The World; Why Is Nigerian Islam So Radical

The World; Why Is Nigerian Islam So Radical?

By Matt Steinglass, The New York Times
1 December 2002

LIKE Nigeria, which recently exploded in religious violence after trying to hold the Miss World pageant, this ancient Islamic city has done battle with the Western beauty industry.

In 1988, when an Italian television crew taped a provocative fashion show at Djenne's fabled mud-walled Great Mosque, the residents were outraged. But unlike Nigeria, Mali did not erupt. Djenne closed the mosque to non-Muslims, and that was the end of the matter.

Sokode, a Muslim city in Togo, 500 miles southeast of here, was host in August to a round of the Miss Togo contest, swimsuits and all. But there was no protest. ''We had 23 contestants, including a number of Muslim girls, and everything went just fine,'' said Kossivi Tanla, the contest's legal adviser.

There are a half-dozen Muslim countries in West Africa. Several others are, like Nigeria, split between a Christian south and a Muslim north. But only Nigeria struggles with a strong radical Islamist movement, and only Nigeria has Shariah, the strict rule of law based on the Koran, in certain states.

While northern Muslims and southern Christians are at war in Ivory Coast, the conflict is exclusively ethnic and nationalist: southerners stigmatize northerners as non-Ivoirian immigrants and shut them out of politics. In Nigeria, on the other hand, when Isioma Daniel, a journalist, said in a newspaper article that Muhammad might have married a Miss World contestant, Muslims vandalized churches and attacked Christians. More than 200 people died in the riots.

What makes Nigeria so different?

History, for one. ''Nigeria is very unusual in that it has a recent history of Shariah rule,'' said David Westerlund, an expert in religious history at Uppsala University in Sweden. In the early 19th century, Usman dan Fodio led a jihad across northern Nigeria, creating a theocratic caliphate in the far northern city of Sokoto. The British took over northern Nigeria in 1900, keeping the Sokoto dynasty as part of their system of indirect rule, but banning punishments like amputation and stoning. By the mid-20th century, northern Nigeria was the only region outside the Arabian peninsula where Islamic criminal law was fully enforced.