Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria

Muslims Talking Politics

Muslims Talking Politics

Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria

Brandon Kendhammer

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Brandon Kendhammmer is assistant professor of political science and the acting director of African Studies at Ohio University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36898-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36903-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36917-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226369174.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kendhammer, Brandon, author.

Title: Muslims talking politics : framing Islam, democracy, and law in Northern Nigeria / Brandon Kendhammer.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041740| ISBN 9780226368986 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226369037 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226369174 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Nigeria, Northern—Religious aspects—Islam. | Islam and politics—Nigeria, Northern. | Islamic law—Nigeria, Northern. | Islamic renewal—Nigeria, Northern.

Classification: LCC DT515.8 .K46 2016 | DDC 320.9669—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041740

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Kim

And for all those who have perished in the fight against Boko Haram, may your countries once again know peace.

Contents

Preface

ONE / Sharia Implementation and Democratic Discourse in Northern Nigeria

TWO / What We Talk about When We Talk about Islam and Democracy

THREE / Envisioning Sharia, Imagining the Past

FOUR / Democracy, Federalism, and the Sharia Question

FIVE / Sharia in a Time of Transition

SIX / Framing Sharia and Democracy

SEVEN / Muslims Talking Politics

EIGHT / All Sharia Is Local: Islamic Law and Democracy in Practice

Appendix: Methodology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book is about how a group of Muslims in Nigeria talks and thinks about democracy in a time of religious revivalism. It is also about that revivalism itself and how, following Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999, popular demands for greater recognition of Islam and Islamic values in the public sphere came to center on the enactment of sharia (Islamic law) in criminal law. Its argument is threefold. First, in many Muslim-majority communities, the transition period that begins with the collapse of authoritarian rule also offers the opportunity for a broader reconsideration of the relationship between religion and state. Globally, one of the most important products of this process has been the emergence of a surprising number of popular movements for the preservation or expansion of Islamic law. Second, these demands are usually most successful when advanced not by Islamists bent on destroying the existing political order and establishing an Islamic state but by those who might reasonably be classed as moderates: members of non–religiously affiliated political parties and ordinary citizens who express strong, generalized support for democratic government over autocracy. And third, in northern Nigeria a large proportion of Muslim political elites and ordinary citizens alike see the revival of Islamic religious values and public morality not as contrary to but as complementary to democratic institutions and practices.

What does this reconciliation look like as a matter of political reasoning? For politicians and other elites, it seems to be largely a matter of expediency—after all, democracy and religious revivalism are often both quite popular in the wake of violent, corrupt dictatorship, and support for both might serve to rebuild citizens’ trust in a tainted political class. For ordinary citizens, however, the story is more complex. In their hands, democratic and religious discourses both serve as vehicles for making sense of their country’s most pressing problems—corruption, insecurity, failing social services, and stagnant growth in economic opportunity—as moral failings that require a morally interventionist state to solve them. In the wake of military rule’s collapse in the late 1990s, both sharia and democracy came to be seen by many ordinary Nigerian Muslims as tools that might be used to force politicians and other public figures to live up to their obligations to the communities they govern.

This third argument is also the most controversial. Indeed, given the hysterics that accompany nearly all discussion of sharia in the United States and Western Europe, suggesting that the story might be a bit more complicated than all advocates of sharia are radicals and antidemocrats is a provocative statement. Of course, the popular perception that sharia and democracy can coexist doesn’t necessarily make it so. For as long as I’ve followed religious affairs in Nigeria, I’ve found most Muslim supporters of sharia to be reasonable, thoughtful people motivated as much by the desire to improve the quality of life in their communities as by their own religious passions. To be clear, I don’t share their confidence that sharia is the answer to Nigeria’s problems, nor would I wish to live in a society governed by many of the policies they advocate. I’ve come to believe, however, that in a society as divided as Nigeria’s, the best hope for interreligious cooperation lies in acknowledging that its many faith communities have (at least, in some respects) fundamentally different visions of the state’s role in fostering public and individual morality. In a democracy, this cannot mean a return to the uncodified classical Islamic constitution or the unfettered local implementation of Islamic law. It can and should mean, however, that Muslims be free (or at least, as free as Christians and members of other religious communities) to pursue a measure of state recognition and support for their values in public policy, particularly when their broader goals—accountability, good governance, and development—might strengthen democratic institutions and practices over the long run.

