Muslim Politics in West Africa
Taken as a whole, continental West Africa is roughly evenly divided between Muslims and non-Muslims. Religious demography, however, varies significantly across the 15 countries: Mauritania – officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania – is effectively 100 per cent Muslim; five others are overwhelmingly (at least 85 per cent) Muslim; another five might be categorized as religiously divided countries, with Muslim populations ranging from 40 per cent to 60 per cent; and finally, four countries of coastal West Africa include significant (10–25 per cent) Muslim minorities (see Table 11.1).
Table 11.1Religious demography of West Africa
Country |
Estimated population (millions) |
Estimated Muslims (%) |
Mauritania |
3.2 |
100 |
Senegal |
12.3 |
94 |
Mali |
13.8 |
90+ |
Niger |
15.9 |
90+ |
Gambia |
1.8 |
90 |
Guinea-Conakry |
10.3 |
85 |
Sierra Leone |
5.2 |
60 |
Nigeria |
150.0 |
50 |
Guinea-Bissau |
1.5 |
50 |
Burkina Faso |
16.2 |
50 |
Côte d’Ivoire |
21.0 |
40 |
Benin |
9.0 |
24 |
Togo |
6.6 |
20 |
Ghana |
24.3 |
16 |
Liberia |
3.7 |
12 |
Note: Estimates for population size and for religion vary significantly among various sources. Reliable censuses in Africa are rare, and even when carried out many do not ask about (or release information on) religion due to the political sensitivity of religious demographics. Additionally, in various countries, the question of whether people should be categorized as ‘Muslim’ based on self-declaration or on observed practice produces rather different estimates. The population numbers provided in this table are primarily from the CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/index.html); religious estimates have been adjusted from other sources.
Simple demography helps explain certain patterns, as well as account for the diversity of Muslim politics in the region. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania prescribes sharia (Islamic law) as the country’s ‘organic law’. Muslim politics in the country have at times involved discussion on what this label of ‘Islamic Republic’ might require of successive governments, and there are some tensions and ambiguity in the relationship between political and religious authorities. However, demography has its limits: as a point of cultural commonality religion has been rather marginal in Mauritania’s tumultuous domestic politics.
In the five countries where Muslims comprise large and dominant majorities, the central political debate on religion and politics might be characterized as a discussion about how and to what extent political and legal systems should reflect or accommodate the religious beliefs of the majority. Interestingly, however, in all five of these countries this debate has been framed in the context of the need to ensure the full citizenship rights of non-Muslim minorities.
In the religiously divided countries there is an obvious potential for rivalry for control of the state, although there is significant variation in terms of whether the religious divide in fact emerges as a political cleavage. When struggles for dominance do occur, they tend to resemble raw identity politics with rather limited religious content. Such dynamics have been notably central to politics in Nigeria. To a more limited extent, religion emerged as one element of the identities framing politics over the decade of crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. Nevertheless, it is also striking to note the lack of significant politicization of the religious cleavage in other divided cases: Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau.
Finally, in the countries in which Muslims comprise a clear minority, Muslim politics have tended to focus on demands for full religious freedom for minorities and at times for religious autonomy in such crucial social arenas as education and family law. These dynamics have marked countries such as Benin and Ghana (Galilou 2002; Weiss 2008).
The chapter cannot pretend to offer a full account of these varied countries with strikingly diverse patterns of Muslim politics. Rather, in what follows I will discuss some of the more important dimensions of religious politics in the region, with particular attention to the cases where Islam has taken a central political role. These include the overwhelmingly Muslim countries of the Francophone Sahel – Senegal, Mali, and Niger – and Nigeria, a religiously divided country but one with a population alone that is approximately the same as all other 14 countries combined.
Situating Muslim Politics
There is a long history of ‘Muslim politics’ across West Africa – in the sense of political action rooted in religious ideas, mobilized around religious symbolism, and pursuing policies rooted in religious values – but three important preliminary points must be made in situating religious politics in the region.1
As elsewhere, Muslim politics in Africa are nothing more than a variant of politics more broadly and must be understood in the context of other political dynamics, to which religion is in fact often marginal. Thus across West Africa major national political debates are primarily focused on such burning questions as the status of constitutionally prescribed presidential term limits, increases in the costs of basic food staples, government shortcomings in the provision of public services and utilities, and corruption scandals – that is, the everyday stuff of African politics across the continent. Religion may or may not colour such debates, but raw politics remains primary.
Second, while situated in the broader world of Islam, African Muslim politics are constrained and shaped by local factors. Transnational religious movements and the increasingly globalized discourse on religion have been fully felt in the region – and increasingly so since the events of 11 September 2001 and the US-led wars in the Muslim world that followed them. However, the impact of external factors is filtered through local social institutions and political dynamics. Even in the interconnected countries of the region, issues that become central in one place may well prove to be irrelevant in another as local actors choose among available symbols and tools to pursue local political goals. Thus even the appeal of, say, Salafist movements, and the specific role they might play in politics, is contingent and shaped by local dynamics (Østebø 2008).
