BOOK: Rabiat AKANDE, Entangled Domains: Empire, Law, and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 202 pp, ISBN 9781316511558, £95

 

(image courtesy: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

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.

Table of contents: 

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.

About the author: 

Rabiat Akande is Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. She works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, International law, and (post)colonial African law and society.

More information can be found here.