An optimism that such a balance could be struck—and that it was slowly emerging in Nigeria—was one of the most important things I brought back from my initial year of research for this book in 2007–8. But in late July 2009, a series of disturbing rumors began to trickle out of the formerly sleepy city of Maiduguri in Borno State. A small community of religious revivalists loosely connected to another group that had gained local notoriety a half-decade earlier as the Nigerian Taliban had engaged in a series of clashes with local police and security officials, culminating in a massive outburst of violence that spanned three states and left perhaps a thousand dead. In both scale and gruesomeness—its most enduring image is Boko Haram’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, naked from the waist up and flanked by security agents minutes before his illegal execution—this conflagration harkened back to other similar events in recent Nigerian history, all of which had begun with a small community of radicals rejecting the state’s authority and ended with brutal crackdowns. In the months following, uncertainty—about the group’s origins, its ideology, and its status following Yusuf’s assassination—proliferated, often at the expense of sound analysis of what had actually happened. But with few exceptions, nearly everyone I spoke with about it expressed the opinion that, just as it always had, the Nigerian government’s violent efforts would eventually succeed at eliminating the threat. In this, we were wrong.

For all the immediacy of its violence, the long-term legacy of Boko Haram in Nigerian political and religious life remains uncertain. Some Nigerian Christians at home and in the diaspora have framed the conflict as a war against them, thereby earning the support of global conservative activists. Others have read into it a vast range of conspiracy theories, identifying at one time or another nearly all members of the country’s political establishment as shadowy sponsors of its activities. Still others have suggested, quite rightly in my estimation, that the conflict has imposed a huge cost on Muslim and Christian Nigerians alike and that it must be understood as a war on all Nigerians, with all equally likely to suffer the consequences if it cannot be won. The peaceful and fair presidential elections held in late March 2015, only six weeks after they had been delayed due to the Nigerian military’s insistence that it could not guarantee their security, are a testament to this latter interpretation. One only needs to juxtapose the peaceful voting in Maiduguri and in internally displaced peoples’ camps across Borno with the sporadic violence and fraud across the Niger Delta region, another sector of the country long victimized by both insurgents and the state agents sent to fight them, to disprove the idea that most Nigerian Muslims prefer radicalism and violence to security and stability. And without the widespread protests against President Goodluck Jonathan and his administration mobilized by civil society activists—including many Muslims—following the dramatic kidnapping of more than 270 girls from the town of Chibok in April 2014, it’s unlikely that the opposition could have gained the national traction necessary to overcome the considerable advantages of incumbency.

For my part, I confess that I’m still unsure how to square my optimism of 2009 with the violence since. The simplest answer is that for all the attention they have drawn, Boko Haram hardly represents the beliefs and values of most Nigerian Muslims, who remain (as I will argue throughout) broadly supportive of both democracy and the idea of a multireligious Nigeria. Yet it’s also true that Boko Haram’s violence is part of a long-standing trend of escalating combativeness within parts of the Muslim community. Although Nigerian Christians often share an equal amount of the blame for fanning the flames of sectarian violence, this destructive legacy has helped make it thinkable for some Muslims to take up arms in the name of their faith and has contributed, along with many other factors, to the growing sense of distance between the lived experiences of young Nigerians in the north and south. While my own experiences as a researcher suggest that northern Nigeria is hardly a mass breeding ground for the psychopaths of faith that Wole Soyinka sees as the prime source of violence in today’s Nigeria,¹ the realities of poverty, inequality, poor governance, and indeed, the ready availability of religious discourses justifying violence and the rejection of state authority make finding an effective response all that more difficult.