Third, the terrain of Muslim politics lies in the public sphere and is thus rooted in public debate and the popular sentiments of Muslim populations. Too often in contemporary discussions of Islam and politics in the African context there is an implicit assumption of the vulnerability of the Muslim masses to the sway of outside (especially ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’) religious ideologies. Analyses attempting to measure the spread of any given religious ideology (‘radical’ or other) often underestimate the role of individual deliberation and agency in the adoption of ideological stances. However, what Cruise O’Brien (1986) long ago labelled ‘the people’s voice in West African Muslim politics’ remains central. In the everyday lives of Muslim societies, in families, friendships, and social relations, religious ideas are discussed, debated, and accepted (or not) in accordance with local preferences and prevailing values.
The State Context
While in practice colonial policies often deviated significantly from the declared norms, both the official French and British colonial policies, and the specific forms that those policies took in given locales, had a major impact and have continued to shape the parameters of Muslim politics in postcolonial West African states.
With the only partial exception of Mauritania (where the ‘Islamic republic’ was adopted at independence primarily to attempt to unite an otherwise diverse population), religion was almost completely absent from the mobilizing discourses of independence. The mostly young and Western-trained nationalist intellectuals who led West African independence movements had little patience for religious (or ethnic) identities, with their potential divisiveness and their implications of ‘tradition’ and backwardness. Rather, the independence leaders were overwhelmingly secular in spirit and ideologically focused on the rapid ‘modernization’ of societies, premised on the notion that primordial ties of ethnicity, language, or religion would soon fade. Obviously this was not always to be, and to varying degrees these factors have persisted – or emerged – as elements of national politics.
The official French policy of ‘assimilation’, however limited in its effective application, produced a political elite imbued in French conceptions of politics and of the state, and the resulting political orientations have continued to dominate across the Francophone countries. The persistence of French colonial educational policies after independence and the fact that the intellectual elite in the region continued to be trained in French institutions contributed significantly to this ongoing impact. Of particular note in terms of Muslim politics is the persistence of the principle of secularism, laïcité, as a core element of the state. The ongoing commitment in the Francophone countries of the region to un état laïc, and the ongoing debate about what this implies for policies and symbolic politics, is intertwined to this day with the unresolved debate in France about the role of religion in public life.
As elsewhere in Africa, the first governments of the post-colonial Francophone Sahel often gave way to authoritarian regimes of various sorts. These regimes, such as those growing out of the military coups in Mali (1968) and Niger (1974), had no more religious credentials or inspiration than their predecessors. As authoritarian regimes focused on social control, however, they were keenly aware of the mobilizational potential of religion and anxious to suppress alternative sources of authority and incipient challenges to their rule. Given the tenuous social bases of military regimes, however, many also sought to harness religion as a source of legitimation. These governments thus tended to try simultaneously to limit and control the power of religious figures, while also extending patronage to religious groups in an effort to enhance their own legitimacy. In the corporatist state structures that came to characterize Mali and Niger until the early 1990s this led to the creation of single, officially sanctioned national Islamic associations under government patronage and tutelage: the Association Malienne pour l’Unité et le Progrès de l’Islam (AMUPI) and the Association Islamique du Niger (AIN). Until the advent of democracy in the early 1990s, then, Muslim politics in Mali and Niger were carefully circumscribed within these limited state channels, in states that remained officially secular in orientation.
Senegal, the other important Francophone Sahelian country, was long considered a political exception, and the role of religion in maintaining the country’s relative stability and its civilian and even quasi-democratic system has been much discussed. The colonial period saw the development of a system of symbiotic relations between the religious and political elite that survived largely intact into the independence era, and which made possible an officially secular state that benefited directly from the conferred legitimacy of the country’s religious elite (Villalón 1995). The system was built on the strength of the Sufi orders in Senegal, of which two are particularly important: the indigenous and highly centralized Mouride order, and the more widespread but less cohesive Tijaniyya. After an initial period of suspicion and fear, the French were eventually to find ‘paths of accommodation’ (Robinson 2000) with the Sufi religious elite. These relations in turn helped to strengthen the Senegalese Sufi system itself, which developed as a far more structured, socially anchored, and hierarchical form of religious organization than elsewhere in the region.
Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1960–80), although a Catholic himself, built the bases of the post-colonial regime on the continuation of close collaborative ties with the Muslim elite. By contrast with much of the region, Senegal maintained a system of regular elections and constitutionally enshrined a multi-party system in the mid-1970s, just as other neighbouring countries were consolidating single-party rule. The Sufi religious elite were closely implicated in this system, lending support to Senghor and often pronouncing themselves publicly in his favour at election time, thus gaining a reputation as kingmakers. In retrospect it is hard to decipher the exact power of the religious elite in determining outcomes, given that the electoral system was carefully circumscribed, but clearly they were an important stabilizing force. Under Senghor’s successor Abdou Diouf (1980–2000), the collaborative ties were to continue, but as the legitimacy of Diouf’s rule was eroded by the increasingly difficult economic conditions of the 1980s and simmering dissatisfaction about a lack of political change, the religious elite took a more cautious stance. Thus the last major religious directive on elections was that pronounced by the Mouride Caliph in favour of Abdou Diouf in the elections of 1988. In the tumultuous period that began with those elections and continued on through the 1990s, the religious elite remained politically influential but carefully cultivated their independence from politicians (Villalón 1999).
In 2000 the defeat of Diouf and the election of Abdoulaye Wade in the country’s first electoral transition signalled a new epoch in many ways, but relations between the religious and the political elite remain central. Wade’s first and highly controversial gesture upon his election was to go to the Mouride holy city of Touba and to be photographed bowing before the Caliph of the order. He was to repeat this act in the company of his entire government following legislative elections the following year. This gesture and subsequent actions sparked sharp criticism of Wade and much controversy about the relationship between the religious and the political elite, but clearly religion remains highly influential in Senegalese political life. There is no religious bloc, however, capable of defining political outcomes.
A striking legacy of the colonial period in the Francophone Sahel is thus the persistence of officially secular states in the context of negotiated ties with the representatives of deeply religious Muslim societies. Despite some initial challenges to this system in the epoch of democratization, it appears to remain well entrenched. An additional legacy, and one that has been carefully nurtured in the postcolonial context, is a lack of significant religious conflict and a solicitous respect for the non-Muslim minorities – mainly Catholics.
This Francophone context is in sharp contrast to the legacy of British indirect rule in the other zone of significant Muslim politics in West Africa, namely the northern states of Nigeria. In very direct ways, the impact of colonial policies continues to shape Muslim politics in that country (Sanusi 2007). Under the colonial administrator Lord Frederick Lugard, the policy of ‘indirect rule’ applied in the region explicitly maintained and in many ways even reinforced the power of local emirs, whose political legitimacy was deeply rooted in Islam. The Sokoto Caliphate which dominated the region at the time of the British conquest was a singularly successful political entity, born of the jihad that swept the region in the early nineteenth century, and which had established a theocratic state under Islamic legal principles of sharia.
When Lugard proclaimed the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1900, he explicitly pledged not to interfere in the religious affairs of the Muslim population, and in fact Christian missionaries were banned for most of the colonial period. The colonial concessions to religion allowed for the continued application of sharia in various domains. Thus, Islamic personal law was left under the jurisdiction of the emirs. While the British gradually circumscribed Islamic penal law and banned various Islamic corporal punishments (the hudud penalties), various aspects of colonial criminal law remained inspired by sharia.
The amalgamation of northern and southern Nigeria in 1914 did not produce any uniform policies in the colony, and in fact the two regions continued to be governed quite differently. The continued reliance on the emirs to implement and enforce colonial rule in the north both reinforced their positions and simultaneously undercut their historical religious legitimacy, forcing them to rely more on repression and less on patronage. This must be seen as an important contributing factor to the subsequent history of controversy and conflict about the right to claim religious authority in the region. Indirect rule also intentionally curtailed the expansion of Western-style education in order to limit the development of an intellectual elite capable of challenging colonial rule, as had occurred in the southern portions of colonial Nigeria. The result of these policies was that at independence northern Nigeria – in contrast to the south – was ‘educationally backward, politically reactionary, socially hierarchical, and deeply steeped in a dependent mind-set’ (Sanusi 2007: 182).
Of particular salience in terms of Muslim politics, the legal differences between the northern and southern portions of Nigeria have never been reconciled and continue to be problematic. Attempting to minimize the contradictions shortly before independence, a Northern Nigeria Penal Code was implemented in 1959 to create a uniform and largely secular criminal law for the north, but which nevertheless made several concessions to Islamic concerns, and which remained distinct from the common-law criminal code prevailing in the south. Far from resolving the issue, however, this was to lead to the ‘unending sharia debates’ of independent Nigeria (Suberu 2005: 215). These debates have been particularly intense at the various moments of attempting to transition to civilian and constitutional rule in the country. Thus there was a major debate on the place of sharia courts in the period leading up to elections and a return to democracy in 1979 (Laitin 1982), and again in the period leading up to the failed transition of the early 1990s.
