Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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The people of Kano have identifed as Muslim Hausa for several cen-
turies, aligned with one of two Suf orders, the Quadiriyya and the Tijani-
yya, but Kano has incorporated large communities of Yoruba (about half of
whom are Christian and half Muslim) and Igbo (predominately Christian).
It includes well-established communities of Muslim Lebanese, and smaller
communities of people from other parts of Nigeria and Africa, and from the
Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
Kano has an emir (traditional Islamic political leader), whose ancient
palace, and the central mosque attached to it, stands in the Gari, the old
city. Surrounding the Gari, remnants of twenty-feet-high walls built during
the twelfth century create weathered hills that are crossed by indented
walkways. Most yan daba hangouts and Hisbah positions of surveillance
are around the gates and walkways of their wards, points of visual power,
security, and escape.
Beyond the predominately Muslim Gari is the congested sprawl of
greater Kano, more cosmopolitan by far, a maze of commercial and industrial
sections interspersed between newly developed residential quarters for the
rich. Two miles from the old walls is the tree-lined Government Residen-
tial Area (GRA), its colonial, stone houses a contrast to newer, Arab-style
residences. Unlike the Gari, there is a level of ethnic, religious, and regional
diversity within this quarter, for it is mainly populated by the Kano middle
and upper classes who work in the professions, small business and manufac-
turing, and government service. There are tensions between Muslims who
live in the single-family compounds of the GRA and their extended-family
relatives in the Gari, who complain that the Westernization and elitism
associated with life in the GRA results in an unruly selfshness that sepa-
rates Muslim Hausa families. No yan daba have historically congregated
in the GRA, though in the years 1999 through 2002 the GRA became one
of the main sites of politicalreligious protest and violence, especially vio-
lence associated with the profling and states of emergency implemented
to regulate prostitution and the consumption of alcohol, the other areas
being neighborhoods on the outskirts of the Gari, such as Doraye and Tudun
Wada, whose populations are also culturally mixed, but tend to be poor, and
Sabon Gari the new city, comprised of a large market and residences of
mainly southern Christians.
In the mid 1990s, the convergence of yan daba and Islamic militant
sectarian violence toward ethnic, religious others formed the basis of my
interest in youth groups and the ways that Muslim Hausa youths transmute
aggression into ideologies of ethnic, religious authenticity and martyrdom,
and use them to justify witchcraft, social banditry, ethnic, religious violence,
and fghting for and against the state (Casey 1998). Between 2000 and 2002, I
used a combination of methodsparticipant observations, semi-structured
and person-centered interviews, archival and library research, and media
collectingto focus on formations of youth groups that through communal
ideologies and acts suffer and mete out physical and metaphysical forms
of violence. I interviewed a hundred yan daba and their family members,
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Abacha lifted the ban he had placed on party politics early in his regime,
ushering in a new phase of yan banga violence in Kano.
In the early 1990s, dan Asabe (1991) considered yan daba to be yan
banga who were recruited from yan farauta and yan tauri, implying an evo-
lution in youth gangs from traditional hunters and ritual fghters to modern
gang members. Contemporary yan daba, yan banga, and most recently
Hisbah, are part of a larger phenomenonthe emergence of ethnic, religious
vigilantes across Nigeria after the 1999 democratic transition and demilitar-
ization, most notably the Yoruba Oodua Peoples Congress in the southwest
(Akinyele 2001; Nolte 2004), and the Igbo Bakassi Boys of the southeast
(Baker 2002; Harnischfeger 2003; Smith 2004).
10
Vanguards in the politics of
identity and citizenship, these ethnic and religious vigilantes represent diver-
gent political imaginings of Nigeria, and the use of power to enforce certain
ethnic, religious, and regional interests. With demilitarization, deregulation
and the primacy of the market, Nigerian vigilantes use violence to control
the means of coercion, gaining advantage in conficts over state sovereignty
and the appropriation of resources (Mbembe 2001:78).
11
Violence occurs in
the struggle for national and state codifcation of new rights and privileges,
extrajudicial challenges to the international judiciary, the Nigerian nation
state, Nigerian state governments, and corporate elites, whom vigilantes
claim turn a deaf ear to the needs of the poor.
