Religion and the Making of Nigeria

Front matter

RELIGION

AND

THE MAKING OF

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

I

ONE. Islam and Christianity in the Making of Modern Nigeria

Conclusion

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated considerable debt to many friends and colleagues during the years this book was in the making. I am grateful to these wonderful people for their support and kindness. Zach Warner and I had many interactions on conceptual and contextual questions that undergird the entangled histories of Christianity, Islam, indigenous religious beliefs, and the Nigerian state. A generous and excellent scholar, Zach provided insightful critiques and ideas that enhanced the overall quality of the book. Iam grateful to Zach for his unflinching commitment to the objectives of this book. During the initial stages of the book’s research, I benefited from the support of several young friends who worked as my research assistants. Rory Brinkman, Suraiya Zubair Banu, Tony Perry, Tyler Silver, Renee Velkoff, and Sarah Watts worked with me to analyze extensive archival materials, many documents of religious institutions, and piles of newspaper reports. I am grateful to Rory, Tony, Tyler, Renee, Suraiya, and Sarah for their assistance and support. Discussions with many friends in several humanistic social science disciplines informed an essential cross-disciplinary perspective that, I believe, gave this book greater scope and depth. Some of these friends read the finished work and offered insightful critiques: my special thanks to Wale Adebanwi, Niyi Afolabi, Okon Akiba, A. B. Assensoh, Peniel Joseph, Insa Nolte, Ebenezer Obadare, Deji Ogunnike, Funke Okome, Joel Rosenthal, Samuel Zalanga, and Nimi Wariboko. I am grateful to Patty McCarthy for providing excellent editorial assistance. Patty is a patient and thoughtful editor who reminded me that a book of this nature must not only speak to scholars in the field, but must also be accessible to students, policy makers, and intelligent lay learners who are willing to wade through the muddled waters of religion and state making in Nigeria. And to Eileen Johnson, I express my gratitude for the excellent maps contained in this book.

The scholarship on religion and society in Nigeria is authoritative in African studies. As a student of Nigerian history and politics, I benefited enormously from the stellar works of many scholars in this important field. While my citation will show the extent of my intellectual debts, I would like to acknowledge the important contribution of the following scholars whose works shaped my thoughts on a wide range of complex issues analyzed in this book: Rowland Abiodun, Afe Adogame, Laolu Akande, Pade Badru, Toyin Falola, T. G. O. Gbadamosi, Rosalind Hackett, Johannes Harnischfeger, Robin Horton, John Hunwick, Julius Ihonvbere, Simeon Ilesanmi, Kelechi Kalu, Ogbu Kalu, Matthew Kukah, Ricardo Rene Larémont, Murray Last, Paul Lubeck, Ruth Marshall, Moses Ochuno, Mathews Ojo, Jacob Olupona, John Paden, John Peel, Frank Salamone, and Nimi Wariboko.

The intellectual perspective for this book was refined while I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2006-2007. In spring 2013, I returned to the Wilson Center as a public policy scholar to complete the book manuscript. In both of my residencies at the Wilson Center, I had the good fortune of developing lasting friendships with some remarkable people in the center’s Fellowship Program and Africa Program: Arlyn Charles, Lindsey Collins, Kim Conner, Lucy Jilka, Bob Litwak, Steve McDonald, Monde Muyangwa, Andrew Selee, and Mike Van Dusen. I am grateful to these special friends for their kindness and generosity over the years. Seun Ajayi is a blessing and a joy—thank you, Seun, for your kind hospitality during my second residency at the Wilson Center. The research for this book project required extensive archival work, and I would like to thank the archivists and librarians who provided assistance during the early stages of my research. I am particularly grateful to the archivists and librarians of the Wilson Center Library; the Library of Congress; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Center for Mission Studies, Oxford; and the University of Ibadan Library. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Bowdoin College’s Africana Studies Program and History Department for their collegiality and friendship. Bowdoin College's Committee for Faculty Development provided supplementary funding to support a critical sabbatical leave in 2012-2013. I am grateful to the college for this generous support.

