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"Islam says once a woman is married, she is of age.” Senator Sani Yerima sparked debate across Nigeria with this intervention in the country’s national assembly in 2013. Senators had voted to delete a section of the constitution that linked adulthood for women to marriage rather than age, and Yerima was challenging their decision.
Yerima has a history of controversy. Zamfara was the first state to institute sharia in Nigeria during his time as Governor there. He is known to have married girls barely in their teens then divorced them when they neared 18, to marry another young girl. He claimed the decision to amend the constitution was “un-Islamic” and demanded another vote be taken. The second time, the vote failed to receive the two-thirds majority required for constitutional amendments. The section stands.
There were protests and public debates in the weeks that followed. While the hashtag #ChildNotBride trended on Twitter, fierce arguments ensued around what Islam says about the ages of marriage and adulthood, what it means to be Nigerian and the role of religion. Increasingly, conservative interpretations of religion are influencing discussions of rights and governance in Nigeria today.
When talking about fundamentalism in Nigeria, the focus most often rests on Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah Lida’awati wal Jihad (JAS), commonly known as Boko Haram. That’s understandable: JAS was responsible for the highest number of deaths related to terrorism in 2014, with Nigeria seeing the most fatalities worldwide after Iraq. Over 2.2 million people have been displaced from their homes due to the conflict. All parties to the conflict have committed human rights violations. Education has been put on hold, with schools closed for over a year. Food insecurity is increasing. People’s livelihoods have been destroyed. Yet this overwhelming focus on JAS has masked deeper trends within Christianity and Islam, where the lines between religious conservatism and religious fundamentalism are increasingly blurred. To what extent these trends influenced the rise of JAS is unclear, but the group did not emerge in a vacuum.
Nigeria is one of the most religious countries in the world according to the 2012 Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, with 93 per cent of Nigerians considering themselves religious, most following either Christianity or Islam. With a population of 182 million, Nigeria is home to an estimated one in six Africans. Independence from the British in 1960 created a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country, stitching together different peoples into one nation determined by artificial colonial borders. After years of military rule, the country adopted parliamentary democracy in 1999, but saw its first real transfer in power only last year, when the incumbent People’s Democratic Party lost the election to the opposition. In recent years Nigeria has seen ever-worsening violence, with the insurgency in the north-east, conflict over land and water in the Middle Belt and conflict caused by environmental degradation due to oil spills and gas flares in the Niger Delta. Rising inequality is seen as one of the key factors driving this trend. In the last decade, while the economy grew at a rate of 7 per cent, unemployment also doubled. Twice as many people are living in poverty than they were in 1980.
These changes have been accompanied by shifts in how religion has been interpreted, practiced and enforced. In Zamfara state’s neighbour Kano, during Ramadan last year, the Hisbah Board (religious police) arrested a number of vendors who sold food during fasting times, as well as non-fasting Muslims. In the last year, sharia courts have handed down a number of death sentences for blasphemy. Protesters burned a court last May after the appearance of one of the accused who had to be rescued. These are the first death sentences for blasphemy handed down in Nigeria and mark a worrying trend. As Leo Igwe, a Nigerian human rights activist, tells me, “People are afraid of criticising Islam. If you are not convicted by the state, non-state elements will eliminate you.”
Igwe trained as a Catholic priest but later became a humanist campaigner focusing on witchcraft accusations. Although religious conservatism and fundamentalism are often seen as the preserve of Islam, which is strongest in the north of the country, strict interpretations of religion are increasingly present across the country. Igwe described to me a shift in Nigerian Christianity from the clerical, with power in the hands of priests, to the charismatic, where everyone is a priest and every place a prayer space. He believes this system has become an alternative safety net in the face of the government’s failure to stem poverty and the inability of traditional churches to address people’s needs. Whether in the form of a collection being passed around after someone leads prayer in a carpark, or fellowship groups that support members in need, the result of this decentralisation has been the drive to ensure everything is compatible with Christianity. “If reading, you want to ensure it is not challenging doctrine. If you are driving, you have to pray. If you are sick, you don’t take medicine as prayer is the ultimate medicine,” Igwe says. “Nigerians are constantly socialised into a religious narrative.”
