Nigeria: Sharia Court orders immediate suspension of all debates on amputation

Beginning in 2000, the Sharia Penal Codes was passed in several Nigerian states and created some new offences in Nigerian law, mostly around sexuality, like the zina laws and the prohibition of lesbianism. The Codes also recognize stoning, retributive punishments, and blood fines. In theory, these laws apply to Muslims only, thereby evading the charge that the Sharia Acts constitute the imposition of a state religion. It remains an open question whether Muslims have the right to choose to be governed by general Nigerian law without having to renounce their religious identity.

Ironically, despite the growth of religious essentialism and religious right tendencies, the new laws were not directly the result of pressure from a religious group. Faced with a small and recently created state with little infrastructure or capital, few natural resources or people with high formal education, the newly elected governor of Zamfara state needed to court popularity― through “Sharianization.”

Many members of Muslim communities who were uneasy about Sharianization felt that they had no solid basis on which to protest. As Muslims, they felt that they could not simply oppose Sharianization, but neither did they feel that they were adequately equipped to criticize, as they did not read Arabic or have years of study of fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence. Hence there was an uneasy public silence, despite private misgivings. Playing the “Sharia card” has largely worked. The conservative political elite in northern Nigeria have been able to use the mass support for Sharia to criticize the federal government and to increase their lowered access to centrally-controlled national resources, following the shift of power in the 1999 elections to the largely Christian southwest/middle belt alliance. Sharia was also welcomed by some Christians as a means of justifying a move toward “Christian law” for themselves. Yet others justified it as a rationale for their own support for increased local state autonomy vis-à-vis the federal state, especially in the delta region and the southeast.

The net effect of the Sharia Acts and the politics around them has been to give increased power and authority to conservative religious essentialism and identity politics. To criticize Sharianization, even mildly, was regarded as anti-Sharia, anti-northern Nigeria, and anti-Islam, even by some convicted under the new Acts, who were therefore unwilling to appeal their convictions.

The first group to be active on Sharianization’s potential to violate women’s rights was BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights. BAOBAB’s work rests on recognizing the historicity and specificity of all discourses of rights and the need for their continual reconstruction. For instance, BAOBAB has been active in a comparative study of women’s rights under customary, general (secular) and religious laws in the Muslim world. BAOBAB has worked in coalition with other women's and human rights groups in a three pronged strategy 1) defense of those convicted under the new Sharia Penal Codes, 2) demystifying the notion of Sharia laws, and 3) working to build common platforms to defend and promote women’s rights across diverse communities.

Demystifying Muslim laws - explaining that Sharia is not divine but merely religious and is neither uniform nor unchanging requires uncovering the historical specificities of Muslim laws, the development and diversity of Muslim jurisprudence, the progressive potentials for women’s rights and the legitimacy of reforming current Sharia laws.

Demystifying Sharianization in Nigeria also involves critiques of the current class- and gender-bias in content and implementation.  The poor have been the most subjected to harsh punishments.  There have been fewer convictions of men than of women for adultery or fornication. Moreover, men convicted of violent sexual offenses, like rape and sexual assault, have received less severe punishments (usually fines, imprisonment, or acceptance of pleas of illness and insanity), despite the stronger punishments available in the Sharia Penal Codes that are routinely meted out for consensual sex outside marriage. Women have clearly been discriminated against. Judges have ignored or dismissed women’s allegations of rape and coercion in zina cases. Charges of adultery/fornication brought against women used different and discriminatory standards of evidence than those used for men – that of pregnancy outside marriage.

Bringing this information and criticism to public discussion debunks the claim that any critique of Sharianization is tantamount to being anti-Islam. It also lays the basis for the demand for demanding reform of the Sharia Acts and Sharia Penal Codes, instead of accepting conservative and retrograde versions.

This background information has been excerpted from 'Women’s Reproductive and Sexual Rights and the Offence of Zina in Muslim Laws in Nigeria' by Ayesha M Imam. (A substantially similar edited version of this paper is published in Where Human Rights Begin—Health, Sexuality, and Women in the New Millennium, edited by Wendy Chavkin and Ellen Chesler, Rutgers University Press, November 2005)