1The Hausa saying, ‘Nijar da Najeriya duka su ke’,¹ perfectly illustrates the case of the Maradi Region (Niger) and Katsina State (Nigeria), which truly seem to be two sides of the same coin. The two capitals of these districts are located within a one-hour drive of each other, and their stories share an inseparable link. The political entity that is Maradi was founded in the early 1820s by a pact between the former ruling dynasty of Katsina, then in exile in the Sultanate of Damagaram, and the animist populations of the region. The latter, resisting the Katsina emirate’s attempts to incorporate them into the territory of Sokoto, eliminated the Fulani emissary Mani Acha and arranged the assumption of power in Maradi by Dan Kassawa, head of Katsina’s old royal dynasty. Dan Kassawa assumed the title ‘King of Katsina’ (Sarkin Katsina) as opposed to ‘Emir of Katsina’, which was used by the Fulani chief who had been installed by Sokoto in his family’s former capital. At the time, Maradi was a ‘war camp’ (sansanin yaki) from which Katsina was to be re-conquered. However, by the late 19^th century, the kings of Katsina in Maradi had, in reality, given up on that project. In 2010, their official title became ‘Sultan of North Katsina’, acknowledging the scission of the old Katsina, which had been confirmed by the modern border between Niger and Nigeria.

2The populations of Maradi and Katsina are composed predominantly of the Katsinawa, a sub-group of the Hausa. The physical, historical, and cultural proximity of the two cities is reinforced by the fact that they are part of a ‘trade corridor’ known as the ‘KKM corridor’ (Kano-Katsina-Maradi), which forms the backbone of Maradi’s trading prosperity, especially after the severe recession of the 1990s. This detail is quite important. The young generation of the ‘Alhazai of Maradi’ – the rich merchants and entrepreneurs of the city² – has almost entirely converted to Izala Islam, which propagates the legal radicalism discussed in this chapter. Given the predominance of this movement among the elites of Kano and Katsina, and the fact that the other social categories of Maradi’s population often become ‘Izalaized’ through contact with merchants, it is quite clear that the ties between Nigeria (Katsina and Kano) and the Maradi trading community have an influence on the spread of the movement.

Map 3. Geographical distribution of Idrissa’s fieldworks

3The religious sociology of Maradi is very similar to that of Katsina, especially when considering the jahars³ of which the two cities are the administrative capitals. One finds the same predominance of the Tijaniyya in the countryside and of the Izala in urban areas; the presence of animist communities, called arnawa in Niger and maguzawa in Nigeria; and the presence of Christian minorities, native to the region and well integrated into its social fabric. Although the government of Katsina Emirate has gotten rid of its old Hausa socio-political structure, while this is still largely in place in Maradi, the proximity of the two ‘traditional chiefdoms’ tends to create numerous similarities between them, expressed for example through their attachment to the Islamic nature of their respective regimes.

4In summary, despite the scission that was imposed by the Sokoto jihad and then entrenched by British and French colonialism, the evolution of Maradi and Katsina in the 20^th century presents remarkable continuities in terms of religion and tradition. However, since 2000, the institutional landscape of the rule of law in Katsina has been progressing in ways that do not seem to be even on the horizon in Maradi. The same dynamic factors behind this rift can also be found in Niger, yet their effects there are different and are generally much milder than in Katsina. While the latter lives in the age of the Sharia Implementation, Maradi remains a city where religious agitation does not seem to compromise the secularism of public institutions. Of course, in Maradi, just as in the rest of Niger, secularism in public places has changed considerably – or deteriorated, if considered from the perspective of a French-style republican secularism. But comparing it with Katsina helps put things into perspective and shows that Maradi still remains a place of secularism, which is actually a source of great frustration for the Izala leaders of the city.

5In this chapter, some of the origins and characteristics of the differences between Katsina and Maradi are analysed and a reflection is centred on two instances of Islamic radicalism: ‘legal radicalism’ and ‘political radicalism’. Without being insurrectional, the first type of radicalism has proved to be more subversive than political radicalism has, as discussed later. In Nigeria, Islamic radicalism has been legal / subversive in the states of the north-central and north-west regions (including Katsina) and political / insurrectional in north-eastern states. In Niger, Islamic radicalism failed to become legal and therefore was never subversive, despite some ‘negative’ or symbolic victories obtained during the first 15 years of political democratization (1991-2006). During that time, Niger was undeniably the site of a kind of Islamic political radicalism, but one that failed to reach the levels of mobilization and ideological penetration required to transform the national political landscape. Since then, Islamic activism in Niger has been expressed mainly through preaching, the spread of Arab-Islamic education, and sporadic riots, all of which have long since become routine in northern Nigeria.

6Thus, the point in comparing Maradi and Katsina is to answer two separate yet related questions: Why, given the proximity between the two jahars, has legal radicalism been so successful in Katsina but not in Maradi? And does the fact that Maradi seems to be simply ‘behind’ Katsina mean that the region is going through a phase of initial political radicalization that could set it on a more similar path to that of the capital of ‘South Katsina’? Without trying to provide definitive answers to these two questions, particularly to the second one, we will see that it is still possible to acquire a fairly accurate picture of the current situation.

Katsina: A waning utopia

7The Sharia Implementation was promulgated by the government of Katsina in 2000. The previous year, Governor Ahmad Sani Yerima had launched the process with great fanfare in Zamfara, the state’s capital, during a ceremony that was reportedly attended by a crowd of over two million Muslims, who had come from all the northern states and other parts of Nigeria. The groundswell spread throughout the region. The stated objective of the Sharia Implementation was the enforcement of ‘full Sharia’,⁴ which on a pragmatic level quickly translated into the application of criminal laws designed to eradicate ‘crime and sin’. Before the process was even finalized and initiated in Katsina, many courts in local governments, known as ‘area courts’, began to implement Sharia criminal laws against sexual debauchery (zina), theft, and physical injury, while injunctions intended to shut down drinking establishments and abolish prostitution proliferated. In 2000, under popular pressure, the government created a Sharia Commission that reused, for the most part, the agenda developed in Zamfara. A law for the adoption of a Sharia-based penal code was passed in a hurry and went into effect the following year. Yet, as early as August 2000, ‘area courts’ had been transformed into ‘Sharia courts’ and had started to adjudicate on both civil and criminal cases using Maliki legal tradition as the sole point of reference. Even before the state had passed laws or taken any measures, some popular festive practices, such as songs, dances, and drums, began to disappear not only from large urban areas, but also from small towns located in the periphery of state local governments.⁵ The Izala theological movement, which promoted Sharia Im-
plementation, was particularly active and well-organized in Katsina, thanks to the dynamism of its leaders, especially Malam Yahaya Yakubu, who deserves further attention.

