Rabiat Akande’s book Entangled Domains provides a close examination of the role of secularism as part of British colonial governance in Northern Nigeria and in the early years of Nigeria’s independence. Akande makes a significant contribution to a growing body of literature that critically examines this concept, “illuminating shifts in the making and remaking of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular,’” demonstrating that “the construction of secularism is constantly shifting” (268).

The great strength of Akande’s work is that she allows her central construct (secularism) to exist without any foundational or central meaning. Rather, the goal of her project is to explore how this idea is used by different actors at different times to advance their own agendas within the governance of Northern Nigeria. This allows the idea itself to change, and in many cases be fundamentally transformed, through the periods of contestation. For example, in the first part of the book, Akande traces how claims to secularism were alternatively deployed by both colonial officials and missionaries as they struggled over whether and how Christian missionaries would be granted access to Muslim-dominated areas of Northern Nigeria. In its first instantiation, under the auspices of Frederick Lugard, the claimed secularism of the colonial state resulted in a promise of “noninterference with Islam” and resulted in an emphasis on restraining Christian missionaries (17). In the later years of colonial rule, however, the British colonial state emphasized “state-religion separation,” which resulted in a “de-emphas[is]” of “the role of Islamic institutions” (17), and greater openness to missionary influence. Both periods involved the idea of secularism, but to very different ends.

A scholar examining the role of secularism in (post)colonial governance might take these disputes and “stop[] at the conclusion that imperial secularism is politics,” but Akande, by allowing secularism to have multiple and contested meanings, argues that “a productive inquiry interrogates the sort of politics that mode of governmentality entailed – and its limits” (69). In her work this results in a close examination of the extent to which “secular governmentality render[ed] [Islam’s] norms and institutions amendable to governance” (71) which she concludes ultimately resulted in the “subvert[ion] [of] the constitutional foundation of precolonial Islamic law” (104). In other words, rather than simply asserting that this history of contestation demonstrates that secularism is inherently political, Akande traces the debates over the term to unearth its role in transforming Northern Nigeria Islamic law.

As this example demonstrates, Akande’s work is an important reminder that statecraft cannot be separated from substantive law. In Akande’s account, the central actors are petitioners to the state, seeking to shape governance in a manner that aligns with their own interests. She argues that secularism’s “internal ambiguities and competing external deployments” allow “subject-stakeholders [to] deploy its conflicting imperatives to challenge the state and attempt to advance their agendas within it” (25). For example, in Part II Akande traces how Christian missionaries argued against secularism in the debates over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (particularly Article 18), whereas in Part III she shows that debates during the 1977 constitutional conference in Nigeria saw Christian groups arguing in favor of secularism in order to reject a Muslim-backed proposal for a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal. Akande argues that “neither religious freedom nor its ostensible rival, secularist separation, are fixed. Rather, both ideas take their shape in the course of specific contestations and are embedded in particular relations of power” (224).

Akande’s work builds on a number of existing literatures. Most broadly, it engages with works considering the dynamic interrelationship of liberalism and empire. More precisely, she builds on what she terms “critical scholarship on secularism” (14). Finally, Akande’s book contributes to the historiography of Northern Nigeria. At the same time, one shortcoming of the work is that, by focusing on the claims that different religious groups made on the state, Akande ends up focusing on the dominant voices that were able to make their voices heard (majority Muslim groups and Christian missionaries) and thus perpetuates the marginalization of minority Muslim groups (to a lesser extent) and other African religions (to a much greater extent) within that historiography.

Ultimately Akande’s book should be of interest to a number of different groups of scholars, including: anyone studying the British Empire (Akande’s book is yet another reminder of the entanglements that occurred within that Empire as concepts developed in other colonies were applied in Northern Nigeria); anyone studying the history and development of Islamic law (Akande reminds us that in order to understand developments internal to a legal system we have to examine the external pressures influencing it); and finally, anyone attempting to acquire a deeper understanding of the close relationship between secularism and religion (Akande reminds us that the former does not eliminate the latter from politics, in fact it ensures the latter’s continuing presence within the liberal state).