The Mosque and the State House: Political Islam in Contemporary Nigeria since 1999

Abstract

The unsuccessful attempt by Nigerian citizen, Mutallab to bomb a Detroid-bound plane from Amsterdam on the eve of Christian in 2008 and the deportation of a group of Nigerian students from Malaysia in 2010 owing to terrorism-related allegation have attracted the attention of the world to Nigeria, which is the Africa's most populous country. Such events have been connected by the media with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, which have culminated in the intensification of research and reporting on Islam and particularly on the relationship between politics and Islam. The searchlight of scholars and writers on this subject has been beamed on the Middle East and South Asian countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan both of which have been indicted by the Western media as safe haven for professional terrorists and potential bombers. The negative image created for Pakistan was later aggravated with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in a military settlement in the Pakistani territory in May, 2011. The purpose of the present article is to examine the dimension of political Islam in Nigeria since the country's return to full democracy in 1999. The rationale for the paper's focus on this period lies in the fact that the period witnessed an unprecedented progress in the Nigerian Muslims' quest for political power, as Muslim scholars, leaders and personalities were elected into a handful of offices as state governors, commissioners, special advisers and other public functionaries which put them in a better stead to fulfill the long-felt need for the implementation of the Islamic legal system in their various states. The paper employs a combination of the historical method and analytic philosophy and concludes that political Islam is systematic in the northern parts of the country where it has yielded meaningful fruits whereas there is need for the systematization of the linkages between Islam and politics in the southern parts of the country.

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