12
Contemporary yan daba align themselves with the yan farauta and
yan tauri of two villages forty minutes to the south of Kano, Kura and Yadda
Kwari, which they call the white team and the black team, respectively
creating an EastWest divide within Kano city. The white and black teams
are essentially parallel black market economies whose members compete,
often violently, for political and economic control over Kano markets. While
yan daba serve as yan banga for political and religious leaders, many of
whom have interests in lucrative black markets for petrol, Indian hemp,
and pharmaceuticals, they generally support the leaders who pay the most
for their services, and if they are caught with illegal items, will bail them
out of jail.
Yan daba speak with pride about the yan farauta from Yadda Kwari
and Kura, expert hunters, and tauri ritual fghters who, in 1980, battled the
yan tauri of the Maitatsine sect,
13
and in 2000 fought Christians in Kaduna
who protested the implementation of Shariah law, yet this relationship is
tenuous, and in some cases another source of yan daba marginalization. For
instance, a mafarauci hunter from Yadda Kwari described daba as:
an acquired habit, not a profession or tradition. . . . Stealing,
drinking, smoking hemp, and general antisocial behavior is
not the culture or subculture of hunters. . . . What is paining
us is that these groups of yan tauri and yan daba, even in the
eyes of the law and the emir, they see them as hunters, which
is not so. To us, yan daba are hooligans.
14
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Yan daba who participate in violence are typically the leaders of a daba
and the inner core of members who have heart (zuciya) for their dabas and
for particular politicalreligious leaders. This inner core differentiates itself
from the majority of yan daba, who restrict their daba involvement to
business.
During the 1990s, skyrocketing infation and unemployment, resulting
from the Structural Adjustment Program implemented in the 1980s by Gen-
eral Ibrahim Babangida as head of state, ushered in greater poverty among the
talakawa and economic hardships in new sectors of the Nigerian population
(Yau 2000). The ranks of yan daba grew from between fourteen per Kano
city ward in 1991 (dan Asabe 1991) to between ffty and two hundred in the
year 2000. These economic hardships widened the pool of potential recruits
into daba activities, and changed the perceptions yan daba have of them-
selves and of Nigerian leaders whom they increasingly view with cynicism
and hostility (Yau 2000).
Yan daba recruits speak about getting even with people who had
downgraded or underrated them. Insults and injuries are taken as
reenactments of earlier acts, variably related to personal experience and to
cultural, religious, or political abstractions, but that nonetheless, excuse
violence. Forceful acts of domination are accompanied by outbursts of rib-
aldry and derision that seem to mock and mimic officialdom, while creat-
ing new forms of officialdom altogether (Mbembe 2001:102). A dan daba,
dressed lavishly in a Muslim-style dress (riga), smoking a joint reminiscent
of Cheech and Chong, slaps an almajiri to the ground for forgetting to say
his prayers, and the crowd cheers and laughs. Using an arbitrary application
of pain and caretaking, yan daba produce a combination of fear and respect
that reinforces certain moral values within society (dan Asabe (1991:99).
The felt and expressed qualities of fear and respect emerge as an entangle-
ment with what Mbembe calls the banality of power, part of which is a
distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and
lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied,
transformed and put into circulation (2001:102).
Yan daba are the main caretakers of younger male siblings and alma-
jirai whose moral aesthetics and behaviors develop through ambiguous
attachments to social rituals and daily life in Quranic school and to those
of the daba street economy. Younger siblings and almajirai form the main
pool of youths from which yan daba recruit.
15
Yan daba self-identify with wards, hanging out in particular joints,
but they shift among modes of violent opposition to other wards, tolerant of
separation and eclecticism. They take non-Hausa street names, like Scorpion
or Pusher, or words combining Hausa with references to people elsewhere,
such as Kayaman reggae man or Takur Sahab (person who has a leader in
India). Yan daba have adopted a style of dress they associate with West-
side niggers (or Los Angelesbased rappers). In their sunglasses, chains,
and baggy jeans, yan daba show a broad interest in world youth cultures,
questioning me, through whirls of Indian hemp, about the political impact of
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rappers like Tupac Shakur and the revolutionary politics of his Black Panther
mother. Yan daba use ideas from the Black Panthers and other revolution-
ary groups in their plans to violently force politicians to make good on their
political promises to the poor.
