The Aminu Kano College of Islamic and Legal Studies: A Site for the Renegotiation of Islamic Law and Authority in Kano, Nigeria

Abstract

The Aminu Kano College of Islamic and Legal Studies (AKCILS) is a postsecondary institution located in Kano, the most populous city in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria. AKCILS offers Islamic education and training in other subjects, such as languages, civil law, and social sciences, to young men and women. Students attend the college either to obtain terminal degrees or to prepare for university education. In addition to its many Nigerian-trained faculty and staff, AKCILS has hired several Nigerian Muslim graduates of foreign Islamic universities. Foreign-educated faculty members at AKCILS maintain far-ranging professional and religious activities outside the college. These include directing their own Islamic schools, serving in state government bureaucracies, teaching in mosques, and publishing religious tracts. These faculty members often pursue additional postgraduate degrees inside and outside Nigeria. In this way, AKCILS serves as an institutional base for its faculty, from which they can continue to build profiles as scholars, professionals, and religious leaders. In other words, AKCILS has been one mechanism by which foreign-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim leaders have been reintegrated into their society. Drawing on interviews with staff members, speeches given at the college, and unpublished materials on AKCILS’s history, this essay examines interrelationships between AKCILS’s role as part of Kano’s shari’a system and its role as a professional platform for Arab-educated faculty members.