Most significantly, when Nigeria again embarked on a return to democratic civilian rule in 1999, a reinforced federal structure allowed the northern states to strike out on their own. Beginning with the small state of Zamfara, 12 Muslim-majority states of the north eventually declared that they were returning to a sharia penal code, and took quick measures to do so. The constitutional status of these state decisions at the federal level has not been clarified, and within each state the move sparked significant debates about the meaning of returning to sharia (Ostien et al. 2005). While portrayed by some observers as the product of a new Islamic fundamentalism in the country, in fact the Nigerian sharia re-implementation process beginning in 1999 must be seen as a continuation of an unresolved contradiction bequeathed to the country by the colonial system.
Muslim politics in Nigeria are therefore played out at multiple levels: at the federal level in terms of the place of the Islamic legal system within the constitution; at the national level in terms of often difficult relations between Muslims and non-Muslims; and within the north in terms of competing claimants to religious authority, with multiple and often conflicting interpretations of Islam. The roots of all of these political confrontations must be situated in the colonial experience, and the form they take today is largely shaped by Nigeria’s difficult post-colonial history.
The Politics of Religious Change
While historical state legacies are clearly central, the political role of Islam in West Africa is also shaped by dynamics internal to religion and which are in part influenced by broader tendencies in the Muslim world, as mediated through local contexts.
West African Islam historically has been overwhelmingly Sunni, and the Maliki school of Islamic law is almost universally followed in the region. As in much of Africa, the dominant practice of Islam has been shaped by Sufism. The Sufi focus on mysticism over legalism, and the central role of religious leaders or guides (known variously as shaykhs, marabouts, and other local terms) facilitated an historical accommodation of the religion to local cultures and societies in a process that might be labelled the ‘Africanization of Islam’ (Robinson 2004; see also Brenner 2000; Sanneh 1997). Echoing colonial discourse, much contemporary analysis has tended to portray Sufi Islam in West Africa as distinctive and uniquely ‘peaceful’ or ‘tolerant’, in sharp contrast to a seemingly more ‘militant’ and ‘rigid’ Islam from the Arab world. This is reflected in scholarly distinctions between Sufism and Reformism, sometimes labelled ‘African Islam’ versus ‘Islam in Africa’ (Westerlund and Rosander 1997). This distinction reflects real social and political tensions, but it is important to note that these are embedded in much more fluid debates about correct religious practice. There is a long history in the region of attempts to purify and reform Islamic practice, of which the most important may be the various jihads that swept much of West Africa in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Notably, however, those militant reform movements were launched by leaders closely affiliated with Sufi orders, but seeking to correct what they portrayed as deviations from Islamic orthodoxy.
While the distinction between Sufis and Reformists must thus be nuanced, most countries in the region have indeed been marked by the gradually increasing importance of explicitly anti-Sufi religious movements, often calling themselves simply ‘Sunnites’ but frequently labelled by others as ‘Wahhabis’ or ‘Salafists’ (Loimeier 2003, 2005; Miles 2007; Sani Umar 1993). In most cases organized reformist movements had their genesis in the late colonial period, frequently appealing in particular to people with a Western education in the ‘modern’ sector, and often as an alternative to the perceived quiescence to colonial rule of traditional Islamic leaders and the ‘backwardness’ of rural religious practice. Throughout most of West Africa these movements stayed small and with very limited popular appeal until the 1980s, devoted primarily to critiques of religious practice to an audience of urban intellectuals.
In the context of the apparent worldwide ‘Islamic revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s, however, reformist movements began to experience a new dynamism and to take on more explicitly political orientations in West Africa. Given the disillusionment both within the Muslim world and in Africa about the failure of the promises of independence, there was a new receptivity to arguments about the need for local alternatives to Western models of ‘modernization’. Economic stagnation and the implementation of structural adjustment programmes that marked the end of assured state employment for university graduates also fed social change, stimulating new reflections on the social and political role of Islam (Brenner 1993). Although its impact was limited and in retrospect rather brief, the Iranian revolution of 1979 sparked some unprecedented – if limited – efforts to organize explicitly political movements based on religion in the region. In the effervescence of the period, various new religious movements emerged and small inroads were made by Muslim groups from outside the region, including Shi’a Islam and the South Asian Ahmadiyya movement, particularly present in Ghana, Benin, and other coastal countries.