8Yahaya’s journey is not unlike that of Muhammad Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram. Having been educated exclusively in Arab-Islamic religious institutions – first in his father’s tsangaya (domestic religious school) and then at the Arabic Islamic College of Katsina – Yahaya honed his preaching skills in Maradi in the mid-1970s as he was just coming out of adolescence – a detail that is reminiscent of the many family ties between northern (Niger) and southern (Nigeria) Katsinawas. After earning a degree from Bayero University Kano and teaching at the Katsina Teacher’s College, he resigned in 1983 to devote himself entirely to anti-government radical preaching. An admirer of the Iranian Revolution, he joined the entourage of radical Shi’ite leader Malam Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, becoming the spokesperson of his organization, the ‘Islamic Movement’, in Katsina in 1985. The group formed by Yahaya consisted mainly of lower-class young people from the city of Katsina and from semi-rural villages in the state. As their leader, he fought the city’s security forces during riots in April 1991. There were no deaths, which reinforced Yahaya’s prestige among the radical Muslims of Katsina.⁶ The informal influence of his movement across the entire state of Katsina enabled him to put pressure on the government so that it would support the Sharia Implementation starting in 2000.

9An independent committee was created in 2000 under the leadership of Yahaya and other Izala figures – Yahaya had joined the Izala movement at the end of the 1990s (as had Mohammed Yusuf) – whose goal was to monitor the government’s commitment to support the legal aspect of the Sharia Implementation. Over the years, the committee’s criticism tended to demonstrate that the government of Katsina resorted to delaying tactics in order to push back the Sharia Implementation: by delaying the appointment of Sharia court judges; favouring secular criminal courts (‘magistrate courts’) for the treatment of cases involving Muslims; or consistently refusing to endorse and compensate the hisbah, the religious militia in charge of arresting Sharia violators, in a context where the federal police were not encouraged to take on that work.⁷ Criticism came not only from Izala circles; there is active support for Sharia Implementation in Katsina from executives and intellectuals of the city – perhaps more so than in Kano, where the intellectual milieu is more diverse. The vision of these intellectuals is laid out both in official documents, such as reports of the Sharia Commission, and in intellectual works such as Malam Abubakar Yusuf’s essay, Shari’a and Contemporary Issues, presented in Katsina in March 2010. While the Izala focus primarily on criminal and missionary Sharia, these intellectuals are trying to get the government to promote economic and social Sharia, but they are even less successful than their comrades-in-arms. From the perspective of its proponents, after 15 years of implementation, the Sharia Implementation programme in Katsina is a failure. The local judicial system has been reformed, yet the tactics used by the government make it possible for the implementation of Sharia to adapt to the norms of the (non-religious) rule of law upon which the Nigerian legal system is based.⁸ A kind of ‘normalization’ of Sharia took place, which was the opposite of what was intended by a project meant to be radical. A survey conducted by the research and statistics institute Afrobarometers eight years after the launch of Sharia Implementation shows that support for Sharia has significantly increased among the population, both in states that implement Sharia and in those that do not.⁹ Even among the Christian population, support or approval has gone up ten points – from 13 to 23%. Interviews conducted in Katsina confirm these statistics for all the local populations, Muslims and Christians alike, but also reveal that support has increased because the project has changed over time. In other words, what is supported or approved is not so much an unadulterated and hard-line Sharia, which would translate into sentences such as stoning, dismemberment, or retaliation, but instead the normalization of Sharia – that is, the moderation of its sentences with an implied ‘repugnancy’ clause and, at the same time, the rapid nature of its procedures. However, that is not what proponents of the reform originally meant by ‘Sharia Implementation’.

10In order to understand the significance of this ‘failure’ of the Sharia Implementation in Katsina, one should examine both the political context of its launch in the state and the limitations intrinsic to the nature of the project. A new generation of rather young politicians (in their late thirties and forties) – often described, at the time, as ‘pragmatists’, as men determined to ‘get things done’ and to be ‘efficient’ – came to the fore across the country with Nigeria’s return to a civilian democracy in 1999. The most striking example was that of the former governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola. Unlike the governors of military regimes,¹⁰ who were army officers appointed by their superiors, the governors of the democratic era got to their positions thanks to the support of political parties that had a national base. In the north, some of the young governors became convinced that Islamizing the government through the implementation of Sharia was an effective way to ‘get things done’ and to be ‘efficient’, counting on Islam’s ability to mobilize a largely Muslim population. The best illustration of this, of course, is Ahmad Sani Yerima, who became Zamfara State’s first elected governor at the age of 39 and who initiated the process of Sharia Implementation. Old-school politicians – who were more business-oriented than they were idealists or pragmatists – were much less interested in this undertaking, which, in their view, would be difficult and uncertain.

11This was the case in Katsina, then governed by Umaru Musa Yar’Adua – who would later be President of the Federal State. Yar’Adua was a man of the old political guard, a member of an aristocratic Fulani family of the emirate that held the honorary title of mutawalli (steward of the Emirate treasury), which he bore when his father died. Unlike Sani Yerima, who entered the political arena thanks to the restoration of democracy in 1999, Yar’Adua began his political career nearly two decades earlier, under the Second Republic. He was part of the political group formed by his older brother, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, under the name of People’s Front, a club of business-minded politicians which later merged with the Social Democratic Party of Nigeria (SDP), one of the two parties that the Babangida military regime had authorized in 1989 in preparation for an impending return to democracy. The People’s Front was also the formal expression of the infamous ‘Kaduna Mafia’ network, supposedly extinct, which was formed by politicians and political patrons – mainly from the north – who owed their power to the support given by Olusegun Obasanjo when he ruled the country between 1976 and 1979. Obasanjo ratified the decisions of the 1979 constitutional commission rejecting the creation of a federal Sharia Appeal Court, and he was able to impose this decision in the north largely thanks to the support of the ‘Kaduna Mafia’.¹¹ It was obvious that, being a member of this political movement, Yar’Adua was not an ideal governor for a dynamic and sincere support of the Sharia Implementation. Many of the analysts interviewed in Katsina actually stressed his reluctance, while some even insinuated that he may have sabotaged the operation. According to Judge Danladi Abubakar, Yar’Adua was faced with a contradictory situation: given the immense popularity of the Sharia Implementation at the time, he had to support it in order to be re-elected – or at least appear to be supporting it and certainly not oppose it; at the same time, however, Yar’Adua was part of a great national party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and in particular of a faction within the party that bound him to politicians from the south and forced him to take into account the opinion of Christians on the issue. ¹²He had to please both camps. While the Sharia Implementation was successfully initiated in Katsina – and relatively early on – it was only weakly supported by the government.

12But despite the frustrations and virulent criticism that his attitude elicited, Yar’Adua managed to get re-elected in 2003, which was probably due in large part to his family’s powerful presence in Katsina’s society. This re-election dealt an additional blow to the Sharia Implementation in the state. A simple comparison of the evolution of Katsina with that of its neighbouring state, Kano, reveals just that. In 1999, the Governor of Kano, Rabiu Kwankwaso, came out of the same mould as Yar’Adua, in the sense that he was also a former member of the People’s Front and of the SDP, which formed an alliance with the PDP, and he had the same reluctant behaviour towards the Sharia Implementation. In the 2003 elections, he was severely defeated by Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, a gubernatorial candidate with a pro-Sharia agenda. Shekarau went on to support missionary and criminal Sharia with the full power of the state – including officially recognizing the hisbah; establishing a ‘Societal Reorientation Directorate’ in charge of reforming the morals of the Kanawas; and strengthening the Censorship Board in order to rein in Kannywood, the Hausa film industry whose capital is Kano. To local supporters of Sharia Implementation, Katsina paled in comparison with those achievements.