Until the emergence of Kano government-sponsored ward vigilantes in
1999, and the Hisbah in 2000, yan daba were the main protectors of their
wards, safeguarding them from armed robberies, police brutality, communal
violence, and crimes committed by yan daba of other wards. Ward vigilan-
tes and Hisbah, agemates and neighbors of yan daba, brought an intimate
challenge to the authority of yan daba in the realm of ward policing.
Media, authentic citizenship, and the emergence of Hisbah
In the late 1970s, a burgeoning media industry and increased access to media
coincided with a powerful reformist Sunni movement, Jamaat Izalatil Bida
wa Iqamatus Sunnah (Movement Against Negative Innovations and for
Orthodoxy),
16
led by Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, former Grand Kadi (Paramount
Islamic Judge), and Mallam Ismail Idris, a former military imam. Popularly
known as Izala, this movements stated purpose is reform and rejuvenation
(tajdid), inspired by Shehu Usman dan Fodios achievements and Wahhabi
Salaf revival, yet realized through the day-to-day struggle against what they
consider the unlawful innovation (bida) of Bori and the Suf orders (Falola
1998; Hunwick 1997; Ibrahim 1991; Loimeier 1997; Umar 1993, 2001;
Williams 1997). After Friday mosque, or in response to new publications
or audiocassettes, violent conficts are largely over doctrinal and legal dis-
putes, accusations that imams are partial to the wealthy, and for control of
mosques and public space (Falola 1998:228). Yan Izala state unequivocally
that Islamic authenticity is best realized through compliance with Shariah
law, based on the laws of belief and conduct spelled out in the Quran and
the Hadith (reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed). Gumi
writes, Indeed, they [the Quran and the Hadith] should form the yardstick
by which to measure the authenticity or otherwise of any new writings
concerning the religion (Gumi with Tsiga 1992:165).
Umar suggests the WahhabiSalaf espousal of this overwhelming
emphasis on the centrality of Shariah in Islamic beliefs and practices is com-
parable to the legal positivism that pervades modernity (Umar 2001:133).
Stressing other aspects of modern lifethe promotion of social justice and
equality, a preference for bureaucratic rules over charismatic authority,
universal education, including the education of women, and the provision
of social services and amenitiesyan Izala have converted thousands of
Nigerian Muslims to their form of Islamic orthodoxy. The intellectualism
of the Izala leadership, with vast funding from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,
contributed to a rapid explosion of Izala publications, radio and television
programs, and cassettes, which compete with media from other parts of
Nigeria and the world.
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During the 1990s, an increase in the speed and density of media and
telecommunications, and thus, amplifcation in the intercultural account-
ings of Nigerias worsening realities, conjoined a split within the Muslim
Students Societys anti-Suf-order reformers, many of whom had previous
Izala affiliations, into the pro-Saudi, Wahhabi-inspired missionary move-
ment (dawa), and the pro-Iranian umma (Ibrahim 1991), which took a
frm stance on the implementation of Shariah and the establishment of
an Islamic state. The umma split again into the Hodabiya, which favored
some accommodation with a secular state, and yan Shia, who, inspired
by the mujahidin struggle in Afghanistan and Islamic state-formation in
Iran, preached no compromise with the secular state (Hunwick 1997:39).
Western-educated Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, leader of the Islamic Move-
ment in Nigeria, whose members are sometimes called yan Shia, was an
early opponent of the idea to reimplement Shariah criminal codes in Kano.
With increased international criticism of the implementation of those codes,
he appeared frequently in the media decrying the U.S. Bush administrations
war on terrorism as a war against Muslims. Yan Shia refer to Yoruba
President Olusegun Obasanjo as the U.S.s boy, implying Yoruba ethnic
support for U.S. government policies. Though El-Zakzaky insists that he and
his followers are not Shiite, they wear the garments of Iranian clerics, dis-
tribute Shia literature, and echo Shia doctrine in their own publications.