Fatimah Kelleher, a feminist activist, has also observed this erosion of the boundary between religion and public life. She sees a shift towards religious conservatism that is particularly evident in the way Muslim women are expected to dress. She told me, “As a woman born into a Muslim family, the expectation to dress more conservatively than many Nigerian Muslim women did in the 1970s and 1980s is today far greater, and certainly more closely associated with how ‘proper’ a woman I am perceived to be.”
To some extent, these trends are attributable to the introduction of sharia to Nigeria’s north after the end of military rule in 1999. Religious scholars became engaged in governance in various ways, appointed as commissioners or advisers to politicians – or as leaders of institutions charged with managing and overseeing sharia implementation. Although others were wary, some Muslims living in these states were in favour of the change. Kelleher characterises a desire for sharia as stemming from belief that Nigeria had failed its citizens and a longing to go back to a cultural and religious identity “that existed before the chaos of colonialism and independence”.
Sharia could have been interpreted in many ways, but contact with more extreme sects abroad from the time of the Iranian revolution onwards had influenced the way Islam was practised in Nigeria. For example, a 1986 paper by the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Nigeria’s leading thinktank, detailed how the Muslim Students’ Society became radicalised due to contact and financial support from groups in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan and Iran. This led to a series of demonstrations, uprisings and other violent incidents in universities throughout the 1980s.
These shifts across the country have obvious implications for freedom of expression. Nigeria was rated as having the most severe violations in the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s 2015 Freedom of Thought report. Dangers range from ostracism by family and friends, or losing one’s job, to being seen as guilty of blasphemy or apostasy. As a result, many atheists are not open about their beliefs. “You are not respected as a human being if you come out as a secular person,” Igwe tells me. “You are seen as someone to be converted, someone who has failed and needs to get back on track.”
Although overt human rights violations such as being charged with apostasy or conviction of death for adultery make the headlines, the daily pressures that infringe human rights and restrict choices have become normalised.
This has also had an impact on Nigeria’s traditional religions. While syncretic (mixed) practices previously existed, the history of conversion is now framed as being saved from hell. In northern Nigeria before Islamicisation, there was a vibrant Bori culture with a keen understanding of medicinal herbs, the role of music in worship and the importance of dance in connecting with the divine. Now, says Kelleher, to engage with those traditions, “you have to go to spaces that are considered ‘deviant’ and it can be considered ‘blasphemous’ to try and learn more.” People are afraid of being seen to condone “paganism”. A conservative interpretation of Islam, drawn from Saudi Arabia, is blurring the lines between culture and religion. For example, the cultures of the Hausa or Fulani ethnic groups are increasingly being seen as synonymous with Islam.
This situation has parallels with how Christianity is framed in opposition to traditional religions. Chinedu Anarado works in peacebuilding and is from Anambra state in South East Nigeria, most of whose population are Igbo. He sees traditional Igbo culture threatened by churches that condemn many Igbo practices as “idol worshipping”. When he goes home to his village, he finds young people no longer perform masquerades. “Before the colonialists came, this was our identity. Muddling everything together and then trying to kill it is not the answer,” he says.
A combination of religion, cultural norms and patriarchy also hinders access to education. Kelleher’s recent research involved her talking with imams in rural areas. She found many of them to be open and even eager to have secular as well as Islamic education. They saw the advantages this learning brings and worried that children of their villages were being left behind. But they sometimes met resistance from parents who were worried about their children being corrupted by what is perceived as “western” learning. Nonetheless, Kelleher is keen to stress that “the commitment of these imams to all education – including for girls – as integral to a Muslim’s responsibility to seek knowledge throughout their life indicates that while religious conservatism has increased overall, the application of simplistic stereotypes to the north is a serious mistake, given these complex realities.”