13That being said, even in Kano the Sharia Implementation was widely perceived as a failure when compared with the initial project. When Shekarau ran for governor in 2015 – after the four-year hiatus, mandated by the constitution, between two consecutive terms and a third term – he was defeated by Kwankwaso. Analysing the situation in Katsina sheds light on the non-circumstantial causes of a failure that transcended state borders. To begin with, the fact that the Sharia Implementation in Katsina ended up being limited to its punitive aspects was seen as deeply problematic by a certain class of actors, whom we will call executives and Islamo-nationalist intellectuals (see further below). Paradoxically, one of the Islamo-nationalist intellectuals who fought the most for the Sharia Implementation to succeed in that state was Danladi Abubakar, a senior judge on the Katsina State High Court, which falls under what he himself refers to as ‘conventional law’ (i.e. secular law). He is not the only one, in fact, since many ‘conventional’ lawyers, who were met during fieldwork, support the process and have lent a hand so that the codification of Sharia would follow the forms and standards of modern legal codes – forms and standards that they alone master. However, these intellectuals are less interested in criminal Sharia, the substance of which reflects the Izala’s literalist orientations, than they are in economic and social Sharia; they are angry and appalled at the fact that the former draws all the attention – and fears – of the outside world and even of a part of the country’s Muslim population.

14The Sharia penal code replicates the form of modern codes of secular law, including the very decision to define Sharia within the constraints of a written legal code. But its substance strives to literally match the injunctions and prescriptions of the Quran and the Sunnah, which, from the perspective of the Islamo-nationalist intellectuals, creates a contradiction – though they do not say so openly. Although its editors insist on its literal adherence to the legal tradition of the Sunnah and the hadiths, the Sharia penal code also inherits its rigidity from the doctrinal and ideological sensitivity of the Izala and of Islamo-nationalist intellectuals. One can easily imagine, as it has been done elsewhere in the past,¹³ that since the codification created a form of positive law – with Sharia as its Grundnorm¹⁴ – it could be adapted to the cultural, political, and economic aspects of northern Nigeria’s modern society. Such an adaptation would have been necessary had the concern been to get the law to handle the practical issues, old and new, of that society. However, the goal of Sharia Implementation proponents was focused more on an ideal and less on its technical aspects: it consisted in reinventing the perfect Islamic society the way it may have existed at the time of Prophet Mohammed, or at least the time of the Sultanate of Sokoto, and whose tradition has supposedly been destroyed or perverted by colonialism. The substance of the criminal code is thus determined by the fact that it must not only set in stone the literal word of Prophetic traditions, but also purge the north of the deleterious effects of colonial rule, which the proponents of implementation believe has survived through the secularism of Nigeria’s federal state.¹⁵ It must also reflect a particular aversion to expressions of local cultures, which the Izala theology likens to ‘paganism’ and which Islamo-nationalist intellectuals perceive as un-Islamic. This also includes cultural practices that had often been accepted by the currents of a so-called traditional Islam (adinin galgajiya), including the Tijaniyya. It is therefore not surprising to see that, besides expected literalist sanctions against the use of alcohol or sexual acts between adults of the same sex, festive practices such as ‘praise singing and drumming’ could constitute an offence. This would outlaw the art of griots, but the definition of this crime means that the penalty attached to it could also apply to certain Sufi rituals, for example.¹⁶ Any gathering of persons of the same sex involving dance and music is also illegal under the Sharia penal code, which would actually amount to banning most of the northern Nigerian film industry, which constantly stages such gatherings¹⁷.

15Therefore, the Sharia codes inevitably create criminals whose distinctive characteristic is mainly their material poverty or the vulnerability of their social status. They establish categories of crimes and offences that make it easier to incriminate vulnerable people (women, for example) or the members of the working classes, because their (mis)behaviour is more exposed and more easily monitored by a ‘local police’ such as the hisbah, for example. Despite the absence of statistical data, the interviewees – who were in favour of Sharia, as it were – all emphasized the fact that crime has gone down in Katsina since the Sharia Implementation was first launched. This piece of information is credible insofar as ‘crime’ is understood mostly as petty crime, prostitution, and observable moral disorder – all of which primarily concern people from disadvantaged backgrounds and which are even easier to fight through street policing and ‘speedy’ justice.

16Given the Promethean ambition of these codes, social inequality in the way that crime and sin are punished is a troubling outcome for Islamo-nationalist intellectuals. Judge Danladi Abubakar underlines the implicit contradiction which now exists between criminal Sharia and the Sharia Implementation project. The rigorous discipline these codes impose on individuals can only be accepted in its transformative – and not only repressive – logic if the integrity of the rulers is equally rigorous and if it is paired with a project of economic justice and effective public charity. If the project is losing momentum, it is because it has failed to take into account the need for a popular legitimization of criminal Sharia. It is clear that given the massive enthusiasm shown when the process was initiated, proponents of the Sharia Implementation may have thought that its legitimacy was a sure thing. But after 15 years of effort, the problems seem more complex than initially, and the results are clearly limited and ambiguous.

17Directly targeting the contradiction between criminal Sharia and the Sharia Implementation in a public lecture given in March 2010, Judge Danladi Abubakar wished to underline, in this context, that Sharia is not limited to a set of legal codes. Sharia is essentially, he said, ‘a coalition of spiritual, moral, socio-economic and legal norms blended and interwoven together’. For an effective implementation of Sharia, all the components mentioned must be brought to work concurrently. But in order for the spiritual and moral aspect to have an effect on individuals and society, he insisted, the government had to provide ‘honest, sincere, just, and transparent leadership’. It had to create

an economic environment that would oppose monopolistic tendencies and the exploitation of vulnerable people, all the while putting in place a system of social assistance to the needy under the leadership of people who, once again, at all levels of authority, would be truly responsible, honest, fair, and transparent.¹⁸

18The judge insisted heavily on the rigour of the leaders, because the establishment of Sharia institutions inevitably created opportunities for corruption, so much so that the level of corruption in the state may have increased accordingly. At the beginning of the Sharia Implementation process, those called ‘secularist Muslims’ by their ‘pro-Sharia’ opponents had already predicted this development,¹⁹ but this observation is also made today by serious Islamo-nationalist intellectuals such as Judge Danladi Abubakar in Katsina. Unfortunately, we were unable to collect examples of such misconduct during the survey, for reasons one might guess. That being said, an almost caricatural illustration of the contradictions that the Sharia Implementation can engender is found in what took place in the neighbouring state of Kano in August 2010, a few months after the conference of the Katsina judge. This was not corruption per se, at least not in the financial sense, but the details of this contradiction appeared in all their grotesque obviousness.

19The origins of the case go back to 2007, when a sex scandal broke out in Kano after a private video of a sexual nature, involving an actress from Kannywood, made the rounds in the city, notably on cell phones via Bluetooth. In response to what was a private incident, Governor Shekarau appointed a former commander of the hisbah, Malam Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, to the head of the state’s Censors Board, whose assignment was to ‘moralize’ Kannywood. The new Director of the Censors Board began his work by multiplying arrests, fines, and bans on the dissemination of cinematographic works, while also making countless speeches on state media about morality in Islam, in particular vis-à-vis women and young girls. Three years later, in August 2010, a police patrol caught Abdulkarim in his car in a compromising position with a minor. He tried to escape, was caught after being hit by a motorcyclist, and was taken to the station where his identity was discovered. Abdulkarim was released on bail and immediately left the country under the pretext of making the small pilgrimage of umrah – but mainly to let things ‘blow over’, which would obviously not be a viable solution for a man from the working class. Despite Governor Shekarau’s promises to open an investigation, Abdulkarim was not charged and he peacefully resumed his duties upon his return from Saudi Arabia.