This book’s title owes a debt of influence to a pair of works focused on communities rather a long way from northern Nigeria. Although political conversations in Boston and Ann Arbor might seem to have little to do with attitudes toward democracy in Sokoto, my initial idea to approach the question of Islamic revivalism’s relationship with democracy in northern Nigeria by actually talking to ordinary people was directly shaped by my encounters with William Gamson’s Talking Politics and Kathy Cramer’s Talking about Politics, both of which masterfully demonstrate the importance of conversation as a window into the process of political reasoning. Without their insights, this project would have been impossible.

My initial research was funded by a Fulbright IIE grant, part of the now sadly defunct Islamic Civilizations initiative. The Ohio University Political Science Department provided funding for a pair of trips back to Nigeria in 2012 and 2013, while director Steve Howard and the Ohio University African Studies program offered a wealth of personal and institutional connections in northern Nigeria. During more recent trips to Abuja and points north, Kole Shettima has been a gracious host and facilitator.

In Sokoto, my wife and I were hosted by Dr. Malami Buba and his family, especially his younger brothers, Bello and Basiru, and his eldest brother, Magagi. Basiru and Malama Hadiza Koko, instructors at Sokoto College of Education, did excellent work as interview facilitators. At Usmanu Danfodiyo University, many members of the faculty, particularly Professor Mohammed Z. Umar, were encouraging and generous with their time and knowledge. The chair of the Department of Political Science, Dr. Ibrahim Zagga, was a constant source of inspiration and information. His contribution also extended to the occasional use of his office, which provided a crucial (if unexpected) source of insight. The staff of the Waziri Junaidu History and Culture Bureau are the custodians of some of the most important historical records in West Africa. Most of their foreign visitors are concerned with their vast collection of jihadist papers from the nineteenth century, and I’m thankful for their efforts to switch gears and locate documents of a more recent vintage. My most important resource was the eighty-odd students who tolerated my unexpected intrusion into their curriculum as a last-minute replacement instructor for their Introduction to Comparative Politics course. I’m deeply grateful for their patience with their bature instructor and his odd notions about global politics.

I’m also grateful to the various colleagues who invited me to share versions of this research or guided me toward important resources. Jaimie Bleck (Notre Dame), Sumit Ganguly (Indiana), Richard Joseph and Rebecca Shereikis (Northwestern), and Nasiru Abdulkadir Ahmad and Moses Aluaigba (Bayero University, Kano) assembled audiences that were willing to hear me out, offer useful advice and feedback, and correct my more outrageous errors and misconceptions. Michael Schatzberg, Alice Kang, Ed Friedman, Scott Straus, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, John Paden, and several anonymous reviewers for the press read and commented on portions of the manuscript, and the final version is better for it. So too did several reviewers for Comparative Politics, which published an early version of my argument as "The Sharia Controversy in Northern Nigeria and the Politics of Islamic Law in New and Uncertain Democracies" (43, no. 3), adapted here with permission. In Washington, DC, Rachel Warner, Jonah Victor, Kris Inman, and especially Matt Page helped connect me with a broad community of scholars and professionals interested in Nigeria and offered new and interesting opportunities to think about the real-world stakes of my academic arguments. Carmen McCain’s willingness to share her extensive knowledge of northern Nigeria saved me a great deal of time and effort, and her insights on Hausa and Muslim culture and politics (best expressed in her weekly columns for the Daily Trust) have often shaped my own. Philip Ostien, formerly of the University of Jos and justly regarded as the leading expert on the legal aspects of sharia implementation in Nigeria, was willing to field any and all narrow and esoteric inquiries, and his massive collection of sharia-related documents from all twelve states was essential. And there is surely a guaranteed spot in the heaven of his choosing for Peter Burtch, guardian of the Northwestern University Library’s collection of African newspapers and periodicals.

