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

An interest in the politics of religion is well established in the field of Islam in Africa. One might say that it is the central theme of the field, given its entanglement with concerns of religious governance, or the management of religious difference that preoccupied colonial states. Indeed, legal historian Rabiat Akande meticulously demonstrates—in her recent Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria—this preoccupation in the seemingly exceptional case of the construction of colonial Islamic law in Northern Nigeria. If, as Edward Said argued long ago, the will to know the so-called Orient has long been tied to the will to power over it, Western scholarship wielded as an instrument of statecraft has advertently and inadvertently been preoccupied with defining, constraining, and regulating Islam in ways that aligned with state interest.

At the same time, what I call the religion of politics—that is, a closed, restricted, and regulated way of understanding the political as being defined by secularity and the autonomy of “politics” from the religious—has also shaped what might be said about Islam in the region in more subtle ways. Those actors who comply with this distinction between politics and religion enjoy—as political theorist Mahmood Mamdani has shown elsewhere—the label of “good Muslims,” while those who do not, face the repercussions of being labeled bad ones.

However, this framing of the politics of religion—that is, the practices, policies, and personalities associated with “Islam” and the moral and epistemological doctrine of secularism that has calcified into the “religion of politics”—fail to exhaust the manifold relationships between the religious and the political either as they have been articulated in society or that might be imagined. The result is something of a deadlock and a compulsion of repetition, sometimes of the same, sometimes with a difference. It is this deadlock and dance of musical chairs that has generated, particularly in the case of Nigeria, a sense of dissatisfaction for this careful observer of constitutional debates. These debates largely consist of an essentialist view of secularism shared by supposed secularists and supposed anti-secularists alike. One might describe Akande’s important contribution as displaying something of a tragic mood.

Motivated by this dissatisfaction, Akande introduces with perceptive insight a third term, “secularism,” as a critical wedge to open up this stalemate to think through a rather complex problem. It is, I believe, the first study to squarely take on this subject in the field of Islam in Africa, narrowly defined. She therefore inaugurates a new direction for the field that holds great promise in unsettling some of the many doxas that it should contend with while opening it up to broader academic conversations around political theology and critical religious studies. In particular, she theoretically engages with critiques such as those by Talal Asad, who has insisted on the historicity of the formation of the secular. Empirically, she attends to the inherently contradictory nature of legal concepts such as secularism by showing the competing claims of religious freedom and state and religion separation as they shift in legal arguments. In so doing, Akande models a constructivist view for the study of Islamic law, and of Islam more generally, in Africa.

This constructivist view of religion, what Mamadou Diallo—reading the literature on South Asia in forthcoming work—describes as “religion-making” in the comparative case of Senegal, yields two profound insights that we should not neglect. The first is historiographical and theoretical. Against a tendency to see indirect rule in northern Nigeria as a case of a paradoxical colonial theocracy, colonial north Nigeria was indeed secular, in the sense that colonial rule “confined and defined” all religion for its purposes. This was a significant and singular development that should be interrogated.

The second, and in my mind, most important, insight is political. The persistence of the essentialist terms of the secularism debate in Nigeria, which were established in elite negotiations with the colonial management of difference, are depoliticizing. The ultimate casualty of colonial governmentality, Akande shows us, was and continues to be equality. But perhaps, this insight is, in fact, religious.