Contacts between sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, carefully circumscribed under colonial rule, increased with independence (Hunwick 1997). In many countries, informal or private schools teaching at least partially in Arabic proliferated as an alternative to the official state schools, and these gradually channelled students to the Arab world for advanced study. The questioning of the local practices of Islam was further fed by the returning graduates of Arabic universities, influenced by their stays abroad and often frustrated by constrained employment opportunities at home given their limited mastery of the official European languages. Such arabisants, as they are known in the Francophone countries, added new voices, with new religious authority, to the critiques of traditional Sufi Islam, thus strengthening the reformist movements.2
In northern Nigeria, the rise of particularly strong tensions between Sufis and anti-Sufis intersected with debates about the religious authority of the emirs (Sani Umar 1993). In this context a movement known as ‘Izala’ (from its full name Jama’t izalat al bid’a wa iqamat as-Sunna – the ‘Society for the removal of innovation and re-establishment of the Sunna’), founded in 1978, was to emerge as the first really serious challenge to the dominance of Sufism in the region. Izala was widely described as a rising ‘fundamentalist’ force as it grew into the largest reformist Muslim movement in sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the 1980s (Kane 2003). Tellingly, though, its energies were directed more towards the socio-religious than the political. As Loimeier has noted, while Izala came to represent the ‘most important Muslim movement of religious, social and educational reform in contemporary northern Nigeria, and a major force of religious opposition to the Sufi brotherhoods’, it never became ‘a revolutionary Islamist organization in political terms’ (Loimeier 1997: 54).
The evolution of Izala illustrates two notable dynamics in the Sufi-Reformist tensions in the region: the importance of local context, and the potential for religious change and influences across ideological divides. Despite its stated universal critiques about appropriate Muslim religious practice, in fact Izala’s activities are shaped primarily by a Nigerian national agenda, and its very organization reflects the Nigerian federal state (Kane 2003: 235–37). Underlining the importance of local political contexts to religious dynamics, branches of Izala established in neighbouring countries have adapted their discourse and activity to the political realities in those countries. Second, given the growing rivalry between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria as efforts at democratization resurfaced in the early 1990s, the violent opposition between Izala and the Sufi orders was gradually downplayed in the 1990s as Muslims in the north came to make common cause against Christian ‘crusaders’ (Loimeier 1997: 60–62). In the strong ethno-regional cleavages that define Nigeria, this has led to periodic violent conflict between Muslims and Christians since the late 1980s.
The liberalization of social life that accompanied the efforts at democratization across the region in the early 1990s was to open up new possibilities for religious movements, and led to a proliferation of new voices. The advent of democracy has thus further blurred distinctions between Sufis and reformists and led to a range of new religious debates with political implications. As was the case across the Muslim world, public debate about religion was to increase even further following the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. Contemporary Muslim politics in West Africa were thus heavily shaped by these two major transformations in the local and the global context, to which we now turn.
Muslim Politics and Democratization
The wave of demands for democratization across Africa in the early 1990s, however mixed the outcomes, nevertheless brought a significant liberalization that led to an explosion of associational life across the continent, including in the religious sphere. In much of Muslim Africa, this has led to the emergence of an ‘Islamic public sphere’ and the rise of what we might call an ‘Islamic civil society’ (Holder 2009; Tayob 2007). The proliferation of varied religious voices has reflected in part the debates between Sufism and its critics, but it has also led to new dynamics and indeed in many ways to a ‘democratization’ of religion itself, in the sense of new possibilities for individual voices to challenge established authorities. As democratization has put policy issues on the public agenda, debates about the appropriate Islamic position on any given issue leads naturally to interpretation and thus opens the door to religious change driven by these public discussions.
In the Francophone Sahel this process has led to wide-ranging debates on policy issues, but few fundamental conflicts on religion.3 Religious voices have, however, certainly made themselves heard more loudly than ever before in the political domain, leading to some tensions with secularists. In Nigeria the transformations of the Islamic public sphere in the new era of democratization starting in 1999 has led to a great degree of conflict and controversy, both in the Muslim north and especially at the national level given the religiously divided context. In the Muslim states of northern Nigeria, however, there has also been a gradual accommodation of public religion and support for democracy.
In much of Francophone Africa, democratization in the early 1990s came via ‘national conferences’, convened to chart a transitional path to the inauguration of new regimes. In the Muslim Sahel the two most important countries to follow this path were Mali and Niger. The overthrow of the military regime in Mali and the marginalization of the much-weakened one in Niger in 1991 led to transitional governments, elections, and finally the inauguration of new regimes. While the Malian democratic experiment has been widely considered a major success, Niger’s experience has been much more difficult and marked by various setbacks. In both countries, however, there has been real and substantial liberalization of political life and an ongoing commitment to the democratic system. In Senegal the point of departure was somewhat different and the process therefore more gradual, but in that country as well the early 1990s were marked by a series of negotiations between government and opposition, a series of fundamental reforms, and finally the country’s first democratic alternation of power in 2000.