My greatest thanks are reserved for my greatest supporters—my parents, Peggy and Tim, and my wife, Kim. My good fortune to travel, to pursue as much education as I could, and to write and teach about what I love is the product of my parents’ dedication to the goal that their children might have greater opportunities than they did. That I squandered it to become a college professor is hopefully not too much of a disappointment. Kim was with me at the very beginning, happily setting off for Nigeria four months after our wedding. She’s put up with the heat and the cold, the close quarters and the long separations, and made a great many sacrifices to help me see this through. In the dedication of one of his many fine books of political philosophy on the concepts of justice and charity, my former professor the late Patrick Riley said of his wife, Joan, No one has ever been helped more than I, and in a sense I am only the person who has actually written down what should be viewed as a collaborative effort. For all her patience, forbearance, and most of all, her willingness to listen, I offer the same sentiment.

ONE

Sharia Implementation and Democratic Discourse in Northern Nigeria

Obasanjo’s Challenge

In August 2007, the recently retired first president of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, Olusegun Obasanjo, spoke at the convention of an evangelical Christian church in his home state of Ogun. The topic of his address was to be a discussion of the greatest challenge of his presidency and how he responded to it. Befitting both his audience and its venue—essentially, a tent revival—its cause was a supernatural one, as Obasanjo blamed agents of darkness for instigating what he called the defining crisis of his rule. The identity of the challenge was equally appropriate but less obvious.¹

The Obasanjo administration faced many problems when it took power in May 1999, most of which remain unresolved. Scarred by sixteen years of military mismanagement, the economy needed rebuilding; except for a few bright spots (telecommunications and the entertainment industry, in particular), many sectors remain deeply dysfunctional. Tensions in the Delta region, driven by conflicts over environmental degradation and the distribution of largesse from oil revenues, spiraled out of control under Obasanjo’s stewardship. Despite an amnesty program for former militants that began in 2009, violence remains a part of daily life across the affected states. The president’s failure to craft institutions capable of rooting out corruption and upholding the rule of law was highlighted by the scandals that repeatedly drove his fellow Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) members from high office in shame. His own efforts to amend the constitution to extend his rule into a third term were thwarted in 2006, much to his public embarrassment. But on the day of his address, none of these earned top billing.

The crisis Obasanjo identified began in September 1999, when Ahmed Sani Yerima, the newly elected governor of Zamfara State and member of the opposition All Peoples’ Party (APP), announced his intention to replace his state’s penal code and legal system with a strict and comprehensive form of sharia. Between 2000 and 2003, twelve states in northern Nigeria—that part of Nigeria with a Muslim-majority population and deep historical roots as an Islamic society—took steps to enact some form of Islamic law for their Muslim citizens.² The sharia controversy drew hundreds of thousands into the street in protest and support, garnered international scorn from human rights organizations, and implicated the country in discussions of Islamic radicalism and its expanding influence in Sahelian Africa. Obasanjo, who famously proclaimed that the sharia issue would fizzle out of its own accord, proved unable to act decisively to diffuse the conflict and prevent escalating religious violence.³ Many of the key legal, constitutional, and social questions around Islamic law in Nigeria are still unsettled nearly two decades later, much like the future of the country’s democracy.

Nigeria isn’t the first place that comes to mind when most Westerners think about Islamic law, and as a nation split nearly equally (if not exactly neatly) between Muslims and Christians, it’s hardly at the center of the Islamic world as we normally think of it.⁴ But with about 85 million Muslims (nearly the same size as the entire population of Egypt) out of a population of 170 million, a fifty-year history of democratic experiments, and a key strategic position in regional religious networks, Nigeria represents a crucial case for understanding the relationship between Islam and democracy. Religious identities play a central role in the lives of an overwhelming majority of Nigerians—one survey found that 91 percent of citizens (and 96 percent of Muslims) identify their religion as very important to them—and the politics of religion are situated firmly at the center of Nigerian public life.⁵ Nigeria is above all else a multireligious state, and almost all of its religious communities actively promote a greater role for religious values in the nation’s politics. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria depend on each other to find a durable solution for sectarian conflict, ideally one that provides for both vibrant public religion and competitive democracy.