17
El-Zakzaky and his followers have been routinely imprisoned on charges of
posing a threat to state security by denouncing the Nigerian State as a system
of nonbelievers (kafrai).
Before the implementation of Shariah law in Kano, Hisbah of diverse
religious sects and factions drew together as Nigerian Orthodox Muslims,
following the model of such Nigerian reformists as Shehu Usman dan
Fodio, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, Mallam Ismail Idris, and Sheikh Ibrahim El-
Zakzaky, and such scholars as Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, from eighteenth-century
Arabia, and Ibn Taymiyya, of the fourteenth century, Sudans Hasan al-Turabi,
and Iranians such as Ayatollah Murtadha Mutahhari, protg of Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who sought to establish the rule of the oppressed
(Sanusi 2006a, b). Through bitter political struggles with Dr. Rabiu Kwank-
waso (Kano State Governor), the emir (Alhaji Ado Bayero) and the Suf estab-
lishment, members of reformist sects united in the struggle for Shariah and
violently forced the implementation of Shariah law as Kano State criminal
law, claiming the governor, the emir and certain religious leaders were not
good Muslims.
18
Beyond local level politics, much Hisbah anger and politi-
cal momentum came from identifcation with the talakawa in relation to
failures of the international judicial system and global inequities:
We have to confront the evildoers. The Hisbah exist and have
100% support from God. Most of the vices committed by
poor people . . . are because of the poor leadership in America,
England, and Switzerland. Why did they allow our leaders to
go and take our money there?
19
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of majority rules, while yan daba emphasized social justice and individual
human rights. For instance, a member of Hisbah said:
We are a democracy. We are the majority. And, the Islamic
injunction is superior to any other injunction. So they say its
a government of the people, for the people, by the people
Abraham Lincoln, American President. . . . Since this is a
democracy, we can use it (Shariah) as a political weapon,
to make sure that someone who is conscious of Shariah is
elected.
28
By contrast, a response I commonly heard among yan daba is refected by
the statement:
We are all Muslims. Shariah will help us to know each other
better. In this way, crimes will be reduced and the rich and
poor will be the same under the law.
29
Yan daba described their hopes for jobs and schooling, healthcare, and per-
sonal reforms in behaviors such as their use of alcohol, forms of idealism
refected in wider discourses of support for Shariah law. However, alongside
these public narratives of support for Shariah law, yan daba activities
revealed mistrust, anger, and feelings of betrayal. Yan daba developed ward
lookouts, who monitored their neighborhoods for Hisbah. Some said dis-
cretion was their best protection from Hisbah because Shariah works with
eye-witnessing a crime. Others said they would allow Hisbah to preach to
them, but would not change. A member of daba smoking Indian hemp on
the side of a major road joked with Hisbah:
These Hisbah are hypocrites. They do these things, but they
hide in their houses. We do it in the open because we only fear
God. We fear God, while they fear other people. We are the
only true Muslims.
30
Yan daba and Hisbah were concerned with masculine power and the
moral authority to secure an area. A member of Hisbah said, We are over
a hundred and we are ready to lose our lives to defend this town.
31
A dan
daba who was a strong supporter of Shariah said:
Daba actions and mode of life do not conform with what soci-
ety wants, so people like the Hisbah are the ones who abuse
them. If they come and meet yan daba committing an offense,
they will try to arrest them; thus there is this kind of indirect
abuse or small talk between them. . . . But yan daba will not
stop because they would be labeled as cowards.
32
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uniform with the word Hisbah written across the front in white, considered
Kano State an Islamic democracy, based on the concept of majority rule,
whereby through control of the population, the law, and government coffers,
reformist Muslims would provide for the basic needs of all Muslim Hausa.
Yusuf said:
We know we are a democracy where the majority are Muslims.
We believe in Islam under Islamic law, and we believe one
hundred percent that Islamic injunctions are superior to all
other injunctions, and that the Quranic constitution is supe-
rior to any other constitution. . . . Hisbah is the organization
to take care of the law. We are going ahead. The governor is
not ready and is going to withdraw all support, so the Hisbah
are using the truth to stop what we can stop.