Two aspects of the democratization process in the Francophone Sahel are crucial to understanding the evolution of Muslim politics in those countries. First, the pro-democracy movements, while fed by popular frustration and economic grievances, were in fact led by the small educated elite of people with formal French-language education – Francophone ‘intellectuals’ as they are known in the region. Students, teachers, lawyers, journalists, and human rights activists were consequently among those at the forefront of the new ‘civil society’ demanding change. In the international enthusiasm for democracy of the early post-Cold War years, there was a wave of outside support for such groups, further strengthening their positions. Second, these pro-democracy activists took their inspiration for the design of new regimes from the model they knew best, namely the French Fifth Republic. Crucially, their normative approach to the democracy they sought to build suggested the need to focus on social transformation so as to build cultures compatible with their vision of democracy, rather than the elaboration of institutions to reflect local values in public policy. The question the pro-democracy activists tended to ask themselves was not, ‘how do we build a democracy that reflects an African Muslim society?’ but rather, ‘How do we transform an African Muslim society so that it is compatible with democracy?’
Not surprisingly, this approach led rather quickly to clashes with representatives of Muslim groups. In Mali and Niger an ideologically and religiously diverse array of new Muslim associations – dozens in each case – were quickly formed and officially recognized following the demise of the corporatist single association system. In Senegal the weight of the Sufi hierarchy and the more gradual political opening resulted in slower evolutionary religious change, but which nonetheless parallels the other countries. While there was initially an important element of rivalry and occasional conflict among different religious groups, they also rather quickly learned to make common cause in opposition to the agenda of the secular pro-democracy forces. The 1990s thus saw a number of conflicts and protests between Muslim groups and new governments on both substantive and symbolic moral issues such as the holding of fashion shows or the opening of bars during Ramadan. These conflicts were often coloured by critiques of the very notion of democracy by religious groups, given the normative content with which it was proposed. The most significant feature of Muslim politics in the region, however, is the fact that religious society quickly came not only to accept the idea of democratization, but to learn to play the democratic game to their advantage. This was facilitated by the demographic advantage of Islamic associations in the confrontation with the secular ‘civil society’ forces, given the much broader appeal of those groups to popular sentiment in deeply religious countries.
As politics have evolved in the era of democracy, then, there has been an increased presence of religion in public life in the form of participation in debates, but also in protests and public pressuring on policy issues of concern to religious sensibilities. There has, however, been very little direct electoral involvement by religious movements and no serious efforts by religious groups to seek direct power. Explicitly religious parties (like ethnic or regional ones) are officially banned in all of these countries, but tellingly even those few that have made implicit appeals on religious grounds have had little electoral success. Rather the rise of religion in the public sphere in the context of democratization has moved from a series of confrontations between secular ‘pro-democracy’ activists and Islamic actors to a much more fluid and wide-ranging debate about what democracy should entail in Muslim societies. These debates have taken place within both the political and the religious arenas. So public issues such as the acceptability of polygamy, or whether the death penalty should be allowed, also become debates within religious society and carried out in religious terms, with different voices claiming varying ‘Islamic’ positions. Of particular importance in these debates has been the rise of Francophone Muslim intellectuals, often organized into new associations, who share a commitment to democracy and the capacity to engage in public policy debate, but who also argue that in a democracy these policy issues should reflect popular (religious) sentiment. In addition these debates have led to new forms of Muslim women’s politics and even to forms of ‘Islamic feminism’, as Muslim women’s associations have weighed in on debates (see Alidou 2005; Augis 2005; Masquelier 2009).
Given the colonial heritage, much of the debate has been couched in terms of the meaning of secularism, laïcité, in a democratic system. The anti-religious French connotations of the term made it the source of explicit attacks at first, and in both the Malian and the Nigerian national conferences there were demands that the term be excluded from the new constitutions. Even in Senegal, the first draft of the new constitution published in 2001 eliminated the term ‘laïc’ in favour of a statement about the ‘non-confessional’ character of the state. In Niger, in fact, this replacement was to take place in a subsequent constitution, and now remains. On this issue as well, what is striking is that there is no longer a serious discussion about whether the state should be secular, but rather a debate about the appropriate limits of religion in a secular state. The term has been reinterpreted from its French connotations of anti-religiosity to a rather American conception of the limits of religious freedom. As a result, we find debates about whether in un état laïc it is acceptable for the state to allow, or build, mosques on university campuses or other public spaces; about whether it is acceptable to allow elected officials to take the oath of office on a religious text; and about whether state schools should provide religious education. Not surprisingly in a democratic context of deep religiosity, the answers have tended to accommodate religion. Thus the ceremony to inaugurate a newly elected president and return Niger again to democratic rule on 7 April 2011 began with the invocation of the Fatiha prayer, and the new president took the oath of office with his hand on a copy of the Qur’an. Such symbolic gestures that would have been hotly contested as religious assaults on democracy in the early 1990s, are now an unquestioned aspect of Niger’s democracy.