The Puzzling Politics of Sharia in New Democracies

More broadly, northern Nigeria’s sharia experiment is the largest example of the growing trend toward sharia politics in new and uncertain Muslim-majority democracies.⁶ In the West, sharia politics is usually associated with radical militants (in Afghanistan, Somalia, and most recently the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) willing to make use of horrific violence and destroy thousands of years of un-Islamic history to advance their cause, or with autocratic governments (Pakistan and Sudan in the 1980s, for example) seeking regime-preserving bargains with Islamist movements. Yet over the past twenty years, a wave of political openings across the Muslim world have generated new demands for the codification and application of Islamic law in the public and private lives of citizens. In countries as different as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan, campaigns to extend or defend sharia-inspired law and public policies have been a major feature in electoral politics, pursued not only by classic Islamist parties but also by religious actors working within otherwise secular or even multireligious electoral coalitions.⁷ From debates over family law reform and women’s rights legislation in Mali, Niger, and Palestine to local officials in Indonesia implementing sharia-style community ordinances and bylaws, making the law more Islamic is a goal many Muslims actively pursue via the ballot box.

What should we make of these demands? From one perspective, the answer is obvious, and not particularly optimistic. Few honest observers were sad to see the likes of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi fall during the revolutions of 2011. Many, however, believed that the fate of the new regimes would be determined not by the secular protests of January and February but by the demonstrations of July, when Islamists occupied Tahrir Square with slogans like the people want God’s law and the Quran is our constitution.⁸ As public Islam came to the forefront, fears first expressed about Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front in the early 1990s—that Islamists’ commitment to electoral democracy goes no deeper than the desire to win power—returned with a vengeance. Similarly, Nigeria’s sharia activists were widely depicted by both local Christian activists and the international press as radical Islamists in democrats’ clothes, leading a march toward the Talibanization of their communities with a national Islamic state soon to follow.⁹ The meteoric rise of Boko Haram (roughly, Westernization is forbidden),¹⁰ a homegrown radical Islamist insurgency that rejects democracy and the authority of the Nigerian state and demands the full implementation of sharia nationwide by way of an extraordinary campaign of violence against Christians and Muslims, has further reinforced the notion that the sharia movement was merely the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

Globally, most efforts to understand the place of Islamic law in the modern world begin with the compatibility question: Is Islam, a religious tradition with a unique theological and historical experience dating back fourteen centuries to the Arabian Desert, compatible with democracy, a philosophy and set of institutions with origins in the political evolution of Western European society? If Islamists and social scientists have anything in common, it’s that they both often treat Islam and democracy as stable, separate, and ultimately competing visions of social life. But whether directed at theology or civilizational values, this approach delivers an inconclusive view of how Muslims actually think and feel about democracy. Indeed, despite being motivated by strong prior assumptions about the theological pervasiveness of Islam and the absence of a distinction between the worldly and the divine in Islamic culture,¹¹ research in the political culture tradition has struggled to find empirical evidence that individual piety or overt commitments to Islamist ideology predict or even influence pro- or antidemocratic values.

On the other side, a large body of research suggests that popular support for sharia is driven by a diverse range of motives, goals, and concerns. For one, as in American politics, where citizens have long expressed the desire for general budget reductions and tax cuts even as they prefer spending increases in specific policy realms, Muslims globally offer far more support for the generic proposition that governments should implement only the laws of the sharia than for any particular policies or proposals.¹² For another, surveys that ask Muslims to define the characteristics of a sharia-inspired government find that most respondents cite issues like public goods provision, the elimination of corruption, and improved security far more often than the application of harsh physical punishments or restrictions on women’s appearance in public spaces—the practices associated with sharia in the global media.¹³ And scholars working around the world have found that the electoral advantage Islamist parties generally enjoy following a transition to multiparty competition owes less to popular religious fervor than to the institutional and social landscapes that give them initial advantages in organizational capacity and the opportunity to develop reputations as providers of social goods and services.¹⁴ Given the recent political successes of Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa offering visions of an Islamic state in which sharia is a central pillar, this is a point worth reinforcing.