34
In the early stages of Shariah implementation, there was little money
for the creation of jobs, social services, or education, other than reformist
Islamic education, funded by Saudis, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, and wealthy Nigeri-
ans. Instead, the Kano State Shariah Implementation Committee started
campaigns against the sale and consumption of alcohol and prostitution, and
for marriages of all unmarried Muslim Hausa women. Sanusi, a member of
Hisbah, told me:
Women are the people to bring all moral conduct. It is for them
to teach children. They are our mothers, so we like them to be
in front. They are the fgureheads of everything moral.
35
Hisbah complained that Muslim Yoruba and Christian women, not practic-
ing the partial seclusion (kulle) of Muslim Hausa women, were too indepen-
dent, available attractions for Muslim men. Among Muslim Hausa, failing
to maintain what is considered proper control of ones love, including mari-
tal and familial relations, erotic desires, and sexual behavior, is a religious
lapse, a falling into non-Muslim patterns of indulgence and romanticism
(Callaway and Creevey 1994; Wall 1988). Because erotic desire and sexual
urges are considered natural and inevitable, moral virtue is relative to ones
behavior within the family, the guardian and container of eros and sex.
Unmarried women and women who live alone are commonly called karuwai
(prostitutes), bound to men only through sex and money, potential sources
of communal betrayal. There is a widespread sentiment among Muslim
Hausa that ethnic others, spirit and human, and members of the opposite sex,
men and women, are uncontrollablethat, without volition, their erotic
desires and sexual activities inevitably overfow the boundaries of marriage.
36
During the implementation itself, yan daba received silent encouragement
(or thought they did) and condemnation from reformist Muslims to frighten
and attack Muslim women, married and unmarried, who ventured out of
their homes unaccompanied.
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governor, Dr. Ganduje led Hisbah on a series of raids to local hotels, restau-
rants, and cool spots, where Hisbah verbally abused patrons and destroyed
millions of dollars worth of alcohol. Because Christian Igbo and Muslim
Yoruba owned most of these businesses, these raids bankrupted some, and
scared others into a mass exodus. Establishments stayed indefnitely closed
or operated at odd hours or with armed guards patrolling the gates. Jokes
about dying for a drink became a permanent fxture, as humor rose to
meet increased levels of anxiety. Rumors about the arming of Muslims and
Christians came more frequently. In response, President Olusegun Obasanjo
called Dr. Ganduje to Abuja, stating in public that the deputy governor had
endangered Nigerian state security, thus reframing Kanos Islamic state of
emergency as a national one.
Concluding Remarks
The Kano State reformist jihad, resulting in the implementation of Shariah
criminal codes expressed the tensions of democratization and censorship,
and ongoing historical perceptions of bad Muslims as kafrai (non-believ-
ers) and baki (strangers), derived from ethnic, regional, and Islamic sectarian
concepts of Islamic authenticity. While social justice, through the concept
of Muslim unity and reform, was a common goal for yan daba and Hisbah,
it was based on the paradoxical notion of an Islamic nation-state, founded
by and through the violence that affectively placed yan daba and Hisbah
outside of Shariah law. Youths with different visions of Shariah law as
democracy, and of affective citizenships under Shariah law, yan daba
and Hisbah, along with the reformist leaders who targeted or supported
them, recreated and reenacted collective Islamic identities, legitimating
state violence against marginal Muslims, whom they considered enemies
of the state. Ultimately, Islamic state-building drew on political antago-
nisms, fusions of personal, ethnic, religious, and regional citizenship, based
on ethnic customary law, religious law, and the historical perceptions of
enclosure and exclusion, all of which underpin memories of belonging and
access to Kano State resources. Islamic state-building became a work of
ethnic, religious, and regional confation, which conficted with, and super-
seded, personal and non-Muslim Hausa expressions of Islamic authenticity,
morality, and security. By profling marginal Muslims, censoring them,
and enacting violence to expel them, yan daba, Hisbah and the reformist
leaders who recruited them into violent struggle, used state, legal and media
rationalities to permeate social perception, to establish self and community
censorship as a means of hiding state violence, and to silence the memories
