Shariʿah On Trial: Northern Nigeria's Islamic Revolution. By Sarah Eltantawi, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12355
• Published date: 01 September 2018

not operate as “either or” binaries but are rather in continuous

dialectic in all regimes. To the extent constitutional theory

attempts to deny this, or to ignore the dialectical forces that are in

play in constitutional politics, constitutional theory obfuscates

rather than illuminates constitutional practice. In the Age of

Trump and with the spread of radical nationalist parties in

Europe, no one should have any ethnocentric illusions of liberal

triumphalism. It is high time, therefore, that the systematic study

of constitutional politics in the Arab world be viewed as raising

questions central to constitutional theory and not just a curiosity

limited to a few specialists. This book makes a powerful case for

why that is so.

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Shariʿah On Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution. By Sarah

Eltantawi, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Reviewed by Mark Fathi Massoud, Department of Politics and Legal

Studies Program, University of California, Santa Cruz

More than a decade before the Arab Spring, another revolution

was taking shape: an Islamic legal revolution in West Africa. It

began in 1999 with the introduction of shariʿah (roughly trans-

lated as Islamic law) by the governor of Nigeria’s northwestern

state of Zamfara.

1

By 2002, all 12 of northern Nigeria’s Muslim-

majority states implemented Islamic-based penal codes. A loosely

organized movement also began to coalesce around the interna-

tionally reported criminal trial of Amina Lawal, a woman facing a

stoning punishment for alleged sexual misconduct. An Islamic

appeals court eventually acquitted Lawal, and the Islamic revolu-

tion ultimately failed. These events would later give rise to Boko

Haram, an extremist paramilitary “of poor, uneducated boys”

(32), and to a milieu in which “no social reward” exists for critical

thinking (200). An ethnographically and historically informed

account of this remarkable social and legal history is found in

Sarah Eltantawi’s Shariʿah on Trial.

1

Authors writing in English transliterate the Arabic word, shariʿah, differently—

commonly shari’a, shari’ah, shariah, or sharia—with apostrophes or diacritical marks to

represent the Arabic ‘ayn. To remain consistent with Eltantawi’s book, this article uses

shariʿah.

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