Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution, Sarah Eltantawi

Abstract

This book is a minimally (alas…) revised version of the author’s PhD thesis (“Stoning in the Islamic Tradition: The Case of Northern Nigeria,” Harvard University, 2012). The author, as she narrates in the introduction, came to academic study after a history of activism in Muslim organisations in the United States. Initially, she had decided to embark on a research on the penalty of stoning for adultery with the aim of trying to understand why many northern Nigerian Muslims, after their successful agitation for the implementation of a Sharia-inspired penal code, had apparently supported the sentence of stoning for zinā (adultery) that had been declared in 2002 by a Sharia court of Katsina State against 30-year old Amina Lawal, after the latter had conceived a child out of wedlock. Although Amina’s case was successfully overturned by a Sharia court of appeal in 2003, the study of this case and of its aftermath provided the author an entry point into a discussion of the application of Islamic law in a postcolonial Muslim society, as this was “the first time shari'ah was put on trial in Nigeria.” (p. 201) Amina’s case was actually the second trial for zinā in post-colonial northern Nigeria, as it followed the similarly famous one of Safiyya Hussaini – which is not discussed in the book – by about one year.