Jacob Olupona, the editor of the series in which this book is published, along with his colleagues, Dianne Stewart and Terrence Johnson, believed that this work can make an important contribution to Africanist scholarship and at the same time encourage a serious dialogue on religious reconciliation in a post-9/11 world. I am indebted to them for their steadfast support for this work. The remarkable professional expertise of Miriam Angress, associate editor at Duke University Press, is second to none. Miriam diligently marshaled the manuscript through various stages in the publication process with exceptional professionalism. I am grateful to Miriam for her kindness and support. I should also thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and critiques of the manuscript.

x Acknowledgments

Many relatives and friends in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom opened the doors of their homes to me while I was conducting field and archival research for this book. My expression of thanks does not adequately capture the extent of my gratitude to these special people. I am particularly grateful to Segun and Desi Abegunrin, Kolade and Yinka Adebayo-Oke, Gbenro and Funso Adegbola, Soji and Fran Adelaja, Jide and Ama Eniola, Bassey and Consola Ewa-Henshaw, Dawari and Data Longjohn, Fidelis and Priscilla Oditah, Bode and Emelda Oladeji, Tony and Diana Oyekan, and Charles Small for their love and support over the years.

Finally, my loving gratitude to my wife, Rosemary, our children, Moni, Ayo, and Olu—and to our extended family in Ibadan (particularly Ronke Adefope, Biola and Funso Osideinde, Biodun Pomary, Shubu Vaughan, Wole Vaughan, and Iyabo Yerima). In addition to her steadfast devotion to our children, Rosemary’s love and support for my work is boundless. If I have attained any professional success, it is in large measure because of Rosemary’s resolute support and encouragement. Thank you, Makamba, for engaging my endless discussions on African studies and African diaspora studies—and for all your love over these wonderful years.

In April 2014, right around the time I finished the final draft of this manuscript, my mother, a granddaughter of early cms (Church Missionary Society) converts in Ibadan in the second half of the nineteenth century, passed on (the role of the CMs in Ibadan is covered in chapter 3 of this book). She was already in her late eighties when I began working on the book, and I discussed various aspects of it with her during our many telephone conversations and my brief summer visits to Ibadan. In retrospect, I can now see how her life and work— along with other forebears—might have inspired my commitment to the excavation of the crucial role of religion in Nigerian history and politics. It is something of a cliché to underscore the bond between mothers and sons, but in this one case, I hope this tie will live on in the legacy she left behind. I am grateful for her remarkable life and cherish her amazing work in Ibadan. As a token of my gratitude for her life and work, I dedicate this book to her memory. It is certainly not my place to recite her or#ki (lineage praise verses), but I know she will allow me to evoke this first line for this special purpose: Aduké Òpó Omo Eegunjénmi—E baa tv kiti kée fori so'lè baba ni baba njé!

Acknowledgments xi

Tokolor Empire Borno

Empire

Sokoto Caliphate

Mandinka Empire of Samori

MAP 1. Political Units: Muslim Empires in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century West Africa

SOKOTO JIHAD

* OLDOYO : : “te, oun a Sant aes F e Ogbomosho $ r e New Oyo ` ‘ e Oshogbo ' + " e Ilesha eAdo Di : etbadan = UESHA n es Di + 1 O ad : e Abeokuta IJEBU sönd ume : en a Po DAHOMEY | EGBA e Ijebu Ode r E : EGBADO K 7 Lagose .

N A

MAP 2. Yoruba Towns (Sokoto Jihad)

Dahomey

Togo

+ Old Oyo e Ilorin

. Ogbomosho e Okuku e Ejigbo

New. Oyos + Oshogbo e Ife ° Ibadan

*Owo

*Abeokuta * Ondo e Ijebu Ode

Lagos iT

MAP 3. Yorubaland and Neighbors e Ilorin

Emirate Ilorin

SSIES LIIL

.

