Politics of Religion in Northern Nigeria

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June/July 2025Nigeria
Religion

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Hausa men riding donkeys, near Sokoto, Nigeria / SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB.

THE MINISTRY OF POLITICAL AFFAIRS

Politics of Religion in Northern Nigeria

The failure of populist religious reforms has opened the door to radical religious groups who criticize the state for both poor governance and non-adherence to religious doctrines. This unresolved tension leads to the politicization of Islam. The resulting disconnect deepens ideological divides and leads to continuous social unrest.
Religion

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Hausa men riding donkeys, near Sokoto, Nigeria / SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB.

THE MINISTRY OF POLITICAL AFFAIRS

Politics of Religion in Northern Nigeria

The failure of populist religious reforms has opened the door to radical religious groups who criticize the state for both poor governance and non-adherence to religious doctrines. This unresolved tension leads to the politicization of Islam. The resulting disconnect deepens ideological divides and leads to continuous social unrest.

The term Islamist has meant different things at different times to different people. Today, when used in English, it usually conjures up terrifying images of masked gunmen on the streets of European capitals killing innocent civilians in the name of Islam. Ironically, the term first began to take hold amongst Western academics and policymakers so that they could talk about largely non-violent Islamic activism in the Muslim world without resorting to the derogatory label of ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’ This, in turn, appears to have influenced democratically-oriented Islamic movements in the Middle East to refer to themselves using the term’s Arabic equivalent: Islamiyyūn. Yet, the word Islamist is used today by media commentators and policymakers alike to describe both democratically oriented political parties like the Muslim Brotherhood as well as anti-democratic terrorist groups like ISIS. 

In a Western context, we are far more careful in making such distinctions, for example between Nazism and liberalism, despite the fact that both are technically ‘Western’ ideologies that have emerged out of the Enlightenment and uphold secular values.

—Dr Usaama al-Azami, Sadeq Institute

Over the last decade, religion (read Islam) looking for authority through the electoral process seemed to be one of the most powerful trends operating in many Muslim majority countries. This went against the approach of ‘participation, not domination’ of religious movements to assuage fears of establishing a religious state.

The uprisings that swept the Arab World in 2011 changed this, even though briefly. In Tunisia, the Ennahda Movement, also known as the Renaissance Party, a self-defined Islamic democratic political party, became the country’s largest parliamentary party; in Morocco, the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) headed a cabinet. Most notably, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood emerged from its political shadows and won a parliamentary plurality and led the country with a president.

In the twenty-first century, Turkey provides a case study of a dynamic experiment with political Islam as a Muslim-majority country. Until recently, Islamic parties in Turkey were on the periphery. The success of the Justice and Development Party seems a model for Muslim countries, as leaned from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech after a landslide victory in 2011. He said: ‘Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul. Beirut won as much as Izmir. Damascus won as much as Ankara. Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, [and] Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.’ Erdogan wears the sleeve of a Muslim leader representing authentic Islamic values.

This legitimization of religious politics, however, was not a big success, especially in North Africa. Morocco’s PJD lost elections; Tunisia’s Ennahda broke down from an authoritarian power grab. Political Islam became sidelined again, in hibernation.

Until the 1990s, Islamic laws were mostly introduced by authoritarian states as efforts towards social transformation, as seen in Pakistan and Sudan. In 1983, Shariah was imposed throughout Sudan, even in the south where Muslims were a minority, leading to a civil war. After the military coup of Omar al-Bashir in 1989, a decree re-established Islam as the only official law in Sudan.

The creation of multiparty systems in countries with sizeable Muslim populations outside the Arab world such as Senegal, Niger, Nigeria and Indonesia in the late 1990s, has seen Shari’a reforms adopted by governments facing elections. Politicians pursued Islamicizing the law as a goal towards winning the ballot in Muslim majority population. As such, Nigeria home to Africa’s largest Muslim population experienced a politicization of Islam but not the extensive Islamization of politics that affected countries like Sudan.

THE GUSAU DECLARATION

To apply an Islamic perspective of development to the socio-economic development of the state…This sound economic development can best be achieved in an atmosphere of judicious, fair and equitable distribution of state-owned resources and the wealth derived from such resources. Thus, under the Islamic sharia system prudent management and optimum utilisation of all state-owned resources is guaranteed as the fear of Allah shall be the guiding principle of both the government and the governed.

—Ahmad Sani, executive governor of Zamfara State, Nigeria, in 1999.

