Safiyya and Adamah: Punishing adultery with sharia stones in twenty-first-century Nigeria

Abstract

In the year 2000, a new phase of the dysfunctional power of religion exploded into the modern public space in Nigeria. Some regional states in the north of the country exploited a loophole in the 1999 constitution to declare themselves as sharia states. Debate on the constitutional legality, political, socio‐economic and gender implications of this development became complicated by ethnicity and regionalism. Soon, a vast array of human rights organizations around the globe joined the affray and employed the power of the media to protest the death sentence by stoning on some women accused of adultery. This paper is a historical reconstruction of the phenomenon using a case study of Safiyyatu Husseini of Sokoto State and her beautiful daughter, Adamah. While the political and socio‐economic perspectives are salient, the conceptual scheme privileges the religious discourse as the core of the issue from which the other connections could be unravelled. It explores the interior of the sharia laws on adultery. The international community hailed the power of the global connections and of the media when Safiyya was acquitted on appeal but many Moslems claimed that the interior of the sharia is perfumed with justice and mercy and that critics are blinded by ignorance. The case is useful for analyzing the resurgence of religion in the politics of an African country. The irony of applying a medieval law in the twenty‐first‐century is not lost.

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