Nigeria is the largest
multi-ethnic country in Africa that has been
bitterly fallen in different international, social and political conflicts and
national division over Islamization idea. According to US Commission on International Religious Freedom, since Islamization era an estimated 10.000 Nigerians have been killed in violent conflicts between Muslims and Christians.
Since 1991 and after the fall of
military rule some Muslim majority states like Kano State in the Northern Nigeria enforces Sharia criminal law. Kano itself has been the
flashpoint for violence between Christians and Muslims, only last year at least
16 people were killed in protests about the Danish cartoons on Prophet
Muhammad. Beside the Kano State that is the largest
Nigerian state to adopt Sharia, there are 12 other northern states that began
enforcing Islamic Sharia since being affected by Islamic revolution in 2000.
Unlike islamization project in Iran and Saudi Arabia,
the Christian minority in these Nigerian states are exempt from the laws, at
least according to the letter of law. There are some evidences that this
strict model of Islamization has been largely financed and promoted by radical
clerics from the Arabian Peninsula who arrived
in droves to preach some sort of Salafid Islamic fundamentalism. However, up to
now, religious judges handed down some tough punishments like cases of stoning
sentence for a man in
2001 and a woman in 2002. The case of woman who was convicted
of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning by an Islamic court in Nigeria has provoked world wide reactions. Also reportedly there have been always cases
of amputations and flogging for theft and other Islamic crimes.
Today, the New York Times has published a most readable article on Sharia in Nigeria which
reveals some new developments in Sharia implementation. This reports, written
by Lydia Polgreen, claims that the Islamcized states are recently turning
from harsher side of Sharia to a soft and non strict aspect. Below is the full
story according to the NYT:
Just last year, the morality police roamed these streets in dusky blue
uniforms and black berets, brandishing cudgels at prayer shirkers and dragging
fornicators into Islamic courts to face sentences like death by public stoning.
But these days, the fearsome police officers, known as the Hisbah, are
little more than glorified crossing guards. They have largely been confined to
their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping
fans to their seats at soccer games.
The Islamic revolution that seemed so destined to transform northern Nigeria in
recent years appears to have come and gone — or at least gone in a direction
few here would have expected.
When Muslim-dominated states like Kano adopted Islamic law after the fall of military rule in 1999, radical clerics
from the Arabian peninsula arrived in droves
to preach a draconian brand of fundamentalism, and newly empowered religious
judges handed down tough punishments like amputation for theft. Kanobecame a center of anti-American sentiment in one of
the most reliably pro-American countries in Africa.
But since then, much of the furor has died down, and the practice of Islamic
law, or Shariah, which had gone on for centuries in the private sphere before
becoming enshrined in public law, has settled into a distinctively Nigerian
compromise between the dictates of faith and the chaotic realities of modern
life in an impoverished, developing nation.
“Shariah needs to be practical,” said Bala Abdullahi, a civil servant here.
“We are a developing country, so there is a kind of moderation between the
ideas of the West and traditional Islamic values. We try to weigh it so there
is no contradiction.”
The federal government cracked down on the Hisbah last year, enforcing a
national ban on religious and ethnic militias, and the secular, federally
controlled police force has little interest in enforcing the harshest
strictures of Shariah. Violence between Muslims and Christians has also begun
to subside in the north.
But even before then, the feared mutilations and death sentences almost
never materialized. Public floggings are quite common, and in Zamfara, the
first state to adopt Shariah as the basis of its criminal code, at least one
man had his hand amputated in 2000 for stealing a cow, but other sentences of
mutilation have rarely been carried out.
And despite several internationally known adultery sentences of death by
stoning in a public square — including that of Amina Lawal, a woman from
Katsina State who gave birth to a child out of wedlock that a Shariah court in
2002 took as evidence of the crime — not one stoning sentence has been carried
out. Ms. Lawal’s conviction was overturned the following year, and she is now
active in local politics, living freely with her daughter Wasila in her
hometown.
The change has little to do with religious attitudes — northern Nigeria remains one of the most pious Muslim
regions in Africa, as it has been since the camel caravans across the Sahara first brought Islam here centuries ago. In Kano,
the main city of Kano State, thousands of men spill out in neat rows onto the
city’s main boulevards on Friday afternoon, an overflow of devotion for the
week’s most important prayer, and virtually all Muslim women are veiled.
The shift reflects the fact that religious law did not transform society.
Indeed, some of the most ardent Shariah-promoting politicians now find
themselves under investigation for embezzling millions of dollars. Many early
proponents of Shariah feel duped by politicians who rode its popular wave but
failed to live by its tenets, enriching themselves and neglecting to improve
the lives of ordinary people.
“Politicians started seeing Shariah as a gateway to political power,” said
Abba Adam Koki, a conservative cleric here who has criticized the local
government’s application of Shariah. “But they were insincere. We have been
disappointed and never got what we had hoped.”