Moreover, many of the same citizens who wish to see sharia formally incorporated in their state’s laws and lawmaking process also express strong, even unequivocal, support for democratic forms of government. In a 2007 poll looking at four large Muslim-majority nations around the globe (Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan), the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that most of the Muslims surveyed favored both democratic rule (67 percent) and the strict application of sharia (71 percent). In 2010, a survey by Pew (again focused on a global sample of Muslim-majority states, both democratic and nondemocratic) found that many of the same Muslims who endorse corporal and even capital punishments drawn from the Islamic legal tradition also prefer democratic government to the alternative.¹⁵ In northern Nigeria too, support for democracy, at least in abstract terms, has hovered around 70 percent during the Fourth Republic era.¹⁶ Whatever else the rise of Islamist political ideologies might portend, the global Muslim community has largely concluded that state-sponsored sharia and democracy are compatible endeavors.

Sharia, Democracy, and the Politics of Public Reasoning

In taking mass Muslim support for both sharia and democracy seriously, this book proposes to approach an otherwise well-worn topic (the relationship between Islam and democracy) from an unconventional perspective. Rather than arguing about whether or not particular Islamic values, doctrines, or institutions are compatible with liberal democracy, I ask how the relationship between Islam and democracy is constructed in practice—in the debates, conversations, and conflicts Nigerian Muslims engage in about sharia and democracy in societies where corruption, poor governance, and inequality are ever-present concerns. My argument builds on a growing body of research focused on the relationship between sharia institutions and politics at the local level, particularly in the context of courts and dispute resolution.¹⁷ It’s not, however, a study of particular institutions, legal questions, or movements, nor does it focus primarily on the thought of religious leaders and jurisprudents. Instead, it offers a broad account of how Muslims in northern Nigeria reason about Islam and democracy in public life, arriving at a local (and, as we’ll see, often incomplete) understanding of what Muslim democracy might look like.

As Robert Hefner has suggested, even when they are couched in the language of reviving the religious practices of 1,400 years ago, conversations about the compatibility of Islamic law and democracy are thoroughly contemporary, in the sense that they take place in late modern societies defined by pluralization, social fragmentation, and heightened debates over the common good. They emerge, he argues, not out of some backward-looking civilizational impulse . . . but from Muslims’ engagement with the central political and ethical questions of our age, including what makes life really worth living?¹⁸ And as Noah Feldman has argued, one of the things that makes both Islam and democracy such powerful ideas in these conversations is that they are fundamentally mobile, having spread throughout the world precisely because they are so susceptible to negotiation and synthesis with other worldviews.¹⁹ Of course, this isn’t always how their proponents see them. An increasingly large percentage of Muslims believe that there is a single, correct interpretation of sharia, an idea that flies directly in the face of more than a millennium of pluralistic legal jurisprudence.²⁰ Meanwhile, advocates of liberal democracy often treat the possibility of other forms of democratic practice as illegitimate or naïve—fundamentally less than the original model.²¹ But as Frederic Schaffer argues in his remarkable study of the language of democracy, a diversity of meanings and opinions about exactly what democracy is and how such a vision might be given institutional form is the norm, even in long-standing democratic states. Indeed, Schaffer points out that even a cursory glance at everyday popular discourse in the United States reveals the idea of democracy being used to describe everything from the availability of gourmet ice cream at neighborhood food trucks (street-corner democracy in action, as in one Washington Post story he mentions) to the on-court action of a basketball game (one man, one shot, as a Los Angeles Times columnist he refers to described it).²² While it’s possible to dismiss these metaphorical appropriations as nothing more than loose talk, Schaffer argues for understanding them as evidence of the basic attributes Americans associate with democratic practice—in this case, the leveling or discounting of difference and the availability of meaningful options.²³

