The Difficulty of Accounting for Women Who Critique Sharia in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

I analyze three responses to Northern Nigeria’s reintroduction of full sharia penal law starting in 1999: the Western response, Nigerian male conservatives’ response, and the response of Nigerian women critical of the sharia experiment. I argue that this latter voice is the most difficult to account for as scholars. The reasons include, first, a constraint placed on Nigerian women to articulate their concerns as a battle over “true Islam”; second, Western feminist scholars’ concentration on the pitfalls of “imperial feminism”; and third, the ferocious backlash of conservative Nigerian men. Finally, I account for my own ambivalence as an ethnographer; while I find myself empathizing with their decolonizing project, I am disturbed by the assumption therein that men should “naturally” dominate women.