This article analyses how the circulation of ideas and hybrid rituals between Shia Muslims and Christians reveals a much more intentional political process whereby minority religious groups consciously create shared experiences and a sense of commonality in the face of political marginalization in northern Nigeria. One example is the Shia invention of Jesus’s Mawlid (Jesus’s birthday), which they perform in a different way from the conventional Christmas but that is attended by some Christians. Also, some Christians participate in the annual celebration of Mawlid al-Nabiy (the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), organized by Shias. Despite the adherents of the two religions participating in mixed religious practices, they continue to see themselves separately as Muslims and Christians. Reactions to these hybrid rituals impact relationships among the mainline Sunni groups. Sufis (Tijanis and Qadiris), who were previously united in the face of the anti-Sufi reform movement (Izala), now diverge over how to respond to Shia Islam. While they disagree with Shias intellectually, not everyone supports the attacks against Shias by Salafi activists. These dynamics add to the understanding that the concept of ‘tolerance’ is not sophisticated enough to capture all forms of religious coexistence in Nigeria.

The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) is a movement that promotes the Islamic identity of Muslims in Nigeria’s educational institutions. Despite promoting the same objectives around the country, a comparison of the MSSN’s activities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria suggests that the success of the movement varies in many aspects. This is because there are two main types of regional variation relating to the MSSN: the success of Christian opposition to the MSSN’s objectives; and the attitude of many Muslims and the government to those objectives. For example, in the Muslim-dominated northern states, the call by the MSSN to let Muslim girls wear the hijab in schools and the MSSN’s support for the reintroduction of sharia were welcomed by the state governors. However, in the south-west region, where the populations of Muslims and Christians are roughly equal, the MSSN struggled to get the state governors to accept the hijab and the call for sharia was rejected. This article thus argues that, despite envisioning the same notion of Islam for all Muslim students in Nigeria, the MSSN’s activities do not produce a monolithic Islam, and that this reflects differences in the practice of the religion across the country.

Nigerian Muslims have undertaken the hajj for centuries. As Nigeria approached independence in the 1950s, Muslims began to discuss and debate this practice on a national scale, through Islamic associations and political committees and in the Nigerian press. At the same time, Muslim politicians began to publicly don the ‘Mecca uniform’, the white robe (thawb) and black cord (‘iqāl) common to Saudi Arabia. While Nigerian pilgrims had worn these garments for decades, their conspicuous adoption by the political elite was novel. This sartorial link between politicians and the East was amplified by photographs and commentary circulating nationally in the press, and generated a mix of admiration and concern. Christians (and some Muslims) questioned whether a secular state ought to oversee the hajj. Within roughly a decade, politicians ceased their official use of the Mecca uniform as the press became saturated with exaggerated stories of ‘corrupt’ pilgrims engaged in smuggling and other crimes. The proliferation of other mass media, such as radio and novels, contributed to this critique. This was not the end of the Mecca uniform’s public life, however, as others – such as Yoruba women in the south-west – continued to employ it in self-fashioned public images, including obituary notices. The transformation of the Mecca uniform into an object of national discourse engaging a range of Muslims and also Christians speaks to the complex dynamics shaping Islam in modern Nigeria.

Nigeria is often portrayed as having a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. Such representations oversimplify the complicated interrelationships between the two religious communities and their geographic locations. Similarly, while much has been written on the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, there has been less scholarly attention to the philosophical and communal relationships between adherents of the two religions in northern Nigeria. I argue that there are parallels in the way in which Hausa-speaking Muslim artists responded to a censorship crisis in Kano State in 2007–11 and in the way in which Hausa-speaking Christian musicians from Nigeria’s north-east responded a few years later to the Boko Haram crisis. I examine Muslim filmmaker Hamisu Lamido Iyantama’s response to the Kano State Censorship Board, alongside Christian musician Saviour Y. Inuwa’s response to Boko Haram. Iyantama and Inuwa both counter repressive forces by expressing parallel understandings of their identities as citizens in the pluralistic state of Nigeria and as righteous members of universal religious communities that emphasize God’s justice in the end times. I argue that these Hausa-language artists present a vision of cosmopolitan unity across ethnicity and religion, as an alternative to the repressive forces of both state censorship and the anarchic violence of Boko Haram.

This article explores recent inter- and intra-religious entanglements and contestations between Sufi Muslims, members of the Izala and Christianity, which have emerged as a result of a new way of celebrating Mawlūd in the Nigerian city of Jos. Through the adept use of loudspeakers, Izala projects a sense of dominance over the public sphere of the city and uses this as a platform to critique the Sufis. In part as a response, and as a counter-critique of Izala, the Sufis have rejuvenated their Mawlūd celebrations as a mass public spectacle, involving the use of Christmas lights to decorate the city and the construction at the entrance to major streets of temporary wooden arches decorated with flowers, Christmas lights, wreaths and images of Shaykh Ibrahim Nyass. This article argues that the Sufis, who are at a disadvantage in the practice of organized preaching and the use of sound media, have transformed the Mawlūd celebrations into a mechanism to counterbalance Izala’s dominance of the public sphere and to reassert their presence in the city. The Sufis’ incorporation of decorative Christmas objects reveals the fluid boundaries between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, which sometimes generate dynamics of interreligious borrowing and mutual influence. This article attempts to remap and push the boundaries of studying Islam and Christianity in Nigeria, because focusing on one religion in isolation downplays the intertwining and intersection of practices between the two religious groups.

