Between Conflict and Compromise: Lessons on Sharia and Pluralism from Nigeria’s Kaduna and Kebbi States

The revitalized implementation of Sharia law and its expansion from the personal to criminal aspects in twelve northern states in the wake of Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in 1999 represents one of the most turbulent cases of intergroup relations in the contemporary history of Nigeria. The development was set in motion by the formal adoption of stringent Sharia codes by Ahmed Sani, the governor of Zamfara State, on October 27, 1999, and thereafter by eleven other northern states—Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Katsina, Kaduna, Kano, Jigawa, Bauchi, Yobe, Gombe, and Borno. In reintroducing Sharia into the domains of criminal justice, these states evoked the “somewhat ambiguous clause [in the 1999 Nigerian Constitution] that empowered a state assembly . . . to confer additional jurisdiction on the Sharia Court of Appeal.” A key consequence of this development was an increase in the politics of identity both in relation to the re-introduction of Sharia and the reactions to it.