20Such incidents have contributed to people’s disappointment in the Sharia Implementation and show that, with its radical ambition, the project contains a strong element of utopian thinking, which places it at odds not only with the parameters of Nigerian political life and the social and cultural complexity of the north, but also with the motives and characters of the people who implement it.

Maradi: The weight of provincialism

21Just like ‘states’ in Nigeria, ‘regions’ in Niger are both political and administrative entities. However, regions are much more integrated into the central government than states are into the federal state. Visible structures are similar. In Nigeria, the state replicates the federal presidential model within its territorial unit; in Niger, the region is a parliamentary structure – which is similar to the base model of the Nigerian states – with an elected Regional Council headed by the President of the Regional Council, a position which is more similar to that of a prime minister than to that of a president of the Republic.

22The Regional Council and city councils make up the base of local politics. Like the governors in Nigeria, the President of the Regional Council in Niger is always de facto a ‘native son’. The same is true for regional and city councillors. This kind of political structure allows for the expression of local sub-patriotisms, which can bring about virtually systemic divergences among the political entities that constitute the central state, such as those that the Sharia Implementation elicited in Nigeria. However, it would actually be impossible for this kind of development to take place in Niger. Unlike states in Nigeria, regions in Niger do not share the sovereignty of the central state; they simply implement it at the local level. Regions and city councils have resources to carry out regional public policies in areas ‘of local and regional interest’, but the main policies are implemented in collaboration with the central state, meaning that local and regional public policies are just local adaptations of policies that have been decided at the central level. With its ‘decentralized state services’ formula, the national administration places itself at the service of regions and cities, yet the careers of civil servants and the administrations’ operating budget depend on centralized decisions. At the head of the Nigérien regions, there are also governors, but these are representatives appointed by the central executive power, not locally elected officials.

23The most important outcome of such an institutional makeup, as far as the subject at hand is concerned, is that the Nigérien judiciary has no real local expression. While Katsina judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are usually Katsina natives appointed by the government of Katsina, those in Maradi are not necessarily Maradi natives and are appointed by the central government. In both countries, the judicial system operates on a kind of dualism, mixing or juxtaposing secular (or conventional) law and customary (or Islamized) law. In Nigeria, this dualism is generally a form of parallelism. In Katsina, before the Sharia Implementation was initiated, the judicial system comprised, at the first-instance level, English law courts (‘magistrate courts’ for criminal law, ‘district courts’ for civil law) and ‘native law’ courts, which handled customs, Sharia, and criminal law of English origin for small crimes and offences (in ‘area courts’). This dualism has been strengthened by the Sharia Implementation, since ‘Sharia courts’, which replaced the area courts, now handle both civil and criminal cases. In Niger, this dualism is a form of hierarchy: traditional leaders have first-instance jurisdiction over minor civil disputes or petty crime at the local level, on which they adjudicate following Islamized customs, while people with immediately higher rank apply Romano-Germanic law. This hierarchy also applies to family law cases, which are heard by secular judges who are assisted by assessors specialized in Islamized customs. This institutional landscape reflects Niger’s colonial past, when conventional law was considered to be ‘the right of the citizen’ (superior), while customs were seen as ‘the right of the subject’ (subaltern). While these legal values may have ceased to exist, the effects that they generated live on in a very different context, in particular through the fact that customs (including Islamized customs), although used as a legal accessory, are not actually part of the law.²⁰

24In this context, it is not surprising that there has been no emergence of a legal radicalism similar to what has been seen in Katsina. What is particular to Niger is primarily the existence of a sociological divide on the issue of Sharia, which actually sheds light, by contrast, on certain aspects of Katsina’s evolution. In order to illustrate this sociological divide, the following are two examples. The first is from a recent survey, and the second is from an event dating back to the end of 2012.

25In 2014, an Afrobarometer poll revealed that 67% of Nigériens were in favour of a revision of the constitution that would make Sharia the main source of law in their country.²¹ The distribution of respondents by social categories indicates that this figure represents social groups that form a majority in Niger: people living in rural areas, or those who have had an ‘informal’ education – in short, the ‘popular masses’. Despite its importance, however, this figure is probably small compared with the results that a similar survey conducted in northern Nigeria would have yielded, insofar as approval rates of the Sharia Implementation in that region transcend social barriers, as we have seen in the case of Katsina. In Niger, the survey highlighted a significant divide between social categories, especially between people living in urban versus rural areas, and, more precisely, between the educated and the uneducated, with an approval rate of Sharia that decreases as a person’s years of education increase, from primary to secondary and then higher education. The survey does not, however, capture possible regional variations, and we will see later how this divide is expressed in the case of Maradi.

26Another telling example of this divide comes from the ‘General Assembly of the Nigérien Judiciary’, a series of debates that took place in November 2012 to examine the problems of such a system. Altogether, its sessions drew more than 500 participants, from all the professions of the legal field and those of law implementation, to initiate the process of modernization of a judicial system that was ‘[weakened] by corruption and political interventions’.²² However, whether in plenary sessions or in committees, the issue of Sharia was never addressed.²³ Among the participants were two judges who, judging by their clothing, looked like they could hold Islamist views. One of them tried to broach the subject in plenary session but was not successful. He was not silenced but was ignored, as if the question was not even worth addressing. The consensus on the principle of secularism in Nigérien law was so strong that neither the problems ‘plaguing’ the judiciary – the reason the General Assembly had been summoned – nor the awareness of the existence of a broad popular support for Sharia had called this principle into question. This consensus reflects in part what we learned from the results of the Afrobarometer survey, since justice professionals belong to the social category that is the least keen on Sharia. But, as we have learned from field surveys, this is also a category of public service officials who are consciously invested in the secularism of the state, which is not the case for their colleagues in Nigeria.

