, despite the increase in different Islamic groups and movements in the region. Among the few exceptions are Isa and Adam’s (Reference Isa and Adam2017) history of Shia Islam and its splinter group in Kano, and Hayatu et al.’s (Reference Hayatu, Othman and Shariffuddin2017) article on the evolutionary dynamics of the Islamic movement as a major Shia group in Nigeria. Larkin (Reference Larkin2002), meanwhile, focuses on Bandiri musicians (members of the formerly dominant but now minority Sunni Qadiriyya sect) in his analysis of religion, globalization, and urban experiences in Kano.
Thus, the articles in this special issue find space to fit – or perhaps remap – Muslim minority groups into the broader Islamic landscape of northern Nigeria, in contrast to much of the existing literature. Typically, when minority Muslim groups in northern Nigeria – such as Shia, the Ahmadiyya, ‘Yan haƙiƙa and neo-Kharijite groups – have been the object of attention in recent literature, the focus has been on tensions between them and the mainstream Sunni Muslims. For example, Ibrahim (Reference Ibrahim and Balkenhol2020) examines how Shia religious processions led to physical violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims over the control of public spaces in northern Nigeria, while Kabiru Isa (Reference Isa2018) highlights similar tensions between the two groups through polemical exchanges expressed in written rejoinders and oral poems and songs. Other scholars have presented minority Muslim groups as threats to the stability of the Nigerian state. Doukhan (Reference Doukhan2016) views the Shia minority, like Biafra separatists and Boko Haram insurgents, as instigating war in Nigeria. Anjide and Okoli (Reference Anjide and Okoli2017) agree that Shia Muslims are an extremist religious movement that constitutes a threat to the country.
Of course, there is good reason for this academic focus on conflict relating to Muslim minority groups. After the recent adoption of sharia by some northern states, not only did Christians protest, but Muslim minorities also feared that they could be persecuted as heretics. In this regard, the activities of the hisbah (sharia enforcers) have targeted minority Muslim groups such as Yan bori and Yan daudu (Casey Reference Casey2008; Gaudio Reference Gaudio2009); in a sense, they have created new marginal Muslim groups, such as the Kannywood filmmakers described by Carmen McCain (Reference McCain, Biltereyst, Vande and Winkel2013; this issue). Likewise, Kabiru Isa’s article acknowledges that ‘Yan haƙiƙa’s growing public presence has come at a cost: social media has allowed members to build their community, but it has also strengthened the ability of the state and the courts to police the group, with leaked WhatsApp voice notes that may result in death sentences. And yet, despite the expanding technological surveillance of ‘Yan haƙiƙa, Isa finds that political and commercial elites still seek out their expertise – albeit in secret – in ways that are similar to what Soares (Reference Soares2005) described as the local prayer economy. Thus, while several articles in this issue affirm such tensions between minority Muslim groups and the Sunni majority, they also find cooperation between various minority religious and marginalized social groups, as well as tacit support from some Sunni elites. They thus reveal minority groups’ creative approaches not just to remain but also to grow and carve out space for themselves within the wider Islamic geography of northern Nigeria.
Perhaps one reason why the strategies of minority religious movements have succeeded in gaining broader purchase is that there is no watertight boundary between who is the majority and who the minority. Rather, many northern Muslims find themselves simultaneously in one majority and in another minority: Salafis are part of the Sunni majority, yet they are a minority within it; the Qadris are within two majorities (Sunni and Sufi) yet are a minority among Sufis, a group dominated by the Tijaniyya; ‘Yan haƙiƙa is a minority splinter group from the Tijaniyya majority, and so forth. Making minority–majority distinctions becomes even trickier when thinking across scales; as Musa Ibrahim’s article discusses, while Shia Muslims remain a minority within the nation and northern Nigeria, they are becoming the dominant group within some neighbourhoods around the residence of the Shia leader in Zaria.
Nor do northern Muslim intellectuals necessarily limit themselves to scholarship and ideas from one group or even one geographical location. In this regard, Alexander Thurston (this issue) examines two northern Sunni Muslim figures who studied in the Sudan but have found themselves at odds with the Sunni majority because of their self-consciously eclectic intellectual style, a style that transcends the familiar categories of Sufis and Salafis. Thus, this special issue suggests that even Muslims within the Sunni mainstream can, perhaps, find themselves in need of some of the same strategies that minority Muslims rely on.
Conclusion
In sum, the contributors in this special issue trace some historical and socio-political developments since 1960 to challenge and expand on the predominant boundaries present in scholarship on Islam and Muslims in Nigeria. They do this by investigating cross-cutting connections between Muslims and Christians, between Muslims in the north and south, and between dominant and minority Muslim groups in northern Nigeria. In doing so, the contributors engage with both theoretical and empirical cases that remap and reconfigure Nigeria as a complex religious space in which Muslim and Christian groups have the capacity to generate political, social and economic debates on a range of scales. This special issue encourages future scholarship that will allow data and research to set the geographic boundaries of its inquiry.
It is our contention that such methods and approaches to research on Islam and Muslim communities in Nigeria are particularly needed in scholarship on the postcolonial period. While Nigeria may be a divided nation, since independence its citizens have become increasingly aware of the people, cultures and problems that exist beyond their personal experience. Although this awareness is often mediated (newspapers, radio, television, sermons, etc.), it nonetheless has an impact on how Nigerians understand and situate their own lives within the nation and informs their political views and religious practices.
We hope that this special issue will encourage new avenues of research. One aspect that deserves attention that we could not include here is the study of Islam in south-eastern and southern Nigeria (Anthony Reference Anthony2000; Uchendu Reference Uchendu2011; Afikpo et al. Reference Afikpo, Owoyemi and Yusoff2016; Priest Reference Priest2020). These regions host smaller yet growing Muslim populations that deserve to be understood both within their local settings and within the wider Nigerian context. More scholarship is also needed to understand the different scales and spaces of Muslim–Christian encounters. Nigerian Muslims form opinions about Christianity and Christians not only through personal interactions but also from depictions in film, news stories, politics, etc. – and these depictions include parts of the nation outside their direct experience. Finally, this special issue benefited from our two different regions of expertise (the south-west and northern Nigeria) during the process of conceptualizing the issue, editing and writing together. Thus, we call for more collaborative studies between scholars researching Islam in the south-west and northern Nigeria.
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend our appreciation to Benjamin Soares, Director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Florida, for his guidance and support throughout this project. We also are grateful to Murray Last, Amidu Sanni and Muhammad Sani Umar for reading and commenting on the draft papers presented at a workshop that was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Religion and International Affairs. We would also like to thank the University of Florida’s Center for African Studies and the Department of Religion for co-sponsoring the workshop. Many thanks also go to the Africa anonymous reviewers.
Musa Ibrahim is a research fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, and a junior research fellow at the African Research Institute for Religion, Ethics and Society at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was a postdoctoral fellow for the Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the University of Florida between 2019 and 2021. He received his PhD from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Her research examines the history of the Nigerian hajj in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Her interests include Muslim–Christian relations, visual culture and global Islam.