In a four-year period after Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, the democratically elected governments of twelve Muslim-majority states in northern Nigeria incorporated Shari’a into state criminal law and introduced Islamic social reforms. Despite Nigeria’s large Muslim population, the country is divided in roughly equal proportions between Muslims, with majority in the north and Christians in the southern part of the country. Shari’a implementation led to a period of sectarian violence, with Nigerian Christians taking it as a religious provocation. One of the most severe cases was the explosion of violence between Muslims and Christians in Kaduna State in February and April 2000.  At least 2,000 people were reported to have been killed by Human Rights Watch as Muslims and Christians attacked each other. This led to a continuous trend of religious politics in which mainstream politicians increasingly wear their religions on their sleeves.

There is popular support for the implementation of Shari’a by Muslims in Nigeria, on which politicians ride. Muslim populations expect politicians to live up to a religious commitment to Islam as a complete way of political, social and economic life. Shari’a is seen by many Muslims as an entire system of guidelines and rules which encompass criminal law, personal status law, and many other aspects of religious, cultural and social life.

The governor of the northern state of Zamfara, Ahmed Sani, was the first to introduce Shari’a for criminal law, within a year of the 1999 new democratic elections, which brought a Christian, President Olusegun Obasanjo, and new state governors across Nigeria’s 36 states to power. The introduction of Shari’a in Zamfara State attracted thousands of Muslim supporters to Gusau, the state capital, paying homage. Bus and taxi drivers reduced fares going into Zamfara State in a show of solidarity, and Sani became the self-appointed champion of Shari’a in Nigeria.

The Zamfara State governor had judged the mood of the population. There was widespread poverty across Nigeria, and the north was especially underdeveloped and the religious public believed that Shari’a, with its emphasis on welfare and the state’s responsibility to provide for the basic needs of the population, would go some way towards alleviating suffering after years of military rule and state corruption. Shari’a was a perfect alternative, offering a ready-made corruption-free system and a reaffirmation of religious identity, with recurring tensions between Muslims and Christians. The Shari’a implementation extended the jurisdiction of Islamic civil law courts into criminal matters, created Islamic criminal codes and implemented Islamic policies to govern the social and economic lives of Muslims.

Capitalizing on the experiment in Zamfara State, other state governors soon introduced their own Shari’a legislation. By 2002, twelve states had adopted some form of Shari’a into their criminal legislation: Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara. Governments placed religious leaders on payrolls, expanded funding for Islamic education and mosque building, and converted enterprises like cinema houses into Islamic spaces. Muslims in other parts of the country, particularly in central and western states, such as Nasarawa, Kwara and Oyo, continued to agitate for Shari’a to be introduced.

Support for Shari’a also became part of the election platform for Muhammadu Buhari, who will go on to become Nigeria’s President from 2015 to 2023. A former military Head of State turned politician, Buhari was the main opposition presidential candidate who ran against President Obasanjo in the 2003 elections. Buhari sought to exploit his credentials as a Muslim and a northerner in appealing to voters in the north and professing his commitment to Shari’a. As the 2003 elections approached, the issue of religion became politicized along political lines, with the opposition All Nigerian People’s Party candidates across much of the north being seen as generally pro-Shari’a, while candidates of other parties, especially the ruling People’s Democratic Party, were seen as anti-Shari’a. Shari’a became a question of both religious and political identity.

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THE GREAT SHARI’A DEBATE

1999 was not the beginning of controversies sparked by Shari’a in Nigeria. During Nigeria’s constitution making process between 1978 and 1979 (preparatory to the first return of Nigeria to democratic rule in 1979 after 13 years of military rule and a civil war), there was a debate on whether the new constitution should recognize Islamic law at the federal or state level through the creation of the federal Sharia courts.

The Supreme Military Council, with General Obasanjo as Head of State, appointed a Constitutional Drafting Committee. This pitched the Muslim-dominated north against the largely Christian-dominated south, where membership of the Constituent Assembly (CA) was drawn, which had been saddled with the task of fashioning a new constitution for Nigeria. The debate on whether or not to include a Sharia clause in the 1979 constitution, as championed by the Muslim members of the CA, became so combative that it almost grounded the entire constitutional process.

The CA passed a recommendation on the creation of a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal as an intermediate court between the already existing Sharia Courts of Appeal of the then six Northern states and the Nigerian Supreme Court to ‘give relevance to the moral, ethical and religious beliefs of all segments of (the Nigerian) society.’ This recommendation was divisive, with strong antagonism from Christians, and the Muslim members boycotted proceedings for nearly three weeks.

