The World - News from Sept. 20, 2009

As military rule ended in Nigeria a decade ago, an Islamic legal system was swept into place on a wave of popular support in the country’s desperately poor and mostly Muslim northern states. It has turned out in a way few expected.

The draconian sentences to amputation that human rights activists warned of and the religious oppression that Christians feared for the most part have not come to pass. But neither has the utopia envisioned by backers of Sharia law, who believed politicians’ promises that it would end decades of corruption and pillaging by civilian and military rulers.

The people say they are still poor and miserable and politicians are still rich.

How the battles over Sharia play out could have effects beyond Nigeria, a nation pivotal to West Africa’s stability and viewed by the United States as key to stopping the spread of religious extremism in Africa. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss the issue with Nigerian leaders on a visit to the country this week.

“People want Sharia. But not this kind of Sharia,” said Ahmad Khanawy, 41, a reed-thin filmmaker. He said that the most visible signs of Islamic law are new censorship rules that ban dancing and singing in movies made in Kannywood, as this city’s film industry is known. Sharia-promoting politicians, he said, “want to cover their failure by making noise about fighting immorality. That is it.”

Nigeria’s moderate form of Sharia may not have delivered a Muslim revolution, but it has fueled a growing disillusionment that analysts say has weakened public faith in democracy, and could, if unchecked, spark religious militancy.

That prospect was highlighted in July when a radical Islamist sect called Boko Haram attacked security forces in northern Nigeria, triggering violence that left more than 700 people dead. The group draws its members from the ranks of frustrated youths.

“Political space is so limited . . . that the disenchanted are finding little avenues for achieving change through dialogue and peaceful expression,” said Nnamdi Obasi, West Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group.

So far, analysts say, extremist groups such as Boko Haram have remained small and do not have links to international terrorist organizations. Many say that in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city, the bigger short-term danger is that people are viewing this form of Sharia, and the democracy that brought it, as just another broken political promise.

Kano, capital of the state of the same name, is a sunbaked metropolis where electricity is fitful, child beggars swarm on street corners, and goats graze in trash heaps. Many of the region’s leaders have been accused of corruption, which plagues Nigeria. Against that backdrop, Nigerians say, edicts such as movie censorship and a ban on women riding motorbike taxis seem like window-dressing.

“Sharia is about justice. Where you have Sharia, you have development,” said Salisu Saidu, 32, standing amid the leather bags he sells in Kano’s labyrinthine market. “Nothing has changed. If one relied on tap water, one would die of thirst. We don’t even talk of electricity.”

Islam has dominated in this region on the edge of the Sahara for centuries, in a tenuous coexistence with Christianity, which is prevalent in more prosperous southern Nigeria. When Kano and 11 other northern states that had long applied Islamic law to civil cases adopted Sharia for criminal matters, clashes broke out between Christians and Muslims. Early on, several sentences of death by stoning for female adulterers -- never carried out -- and the amputation of two men’s hands for theft drew international condemnation.

But this version of Sharia turned out to be fairly temperate, reflecting local sensibilities and religious law’s existence within a secular federal system. The harshest sentences imposed under the new system, which applies only to Muslims, garnered little public support.

The efforts to ban women from motorbike taxis sparked protests, so veiled women still zip about Kano with their arms around male drivers. The federal government reined in the Sharia police, known as the Hisbah, after they were accused of terrorizing people.

Still, the Hisbah remain active. This year, they thwarted a planned protest by divorced Muslim women. Alongside politicians, they regularly smash bottles of liquor seized from trucks smuggling them into Kano’s Christian neighborhood, where bars operate openly despite a state ban on alcohol sales. The Hisbah’s actions have rankled Christian leaders.

“To us, Sharia is a religious injunction laced around the strings of love, tolerance and respect for human dignity,” said Tobias Michael Idika, 48, a Christian community leader, who on a day this summer sat in a Kano hotel lobby and read from a letter he had written to local officials to protest the actions.

He looked up and shook his head: “Now we are being used as sacrificial lambs.”

All this has added up to a mishmash that looks little like the progress Sharia supporters had envisaged. In their version, the tenets of Islam would guide leaders to care for the downtrodden, use resources wisely and punish criminals both powerful and lowly.

But few officials in Sharia-governed states have been convicted of corruption, though critics point to their grand houses as evidence that wealth is not being spread.

“If anybody comes to me and asks for my support on the promise of implementing Sharia, I wouldn’t even vote for him,” said Abba Adam Koki, an imam who served on a government Sharia board for two years but said he quit after deciding that officials were committed only to preserving their power. “I prefer someone to come and tell me what programs he has for the people.”

Government officials say they are doing their best and insist that there can be no turning back from Islamic law, though they concede that a full Sharia state in multi-faith Nigeria is impossible.

Sule Ya’u Sule, Kano state’s spokesman, said the governor had established several agencies to oversee the spread of Islamic principles, including an anti-corruption unit and a branch that collects alms to pay the hospital bills of thousands of poor people each year. The government created 40,000 jobs from 2003 through 2006 and has curbed prostitution and alcohol use, he said.

The challenges, Sule said, are that the secular federal police who still patrol Kano are unwilling to cooperate with the Hisbah and that the government does not give states enough money. Officials require decent clothing, cars and houses, he said, but that does not mean they are corrupt.

“The federal government only gives you a little amount every month. And it is that amount that it expects you to use to develop the state,” Sule said. “This money is not enough to finish this work and distribute it to the needy.”

One day this summer outside the Islamic court in the northern city of Kaduna, two businessmen lamented that even the heart of Nigeria’s Islamic law revolution -- its courts -- had turned out as sluggish as any.

In the courtroom, prosecutors scolded the judge for postponing several long-standing cases on the docket.

Muhammed Bello, 45, and Yushau Inuwa, 28, were there to see whether a friend accused of theft a year before -- and badly beaten by the Hisbah, they said -- would finally get a trial. The courts were inefficient, they said, and the government had not delivered on what they referred to as their constitutional rights to better roads, schools and healthcare.

“It’s a double tragedy,” Inuwa said, but rejected violence as an answer to his frustration. “We need better leaders.”

--

Brulliard writes for the Washington Post.