Part of review forum on “Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria.”

Early on in Rabiat Akande’s analytically brilliant and meticulously researched Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria, she writes that “Secularism, like all legal ideas, is not free of internal ambiguities and competing external deployments” (25). Though this observation appears, on the surface, rather matter of fact, it says something quite profound about the nature of colonial legal reform that has been under-appreciated in the scholarship. The remainder of the volume is a virtuoso display of how precisely the co-construction of law and secularism has proceeded. Linear narratives such as modernization, separation, and the rising dominance of siyasa at the expense of shari‘a that have characterized many accounts of the imposition of secular law are complicated in this volume through exploring a far more multidirectional landscape.Footnote ¹ In refusing a narrative account of secularism, one with a linear trajectory and a predictable ending, Akande both complicates the history of colonial empire in Africa and offers us insight into the basis for a potentially more participatory mode of law and politics in the postcolonial period.

Akande’s book insists that despite the ballooning domain of siyasa (here, the machinations of the British empire) in the colonial period, a robust religious and legal dynamic is also activated in this heady froth of the emerging governmental order. That is, it is not merely officials in London’s foreign office imposing policy from on high, but “missionaries, [along with] [caliphal] emirs and colonial administrators, [who] were participating in shaping the trajectory of imperial secularism, and ultimately in making the state” (69). And so, while the ever-expanding domain of state power may be a constant in the story she tells, the role of religion and the secular are not nearly as stable, playing varying, and often surprising, roles in collaboration or tension with the political realm. This is so much the case that proponents of the revival of a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal in 1977 could plausibly argue that the call for secularism “was a constitutional idea of state-religion separation that had been introduced by the empire to exclude Islamic institutions and disempower Muslims” (230), even after many decades in the early part of the same century in which the consolidation of caliphal power was precisely made possible due to the secular principle of noninterference in religion. Now, it was the caliphal powers that were embracing the ideal of religious liberty that had once been the Christian missionaries’ calling card in opposing the earlier closeness between the caliphate and colonial authorities.

On the one hand, Akande’s book might be understood to be a pessimistic one. She writes regarding modern revivalist movements, “The sacred agenda is, in sum, already constituted by the secular in spite of contestations to the contrary. The consequence is that the postcolonial renaissance agenda becomes the very model of governance that it critiques … The state, in the renaissance mode as in its old colonial form, continues to assume the authority to ‘constitute’ religion and religious law” (263–64). And yet, her book also offers hints as to how we might emerge from the cycle of “brute politics” wherein “yesterday’s subordinated are today’s dominant” (270), and towards one closer to the kind of equality and self-governance that the voices on the street seem to demand. If law is both an “instrument of domination and a repertoire of tools that may be harnessed for contestation” (272, my emphasis), as she tells us, then might we plug into its capacity to center multiple aspirations, such as those she traces in the early part of the book when she fascinatingly studies the development of Islamic law from its (relative) precolonial independence to its colonial and postcolonial merging with the fiat of the ruling order? If the sacred and the secular are not neutral terms that precede debate, but rather emerge in entangled ways out of it (and contain DNA from such debates throughout their lives), as her study of constitutional reforms in both the pre- and postindependence periods so clearly shows, then is Akande offering us a note of hope at the end of this volume, something beyond realpolitik? If indeed there exists the possibility of contesting religion and politics anew, might we imagine a situation in which siyasa might have a more limited control over our lives, with law’s polyvocal capacity militating against the singularization of power effected by the modern state? It is questions like these that Akande’s study raises and I am so grateful to her for having written such a paradigm-shifting volume that has offered the opportunity to reflect on them.