So too has Islam given birth to an extraordinary diversity of practices, experiences, identities, and institutional forms, all of which serve as fodder for juxtaposing, extending, and reconciling it with other ideas. The global Islamic tradition has long been characterized by both the fact of pluralism (in expressions of belief, the production of religious knowledge, the theory and practice of jurisprudence) and an intense struggle to make sense of what that pluralism means for the community of the faithful. For a wide range of Muslim thinkers, democracy serves as a foil in these struggles, engaged with as a means of making sense of how the Islamic tradition might best preserve and protect the role of public religion in an increasingly pluralized world. Increasingly, these issues are debated within self-consciously styled Muslim publics, drawn together by a breakdown in hierarchies of knowledge authority and the growing confidence with which many Muslims offer their own interpretations of Islamic identity, values, and practice.²⁴ These publics and the Muslim public spheres they produce have little in common with the bourgeois (and desacralized) public spheres described by Jürgen Habermas,²⁵ but they are important arenas in which claims about religious authority, authenticity, and the state’s role in religious life are contested by a diverse set of participants. My approach is to focus on these conversations and the places they happen as sites for what John Bowen calls public reasoning (processes of reasoning about apparently incompatible ideas, towards workable arrangements to govern everyday social life) about the theoretical and practical consequences of democratic government for Muslim citizens.²⁶

In other words, how people talk and think about democracy (and sharia) plays a crucial role in determining how democracy (and sharia) is practiced, and in northern Nigeria, these conversations are often framed in terms of demands for and experiences with sharia (democracy). Although this might seem intuitive, it’s not often reflected in political science research on democratization, which generally relies on a thin definition of democracy—elections and procedures, with perhaps a cursory nod to the protection of civil liberties or rights—as its point of reference.²⁷ While such definitions have advantages in facilitating cross-national comparisons or communicating with policy makers, they rarely reflect conversations on the ground in countries like Nigeria, where democracy remains a fundamentally contested concept. For many Nigerians (Muslims and Christians alike), the actual experience of democracy is better understood as democrazy, a bit of clever wordplay introduced to the Nigerian lexicon by the irrepressible Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose song Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense (1986) lampooned the failure of the Second Republic (1979–83) as the result of his country’s eagerness to adopt Oyibo (European) models of government that allowed elites to run roughshod over the interests of ordinary people. Nigerians have learned their skepticism of democracy the hard way, and as Ruth Marshall has documented in her study of Pentecostalism and politics in southern Nigeria, the promise of democracy is counterbalanced by an abiding doubt that any particular political system is better for helping ordinary people lead moral, prosperous, and fulfilling lives.²⁸

There are also good reasons to be skeptical that the mere presence of public reasoning around the relationship between sharia and democracy will necessarily produce societies that are more democratic. As Lisa Wedeen argues in her study of public deliberation during communal qat (a mildly intoxicating leaf) chews in Yemen, the fact that members of a community are engaged in identifiably democratic practice[s] like deliberation about the quality of governance does not necessarily imply the making of a democratic regime (however defined). She notes that these limitations exist on two planes: first, democratic performances are rarely enough on their own to create the conditions for institutionalizing the electoral/procedural aspects of democracy, and second, there’s an important distinction between democratic practices (like open, freewheeling, critical debate) and liberal values, including toleration of difference.²⁹ Such concerns aren’t limited to the Muslim world alone—in an influential study of informal political talk in the United States, Katherine Cramer found that everyday deliberative practices do as much to reinforce the social identities and biases of participants as to build broader democratic values.³⁰ Ultimately, though, I side with Schaffer, who argues that the presence of multiple, local, and even (at least partially) illiberal democratic definitions and practices doesn’t mean people are playing the democratic game badly but rather that they are playing according to rules that have meaning for their specific circumstances.³¹