Unsurprisingly, agreement on the limits of religion in public policy has not been resolved in many areas, and some have proven rather intractable. This is particularly the case on issues that concern clashes between what secular activists present as ‘international’ and ‘universal’ values that cannot be compromised, and prevailing local values. These conflicts occur over whether a given position is an inalienable element of democracy, regardless of what the majority might want, or whether it is subject to democratic majority rule. The most noteworthy and difficult policy issues have been those concerning family law and issues regarding the status of the sexes more broadly. In each of the Francophone countries there have been long, intense, and ultimately unresolved debates about ‘family codes’ (Villalón 1996; Soares 2009; Schulz 2003; Brossier 2004). While these debates often have been portrayed as struggles between democrats and anti-democratic forces, their parallels with American debates on abortion or gay marriage suggest that it is more useful to frame them as intrinsic characteristics of the functioning of democracy in religious societies.
The adoption of sharia by 12 states of northern Nigeria was undoubtedly the most significant entry of religion into the public sphere in West Africa in the 1990s. As elsewhere in the region, this was a direct product of democratization. Following the collapse of the particularly repressive military regime of Sani Abacha, democratization and the elections of 1999 brought new possibilities for the states in Nigeria’s federal system to assert their autonomy. At the national level the southern Christian candidate Olusegun Obasanjo was elected president, ending years of northern dominance under military regimes. In this context, a gubernatorial candidate in the small northern state of Zamfara seized the opportunity during the campaign to promise an adoption of sharia law, and quickly moved to do so once he was elected. The move was widely publicized and received enormous popular support in the north of the country, and other states quickly followed suit so that by 2002, 12 northern states (of Nigeria’s 36) had declared that they would adopt sharia – or more specifically sharia penal codes. While the constitutional status of these actions within Nigeria remains unresolved, the states have moved to establish sharia courts to try criminal cases, presenting the reforms as a ‘return’ to the Islamic penal codes that had been abolished by the British on the eve of independence. There is significant variation among the states in how this was done, but in all cases these courts are parallel to (rather than replacing) existing magistrate courts, which still maintain jurisdiction over cases involving non-Muslims, and under some conditions even Muslims (Ostien et al. 2005).
The ultimate outcomes of these ongoing experiments with democratic sharia implementation, in many ways unprecedented in the Muslim world, remain to be seen, but a number of trends have clearly emerged. While the principle of sharia has maintained wide popular support in the region, the decade following its implementation saw significant internal debates about the actual meaning of sharia, and a consequent evolution in how it is understood. The dramatic initial cases that attracted much attention and outcry both within Nigeria and internationally – such as the sentencing of several women to the hudud punishment of death by stoning for adultery – were in fact eventually overturned by sharia courts of appeal, on Islamic grounds. What instead has remained at the official level are ongoing social policy debates on the need to ‘sanitize’ society, by banning or restricting alcohol, policing sexual practices, and censoring ‘immoral’ electronic media. Strikingly, however, the debate on sharia has also increasingly empowered popular criticisms of political corruption and demands for good governance, critiques levelled in the name of the need to establish a just Islamic social order. In part, sharia has thus been converted into a useful instrument for pursuing popular goals and limitations on the arbitrary exercise of power within a democratic context. The adoption of sharia has therefore been a major factor in the legitimation of the principle of democracy in northern Nigeria (Kendhammer 2010).
In addition, rather than the radicalization that was originally feared by many, the implementation of sharia in the democratic context has also tempered Muslim politics. Suberu (2005: 223) argues that ‘the implementation of shari’a in Nigeria within a constitutional federal democratic framework has probably contributed to the moderation of Islamic religious fundamentalism in the country’. To be sure, this should not obscure the fact that sharia implementation has been accompanied also by significant violence. Especially in the states with important Christian minorities, the sharia controversy at the national level has fed the long-standing religious tensions in Nigeria, with periodic explosions of intense violence. In addition, the perceived shortcomings of sharia and its accommodation to democracy has opened the door to new forms of radical Muslim sects, such as the so-called ‘Boko Haram’, which rejects schooling and all forms of ‘Western’ modernity. Boko Haram’s actions have been met with severe repression by the state, producing other cycles of violence. It is important to note, however, that both of these sources of violence have been persistent characteristics of the Nigerian political landscape and so cannot be attributed to sharia implantation per se. Nigeria’s difficult politics pose the more significant threat to the future of democracy in the country. As Kendhammer (2010: 35) concludes, ‘While the sharia debate has been a source of support for democracy in Northern Nigeria, whether democracy as it is practiced in Nigeria can sustain this support remains an open question’.