27Regarding the specific case of Maradi: although the Afrobarometer survey did not offer a breakdown by region, we can assume that support for Sharia is even stronger in that area than the national average, since the social groups that are most likely to support Sharia, rural and uneducated people, are numerically higher in Maradi than anywhere else in Niger. Maradi’s urbanization rate is 14%, compared with a national average of 17%, and its literacy rate is 19%, while the national average is 29%. During the 1990s and 2000s, Maradi also became the region of Niger where the Izala movement made the most headway, especially because of its proximity to Nigeria and the constant exchanges between the Izala organizations of Kano and Katsina and those of Maradi. In Maradi, many small Niger-Nigerian sermons are held during Wa’azin Kasa da Kasa (the International Sermon), the international meeting of Izala preachers, which is held sporadically; these sermons are used as a pretext to bring to the city the stars of Izala preaching from Nigerian cities. More significantly, many outlets in Maradi (kiosks and shops) now sell Izala products – mainly audio and video CDs of sermons. Field surveys yielded two interesting findings: no other theological movement is represented in this type of business, and the overwhelming majority of products sold are from Nigeria.²⁴

28The critical aspect of legal radicalism is expressed in the discourse of Maradian Izala, which actually makes things more difficult for researchers when it comes to interviewing preachers. One preacher who agreed to talk began the interview, before a single question was asked, by calling his interlocutor (myself) a ‘philosopher’ and an ‘emissary of the West’ in Hausa. Although the interview had started on an uninviting note, the conversation subsequently took place in a pleasant atmosphere. The seemingly hostile introduction took aim at the targets of Maradian Izala, namely secularism²⁵ and the hegemony of the West. Even in this regard, the discourses coming from each side of the border are noticeably different. In Katsina, and in northern Nigeria generally speaking, the critical discourse about the West refers repeatedly to mulkin malaka (colonization) and, much more rarely, to contemporary events. In Maradi, on the other hand, the colonial era was never mentioned and the interviewee focused instead on two situations: first the events in the Middle East, analysed from the geopolitical perspective of a siege, according to which Muslims are attacked by their Western and Israeli enemies, sometimes with the support of unenlightened Islamic powers (the Saudis, in this case); and secondly, Western humanitarian action, seen as an insidious instrument of domination, which, one of the preachers stated, for poor Muslim countries like Niger should be systematically replaced with aid coming from rich Muslim countries. As for the discourse on secularism, it emphasizes that this concept bars Niger from adopting a system of Islamic government, even though, in the opinion of Malam dan Katsina for example, all Islamic doctrines – including that of the Izala’s theological opponents, the Tijaniyya – endorse the same theory of government. The interviews also showed that the Izala in Maradi feel weakened by a lack of support from yan book ‑ that is, secular executives and intellectuals.²⁶ While legal radicalism prevailed in Katsina thanks to a collusion between Izala and Islamo-nationalist intellectuals, this latter element never developed in Niger beyond a minority coalition that seems to have lost its momentum in the early 2000s.

29It should be noted that, from this perspective, Niger was one step ahead of northern Nigeria due to its earlier political democratization, which dates back to 1991. In Niger, the Islamic-nationalist unrest spurred by political liberalization took place throughout the 1990s, a full decade before their neighbour to the south. During that period, a certain collusion had begun to emerge between the Izala and Islamo-nationalist intellectuals. In Maradi, this was expressed by the Association for the Diffusion of Islam in Niger (ADINI-Islam), founded in that city by a disciple of Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, Yahaya Mohammed, and supported by Izala billionaire Rabé dan Tchadoua. It was also in Maradi that the country’s first Islamic magazine, Ikra, was published. It was founded by an Islamo-nationalist intellectual, Ali Zada. The latter was a native of Dosso, a town located in the west of the country, and had no real ties to Maradi where he arrived as a state official. Nevertheless, he was able to develop ties with young Izala-inclined shopkeepers in the city; this was probably the first attempt to form this type of sociological collusion, which, in Nigeria, made it possible to initiate the Sharia Implementation process in the 2000s. However, the activities of ADINI-Islam, like those of Ali Zada, soon focused on Niamey. In the context of centralized Niger, the capital was the place where Islamic radicals needed to exert pressure. For such a movement, however, this was also a much more difficult terrain than Maradi. The opposing side, the proponents of a secular republicanism inherited from the particular colonial dynamic of Francophone countries, was leading the democratization movement, and even if they had to make concessions to Islamic radicals during a stormy decade, the latter were unable to further their project to establish an ‘Islamic state’ in Niger. Moreover, Islamic radicalism in Niger immediately focused on the political field: no claims to ‘restore’ Sharia were made, because the memory of the Sokoto Caliphate, and the destruction of its Islamic rule of law by colonial domination is not as vivid as in Nigeria, which constituted the greater part of the Calipathe’s territory.

30In short, despite its many similarities to Katsina, Maradi is tied to Niamey when it comes to its political evolution. The city is in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, a popular trend of social and political criticism has developed through Izala preaching that was largely influenced by the religious discourse coming from Katsina and Kano; on the other hand, this trend, also influenced by its Nigérien identity, remains moot since Maradi is not the place from which radical change can spread in the country. Furthermore, local Izala were unable to gain the support of a critical mass of Nigérien intellectuals and Islamo-nationalist officials at the central level. Despite being the capital of the Izala movement in Niger, Maradi is also a provincial town, compared with both Niamey and Katsina. It is under the cultural authority of the latter and the political authority of the former.

31As a result, it could be said that on the one hand, in Katsina, Sharia legal radicalism grew to the point of leading to the reform of the state’s judicial system while failing in its project to establish a perfect Islamic society; and on the other hand, in Maradi, legal radicalism did not develop and political radicalism is moot. These variances are rooted in the differences that exist between the Nigerian and Nigérien contexts. To understand the implications of these contrasting developments, including the particular nature of the various types of Islamic radicalism (legal, political, critical) that can be observed, these contexts must be examined using the tools of historical analysis. The emergence of legal radicalism in Nigeria can be explained by comparing the country’s historical trajectory with that of Niger – which reveals why this radicalism developed in the northern part of Nigeria without spreading to Niger, a country both close and far away at the same time. A historical analysis comparing the Nigérien context with that of Nigeria also allows us to address, at least partially, the question of the future of Islamic political radicalization in Niger.

Genealogy and implications of legal radicalism

32Legal radicalism is undeniably a distinctive feature of northern Nigeria. Although it can be found in other parts of the Muslim world, it is not common in West Africa. Even in Nigeria, it has little appeal for the Muslim population of the south-west (Yorubaland being significantly Islamized) and seems to be confined to the former territory of the Sultanate or Caliphate of Sokoto and, specifically, to the area of the large emirates – including Borno, which was not conquered by Sokoto but was the subject of its doctrinal dominion. A clear illustration of this can be found in this description of the territory of Sokoto at the end of the 19^th century, at a time when its system of government had stabilized and was no longer in a phase of expansion or a process of strengthening:

By the time of British occupation of Northern Nigeria between 1900 and 1903, Muslim rule in the big emirates of Sokoto, Kano, Zaria, and Borno was quite firm and consolidated among Muslims. Non-Muslims who were under effective control in these emirates paid the statutory tax in addition to discharging other obligations towards the Islamic state, but otherwise they managed their internal affairs without interference by the Islamic authorities. Unconsolidated parts of the 19^th century conquests during and after the Sokoto jihad did not more than recognize a vague suzerainty of the emirs. Large areas of Northern Nigeria, especially in parts of the present Bauchi, Plateau, Niger, Kwara, Kaduna, Gongola, and Benue States, lay outside the expanding frontiers of Islam. Some of these were no more than raiding grounds of the Islamic powers, but in others Islamic influences were completely nonexistent.²⁷

33Aside from Kaduna, Bauchi, and Niger, all the states that initiated a process of Sharia Implementation belong to the zone of the large emirates identified in this description. Since Sharia was already in place in those areas in the 19^th century, one might think that its implementation at the beginning of the 21^st century may have held a certain legitimacy that would make the concept of radicalism rather doubtful in this case. As mentioned above, when Ahmad Sani Yerima, Governor of Zamfara State, launched the process through a giant rally in the capital in 1999, some reports said that more than two million Muslims – predominantly from the north – gathered to support and applaud the initiative. Furthermore, the initiative was launched legitimately and legally, within the legal framework of the Nigerian constitution and did not meet any opposition from the federal state.