Facing backlash from citizens and criticism from human rights groups at home
and abroad, state governments that had swiftly enacted Shariah and embraced its
harshest tenets are now shifting the emphasis from the punishments and
prohibitions to a softer approach that emphasizes other tenets of Muslim law,
like charity, women’s rights and the duty of Muslims to keep their environment
clean.
“Shariah is not only about the cutting off of wrists,” said Muzammil Sani
Hanga, a member of Kano State’s Shariah
Commission and a legal expert who helped draft the state’s Islamic code. “It is
a complete way of life.”
New programs have sprung up to encourage parents to send their daughters to
hybrid public elementary schools that offer traditional Islamic education along
with math and reading, in keeping with Islamic principles that call for the
education of girls. In many of these classrooms, girls outnumber boys, and the
United States Agency for International Development is so impressed with the
potential of these programs that one third of the schools it supports across Nigeria are
integrated Islamic and secular, according to officials at the agency.
State officials are using Islamic exhortations on cleanliness to encourage
recycling of the plastic bags that choke landfills and gutters. One governor,
citing the Islamic duty to care for the indigent, recently instituted a monthly
stipend for disabled beggars.
“Our approach is a humane Shariah, not a punitive Shariah,” said Bala A.
Muhammad, director of a state program in Kano called A Daidaita Sahu. The name, a Hausa commandment, means “straighten your
rows,” a reference to the razor-sharp lines formed by Muslims as they line up
to pray and a metaphor for the orderliness required in everyday life by the
Koran.
Hundreds of yellow motorized rickshaws purchased by the state government
make it easier for women, who had been barred from taking motorcycle taxis, to
get around.
“As a Muslim woman I want to be modest,” said one commuter, Amina Abubakar,
as she stepped daintily into the back seat of a rickshaw and pulled its privacy
curtain closed. “This is more comfortable, and the safety is better.”
To be sure, conservative elements hold sway in some areas. In October, a
Shariah court in Kaduna upheld the ban of a satirical play by the human rights activist Shehu Sani
about a corrupt politician who uses Shariah to manipulate his constituents.
But the shift may also be helping to ease tensions between Muslims and
Christians in a country where sectarian conflicts, often stoked by politicians
to stir up support, have killed thousands over the past decade.
“The thing has caused a lot of harm,” said the Rev. Foster O. Ekeleme, a
Methodist bishop in Kano who leads a flock of mostly
Ibo tribespeople from southeastern Nigeria. “There was burning of
Christian churches. Christians were killed. So many people were displaced. But
now, the tempo is cooling down.”
Mr. Ekeleme had just been visited by a senior adviser of the Kano State governor, an Ibo Catholic, Chris Azuka, who was appointed to try to improve
interfaith relations in the state.
“The idea of Shariah is to promote social justice, not create religious
conflict,” Mr. Azuka said. “Shariah is not about violence.”
Northern Muslims and southern Christians have long coexisted uneasily across
what is now modern Nigeria.
Two centuries ago, the Hausa rulers of the north waged a jihad to convert
southerners to Islam, and while they only reached the middle of the country,
the aftershocks of the period can be felt to this day.
More recently, the Hausa elite have dominated the military, while southern
Christians, like the Yoruba and the Ibo, have dominated commercial and
intellectual life. According to international human rights organizations,
11,000 to 15,000 people have been killed in sectarian and ethnic conflicts in Nigeria since
the return of democracy in 1999.
In Jigawa State, religious violence exploded in
September 2006, amid political tensions before elections in 2007. A Muslim
woman claimed that a Christian one had insulted the Prophet Muhammad, and mobs
of Muslim youths descended on Christian churches in the state capital, Dutse,
burning several to the ground.
The mob arrived at the Assemblies of God church, where the pastor’s wife,
Nadi Dangana, said she barely escaped over the wall before the youths broke
down the gate.
“We escaped with our lives, but all our property is gone,” she said.
The church was left in ashes, its altar and crosses charred stumps. A
makeshift sanctuary without walls stands in its place. Blackened bits of
salvaged corrugated roofing keep out the rain.
But these days tensions have cooled, said Garba Shehu, a former Muslim from
Dutse who converted to evangelical Christianity. When the governor signed the
law creating a stipend for beggars, he invited three Christian clergy members
to pray alongside three Muslim clerics.
“We thank God we don’t see the same tensions as before,” Mr. Shehu said. “We
are free to practice our faith without fear.”
Further reading:
1. The report of Prof. Ruud Peters to the European Commission on Islamization of Criminal Justice in Nigeria
Download islamic-criminal-law-nigeria_en.pdf
2. A Comparative view to Islamization Project in Nigeria
Download sharia_in_nigeria.pdf
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