Empire’s embrace of secular governmentality called for a rhetoric of state separation from religion. At the same time, however, the state’s promise of religious autonomy and the ideological underpinnings and administrative exigencies of indirect rule translated into the co-option, regulation, and transformation of religion and religious institutions. In the end, therefore, imperial secular governmentality–in its varied spatial and temporal manifestations–entailed an uneasy truce between the rhetoric of state-religion separation, and the everyday intimacy of religion and state authority. The conclusion argues that that paradox is central to the law and politics of the modern state’s governance of religious difference.

The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

Set in Africa’s most populous Muslim country, the book takes on a paradox: colonial governance in Northern Nigeria entailed indirect rule through Muslim intermediaries and caliphate institutions; yet, the state insisted on its secularity. In unravelling this puzzle, the book offers a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, the book illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state’s governance of religion and interrogates its legacy in the postcolonial state. The book illuminates the dynamic interplay between law, religion, and power in the political context of the modern state’s unique emergence from colonial processes.