34Nevertheless, it is still a form of radicalism, for reasons both historical and contemporary. As illustrated by the example of Katsina, the aim of the Sharia Implementation was not simply to reform the judicial system, but to use this reform, which the people wanted and the constitution permitted, to (re)Islamize the government and society of the northern states with a particular theological–political orientation. This aim indirectly stems from a historical logic of confrontation, shaped by the British colonial practice of ‘indirect rule’, a logic that lived on after Independence and has weakened the Nigerian state. Moreover, because its aim was to Islamize the government and society, the Sharia Implementation took the form of a radical project based, firstly, on a complete criticism of Nigeria’s system of government and, secondly, on a utopian vision of a world transformed and regenerated by the efficiency of divine law.

Conflicting rules of law

35For a long time, Islam was a minority religion in West Africa, including in its Sudanese region, even though the opposite impression is given by ‘the source effect’ (the exclusive predominance of Islamic written sources until the first arrivals of Portuguese ships from the Atlantic). It used to be found in cities and courts at a time when most of the population lived in village communities, often without masters or kings (and thus without courts). It went through two periods of expansion in the 16^th and then in the 18^th-19^th centuries. The first period, which ended with the fall of the Songhay Empire, was followed by a long ‘recession’, and historical data indicates the possibility of a similar recession after the second period of expansion ‑ especially if, as was likely the case in the 1890s, the Sokoto emirates had been conquered by Rabih Fadlallah, the conqueror of Borno.

36This second period of expansion corresponds to the jihad of the Fulani from Torodbe clerical communities; its most brilliant success came in the form of the conquest of the Hausa kingdoms of central Sudan and the creation of the Sultanate of Sokoto in the 1810s. Although all these jihads started as proselytizing war movements, they resulted, once a territorial base had been acquired, in systems of government for which Islamization was not a priority. The geopolitical context and the state of the political economy of the time were obviously insurmountable barriers for any project of that nature. For the jihadist states that were smaller and more isolated (e.g. the imamats of Fouta Djallon and of Fouta Tooro), poorer (e.g. the Liptako Emirate), or had no expansionist agenda (e.g. the Diina of Macina), strategic considerations of survival – in a Sudanese world that was still largely dominated by animist kingdoms or itinerant predatory groups – outweighed the propaganda fidei.²⁸ As illustrated by Ubah’s description of Sokoto, the sultanate was not a special case, especially in a context of political economy which did not lend itself to mass Islam. We should remember that, at the time, most people lived in village communities that were attached to their traditional religions and their customs;²⁹ slavery remained the main method of putting together a workforce; and the mobility of Muslims was contingent on trade routes that were protected by partnerships with people, mostly animist, whose land they crossed. Therefore, emphasis was placed everywhere on establishing appropriate institutions that were designed to govern people or exploit them, rather than to convert them.

37These institutions ensured the emergence and operation of an Islamic rule of law in the better-held areas of the jihadist state territories. The emirates provided the most Islamized parts of the territory of Sokoto, as well as of Borno, with religious institutions of government, including Islamic courts and a system of educational patronage, while tax and land administration had been simplified – compared with what existed before the foundation of the sultanate – using the jurisprudential principles of Sharia. The ‘big emirates’ were therefore founded on an Islamic rule of law, a system of government that laid down the rights and obligations of all members of society according to their status in Islam (including those who were not Muslims), governed interpersonal relationships (contracts, family), determined contributions to the community (zakat and other taxes), and, therefore, limited the scope of government to the implementation of the rule of law and – in principle – the promotion of social justice. The act of faith upon which the government was based was not a social contract between rulers and ruled, as was the case with the civic state, but the recognition by all, rulers and ruled alike, of the sovereignty of God, to whom ultimately answered both those who commanded and those who obeyed.

38Of course, this was a theoretical ideal; it was often contradicted by a reality consisting of violence, injustice, corruption, or incompetence, as is the case in any system of government that is complex. With colonization, the objective conditions that determined the functioning of this system changed. In particular, an unexpected result of colonial peace and the revolutionary transformation of the West African political economy was the start of a rapid process of mass Islamization through Sudan and the Sahel. This decisive moment in the history of Islam in the region was also accompanied – one could even say contradicted – by the advent of a type of government that was not based on Islam.

39Great Britain and France, which took possession of Sokoto and its sphere of influence, also operated on the basis of a rule of law. But the European nations’ rule of law, unlike that of Sokoto, was not religious but civic. As with Sharia, the scope of government was determined and regulated by the rights and obligations of individuals, the jurisprudence (Great Britain) or codes (France) governing interpersonal relationships and determining contributions to the community.³⁰ This was based on a process of law creation that reflected the sovereignty of the people and its participation in the social contract upon which the status of citizen was based – that is, that of a member of the city, who is equal to others. Here again theory was not without more or less serious failures; but the main failure, in the eyes of Muslims, was that the theory of a civic rule of law could be used against the Islamic rule of law. Since their modes of operation were similar while their sources of inspiration were different, these two ‘rules of law’ were mutually exclusive, and only force could determine which would prevail.³¹

40However, although the ideological discourse of legal radicalism in northern Nigeria emphasizes the idea that what started this movement was the elimination by colonial power of the Islamic rule of law, the reality is more complex and the cause and effect relationship is less direct. Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, the great Nigerian Sharia ideologist, was perhaps the first to define the issue from this angle. In his memoirs, he states that ‘the English law was imposed on the Muslims, thereby making it a far more serious issue, because it could not be compared with the Sharia’.³² What Gumi meant was that, because of its divine origins, Sharia was infinitely superior to English law, the latter being a man-made law that ‘betrays its European origins, including those pre-Christian pagan influences which characterize it, and which are particularly odd in our cultural setting’. However, it is precisely because ‘English law’ and Sharia are comparable in their modes of operation and their field of practice that they are in conflict: one cannot be applied where the other one exists, and the two are mutually exclusive. However – Gumi later recognized this as being the real source of the problem – the British behaved as if the two laws could co-exist. They did not want to eliminate the Islamic rule of law: on the contrary, they extended its territorial scope and strengthened its implementation, but they also wanted to manipulate internal factors and subordinate its mechanisms to the needs of the colonial enterprise.