‘Yan haƙiƙa are a Sufi group that has come to prominence in the second decade of the twenty-first century in northern Nigeria, with a significant following in Kano. Although members of the group perceive themselves to be bona fide followers of the path of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (Senegalese Islamic scholar and founder of Tijaniyya-Ibrahimiyya), they are considered by Sunni Muslims (both Salafis and Sufis) as a heretical faction. The basic ideology of this group is that Niasse Allah ne (Niasse is God); they also apotheosize their members. Their ideology stems from the concepts of Wahadat al-Wujud (oneness of being and unity of existence) and Tarbiyya (spiritual training), which is a method used by Sufi shaykhs to guide their disciples on the mystical journey to direct experiences of the Divine Essence – a method popularized by Tijaniyya-Ibrahimiyya. Initially, the group operated clandestinely, but in recent years its members have attracted public attention through Mawlid Baaye (celebrating the birthday of Niasse). During the celebration, they shower praises on Niasse and rank him above the Prophet Muhammad. Their comments generate violent reactions from Salafi and Sufi communities. While Salafis consider the creed of ‘Yan haƙiƙa as typical Sufi heresy, the Sufis not only disown them but also question their ‘Muslimness’. The emergence of ‘Yan haƙiƙa has changed the contours and composition of Tijaniyya in Kano because its defining ideology of deifying Niasse and its members contradict the teaching and doctrine of the mainstream Tijaniyya. This article unpacks the place of ‘Yan haƙiƙa in the highly contested and tense religious geography of Kano, exploring how its emergence complicates the category of ‘Muslim’ within mainstream Sunni Islam.

This article examines two northern Nigerian Muslim intellectuals – Aminu Sagagi and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (enthroned as Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano, 2014–20) – whose approaches, in different ways, exemplify a self-consciously eclectic Islamic intellectual style. Their eclecticism breaks with categories familiar from the study of Islam in Africa and Nigeria, categories such as Sufis, Salafis and Islamists. The eclecticist style – or rather, styles – draw on northern Nigerian Islamic modernist traditions, the curriculum and atmosphere of Sudan’s International University of Africa (where both of these Nigerian intellectuals received degrees), and a wider set of global influences. Given their diverse intellectual formation, the eclecticists’ writings and careers allow for an examination of the translocal exchanges that have shaped what is sometimes perceived as a self-contained unit called ‘northern Nigeria’. The article further explores how the eclecticist style manifests in legal and political thought, analysing the critiques that Sagagi and Sanusi made of sharīʿa implementation in northern Nigerian states in the early 2000s. The article draws on Nigerian and Sudanese sources, as well as unpublished and published writings by Sagagi and Sanusi, to describe their intellectual trajectories and outlooks and offer a portrait of the eclecticist style.

In 1932, as Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) was heading to indirect rule, a small vocal community in the north of the country resisted the colonial government’s attempts to assign them a Native Authority. Instead, they proposed their own form of government: a council of thirty-two mafumu (chiefs) who would make decisions on an egalitarian basis, the Atonga tribal council. The champion of this alternative form of governance was a Tonga intellectual named Filemon K. Chirwa. At the height of the political manoeuvring to institute the Atonga tribal council, Filemon wrote and published his only book: Nthanu za Chitonga (Folktales in Chitonga). This article argues that this book was – and still is – an important piece of political literature. Through an exploration of the context of the creation of the Atonga tribal council, it sets out the stakes that were at play in the construction of local traditions and customs, and then shows how the book was part of a project of producing an image of these. It then explores the ‘afterlife’ of the book, as it became a symbolic force in contemporary village communities, not only articulating the sense of political marginalization experienced, but also capturing a new form of political agency. The article concludes by suggesting that Filemon Chirwa’s collection of stories is an astounding example of the deeply political role that folktale literature can play within colonial and (post)colonial Africa.

Why are Nigeria’s universities launching a growing number of open access journals while simultaneously expecting their academic staff to publish ‘internationally’? And what impact do these expectations have on Nigerian journals? Drawing on interviews with editors and publishers, we describe the emergence of a hyperlocal ‘credibility economy’ within the Nigerian academy. The great majority of Nigerian scholarly journals are excluded from Scopus and Web of Science, the two main global citation indexes. Stigmatized by geography, Nigerian journals are ignored, rendered invisible, classed as poor quality or condemned as ‘predatory’. Historicizing these trends, we illustrate our argument with four case studies: two science and technology journals hosted by universities and two independent publishers, one with expertise in African studies, the other in information studies. In each case, we explore the motivations, commitments and strategies of editors and publishers. Their stories exemplify the impact of colonial histories, global discourses and bibliometric infrastructures on African research publishing cultures. The histories, logics and fragilities of this regional research ecosystem reveal how Africa’s scholars and publishers are getting by – but only just – amid the metricized judgements of the global research economy.

This article brings new perspectives on state–citizen relations in African petro-states by analysing the role of Nigerian trade unions in the recurring fuel subsidy protests. Nigerian trade unions have played an instrumental role in protests against fuel subsidy removals since the mid-1980s, most recently in the massive 2012 protest known as ‘Occupy Nigeria’. Based on the idea that the fuel subsidy forms part of a social contract in Nigeria, and through revisiting T. H. Marshall’s seminal work on citizenship and industrial citizenship, I propose that the protests are sites for popular assertions of broader citizenship, as people rally behind the fuel subsidy as a social right and affirm political rights to participate and civil rights to bargain. This article further argues that the trade unions act as a mediator between state and citizens – that is, embedded in their industrial citizenship with collective forms of representation, organizing and bargaining. In this way, Nigerian trade unions have kept their relevance for workers and beyond, despite eroded labour rights. However, this social contract is fragile, contextual and contradictory, and the mediating role of the unions carries challenges and ambiguities, which became particularly clear in the 2012 protest.