More than a decade before the Arab Spring, another revolution was taking shape: an Islamic legal revolution in West Africa. It began in 1999 with the introduction of shariʿah (roughly translated as Islamic law) by the governor of Nigeria's northwestern state of Zamfara.Footnote 1 By 2002, all 12 of northern Nigeria's Muslim-majority states implemented Islamic-based penal codes. A loosely organized movement also began to coalesce around the internationally reported criminal trial of Amina Lawal, a woman facing a stoning punishment for alleged sexual misconduct. An Islamic appeals court eventually acquitted Lawal, and the Islamic revolution ultimately failed. These events would later give rise to Boko Haram, an extremist paramilitary “of poor, uneducated boys” (32), and to a milieu in which “no social reward” exists for critical thinking (200). An ethnographically and historically informed account of this remarkable social and legal history is found in Sarah Eltantawi's Shariʿah on Trial.
Why should sociolegal scholars care about law and religion in Nigeria? Nigeria is home to Africa's largest citizenry. The country's population of nearly 200 million is nearly double that of Africa's second most populated country, Ethiopia. Estimates suggest that Nigeria may have more than 100 million Muslims by 2035, which would make it the world's fifth largest Muslim population (98). The political history of northern Nigeria (Hausaland) reveals how citizens envisioning a brighter future must first confront precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial legacies of law and religion.
Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of comparative religion at The Evergreen State College, argues that studying revolutions that call for legal change involves detailing the long cultural and religious histories within which those revolutions take place. Why? Revolutionary politics are not new, particularly when they idealize “a utopian past…as a form of protest against a distressing present” (5). In northern Nigeria, citizens have called for shariʿah not to penalize or to harm, as media reports would suggest. Rather, citizens have sought to introduce the moral and ethical guidelines of shariʿah that promote social and economic justice, just as the Prophet Muhammad did when introducing Islam into Arabia. Northern Nigerians “desired shariʿah to mean justice” (21) in the face of daily poverty, disease, corruption, social disorder, and injustice. Eltantawi calls their hopes “idealized shariʿah,” and she contrasts these ideals to “political shariʿah,” a term her interviewees use to denote the failed or corrupted manifestations of shariʿah in Nigerian politics “that do not meet” the standards of social justice for the poor (7).
Eltantawi's findings are based on fieldwork in northern Nigeria in 2010, where she interviewed activists, academics, and lawyers, including Lawal's attorneys. Where applicable, her book also analyzes relevant Qur'anic text and classical Hadith (statements, actions, or tacit approvals of the Prophet Muhammad). The book begins with Nigeria's present reality in which the country's military is battling Boko Haram, a group that pledged allegiance to the “Islamic State” (ISIS). Chapter 1 discusses the differences between the idealized shariʿah that northern Nigerians have demanded and the political shariʿah that they have received, which, in their words, is “not really Islamic” (38). The five substantive chapters that follow (Chapters 2–6) take readers on an asynchronous journey across the history of Islamic law, particularly Islamic criminal law, and northern Nigeria's precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial legacies.
Islam arrived to northern Nigeria in the eighth century (42–44), and Chapter 2 discusses how the precolonial (19th century) Sokoto Caliphate crystallized northern Nigeria's “shariʿah society” where punishments of stoning never materialized (8). The chapter serves as a reminder of the importance of, where feasible, studying precolonial legal legacies when investigating present-day legal institutions. Law grounded all activities of the Caliphate; legal texts were the “practical and moral reference for a social and political administration” (53).
Chapter 3 zooms out of the Nigerian context to offer a history of stoning, a punishment practice that predates Islam “by … three thousand years” (71). Stoning entered Islam by way of a “fraught [and] contested … anthropomorphic” process (68). The punishment is not found in the Qur'an, and it has been “always exceptional, always controversial,” and rarely executed in Muslim societies (80, 96, 68). Chapter 4 returns the reader to Nigeria by providing a legal history of the British colonial intervention (1903–1960). Though stoning was not used in the Caliphate that the British destroyed, the British asserted their new authority by outlawing the punishment as Islamic and, thus, “repugnant to natural justice,” though the colonial administration simultaneously permitted punishments like flogging, hanging, whipping, or “being chained by irons” (117–120).
Chapters 5 and 6 flash forward to the Amina Lawal adultery trial in the early 2000s (Chapter 5) and the international outcry against it (Chapter 6). Eltantawi's ethnography of the Lawal trial in Chapter 5 exposes the complexity of how lawyers and judges simultaneously apply Islamic legal traditions (in this case, the Maliki School of Sunni Islamic Law) and Nigerian constitutional and criminal laws and procedures. Chapter 6 turns to the court of public opinion and how women's movements and nongovernmental organizations capitalize on international opposition to the Lawal adultery trial and stoning.
Shariʿah on Trial is relevant to sociolegal scholars who care about contentious politics, particularly political or legal revolutions that claim religious grounds. Ultimately, the book shows how Islam cannot be separated from the cultural and historical context within which it is a part (3). In Nigeria, the injustices of colonial rule have led activists to reach back to the Prophet's life, and Islam's earliest days, and call for the implementation of Islamic law in government today. These activists, according to Eltantawi, nevertheless “flatten inconvenient complexity and contradiction [within Islamic law] in the singular quest to live within God's law” (137).
Ending her book, Eltantawi proposes two avenues for the reform of Islamic law: more Western-style education and more Islamic progressivism. (These are not mutually exclusive recommendations.) The challenge of legal reform remains for northern Nigeria, as it does for other postcolonial Muslim-majority societies. In these places, citizens use a “medieval jurisprudential” logic—and not constitutional law and its embedded colonial legacies—to fight for stability and moral order (177). The ideals of constitutionalism and religion are, however, layered with tradition and modernity, and both of these ideals may ultimately serve a “masculinist [and reductionist] account of” the state, law, and religion (16).