41Indeed, generally speaking, both English and French colonialisms had a tendency, in their early stages, to use Islamic institutions as tools to ‘indirectly’ govern both Muslim and non-Muslim populations.³³ Even later, the rapid growth of the Muslim population, which took place through mass conversions, maintained the political relevance of such an approach. At the same time, however, the colonial state intended for this institutional expedient to be managed by the upper ranks of its administration, while controlling the implementation of Islamic law via limitations that had their origins in European modern legal principles. For the British, this control was expressed in particular by the ‘repugnancy’ clause, which was applied primarily in criminal cases and allowed for local customs and laws to be fully applied provided that they were not ‘repugnant to natural justice, equity and good consciousness’.³⁴ Consequently, the Islamic rule of law was maintained and even developed across all of northern Nigeria, while being modified and adapted to the needs of the colonial administration and to certain legal and cultural European standards. Thus, for criminal offences, the British permitted Islamic courts to make use of the capital sentence, but only in some cases and provided that the execution be performed by hanging. Incidentally, this adjustment to British sensibility has survived until today. Katsina is the only state in which a Sharia court has used the death penalty – in the case of Sani Rodi, who had been accused of a triple murder in June 2001. Although proponents of Maliki legal orthodoxy – including Sheikh Habibu Kaura, a leading figure of the Izala movement in Katsina who witnessed Rodi’s execution – protested the fact that the execution method did not conform to the principle of reciprocity, Rodi was hanged and not stabbed to death.³⁵

42The colonial principles and practices of the British and the French in West Africa were generally more alike than they were different. That being said, at this point we should mention a few differences that became important later, especially after 1945, when colonialism became more liberal and integrated the perspective of the independence of the colonies. Emphasis is often placed on the fact that the British practised indirect rule in Northern Nigeria, while the French resorted to direct rule in all their colonies. In reality, however, the French practised two different policies: assimilation and association. The latter, which posited that Africans were different from the French but were associated with their government, was based on a philosophy similar to that underlying Lord Lugard’s ‘indirect rule’ theory which was applied in Northern Nigeria. But although the effects of association were similar to those of indirect rule, they were also more categorical. The French claimed that an association was created between people from superior and inferior cultures, something that the British also subscribed to but without making it a principle of government. This is not a mere nuance. In the legal field, the British and the French were convinced of the superiority of their systems of law, which they considered more advanced, progressive, and civilized than those that existed in Africa. But they were in no rush to replace the latter, since such an endeavour could be politically difficult and financially costly. What set them apart were the solutions that they offered to the same problem.

43In northern Nigeria, the British chose to preserve the legal system of the emirates, as mentioned previously, with what they deemed minor but necessary touch-ups, which, in reality, offended Muslims. In Niger, the French set up a fragmented system in which there coexisted both French law and a regime called indigénat. This regime was itself divided into two rather distinct segments, with, on the one hand, a range of discretionary measures that promoted the colonial enterprise by limiting or invalidating the rule of law (both Islamic and civic), and, on the other hand, a range of customs, or ‘customary’ law, applicable to ‘personal status’ and to family. In both cases, British and French, the results were rather inconsistent (and will not be described here), but they led to significantly different situations. One of the major differences was the fact that in French law, the civic rule of law was seen and valued as ‘the right of citizens’, a rule of law to which it was rewarding and liberating to be ‘assimilated’, while the indigénat system was seen as the right of the subject, or rather the lack thereof – reflecting the fact that, as Hubert Deschamps ironically put it, the French doctrine was ‘the association of man and horse’.³⁶ Therefore, in Niger, the elite educated in the schools of colonization, wanting the same rights as French citizens – and thus wanting to stop being subjects – sought the abolition of the indigénat system and the affirmation of equal rights throughout the entire colony, which was obtained in 1946. Access to French law in civil and criminal matters was thus considered, here as in other French colonies, to be progress and a victory in the anti-colonial struggle.

44In contrast, in northern Nigeria, the legal hierarchy was not as clear-cut. We can say, simplifying considerably, that business and civil liability laws – which were important for the implementation of public policies – were generally of British origin, while personal status and family laws were indigenous. Criminal law was governed by a code based on British law, but in northern Nigeria, crimes and offences, including those punishable by death, could be adjudicated by higher indigenous courts, those of emirs – even though, as mentioned previously, in the event of an execution, ‘British’ hanging was preferred over ‘Islamic’ beheading or crucifixion. In any case, unlike in the French colonies, everyone had access to an entire system that formed an intricate web of laws and procedures with different origins and significance, depending on the type of problem brought to court and / or the part of the colony where one resided.

45However – and in parallel with the French colonies – the situation changed in the aftermath of the Second World War. As Nigeria was moving towards independence, the system of colonial law seemed too fragmented and ‘backward’ for a future modern nation-state. In the 1950s, a general effort was therefore made to modernize the judicial system, leading to the first reform of the system of Sharia implementation. Citing similar reforms in other Muslim countries, the codification of Sharia at that stage created an Islamic law that was applied only to personal status and family law, referring cases of crimes and offences to the penal code that was adopted nationally. This is referred to as the ‘settlement of 1960’. This 1960 resolution therefore created, within the Nigerian legal system, personal status and family laws based on Maliki jurisprudence and adjudicated by local courts (‘area courts’), above which was the Sharia Court of Appeal, a superior Sharia court located in Kaduna, the capital of the northern region. Just as Sheikh Abubakar Gumi – the Grand Kadi in the north – had understood it, this represented a subordination of the Islamic rule of law to a civic rule of law, a subordination which reduced Sharia to a mere sub-category of Nigerian law that dealt with the privacy of Muslims in the north, with no jurisdiction over civil cases, let alone over criminal ones.³⁷ And so it seemed that in 1960, the civic rule of law had somehow prevailed in Nigeria.

46The same thing took place in Niger but in a more drastic way. Indeed, the indigénat system was abolished in 1945 and replaced by French law; there was no creation of Islamic courts. In theory, the French Civil Code governed Nigérien family and civil matters, but the practical impossibility of consistently applying this code in the family field led to the almost clandestine emergence of a customary law that was originally based on the justice applied by traditional leaders. This customary law is part of the procedures followed by the secular justice system in cases of divorce, marriage, and inheritance, although it is practised in a more Islamized form by the Islamic Association of Niger. These, it should be emphasized, are not courts and are not part of Niger’s judiciary: they are comparable to the judicial panels used in Yorubaland in south-west Nigeria to deal with Muslim family cases, resorting to arbitration rather than litigation.

47Although the subordination or dissolution of the Islamic rule of law to the civic or secular rule of law seems to have been accepted in Niger – and in the south-west of Nigeria, as we have noted – the ideal of a ‘restoration’ of Islamic rule of law in the north of Nigeria gradually developed through a rejection of the 1960 resolution, radicalized with each accident of history, and has morphed into a project to build a perfect Islamic society – all the more perfect as it was to emerge from the socio-political chaos into which Nigeria had plunged.

Complete deadlocks

48While colonial indirect rule contained the seeds of legal radicalism, it developed only as a result of setbacks and blockages experienced by northern Muslims after the 1966 coup and during the process of adoption of the constitution of the Second Republic in 1979. Indirect rule had developed and adapted the judicial institutions of Sokoto to Nigeria’s colonial context, promising Muslims they would continue to be governed by ‘their law’. At the same time, however, this approach was purely instrumental, and so in the end the logic of development of an Islamic rule of law was subordinated to the imperatives of the colonial government. While such a contradiction could be resolved in the colonial context by the authoritarian nature of the ruling regime – Lord Lugard would gladly remind emirs that Britain dominated them thanks to its superior force – the problem presented itself differently once the independent state of Nigeria replaced the colonial state. Dividing Nigeria into three autonomous regions allowed for a full development of the Sharia judicial system, from ‘area courts’ to a Court of Appeal located in Kaduna, in the northern region. Although critics like Gumi deplored the fact that Islamic courts theoretically dealt only with family affairs, the autonomy of the system seemed to be at least guaranteed in an otherwise favourable political context, since the Premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna (‘Defender’) of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, favoured a gradual Islamization of the government in that region.