To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not arguing that all claims about what democracy means are equally valid or that the terrain of defining these issues must be ceded to Islamist movements. Where Muslim-majority societies fail to live up to their democratic rhetorics, it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize them by invoking the notions of liberal democracy and international human rights norms, even though we know that these languages are the product of particular cultural and political contexts. What matters more is that even seemingly unproblematic democratic concepts (competitive elections, for example, as Mariane Ferme’s careful ethnography of politics in Sierra Leone suggests) may have vastly different meanings across cultural and religious contexts.³² By focusing on what Nigerian Muslims think democracy is and how they imagine it relates to their religious values and identities, we can learn important lessons about the potential democratic future of Nigeria and nations like it.

Sharia and Democracy in Fourth Republic Nigeria: An Unfinished Story

Sharia activists like Yerima—drawn mostly from among the first wave of democratically elected state governors and legislators rather than from Nigeria’s Islamist community—made many promises to the Muslim citizens who elected them. They guaranteed that sharia implementation would create a more pious society by ending the moral decay and corruption that ordinary Nigerians see as being at the heart of the country’s political and economic failures. They claimed it would create economic opportunities and better social services for northern Muslims, who suffer from greater poverty and a weaker educational system than in the south. They assured them it would address the region’s endemic lawlessness and insecurity. And perhaps most significantly, they argued that their sharia project not only was compatible with democracy but was itself a product of the country’s democratization.

On the pages of northern newspapers, over the airwaves of Hausa-language radio and local television, in mosques and religious gatherings, and in the neighborhoods and homes of many ordinary citizens, sharia implementation was discussed as a vehicle for promoting fair and just economic development and for protecting the religious and political rights of Muslims (men and women) and as a means of holding the political class accountable for their actions on behalf of the citizenry. Sharia proponents emphasized that they pursued their goals through the democratic process and with great care to respect the intent of the Nigerian constitution. Intentionally excluding the most radical Islamist voices, pro-sharia politicians took to the airwaves and the presses to argue that sharia was a right for Muslim citizens living within a religiously plural society. As Governor Abdulkadir Kure of Niger State argued:

I am convinced that our Constitution guarantees the freedom of Religion . . . Consequently, it is only natural that once a State has . . . adopted a way of life, its choice should be respected subject to the condition that the choice does not trample on the rights of other people living within its borders.

The acceptance of the choice . . . to be guided by the Shariah is an important ingredient of our Federal nature. Federalism enshrined in our constitution is not for our fancy. As a Federal State, our laws, institutions, and people must respect our cultural diversities, which are not just regional, ethnic, or tribal, but also extend to our religious beliefs and practices . . .

Our return to democracy has far-reaching consequences. One of these is to give weight to our right to democratically choose the kind of society we wish to have. We do not need to uniformalize [sic] everything, particularly two disparate religions.³³

Calling sharia a dividend of democracy, Kure claimed that without the democratic transition, the will of the people for a greater religious presence in public life couldn’t have been realized. Sharia proponents sought constitutional justifications and legal authority for their plans—authority that was begrudgingly acknowledged as having a basis in Nigerian constitutional law by the Obasanjo administration. Not surprisingly, Muslim responses were enthusiastic, with enormous crowds appearing at rallies across the north to welcome new states into the sharia fold.

The most recognizable changes took place in the legal sphere, where states created sharia procedure codes and sharia criminal courts to try cases under the new laws. Equally substantive reforms, often borrowed from precedents set in other Muslim-majority nations, were adopted in the realm of public policy. Zamfara State banned women from riding motorcycle taxis and mandated appropriate Islamic dress for female students and public employees, and most states crafted ordinances to eliminate the sale of liquor and beer and close down suspected gambling houses and brothels. Other reforms sprang from local concerns. Several states prohibited praise singing, and many organized grants or small loans to help women transition from prostitution (often a euphemism for a range of socially stigmatized professions for women) or find husbands. Censorship boards sought to stamp out the immoral and un-Islamic aspects of popular artistic and