While some use Islam to justify child marriage or denying education to girls, Christianity is being used to justify prohibitions on contraception and abortion. According to UNICEF, a woman’s chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth in Nigeria is one in 13. Mariya Saleh is a doctor and reproductive health specialist. “People use religion as a crutch for what is happening. They very lazily say, ‘The Lord said go forth and multiply’ or that the Prophet said that you should have many children so the Muslim ummah [community] can grow big and prosper,” she told me. But religion is not the only factor: Saleh also attributes the high maternal mortality rate to the low use of family planning and skilled birth attendants, a lack of health facilities and their low numbers of women employees.
One area where the impact of religion is clear is in access to safe abortion. Although post-abortion care is allowed, providing or procuring an abortion itself is a criminal act unless the mother’s life is at risk. (In reality, abortion is available for those who can pay, via several private hospitals that do not advertise services openly and do not always provide proper care.) Saleh talked about the role of the Catholic Church in preventing liberalisation of Nigeria’s abortion laws, saying a lot of the funding comes from outside Nigeria. On the day of the first reading of a bill on reproductive health in 2006, the Church mobilised women to protest outside the National Assembly. The bill was dropped.
Having an abortion is seen as a sign of moral laxity, and communities punish women even if they are raped. In 2013, I came across the case of a woman who had been kidnapped by JAS. Men young enough to be her sons had raped her repeatedly. When she returned to her community, she found out she was pregnant. Her husband found it difficult to accept her back and she became depressed and suicidal. It was only after she attempted suicide that it was decided an abortion was permissible to save her life. After the procedure, both she and her husband were thrown out of their church.
There are obvious parallels between these dynamics and those around sexual orientation and gender identity. In January 2014, Nigeria passed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA), largely due to the actions of Nigerian churches, supported by funding and other assistance from counterparts abroad. Igwe told me that he grew up with transgender and homosexual friends; that they were seen as different, but not criminal. He believes the SSMPA has “reinforced hatred. People now go to fish them out, torture them and kill them, because God forbids them.”
Kelleher sees discussions of homosexuality and non-binary gender identities responding to rapid shifts in society. We spoke about yan daudu communities and their culture of transvestism, a part of some northern Nigerian societies for centuries. Not so long ago, “their ostracism and marginalisation largely involved walking down the street and having insults thrown at them. Today, they risk being thrown before a court.”
Even the human rights community is not firm and united: in a nation where religion is everywhere, the human rights that one supports are themselves conditional. I have met many activists who, although they work for human rights and peace, will tell me that they do not support homosexuality, because religion does not permit it – and that there should be no tolerance or acceptance of gay people.
But many other activists are trying to combat these ideas. Often their choice of whether to work within a secular or a religious framework is a matter of strategy as much as personal ideology. Some activists work to ensure that sharia courts uphold such women’s rights as are provided by sharia, such as those to inheritance, land and financial support. Christian women spread interpretations of the Bible to challenge the dominant Christian narratives that emphasise women’s submissiveness, or normalise violence against women and girls. Some religious leaders are using the social capital they have accrued to come together during times of inter-communal tension and call for peace and tolerance. At the other end of the spectrum, activists focus on Nigerian and international law. In May 2015, after 14 years of advocacy, activists celebrated the passage of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act, Nigeria’s first comprehensive law on violence against women and girls.
Many activists can see how religion is being used to mask poverty and corruption. They contrast the government’s haste to outlaw same-sex marriage with the lack of progress on security and unemployment. The elite in Nigeria is made up of people from different ethnicities and religions – both major political parties are mixed – but individuals know they can play the ethnic or religious card in their local constituencies to hold on to power. Kelleher believes “religious arguments are shrouding some of the arguments we need to have about social class and wealth. The growth of conservative religion has not allowed us to have the open conversations that Nigeria needs.”