When northern Nigeria was colonized by the British in the late 19th century as a separate protectorate from the south (before amalgamation into one Nigeria in 1914), colonial laws continued to recognize Shari’a, but certain aspects of it were altered or limited. Shari’a courts, then known as area courts, had jurisdiction only over matters of personal status law, such as divorce, inheritance and domestic disputes. Criminal matters were dealt with under the penal code for northern Nigeria. Although strongly influenced by the British legal system, the penal code included many components of Shari’a. However, the British colonial administration omitted severe penalties such as death by stoning and amputations on the basis that they were ‘repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience.’ Floggings for crimes like fornication continued to be carried out.

The British had supported and helped rationalize the Islamic court system in the northern Provinces of Nigeria from 1933 onwards, and a Muslim Court of Appeal was created. Just before Nigeria’s independence from British rule in 1960, this was renamed the Shari’a Court of Appeal by the northern House of Assembly. With the break-up of the northern region into a number of states after a bloody coup in 1966, each state created their own Shari’a Courts of Appeal, but there was no final Court of Appeal for matters relating to Shari’a law. It was in reaction to those Northern interests that the CDC recommended a Federal Shari’a Court of Appeal.

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THE KADUNA SHARI’A SCENARIO

I dare say since 1960, we have watched the human rights of our fellow citizens, indigenes to this area, their human rights being trampled with impunity. Those who did so, will not stop until they have annihilated your faith. Let’s join hands to stand shoulder to shoulder and face the onslaught on our rights.

—Chief Odumegu Ojukwu at the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) seminar on Shari’a at Hekan Church Kaduna in January 2000.

In all the twelve states that implemented Shari’a in 2000, Shari’a applied only to Muslims. However, non-Muslims were not prevented from accessing the Shari’a jurisdictions and may choose to take cases through the Shari’a courts if they wish.

In most cases, the Shari’a legislation was rushed through in a hurried and incomplete way due to social and political aspirations. Not only were the new Shari’a penal codes deficient and erratic, but some of them also referred to prescriptions within Islam which were not codified in the new laws but were nevertheless expected to be enforced.

The general population was even less well-prepared for the introduction of an entirely new legal system. As such, Shari’a was applied inconsistently across the twelve states. At one end of the spectrum, Zamfara State applied it the most severely. At the other end of the spectrum, in Kaduna State, where a good number of the population of the state are Christians and where the prospect of the introduction of Shari’a led to massive riots and killings in 2000, strict sentences have not been passed.

The Kaduna State Sharia enactment journey started in December 1999 when the state House of Assembly constituted an eleven-member all-Muslim-member committee to collate views of the people on the need to introduce the Shari’a legal system in the state. This act divided the House of Assembly across religious lines.

The committee called for memoranda from the public and began public hearings in January 2000. The Christian community snubbed the committee, while Muslims from various local governments in Kaduna State trooped to the House of Assembly to present their memoranda and expressed solidarity with the House. Mass rallies were organized by both Muslims and Christians to marshal and educate adherents of the religious groups on their differing points of view. In January 2000, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Kaduna held a seminar to enlighten Christians on the implications of the Sharia Law enactment. Chief Emeka Odumegu Ojukwu (previous military governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which he declared as the independent nation of Biafra from 1967 to 1970 during the Nigerian Civil War) presented a paper and condemned Sharia implementation as an infringement of Christians’ rights.

In February 2000, the Kaduna chapter of CAN organized a public protest against Shari’a. The peaceful protest transformed into violent clashes between Christians and Muslims. Muslim youths counter-rallied and clashed with the Christian protestors. The fighting during the protests spiralled out of control, spreading all over the city with continued reprisals and destruction on both sides. At least 2,000 people were killed.  

Kaduna, as such, became divided into ‘Shari’a-compliant’ and ‘non-Shari’a-compliant’ areas. Shari’a in Kaduna existed in one street but not in another. As a once cosmopolitan state, this led to a sharp exodus of Muslims towards ‘Shari’a-compliant’ areas and Christians to ‘non-Shari’a-compliant’ areas, especially after deadly sectarian crises, creating de facto Muslim-side and Christian-side separated by the river Kaduna bridge. Muslims living on one side will swap houses with Christians living on the other.

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WILD WILD (NORTH) WEST

Over time, the application of Shari’a in northern Nigeria has declined. Shari’a legislation is still in place in twelve states, and Shari’a courts continue to function and hand down sentences, but the political will to administer it in a strict manner has faded, with hesitancy to carry out some of the stricter aspects of the system, such as death sentences and amputations. This stems from a desire to avoid further controversy and deadly riots. Disillusionment by citizens with how Shari’a has been implemented, which has excluded corrupt politicians from its purview, and the rise in poverty and economic crisis has dampened politicians’ zeal for using it as a popularity boost.

