Secular States, Muslim Law and Islamic Religious Culture: Gender Implications of Legal Struggles in Hybrid Legal Systems in Contemporary West Africa

This article sets out the differing approaches of three West African states (Niger, Senegal, and Nigeria) towards reconciling the multiple legal systems (Islamic, western, military) they have inherited as ostensibly secular states in regions with prominent Muslim populations. While Senegal has adopted a Family Code that appears to modify and regulate some of the perceived injustices of Islamic law in family life, a number of states within Nigeria have gone in the opposite direction, expanding Islamic law beyond family law into the criminal domain. In Niger, on the other hand, multiple systems of law co-exist uneasily, without any effective hierarchy or definitive conclusion to legal disputes carried into different legal domains. In all three cases the state does not have the capacity to effectively enforce a single coherent legal system, nor does it succeed in controlling the «justice» that so commonly occurs in extra-legal settings. Throughout West Africa legal reform must contend with the dual problems of weak state capacity to impose a unified legal system and of the vigilantism of pressure groups that may have limited mastery of the Islamic juridical tradition in an atmosphere that is nevertheless heavy with the rhetoric of a return to Islamic purity