Shagamu

Dahomey e Remo e Remo Ikorodu Porto Novo e Lagos

“i, Ibadan subject areas

%2 Ijaye areas

MAP 4. Yorubaland, 1840-1870 a Lake

ae Chad

. Shuwa

Kebbi i Gumel Hadejia

Katsina

Bedde ns

Bornu Gwandu Bauchi oe

YZ, BEA,

Independent Indigenous District wa

Regions

Emirates - Mainly Muslim

Emirates - Some Indigenous

Emirates - Many Indigenous

MAP 5. Islam and Indigenous Religions in the Northern Nigerian Protectorate, 1900-1940

«Kano e Maiduguri

NORTHERN REGION

O Kaduna * Kontagora © Bauchi © Gombe e Minna

Ogbomosho e Oyoe e Oshogbo

O Ibadan Abeokuta WESTERN REGION

O Benin O Enugu

EASTERN REGION

Calabar .

MAP 6. Nigerian Regional Governments, 1960-1966 e Sokoto

NORTH WESTERN e Maiduguri

NORTH EASTERN

NORTH CENTRAL

* Kaduna e Ilorin

WESTERN

BENUE PLATEAU e Benin * Enugu MID- EAST CENTRAL

, WESTERN

Calabar .

MAP 7. The Twelve States of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1967-1975

MIDDLE BELT STATES l ees i

MAP 8. Nigerias Geopolitical Zones and the Thirty-Six States, 2000s

Sharia States

[E] Non-Sharia States (Middle Belt and Southern States) y

MAP 9. Northern Nigeria’s Sharia States, 20008

Introduction

Nigeria holds political and economic prominence in Africa. A major oil producer with a population of 180 million (in 2015) and more than 250 ethnic groups, Nigeria is home to millions of Christians, Muslims, and adherents of indigenous religions. With complicated relations between Christians and Muslims in the Northern and central regions of the country, Nigeria is one of the world’s major laboratories for the study of religious-based conflict and reconciliation. While many scholars have focused on recurring Christian-Muslim confrontations as an aspect of endemic sectarian conflict in Nigeria—showing how an obdurate political class exploits ethno-religious divisions to mobilize collective political action'—I contend that Christian, Muslim, and indigenous religious structures are integral to the formation of the modern Nigerian state and society. Specifically, I will analyze how the underpinnings of religious doctrines, the nature of social structures, and the proclivities of the political class have shaped the evolution of modern Nigeria since the turbulent nineteenth century. I am persuaded that the intersections of these competing religious traditions—Islam, Christianity, and indigenous religions—are decisive in the making of modern Nigeria.

Starting with a major Muslim reformist movement—the Sokoto Jihad— in contemporary Nigeria’s vast Northern Region, and a Christian evangelical movement, propelled by the influential English missionary organization called the Church Missionary Society (CMs), in Atlantic Yoruba communities in southwestern Nigeria during the nineteenth century, I argue that Muslim and Christian structures made up the foundation on which the Nigerian colonial state was grafted in the early twentieth century. In what later became the Northern Nigerian Protectorate, the Sokoto Jihad of 1804-1808 transformed not only the Hausa city-states, but also shaped the geopolitics of their neighbors to the south, especially the diverse communities in contemporary central and northeastern Nigeria (modern Nigeria’s Middle Belt region) as well as the Yoruba region in the southwest. As the Sokoto Jihad consolidated a theocratic confederacy (the Sokoto Caliphate) under the control of Fulani Muslim reformers in the northern Hausa region by the mid-nineteenth century, Christian evangelical movements, fueled by the activities of Yoruba CMs returnees from Sierra Leone, penetrated Nigeria’s Southwest, steadily transforming the social structure of Southern and central Nigerian communities by the late nineteenth century. These two world religious currents, along with their entangled social and political histories, set the stage on which Muslim and Christian structures would shape the processes of state-society formation in colonial Nigeria since the imposition of British rule at the turn of the twentieth century. Consequently, Islam and Christianity fundamentally shaped—and have been shaped by—local religious, social, and political structures since the transformative nineteenth century.