and agencies of marginal Muslims. Nigerian reformist Muslims, failing
to fully convert, expel, or silence the marginalized, used yan daba and
state law to physically enforce certain historical perceptions while censoring
others, sacrifcing other Muslims and the bodies of youths to the Wars of
Orthodoxya microcosm of world confict at home.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Aminu Sharif Bappa, Abdulkarim dan Asabe, and Show Boy for introducing me
to yan daba and Hisbah, and to the yan daba, Hisbah, and families who allowed me into their
lives. For reasons of confdentiality, they shall remain unnamed, but I greatly appreciate my
experiences with them. I thank Abdulkarim dan Asabe, Salisu Abdullahi, Phillip Shea, Murray
Last, Istvan Patkai, Aminu Taura Abdullahi, Aminu Inuwa, and Umar Sanda for their important
contributions to my thinking about this project. I thank faculty in the Departments of Psychiatry
and Sociology at Bayero University in Kano for research afliations and a sense of home base. I
am greatly indebted to Robert Edgerton, Douglas Hollan, Allen Feldman, Uli Linke, and Alexan-
der Hinton for their mentoring, and to Benjamin F. Soares and Marie Nathalie LeBlanc for inviting
me to participate in this volume. The project would have been impossible without the generous
support of a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Award (20002002), the skillful guidance of
Karen Colvard, and a Fulbright IIE Lecturing/Research Award (2004).
NOTES
The civil code of Shariah law, which guides matters such as marriage, divorce, child custody, 1.
and inheritance, has been continuously in place since the nineteenth century (Gumi with
Tsiga 1992:50). The change in 1999 and 2000 involved a reimposition of the criminal code of
Shariah that had been in place during the colonial period (under the control of the British,
who had outlawed hadd punishments, which they found repugnant), but had been excised
at independence (Kumo 1993:78).
While many Muslims considered Shariah law as an alternative to, or critique of, colonial and 2.
postcolonial elitism and corruption, the Independent Shariah Implementation Committee
was the frst group to implement it as a legal structure, with Hisbah (Shariah law enforcers),
Sirhul (committee of community elders), and Shura (Shariah court judges).
Scholarly debate about the impact of Shia Muslims on the politics of religion in northern 3.
Nigeria is based on the notion of authentic Shia identity and a preference for doctrinal, rather
than communal, identifcation (Gumi with Tsiga 1992; Umar 2001).
Bori is widely regarded as animism or a spirit-possession cult, which predated Islam (Besmer 4.
1983; Greenberg 1946; Masquelier 1993; Onwuegeogwu 1969; Palmer 1914; Tremearne 1914).
Scholars describe the Bori spirit-possession rituals, practiced in Kano State, as religious
opposition to Islam (Besmer 1983; Onwuegeogwu 1969) and as alternative or oppositional
gender experience and expression (Callaway 1987; Wall 1988). Yan Bori consider themselves
Muslims, while Kano reformist Muslims variably refer to them as fallen Muslims, marginal
Muslims, or pagans.
After the implementation of Shariah law, in November of 2000, members of the Indepen- 5.
dent Shariah Implementation Committee Sirhul (community of elders) and Shura (Islamic
judges) condemned Hisbah violence as un-Islamic. The Kano State government formed
the Kano State Sharia Implementation Committee to address charges that Hisbah were
abusing their powers. The government retained most Hisbah from the Kano Independent
Sharia Implementation Committee, but provided increased supervision and a written code
of conduct.
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Nafs 6. refer to the biopsychological powers of humans, such as feelings, emotions, sexual
desires, and carnal appetites.
See Casey (2007) for an analysis of the Kano 7. yan daba violence that occurred on 11 May 2004
against kafrai, Kiristoci, and baki.
Personal communication, Professor Phillip Shea, Department of History, Bayero University, 8.
Kano, Nigeria, 19 July 2004.
During the 1950s, Fulani elite used the 9. alkali (Islamic judge) courts for political ends, to sup-
press dissent, especially by adherents of the Northern Elements Progressive Union (Christelow
2002:195).
Pratten (2005:2) suggests Annang vigilantes come to terms with Nigerian state disorder by 10.
means of brokerage, by inserting themselves within political and economic niches, arrived at
through monitoring and surveillance, and ambiguous notions of accountability. Gore and Prat-
ten (2003:213) fnd popular responses to disorder contribute to an insurgent construction of
the public realm in which groups marginalized and excluded challenge the logic, locations,
patterns of discourse[,] and constructions of the public good.
