Sharia, reform and insecurity

Islamic law had never disappeared from northern Nigeria. Under colonial rule Sharia courts continued to handle family and civil matters, but criminal law was replaced by a penal code. In October 1999 Zamfara announced the reintroduction of Sharia criminal law, in force from January 2000, and about a dozen other northern states followed. Supporters saw a return to justice and moral order after years of military misrule. Critics worried about the treatment of women, non-Muslims and the poor. Several harsh sentences, including stoning sentences for women convicted of adultery, were overturned on appeal and were not carried out.

Religious reform continued alongside. The Izala movement, described in the chapter on Islam, and the older Sufi brotherhoods compete in mosques and on radio, and debate whether practices such as spirit possession, saint cults or music are acceptable. Roman Loimeier and John Paden have studied how these arguments relate to politics and to local power.

Since 2009 the north-east has suffered from the insurgency of Boko Haram, a group based in Borno State and drawing largely on Kanuri-speaking followers, which has attacked schools, markets and mosques and spread its violence to cities including Kano. In the north-west, armed gangs, kidnapping and raids on villages in Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna have displaced many farmers, and conflicts over land between farmers and herders have claimed lives in the Middle Belt. Most victims are ordinary Muslim and Christian villagers. These crises have many causes, including poverty, weak policing, climate change and land pressure, and it would be wrong to blame any ethnic group as a whole.

• Education is a central issue. Many children, mainly boys, study the Quran in traditional schools (makarantar allo), and the relationship between these schools and formal education is debated. Girls’ enrolment is lower than boys’ in many areas.
• Reform is not only about law. It also concerns dress, entertainment, marriage and the role of women, as in the debates on film in the chapter on Arts.
• Voices differ. Scholars, mallams, journalists and women’s organisations in the North argue in public, in Hausa, about all of these questions.