Search Results

This chapter provides a history of the rise of Islam in west Africa, in particular to Hausaland, which is today’s Northern Nigeria. The chapter then concentrates on the Sokoto Jihad and subsequent caliphate led by Uthman Dan Fodio. The chapter traces his intellectual history, highlighting his engagement with the Arabian peninsula and championing of unifying the Hausaland region under the textual regimen of the Maliki school of Islamic law. The second layer of the sunnaic paradigm, the role the Sokoto jihad plays in contemporary northern Nigerian idealizations of an ideal Islamic society, is explained. Idealization of scholars and hudud punishments are shown to be reinscribed into Nigeria’s present moment as a source of authentication of the 1999 sharia experiment.

This chapter traces the development of “Muslim politics” in northern Nigeria from the era of the Sokoto Caliphate through British colonial rule and the independence-era Nigerian First Republic. Drawing on the work of Hussein Ali Agrama, Mahmood Mamdani, and other critical scholars of secularism, colonialism, and law, it traces the “state-ification” of Islamic law, and the growing use of the religious and sharia as sources of political control under colonial and early independence-era government

Eltantawi became interested in the case of Amina Lawal in 2002 when she was working in Washington DC in media and communications after the 9-11 attacks and was inundated with media phone calls about Lawal’s trial. This chapter introduces the book’s themes and lays out its guiding framework, the “sunnaic paradigm”: the concerns of Nigeria’s present, read back into the nineteenth century Sokoto Caliphate, which is then read back into the classical, Prophetic period of Islam. The sunnaic paradigm gave a sense of power to Nigerians as they embarked on the 1999 shar’ia experiment to overcome their societies’ significant challenges. The book wrestles throughout with how the seventh century past (birth of Islam) affects the twenty-first century present (demanding shar’ia).

During the years Camejo and Prieto led the Lucumí cabildo, warfare in the Bight of Benin hinterland resulted in the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo, which was a major West African slave-trading state. As a result, tens of thousands of Yoruba-speakers arrived to Cuba, including hundreds liberated in British abolition efforts. This chapter examines this migration in relation to Camejo and Prieto’s leadership.