6 - The politics of gender: Nigerian women's responses to Shari'a

Summary

The re-introduction of Shari’a (Islamic law) to criminal offences and social vices in northern Nigeria in 1999 shifted the Shari’a debate from the narrow terrain of the Constituent Assembly and the Federal Executive Council into a wider section of society. The Shari’anization of northern Nigeria and the implementation of hudud punishments not only shocked a vast majority of Nigerians, but resulted in a mushrooming of criticism and generated a lot of support for Shari’a victims from various sectors of society including women and women's groups, human rights activists and other concerned Nigerians. The intensity of the criticisms and the overwhelming support received by Shari’a victims should not, however, be construed as meaning that the Shari’aists were totally bereft of support in the society. Certain sections of the Muslim community, including women and women's groups, the poor and marginalised and other categories of Nigerians supported the Shari’a project. It is in the context of support and opposition to the Shari’anization policy that we will attempt to assess the responses of the Nigerian women's movement to the re-introduction of Shari’a to criminal offences and social vices.

This essay focuses on the differing and differentiated responses of the Nigerian women's movement to the Shari’anization process. The Nigerian women’s movement is made up of several groups and individuals reflecting different perspectives and interests, with different ideas of what women's interests are, but with the common goal of resisting patriarchy and advancing the objectives and aspirations of women. In other words, all the groups take the issue of women’s subordination as their starting point in their different activities and programmes. For example, the various groups acknowledge that there are very many practices, regardless of what the laws formally say, that are discriminatory against women; that women's access to opportunities for earning a livelihood need to be improved; and that child and health care facilities need to be improved to enable women to have some kind of autonomy, however minimal.

These are some of the issues that these diverse groups, which constitute the Nigerian women's movement, have taken up individually irrespective of the fact that some of them are relatively conservative while some others are much more radical.