Drawing from an interdisciplinary Africanist scholarship, I contend that the impact of these Muslim and Christian movements on Nigerian communities did not simply serve as a precursor to British colonial rule, but provided essential structural and ideological frameworks for the rationalization of colonial society throughout the first half of the twentieth century. My analyses emphasize how these two major religions shaped collective political and social action and complicated Nigeria’s tapestry of identities, especially ethnic and regional forms of identifications. Given the transformative impact of these world religious movements on structures of society, I will analyze their manifestations in their broad historical, political, and sociological contexts,” emphasizing the dialectical tensions between local and global forces. This perspective underscores how the persistence of Muslim and Christian structures has consistently produced contending—and competing—doctrines, practices, and ideologies to transform Nigeria’s complicated social and political landscape.

The history of the communities in this West African region is characterized by interwoven religious, social, and political strands that reflect entrenched hierarchies of power integrated into communal, kinship, gender, and class identities? and conditioned by spatial and demographic factors. In this dynamic process, Nigeria’s formidable Muslim and Christian structures are at the center of the country’s history, expanding Nigerias chronology to fully incorporate the critical religious, social, and political developments of the turbulent nineteenth century into the processes of Nigerian state formation. Simply put, Muslim and Christian movements have flourished in modern Nigeria because their institutions and doctrines are consistently embedded in the structures of society, shaping social relations and the configuration of power.

Given the decisive impact of these two world religious currents on the diverse communities in the Nigerian region, it is useful to draw on landmark theoretical analyses that explain the conversion of local communities in the region from indigenous religions to Christianity and Islam.* For more than four decades, anthropologists Robin Horton and John Peel’s intellectualist paradigm has shaped the theoretical debate on this conversion process.’ Focusing on the cosmological rationale for traditional West African religions to “explain, predict and control” the challenges that confront local people, Horton argues that the processes of conversion from indigenous religions to Christianity must be articulated in a specific nineteenth-century context of rapid social and political change.® Preoccupied with parochial conditions in isolated communities before the complex transformation of the nineteenth century, Horton contends that local deities that underscore microcosmic cosmologies essentially dominated the everyday world of local people in small-scale locales. As West African communities took on the more complicated social, political, and economic conditions at the intersection of local, regional, and global forces in a tumultuous nineteenth century, prevailing local cosmologies shifted from their small-scale (microcosmic) preoccupation to large-scale, macrocosmic framework that could explain the rapidly changing conditions of the time. In short, Horton stresses that age-old West African cosmologies expanded their scope to accommodate the more complicated regional and global forces unfolding in the region in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, this shift in focus encouraged the macrocosmic worship of the “cult of the Supreme Being,” opening the door to the monotheistic Christian faith evangelical missionaries introduced along with other far-reaching Western social, economic, and political transformations starting in the early 1800s. While these shifts in religious practice were often characterized as conversion from indigenous religions to Christianity by the turn of the twentieth century, Horton contends that this phenomenon reflected trends that were already in motion in much of the nineteenth century.’

In the case of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, Peel argues that the new emphasis on the “cult of the Supreme Being” was crucial in the conversion experience of Yoruba communities from their indigenous religion to Christianity starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. This complicated process of conversion provided a new narrative that shaped the way the Yoruba embraced the promise of a better future following the cataclysmic upheavals from prolonged regional warfare in much of the nineteenth century. This dialogue that integrated indigenous cosmology to Christianity ultimately explains the remarkable success of the Yoruba Christian church movement, Aladura, during the period of colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century.”

Drawing from Southern African case studies to complicate Horton and Peel’s intellectualist theory, historian Terence Ranger argued that the macrocosmic framework already was prevalent in indigenous cosmologies by the time they came into contact with mission Christianity in the mid-1800s, and that the concept of a Supreme Being subsequently reified in world religions was, in many instances, reflected in microcosmic conditions.'° For Ranger, indigenous religious systems had long possessed adaptive cosmological qualities to explain larger-scale regional transformations. Consequently, the Christian missionary impact that accompanied Western-induced social, political, and economic conditions should not be seen as the only radical development that expanded the scope of indigenous African cosmologies. While Ranger agrees that the nineteenth century was a critical turning point in African history, he asserts that the radical shifts from a microcosmic to macrocosmic framework starting in the nineteenth century cannot fully explain the conversion of Africans from indigenous religions to Christianity. Ranger concludes that “much of the continuing history of religion in Southern Africa, whether of Christianity or of African religion, lies in the working out of this dialectic between the local and the central.”!! Thus the new Christian doctrines that were embedded in indigenous cosmologies to articulate the rapidly changing social conditions in the early years of colonial rule were following trends that had been established in earlier moments of major transformations in the region. Despite this revision of a paradigm that underscores the integration of mission Christianity to African cosmologies in the context of the rapid social transformation at the turn of the twentieth century, Ranger’s analysis still falls within the framework of Horton and Peel’s intellectualist imperative in the conversion of Africans from indigenous religions to world religions.

