Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria [Paperback]

This book provides the first account of the sustained entanglement of law, religion, and empire in Northern Nigeria.This book traces the emergence of secularism as a way of ordering religion-state relations in colonial and post-colonial Northern Nigeria. The book draws on extensive research in six archival repositories on two continents to provide a novel and comprehensive historiography.This book traces the emergence of secularism as a way of ordering religion-state relations in colonial and post-colonial Northern Nigeria. The book draws on extensive research in six archival repositories on two continents to provide a novel and comprehensive historiography.Set in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, Rabiat Akande vividly illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state's governance of religion and interrogates the legacy of that governance agenda in the postcolonial state. This book is a novel commentary on the dynamic interplay between law, faith, identity, and power in the context of the modern state's emergence from colonial processes.Introduction; Part I. Governing Faith: 1. Jousting for souls: indirect rule, Christian missions and the governance of religious difference; 2. Governing Shari'a; Part II. Constituting Difference: 3. The construction of minorities: late imperial secularity and the constitutional politics of decolonization; 4. The making of the 1958 Penal Code; 5. Constituting rights: Christian religious liberty in the late colonial state; Part III. Imagining the Past: 6. The 1977 Constitutional Conference and beyond; Conclusion.With the shift away frol£!