In November, 1999, hundreds of thousands of Northern Nigerians took to the streets of Zamfara state to demand the (re)implementation of full shar’iah penal law. Insisting on the laws of God where the laws of man had failed, Nigerians believed shari’ah would stem massive corruption and deepening poverty in their society. Two years after shar’iah, a peasant woman from Katsina state, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by stoning for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, raising world wide concern about her fate and that of Nigeria. This book critically examines this western r ... More

In November, 1999, hundreds of thousands of Northern Nigerians took to the streets of Zamfara state to demand the (re)implementation of full shar’iah penal law. Insisting on the laws of God where the laws of man had failed, Nigerians believed shari’ah would stem massive corruption and deepening poverty in their society. Two years after shar’iah, a peasant woman from Katsina state, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by stoning for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, raising world wide concern about her fate and that of Nigeria. This book critically examines this western reaction, and asks how a revolution for total restructuring of society to bring justice and poverty alleviation most immediately affected a peasant woman accused of sexual crimes. Through the lens of Lawal’s case and its dramatic outcome, Eltantawi examines original Nigerian archival material, her ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, premodern and modern Nigerian history, histories of Hausaland’s colonial encounter, the early legalization of stoning in Islam, Islamic legal theory, and contemporary debates around gender and geopolitics to piece together the histories that gave rise to latest Islamic revolution in Northern Nigeria -- the failure of which empowered terrorist group Boko Haram.