In this context, with the imposition of colonial rule in Southern Nigeria, mission Christianity and its trappings of modern education provided appealing religious explanations in an increasingly novel world. The appeal of Christianity, from this perspective, was not simply in its emphasis on the transcendent “macrocosm; but rather in its relation to and ability to “explain, control, and predict” the dynamic conditions of the time. Indigenous religions, as Jack Goody reminds us, have serious limitations in the modern world because of their inability to generate requisite modern institutions, professional skills and technical expertise essential to navigate the major social, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century—attributes that world religions, especially mission Christianity, possess in abundance because of their long history of transregional networks, scientific engagement, professionalization, and extensive traditions in literacy.'* Incorporated into indigenous cosmologies, Christianity and Islam provided frameworks for large-scale modes of identity as well as instruments for an “intellectualist paradigm” that reflects the rapidly changing conditions that were becoming prevalent starting in the second half of the nineteenth century.” “The changing social environment in which conversion so often unfolds is not simply a product of material forces,’ Robert Hefner perceptively notes; it also reflects a “sense of self-worth and community. ... [The] problem of dignity and self-identity in a pluralized and politically imbalanced world lies at the heart of many conversion histories”! This was the dynamic social, political, and economic context in which the world religions—especially Christianity—flourished in various Nigerian communities immediately after the imposition of colonial rule.

Given this dynamic process in the transformation of Nigerian communities since the nineteenth century, my methodological emphasis is at the intersection of historical, political, and sociological analyses. Focusing on the enduring structures of precolonial Nigerian communities, I will emphasize the longue durée of Muslim and Christian movements’? in the making of Nigeria, analyzing how the historical evolution of three major Nigerian geocultural regions— notably the Hausa-Fulani Muslim North, the non-Muslim Middle Belt, and the Yoruba Muslim-Christian crossroads of the southwest—have consistently intersected since the nineteenth century to complicate the formation of the Nigerian state and society.

Following Peel’s contention that precolonial West African political and social relations are shaped by hierarchies of communities,!° I contend that the Islamic reformism of the Sokoto Jihad established a precolonial state-society system that presided over the allocation of resources such as tributes, taxes, and slaves, and controlled trade routes and markets in a vast and heterogeneous region that included Hausa-Fulani Muslims and adherents of indigenous religions (the so-called pagan tribes of Northern Nigeria). Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominant power of Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers was complicated by the advent of mission Christianity in the southern fringe of the Sokoto Caliphate along the confluence of the Rivers Niger and Benue. With the growing influence of mission Christianity by the turn of the twentieth century, non-Muslim communities some of whom had been brought under the suzerainty of the Sokoto Caliphate—especially new converts to Christianity—made use of Christianity’s universal doctrines to challenge the dominance of Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers and assert their autonomy under colonial rule. In this intense political environment, conversion from indigenous religions to Christianity by missionary societies was far from a simple religious act; Christian conversion became a crucial medium of collective action against Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers. Nevertheless, since the Sokoto Caliphate provided the framework on which the British colonial system of indirect rule was constructed, Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers consolidated their power base under British rule during the first half of the twentieth century.