This opened the door for the emergence of fundamentalist non-state actors such as Boko Haram, interested in the strict application of Shari’a and also fueled by social and economic deprivation and extreme poverty. Boko Haram, which literally means ‘Western education is forbidden’, was mostly comprised of disgruntled young people and unemployed university students and graduates with general frustration at the grassroots level of the political class.

While Boko Haram’s strategy shifted in the early 2010s towards suicide bombings and attacks in Christian churches and communities, its initial targets were government installations and Muslim political and religious elites whom they saw as hypocrites after the extrajudicial execution of their leader, Mohammed Yusuf, by state security in July 2009. Boko Haram’s major grievance had been the failure of northern political and religious elites to sufficiently defend Muslim interests.

Boko Haram’s demands and critiques of Shari’a implementation were grounded in a sense of the failure of the political class to implement it in the strictest of ways to improve the lives of Muslim citizens, and that the elites remained corrupt and unaccountable, with poverty remaining rampant in the society. Just like mainstream Shari’a proponents, Boko Haram also demand formal recognition of ‘pure’ Islamic law and culture as a means of rectifying imbalances in Nigerian political life by renouncing ‘Western’ (Boko) laws and teachings in favour of Shari’a implementation and making Nigeria an Islamic nation.

Bandits and organized gangs would also become active in the Shari’a-implementing north-western states of Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna, Kebbi and Niger in the last decade. Government policies to progressively enable the transformation of nomadic herders into agro-pastoral communities led to a competition for resources. Livestock, in the North, became as precious as gold. Powerful gangs emerged, as warlords and militias with a segmented structure and loose organization in rural areas of Katsina, Zamfara and Kaduna states. These strongholds merged with hideouts of splinter groups of Boko Haram based in the North-West, leading to fears of a possible merging of bandits and jihadists.

When populist religious reforms fail, they open the door to radical religious groups who criticize the state for both poor governance and non-adherence to religious doctrines. In regions like northern Nigeria, where citizens simultaneously demand democratic accountability and adherence to Shari’a, this unresolved tension leads to the politicization of Islam. The resulting disconnect deepens ideological divides and leads to continuous social unrest.

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RELIGION ON THE BALLOT

During Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, there has been a tradition and an expectation that if a Christian southerner holds the presidency, a Muslim northerner will hold the vice presidency, and vice versa. Since 1999, the pattern has held: a southern Christian president and a northern Muslim vice president or a northern Muslim president and a southern Christian vice president until presently. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a southern Muslim, and his northern Muslim Vice President Kashim Shettima became Nigeria’s first Muslim-Muslim president and vice-president after disputed elections in February 2023.

Kaduna State, a microcosm of Nigeria, has had a version of this rotational system, though usually under Muslim governors. The Muslim governor, Ahmed Makarfi, from 1999 to 2007, had two Christian deputy governors: first, Stephen Shekari until he died in 2005, and then Patrick Yakowa until 2007. A Muslim, Governor Namadi Sambo, succeeded Makarfi, with Yakowa continuing on as deputy; when Sambo ascended to the vice presidency in 2010, Yakowa became Governor with a Muslim, Mukhtar Ramalan Yero as his deputy. Yakowa won re-election in 2011 and was the state’s first elected Christian governor. Yakowa died in office in 2012, and Yero became governor, appointing a Christian deputy governor, Nuhu Bajoga. Nasir El-Rufai, a Muslim, became the first opposition to win the gubernatorial election in Kaduna State in 2015 with Barnabas Bala, a Christian, as his deputy.

During his re-election in 2015 for a second term, El-Rufai turned the tables and went with a Muslim deputy governor, Hadiza Balarabe, who became the first woman elected to the position. This Muslim-Muslim template would also become a winning formula in Kaduna’s gubernatorial election and Nigeria’s presidential election in 2023.

Despite continuous clashes between Muslims and Christians, Nigeria has never developed religious parties, either Islamic or Christian, quite different from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and South Africa, which have all experienced the formation of Islamic parties, with or without people’s support and legal recognition. But President Tinubu’s victory points to a new chapter of religious politics in Nigeria outside of the push for implementation of Shari’a in the northern part of the country, but rather framed on the assumed but never substantiated majority population of Nigeria’s Muslim demography. Politicians can now use religion as an instrument rather than an action point by pushing forward a Muslim plurality as a template of Muslim majority rule. Tinubu’s victory does not necessarily mean that Islamic values will now be more thoroughly represented in Nigeria, but rather continues to provide a breeding ground for politicians to draw religious cards in different versions to win elections at federal, state or local government levels in the country⎈

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