Demilitarization led to a security vacuum, with retrenched military personnel and under- 11.
paid Nigerian police ofcers increasingly involved in armed robberies and other forms of
extrajudicial violence.
Saro-Wiwa (1992) documents routine pleas to the United Nations and to the Nigerian nation- 12.
state for public safety and a fair claim to oil revenues and jobs.
According to the Report of Tribunal of Inquiry on Kano Disturbances, Maitatsine The One 13.
Who Curses (a nickname given to him by Kano residents) came to Kano from Damaturu
in Borno State. He claimed that Kano Muslims had no direction (kibla), and he repeatedly
shouted at them, May Allah separate you from all of His blessings! He considered himself
a prophet, whose followers were original Muslims, uncorrupted by unlawful innovation
(bida) and shirk.
Interview with a hunter, 14. Yadda Kwari, Nigeria, 26 October 2000.
Yau (2000) describes the social services 15. yan daba have historically provided for their
wards, including labor for community projects, protection, sporting and cultural events for
community entertainment, and enforcing the community discipline.
While there have been a number of slightly diferent names and translations given to this 16.
movement, this is the name Gumi gave to it at its inception, 8 February 1978, in Jos, Nigeria
(Gumi with Tsiga 1992:155156).
El-Zakzaky, former leader of the Muslim Brothers, a Sunni sect, developed close relations with 17.
Iranian scholars and frequently traveled to Iran. Many of his followers, funded by scholarships
from the Iranian government, claim to be Shia.
Yan daba 18. threatened to use their black-market petrol to burn down the city of Kano if the Kano
State governor refused to sign Shariah criminal codes into Kano State law.
Interview with a member of 19. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 3 August 2001.
Indian 20. masala flm is the most popular genre watched in Kano, followed by Chinese Kung Fu,
and Nigerian magical and American crime flms (Larkin 1998).
Musa, and all subsequent names that I use to ease the narratives of Kano Muslims, are 21.
pseudonyms, meant to protect their identities.
Please see Paden (1986:43) for scholarship that supports both positions. During the transition 22.
to independence, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, revived the works of Shehu Usman
Dan Fodio to unify northern Muslims, regardless of brotherhood or legal school.
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Yan Shia 23. and yan Izala consider secular human legislation one of the most egregious forms
of shirk because it places humans on par with Allah (Westerlund 1997:309).
Rubutu 24. is a Muslim Hausa treatment for rashin lafya (imbalance in all areas of lifepsychical,
spiritual, social, physical). To take rubutu, the aficted person writes Quranic verses on a board
or bowl, washes it with water, and drinks the solution, to, literally, internalize the medicinal
verses.
Interview with a hunter, Yadda Kwari, Nigeria, 9 September 2000. 25.
This sentiment, that violence in Kano is a manifestation of aggressive intrusions from the 26.
outside, is widespread, and cuts across historical perceptions of violence from colonization
to the most recent massacres of Christians in 2004 (Casey 1998, 2007).
Interview with a member of 27. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 15 January 2001.
Interview with a member of 28. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 12 August 2001.
Interview with a 29. dan daba, Kano, Nigeria, 13 October 2001.
Interview with a 30. dan daba, Kano, Nigeria, 12 September 2001.
Interview with a member of 31. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 3 August 2001.
Interview with a 32. dan daba, Kano, Nigeria, 29 January 2001.
Interview with a 33. dan daba, Kano, Nigeria, 23 February 2000.
Interview with a member of 34. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 3 August 2001.
Interview with a member of 35. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 15 January 2001.
Before the implementation of Shariah law, I witnessed the exorcism of a Muslim Yoruba spirit 36.
who had possessed a Muslim Hausa woman because he loved her. The malams performing
the exorcism challenged him to recite from the Quranto prove, in other words, his Islamic
authenticitybefore frmly establishing his possession as oppression.
Interview with a member of 37. Hisbah, Kano, Nigeria, 3 August 2001.
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