49The bloody coup in 1966, which aimed to end what its authors – soldiers from Christian south-east Nigeria – considered to be an Islamic hegemony, was followed by the disintegration of Nigeria’s regions into a dozen states, which resulted in the dismantlement of the Sharia judicial system. Those events, as well as the prolonged political crisis in Nigeria which ensued, including the Biafra War, also challenged the adherence of northern Muslims to the 1960 resolution and revealed that the main issue, from their point of view, was to achieve unity and ensure the autonomy of Sharia in Nigeria – that is to say, without challenging the secularism of its constitution or breaking with the Christians. Given the intransigence of Christians in the face of a rather modest and ‘reasonable’ project and the northerners’ growing desire for an Islamized government – mainly because of violent crises and the corruption of the federal state – the issue went through transformations that led to the emergence of two types of Islamic radicalism in northern Nigeria: political radicalism and legal radicalism.

50The transition back to constitutional democracy, initiated in the late 1970s, first led to a mobilization of northern Muslims for a rehabilitation of the legal autonomy of Sharia. The creation of Sharia courts of appeal in each of the ten new states that had replaced the Northern Region had opened the door to insoluble contradictions in appeal rulings made in several different courts. Reconstituting the unity and jurisdictional autonomy of Sharia, the only way to solve this problem, required the establishment of a federal Sharia Court of Appeal. Moreover, from the perspective of Muslims, such a reform would simply create a situation of equity or equality, since they saw the secular judicial system as an implementation of ‘Anglo-Christian law’, which satisfied the country’s Christian population while the Muslim population had an incomplete judiciary. But the Christians’ take on the matter was very different. From their perspective, the secular law was not Christian. It was a positive law inherited from the colonizers, before which the various categories of the population were equal, regardless of their religious affiliation. From this point of view, Sharia was but the Muslims’ customary law and had to be treated equally with the customary law of non-Muslims, instead of enjoying the same status as the secular law. Granting the Sharia such a status, by giving it a federal institution, would amount to indirectly ‘Islamizing’ the national justice system and sanctioning the ‘hegemonic project’ of northern Muslims.

51During constitutional debates, the solution proposed by Christians was to create Sharia courts of appeal and customary courts of appeal, as well as to grant the states the ability to extend the jurisdiction of religious courts to areas they deemed necessary and desirable – which created opportunities which were later to be seized by proponents of the Sharia Implementation. Despite the opposition of the Muslim delegates, it was this solution that was chosen for the 1979 constitution, marking a defeat for the Muslims, since the operational problems related to the Sharia judicial system as it then was remained the same and even worsened because of ancillary reforms.

52This defeat for Muslims took place during the Iranian Revolution, an event that offered a glimpse into the possibility of establishing an Islamic state in many Muslim countries and helped to radicalize many young Muslims, including Yakubu Yahaya in Katsina, as mentioned previously. Political radicalism – this project of Islamic hegemony that some Muslims in the north actually aspired to – was not the result of the 1979 defeat or of the Iranian Revolution; but from 1979 onwards, it was to permeate the minds of those who wished to solve the problem of the Islamic rule of law in Nigeria. During the ‘Years of Lead’, from 1983 to 1999, this diffusion of radicalism through the issue of Sharia took place discreetly via the educated classes in the north. When the issue came to the fore again in 1999, it was therefore no longer about simply reconstructing the unity and autonomy of the Sharia judicial system, but about using Sharia to Islamize the government and society. To the first theme – which was moderate and non-subversive but blocked by the intransigence of Christians – was added the more radical and subversive theme of a utopian Islamic society, which was the result of a political radicalism that, for a long time, had remained confined to marginal groups such as Mohammed Marwa’s Yan Tatsine and Ibrahim al-Zakzaky’s Yan Shi’a. This is how someone like Yakubu Yahaya and someone like Judge Danladi Abubakar – who in other circumstances would have had nothing in common – found themselves in the same fight with a passion and a vision that were genuinely shared. This is also how the project of Sharia Implementation, based on a substrate of legitimacy that has its origins in the government of Sokoto and the mass Islamization of the colonial period, became a radical project – meaning that, like any radical ideology, it had to find its legitimacy in its execution.

53At a conference at Bayero University in December 1999, Malam Ibrahim al-Zakzaky explained why, unlike the Izala and many of his former followers who had joined this movement, he would not support the Sharia Implementation. He said that two conflicts would arise with the implementation of Sharia:

One conflict will be with the constitution which will claim superiority over the Shari’ah and will, therefore, place the Shari’ah under its control and regulations. The other conflict will be with the Shari’ah itself which, as the Law of Almighty God, claims superiority over all laws and therefore cannot accept the supremacy of the Nigerian constitution.³⁸

54The absolute incompatibility between Islamic rule of law and civic rule of law is thus reaffirmed as the main reason behind political radicalism in a country, like Nigeria, where the latter is the reigning system. Al-Zakzaky predicted the failure of the Sharia Implementation and, therefore, refused to support it. Legal radicalism seems to be a dead-end – and political radicalism can lead only to submission under the guise of isolation, as was the case with Zakzaky, or to insurrection, as was the case with another of his disciples who joined the Izala: Muhammad Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram.

Nigérien epilogue

55What this examination of the Nigerian context reveals is that the fundamental problem of the conflict between rules of law does not really have an equivalent in Niger. The close and numerous ties between the two cities of Maradi and Katsina, which are both populated by Hausas, failed to serve as a conduit for either legal or political radicalism. The French colonial practice, which was more brutal but less hypocritical than its British counterpart, did not incorporate into the development of the modern state religious institutions that could be sources of internal contradictions within its system, and Niger does not have a large Christian population that harbours a paranoid fear of Islamic hegemony. Therefore, there was no need for legal radicalism in Niger; and in a country that never had an equivalent to Al-Zakzaky’s Islamic Movement, political radicalism tends to be curbed by the Izala’s pragmatist orientation. Their stated goal, after all, has always been to Islamize society through preaching and education, not to destroy the state. Thus, when examining the Nigérien political radicalism of the 1990s, one realizes that those who demanded an Islamic state were Islamo-nationalist intellectuals, not the Izala. What the latter wanted most of all was to be supported by the state in their Islamizing effort, through paid positions for their preaching work or legal and financial support for the preservation and expansion of Franco-Arab education. Similarly, in Katsina, it is clear that the most utopian components of the Sharia Implementation – the implementation of economic and social Sharia by a state that is led by political saints – was the dream of Islamo-nationalist intellectuals, while Izala activists were content with the jobs provided by the da’wa commission (missionary Islamization) and the war against ‘crime and sin’. From this perspective, the goal of Izala political radicalism, both in Nigeria and in Niger, is not to establish an Islamic state in a revolutionary way, but to bring the state to support the ‘Islamization of society’ and thus to become ever more Islamic, in order to ensure its legitimacy. That is why, on both sides of the border, secularism is the common enemy. As an Izala preacher in Maradi used to say: ‘If tomorrow a dan boko wants to say that he is against secularism, when the government pays for the cost of electricity in our mosque, we will have issues.’³⁹ In Katsina, the government builds mosques. In Maradi, it is not yet the case, but it already pays for their electricity.