This process in which Muslim and Christian structures were integral to state-society formation encouraged the development of ethno-national identities in Nigeria’s emergent geocultural regions. In the Hausa region that served as the epicenter for Britain’s Northern Nigerian Protectorate, Fulani Muslim reformism of the Sokoto Caliphate effectively appropriated the dominant Hausa culture and language as the essential structural framework for Hausa- Fulani ethno-religious identity. This large-scale ethno-national identity was instrumental in the mobilization of Hausa-Fulani Muslim consciousness in colonial Nigeria after the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate by the British in 1903. As this process of modern Nigerian state-making unfolded under British colonial rule, Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers consolidated their control over their non-Muslim neighbors as the “pagan”—and consequently the Christian— other throughout the region. While British colonial authorities traced Hausa- Fulani Muslim hegemony to its precolonial status as natural ruler of “backward pagan” vassals, especially those in the southern boundaries of the Sokoto Caliphate, British colonial policy inadvertently encouraged the formation of a new regional sociopolitical identity—Middle Belt regional identity—by the late colonial period.!” Drawing on highly subjective local and regional narratives and mythologies! that sought to legitimate this emergent Middle Belt regional identity in contradistinction to Hausa-Fulani Muslim identity, mission Christianity’s modern institutions and doctrines emerged as a formidable medium of “infrapolitics” for non-Muslim communities to resist Hausa-Fulani Muslim hegemony throughout the region.!? However, since the British colonial system of indirect rule was grafted on the prevailing Hausa-Fulani emirate system, British rule inevitably intensified the structural imbalance between Hausa-Fulani emirates and the non-Muslim communities of the region. This dynamic system that continues to shape Nigeria’s geopolitics even to this day is deeply rooted in the enduring structures of Northern Nigerias fragmented society going back to precolonial times. This political arrangement was predicated on a problematic tributary system that depended on slave raiding and other forms of primitive extraction in the precolonial caliphate era. As Moses Ochonu deftly analyzed, this colonial arrangement was, in part, sustained by highly subjective British ethnographic studies that affirmed the claims of Hausa-Fulani Muslims as natural rulers of their “pagan” neighbors. These British imperial studies were replete with imagined social, habitual, and physical attributes that rationalized the natural order of things under a superior Hausa-

Fulani Muslim “race?”

In the Yoruba region, Peel has written convincingly about the transformative role of Yoruba CMs missionaries and early converts—to articulate a pan- Yoruba ethno-national consciousness following the protracted social upheaval from the Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century.*’ This emergent ethno-national identity, shaped profoundly by mission Christianity by the end of the nineteenth century, was a critical precursor for Yoruba sociocultural and political renewal under colonial rule in southwestern Nigeria. As this pan-Yoruba consciousness emerged, the first generation of Yoruba-educated Christians embarked on a discourse of modern Christian civilization as a counternarrative to the prolonged turbulence that consumed much of the Yoruba region in the nineteenth century.” Derived from contested histories and mythologies,” this complicated precolonial and colonial process profoundly shaped the meaning of power and identity for Yoruba communities within the wider context of modern Nigerian state-society formation.

Following decolonization after World War II and the attainment of Nigerian independence in 1960, these religious structures were essential to the mobilization of collective action by ethno-regional political elites in a rapidly shifting context. With a weak nation-state derived from the imposition of colonial rule, neopatrimonial regimes embraced patronage-clientage networks structured on communal relations as the framework for the distribution of scarce resources.” Again, this encouraged the recasting of ethno-religious identity—along with other critical modes of communal identity. Amid political uncertainty, insecurity, and instability, Muslim and Christian structures consistently retained prominence from decolonization in the 1950s to the country’s civil-democratic government at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Focusing on more than two centuries of detailed historical analysis, I will show how religious forces—especially the dominant force of Islam and Christianity—profoundly shaped the formation of the modern Nigerian state and society since the turbulent nineteenth century. The extensive social science scholarship on Nigeria surprisingly has ignored a methodological approach that focuses on the entangled histories of Islam and Christianity as a pathway for analyzing the making of Nigeria. In this book, I seek to deeply analyze the significant impact of the history of Islam and Christianity on the formation of the modern Nigerian state and society.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section analyzes the impact of Islam and Christianity on three major Nigerian regions where the two world religions consistently intersect to shape the evolution of modern Nigeria from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century; these three intersecting regions are the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri Muslim North (the region dominated by the Sokoto Caliphate), the traditionally non-Muslim Middle Belt region (a religious and culturally distinct section of Britain’s Northern Nigerian Protectorate in contemporary central and northeastern Nigeria), and the Yoruba Muslim-Christian crossroads in the southwest region of Britain’s Southern Provinces. The second section provides detailed analyses of how the recurring crisis of sharia (Islamic law) in postcolonial Nigeria essentially reflects the structural imbalance between emirate Northern Nigeria on the one hand, and Nigeria’s Middle Belt and Southern Regions on the other, going back to the amalgamation of Britain’s Northern and Southern colonial provinces in 1914. The fierce contestation between Northern Muslim rulers and Christian elites from other parts of the country over the imposition of expanded sharia in predominantly Northern Muslim states were far from straightforward disagreements between Muslims and Christians on matters of religious beliefs; rather, they were emblematic of deep structural imbalance that evolved with the formation of the modern Nigerian state under colonial rule. The persistent call for expanded sharia by the Northern Muslim political class has consistently intensified this structural imbalance along ethno-religious and ethno-regional lines between the Muslim north and the rest of the country during the postcolonial period.

