Islam and the Nigeria quandary: history, politics and reform

Despite immense oil wealth and astounding human potential, the Nigerian project has stalled. There are Nigerians–probably many more than one may suppose–who passionately want to achieve their country, to create a patriotic home and a stable political settlement that would allow them to use their wealth to fructify their potential, but regional division has so far been insuperable. Nigeria's own founding fathers were grimly ironic about this struggle. Nigerian unity, quipped Tafawa Balewa, the country's first premier, was 'only a British intention'; another grandee of the time, Obafemi Awolowo, said the name 'Nigeria' was 'merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not'; while the contemporaneous paramount northern leader, Ahmadu Bello, dismissed the Nigerian project as 'the mistake of 1914', in reference to the half-baked British 'amalgamation' of northern and southern Nigeria of that year. At critical junctures in Nigerian history, one key factor after another has emerged to confirm these dismal prophesies. It was ethnic 'sub-nationalism' in the 1960s; oil boom and bust in the 1970s; and it appears that it is religion today, as devotional ideologies are springing from Islam and Christianity, the two faiths that overlay almost exactly Nigeria's north–south divide,¹ to anchor regional antagonism into the absolutism of religious dogmas.

The four books reviewed here have very different ambitions–and scholarly merits–but their focused exploration of religion, or the politics of religion, in Nigeria speaks to this moment in Nigerian history. In the case of Thurston's and Loimeier's remarkable books, it also speaks to this fraught moment in the global history of Islam. What do we glean from them?

Olufemi Vaughan's argument in Religion and the Making of Nigeria speaks most directly to the Nigerian quandary. Vaughan's first objective is to demonstrate how Nigeria was constituted by religion–by which one must understand, despite a few token references to 'indigenous religions', the two imported monotheisms: Christianity and Islam. Paradoxically, Vaughan's thesis on the development of the monotheisms in Nigeria is reminiscent of the 'modernization theory' used by political scientists and others in the 1960s to predict, among other things, the demise of religion as a social-political force. Drawing on a similarly teleological literature on 'world religions', Vaughan explains that the indigenous religions of Nigeria could not cope with the 'complicated social, political and economic conditions' that started to prevail in the area in the nineteenth century. They inevitably gave way to the 'world religions', which went on to produce the 'doctrines, practices, and ideologies' that transformed (and created) Nigeria. Vaughan's second objective is to analyse 'the political struggles between Hausa-Fulani Muslim society and other regions in the country'. These other regions are the middle belt–in Nigerian geopolitics, the region where north and south meet, and a major site of recurring communal violence–and the Yoruba-dominated south-west. Vaughan oddly leaves out of his study the south-east, the region where the Nigerian project came closest to an end during the Biafran war, a clash that included the hostility of upholders of Catholicism and local belief systems towards a perceived Muslim threat from the north.

As a result, the book is the story of the concurrent development of the 'world religions' at the expense of 'indigenous religions...