The chapter chronicles the emergence of religious minorities in late colonial constitutional politics. Efforts to actualize the missionary dream of winning souls took the form of self-determination advocacy in the late colonial years with Protestant advocates constructing the religious minorities as the group seeking self-determination. Although the religious minorities emerged to resist colonial rule, paradoxically, making that identity affirmed the Muslim-non-Muslim classification central to colonial governance. By telling a story of the oppression of Christians and diverse indigenous faiths based on their status as non-Muslims, Protestant advocates constructed an identity centered on its antithesis to Islam. That binary failed to capture the complex forms of exclusion that colonial governance of religion entailed. Although it purported to be inclusive of all non-Muslim concerns, self-determination advocacy overwhelmingly privileged the Protestant experience. Moreover, the religious minorities' identity excluded Muslim populations marginalized in the colonial state. The ultimate consequence was that the religious minorities project opened new doors to inequality.

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.

This chapter chronicles the late colonial state’s elimination of Islamic law from public law through a Penal Code rooted in imperial law. The transformation of Islamic law since the inception of colonial rule belied the early colonial state’s claim to retaining Islamic criminal law. Nevertheless, the formal retention of the Shari’a in public law through Islamic criminal law had been a distinct feature of Northern Nigeria, underlining the formal status of Muslim elites and Islamic law. In response to the concerted criticism of missionaries, and senior colonial officials, the 1958 reforms abrogated the ceremonial status of Islamic law. Even as the 1958 Penal Code removed all illusions of the retention of Islamic law, administrators and Muslim elites legitimated the reform exercise by invoking Islamic legal authority, particularly the practice of Muslim societies. That discourse capaciously expanded the state’s power to regulate the content of Islamic law by re-casting the state’s Sharia-constrained siyasa jurisdiction as an expansive siyasa whose constitutional boundaries are drawn by the modern state. By so doing, the 1958 reforms sealed the state’s prerogative to govern religion.

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.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT – the religious movement described in Chapter 4 – is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.