Specifically, the book explores four major issues of importance to the critical roles of Muslim and Christian movements in the formation of the modern Nigerian state and society: the role of Islamic reformism and mission Christianity in the transformation of precolonial Nigerian communities in a turbulent nineteenth century; Islam, Christianity, and colonial rule in Nigerias Northern and Southern Provinces; Islam, Christianity, and the political transformation of the Northern and Middle Belt regions during Nigeria’s decolonization process; and Islam, Christianity, and the crisis of the postcolonial Nigerian nation-state.

Chapter 1 proceeds on the understanding that the Sokoto Jihad in the Hausa region and the emergence of mission Christianity from Atlantic Yoruba communities in the nineteenth century were pivotal in the transformation of the Nigerian region before the imposition of colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, the chapter analyzes the institutional and theological basis on which the Sokoto Caliphate was constructed in the nineteenth century. In a similar vein, starting in Nigeria’s coastal southwest region, this chapter discusses how mission Christianity set the stage for the social and political transformation of Southern and non-Muslim Northern Nigeria, providing a framework for social change in these regions during the colonial period. This chapter is not a prelude to modern Nigerian history. It deeply examines how

Islam and Christianity were essential in framing social and political relations among Nigerias diverse communities in the critical decades before the imposition of British colonial rule.

Chapter 2 analyzes the complex interactions between Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers and British colonial rulers from 1903, when the Sokoto Caliphate and Kanem-Bornu Empire came under British rule, to the 1950s, when British authorities started the decolonization process in Nigeria. Using the case-study analytical approach, this chapter examines Hausa-Fulani emirate structures’ broad influence on colonial state formation in the Northern Nigerian Protectorate, and how the structures of this Northern Muslim confederacy were woven into the colonial system of indirect rule. The political implications of the interactions among Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers, non-Muslim communities, and British colonial policies are analyzed against the backdrop of evolving power configurations in the Northern Nigerian Protectorate—as these were expressed by Hausa-Fulani Muslim rulers and their Muslim subjects, Hausa-Fulani Muslim potentates and their non-Muslim “subordinates; and Hausa-Fulani Muslim “metropolitan” centers and “tributary” communities.

The outcomes of the interactions between mission Christianity and colonialism in diverse communities in Southern and Northern Nigeria are dissected in chapter 3. Although Christianity, unlike Islam in the Northern emirates, did not play a formal political role in colonial administration, the objectives of Christian missionary groups nevertheless advanced British interests, while paradoxically, challenging the hegemony of Hausa-Fulani emirate rulers in non- Muslim areas of the Northern Provinces, especially in the Middle Belt region. Christian missionaries and colonial administrators worked creatively to deploy complementary doctrines of Western training and enlightenment to advance colonial imperatives. While local structures of society remained resilient—revealing the depth of indigenous cosmologies in various communities—Christian missionary impact was far-reaching. Paradoxical relationships consistently were revealed in the everyday life of local people: they were played out in the objectives of colonial authorities and Christian missionaries, reflecting contending and competing forces between the temporal and the spiritual, between colonial state power and the power of Christianity.”