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

Rabiat Akande’s Entangled Domains joins a wave of important scholarship on the encounter between Islamic law and colonialism. Relevant works include Iza Hussin’s The Politics of Islamic Law (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Junaid Quadri’s Transformations of Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Elizabeth Lhost’s Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (University of North Carolina, 2022). One major difference is that while those books accord significant agency to Muslims, Akande’s book reminds us of the tremendous discursive and institutional power of the colonial state.

Akande shows that colonial policymakers had the power to frame issues and identities and thereby set the parameters of debate, with major consequences. For example, the Tijaniyya Sufi order was denied the status of minority despite their lobbying for it; rather, colonial authorities classed them as dissidents (139). Or to take another even more consequential example, the colonial state steered and shaped the process of legal reform and codification in the late 1950s, “supplant[ing] Islamic criminal jurisprudence with an imperial code of criminal justice” (185). Akande directs careful attention to the discourses of key colonial administrators and, in the process, shows significant internal debates, tensions, and contradictions among them. The colonial state was neither homogeneous nor static. Yet colonial interventions, Akande shows, had lasting impacts even on postcolonial debates over Islamic law; the colonial authorities spun a kind of web that Nigerian Muslims—and perhaps other postcolonial Muslim societies—have had difficulty breaking.

Akande does not neglect Muslim voices from northern Nigeria. On the contrary, she offers a sophisticated mapping of debates within the northern Muslim elite over the meanings of law and the desirability and direction of reform. She writes, persuasively, that “colonial subjects” were not “passive receptors,” and that law functioned as both “an instrument of domination and a repertoire of tools that may be harnessed for contestation” (272). Akande is particularly attuned to the voices of politicians, including progressive critics who voiced alternative visions of what Islamic law could be. At the same time, something I have struggled with in my own work is whether it is possible to capture an even greater range of voices. One progressive northern Nigerian Muslim quoted in Akande’s book spoke scornfully of the “sleepy alkali” (157), meaning the stereotype of Islamic judge who—in a view common to many Orientalists and progressive Muslims alike—had little intellectual dynamism to offer. How to access the perspective of such figures (rural jurists, for example) is one frontier for future research.

Akande’s work also impresses in its attention to transnational dynamics and the circulation of ideas—for example, about religious minorities—within the colonized world. Here I was struck in part by how myopic the British administrators were, even as they ruled over this vast empire through which discourses traveled. In northern Nigeria and beyond, the British were deeply suspicious of the influence of Al-Azhar, the famous Islamic university in Egypt, which British administrators viewed as a dangerous source of pan-Islamic “propaganda.” Akande relates that when a delegation of northern Nigerian Muslims visited Libya in 1958 in the context of exploring legal reform, the British were uneasy at the delegation’s meeting with Libya’s then-Grand Mufti, a graduate of al-Azhar—but, Akande writes, “The colonial administrators later concluded that the grand mufti was not ‘a latter-day Muslim fundamentalist,’ as they regarded Al-Azhar scholars” (145). Ironically, in 1958 the new rector of al-Azhar was Mahmud Shaltut (1893–1963), a reformist and modernist thinker. Shaltut was, moreover, part of an intellectual lineage of reformists at al-Azhar that also included Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) and Mustafa al-Maraghi (d. 1945), among others. British administrators were well aware of those developments—Lord Cromer had personally known Abduh, after all. Between immense powers of surveillance and control on the one hand, and substantial paranoia and selectivity on the other hand, the British empire shaped Islam in part through active intervention, and in part through foreclosing channels of communication and possibility.

Ultimately, as Akande shows, the reform of Islamic law in northern Nigeria proceeded along the lines of those models the British approved. Yet, as she demonstrates in the last chapter of the book, on postcolonial dynamics, the power of colonial secularism did not settle anything—“secularism,” she writes, “is not an unchanging mode of domination. It is a domain of contestation” (266).