Introduction: religious conflict and cooperation in northern Nigeria

Since the late 1980s, interfaith relations in northern Nigeria have been marked by intensifying conflict, involving over 10,000 deaths as well as widespread economic disruption (Haynes 2009). Repeated clashes between the Muslim majority and Christian minorities have taken place in various northern cities. While identity-based violence tended to take an ethnic form prior to the 1980s, such clashes began to assume an explicitly religious tone with the Maitatsine riots and the infamous ‘burning of churches’ in the 1980s. Local struggles over land and authority, controversy over perceived slights to Islam, and reactions to the implementation of Sharia law in several northern states triggered waves of religious clashes in the succeeding decades, often spreading through several northern cities. Since 2009, the activities of the extremist Islamic group, Boko Haram, have set off new rounds of religious violence in the core north.

These tales of carnage make it easy to forget that historically, religion has played an integrative rather than a conflictual role in northern Nigeria. Economic historians have documented the role of Islam in bridging ethnic divides and providing a framework for economic cooperation and trade across northern Nigeria and West Africa more broadly (Austen 1987; Curtin 1975; Hopkins 1973; Lovejoy 1980). More recently, economic anthropologists and sociologists have traced the role of ethno-religious networks in extending informal trading systems across Nigeria and outward into neighbouring West African countries (Anthony 2000, 2002; Forrest 1994; Hashim & Meagher 1999; Meagher 2009a). How can communities locked in such violent religious conflict also participate in relations of close economic collaboration? Is mounting religious violence in northern Nigeria breaking down older relations of trust and inter-religious cooperation, or do informal economic linkages across religious lines help to mitigate contemporary religious divisions? These questions will be addressed in the context of empirical research on cross-religious informal economic organization carried out in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna. An ethnography of informal economic relations across the religious divide will be used to trace a more complex picture of the informal institutional processes at work under the surface of contemporary religious tensions in northern Nigeria. The objective is to explore how popular institutions of economic collaboration and the political mobilization of religious conflict shape social resilience amid religious tension and conflict.