In Nigeria as in the Francophone Sahel, then, much research strongly supports the findings of Afrobarometer polls which show strong support for democracy among Muslims across West Africa (Bratton 2003). These cases point to the fact that it is precisely because democracy accommodates religion that it enjoys this support. We thus find that across the region popular sentiment simultaneously expresses support for religious tenets – including sharia – and democracy. The tension often expressed in the West between public religion and democracy appears to be largely absent in the African context, a fact strikingly demonstrated in a major survey of religion in Africa conducted by the Pew charitable trusts (Pew Research Centre 2010).4 This seeming paradox is rooted in notions of the compatibility of religion with specific conceptions of democracy. The fact that it has allowed religious groups to advocate policies that are more accommodating of local cultural values than had ever been the case in Africa since the colonial period has strengthened support for democracy.
The ‘War on Terror’
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 provoked intense debates about religion across the Muslim world, and in many ways much soul-searching about the place of Islam in the modern state system and about the relations between Muslims and the West. In Africa, as elsewhere, this has led simultaneously to the erasure of some historical distinctions, but also to the emergence of new or renewed religious perspectives. Across the region – and despite some appeal at the popular level of Osama bin Laden as a sort of folk hero – Muslim leaders from both Sufi and Reformist groups tended overwhelmingly to condemn the attacks and to distance themselves from them. Both, however, were also quickly angered by the American response to the events, especially by the launching of the Iraq war in 2003. Anger at the subsequent policies of the Bush Administration led to periodic protests in various countries of the region, and often to common cause among otherwise varied Muslim groups.
The search to identify a ‘correct’ Islamic response to such difficult events has further fed the new respect and public role for arabisants and other Muslim intellectuals, as well as a new willingness to reinterpret Sufi tradition in light of the earlier history of Sufi militancy in the region. Pointing to the jihads of the nineteenth century, some intellectuals in the region have identified Sufism as an ideology with potential for militant mobilization against aggression. Interestingly, it has also led in some areas to a renewed assertion of a Sufi Muslim identity as an indigenous African way of being Muslim, distinct from Arab ‘extremism’. After having been largely on the defensive, Sufism thus seems to be both rapidly evolving and experiencing a resurgence in West Africa, in the same context in which reformists have adopted more explicitly political stances.
In the face of this fluid religious situation, fears of ‘radicalization’ of ‘traditionally peaceful’ African Islam are the hallmarks of much Western debate about contemporary Muslim politics in West Africa. Often posed as the likely outcome of the ‘spread of extremist ideologies’, some have identified a ‘terrorist threat’ (Lyman and Morrison 2004; ICG 2005). These fears intensified following a number of highly publicized kidnappings of Westerners and other targeted attacks in the West African Sahara, especially in Niger and Mali. These attacks have been claimed by a group which, since 2007, calls itself ‘al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’ (AQIM), but which is a transformation of the earlier ‘Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’ (GSPC), itself an outgrowth of the Algerian ‘Islamic Armed Group’ (GIA). The origin of these militant movements is rooted directly in Algerian politics and their original impetus springs from the refusal to allow the Islamic party that was poised to come to power in Algeria through democratic elections to take office.
This ‘terrorist threat’ is of very specific North African origin and in fact it has shown very little potential for action south of the Sahara (cf. Menkhaus, this volume). While they clearly have some capacity for disruption, these movements seem to have virtually no popular traction capable of translating into sustained political action in the region. The few incidents of violence that have been linked to AQIM in Nigeria represent familiar iterations of the long history of violence in Nigeria, and the label appears to be opportunistic at best. Only in Mauritania does AQIM appear to have gained a toehold in terms of popular recruitment, but even in the context of that country’s more established Islamist movement, one keen observer notes a process of ‘deradicalization’, both as ‘political programme and a strategic option’ (Ould Ahmed Salem 2012).
While little in the history of Muslim politics or in the current dynamics under liberalized regimes would suggest the likelihood of significant religiously based terrorism in West Africa, the question of whether al-Qaeda could ‘turn African in the Sahel’ haunts current policy debates (Filiu 2010). This fear has driven a militarization of Western and especially American policy in the region, and the unanswered question is whether policies based on such fears could prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The Algerian case strongly suggests that denying democracy may be a prescription for the violent transformations of Muslim politics. The dynamics of the ongoing democratization of West Africa, by contrast, show all signs of being the most effective counterforce to radicalization, though it is indeed likely to bring increased religious influence in politics and increased importance to Muslim politics in shaping the future.
1A thorough discussion of what ‘Muslim politics’ entail (intentionally framed as an alternative to discussing ‘Islam and politics’) is provided by Eickelman and Piscatori (1996).
2For a number of studies of this phenomenon in different countries, see Otayek (1993).
3A longer discussion of the issues described below in Francophone Africa is available in Villalón (2010).
4In a survey of 600 university students in Senegal, Mali, and Niger, which the author carried out in 2008, these young and educated Francophone intellectuals avowed strikingly similar sentiments. Overwhelmingly in each country, students expressed strong support for democracy, while majorities also answered that they were in favour of the adoption of sharia in their country.
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