With all due respect, could you make an intervention, even a corrective one, without adopting a condescending tone? It's offensive for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the knowledge/power assumptions that actuate such a tone. Couldn't you have made your points without those condescending (rhetorical) questions? Even clueless, prejudiced, and sharia-phobic Westerners know that there is more to sharia than the prescribed punishments. I don't enjoy being talked down to.
On the substance of your post, perhaps the question of why the late formal restriction of sharia to civil law, especially family law, occurred is more germane. Of course, Sharia guided the decisions of the alkali courts in the emirates, but it was not only sharia. It was a mishmash of sharia and common law principles. But, as you yourself said, this colonial sharia regime could not impose any punishments considered offensive to British morality, which means MOST prescribed punishments for CRIMINAL offenses. It seems to m then that, whatever the official policy was, if the Alkali courts could not rule on criminal law because their punishments were likely to offend "British morality" and to be overturned sharia became effectively restricted to the civil and family realm. You seem exclusively focused on formal changes in British policy. I am focused on that too, and my own information is that the change actually began sooner, albeit in specific areas and on a case-by-case basis. But I am also concerned with what actually happened on the ground. Steven Pierce has a good article on this, and there are others.
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 4:03 AM, John Edward Philips <philips@cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp> wrote:
On Oct 25, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:According to everything else I've ever read about sharia law in colonial Northern Nigeria it was only on the eve of independence that sharia law was restricted to civil law only, but that sharia law, minus punishments that might have been considered "cruel or unusual" by 20th century British Law, was applied throughout colonialism in Emirate areas of Northern Nigeria. Given the origins of Common Law from Anglo-Saxon tribal law, incorporating sharia law within Common Law as a sort of traditional law the way 'urf was incorporated into Islamic law doesn't seem very strange.
> 1. The sharia of colonial times did not embrace the realm of criminality for obvious reasons. That would have undercut the ability of European colonial authorities to criminalize and prosecute infractions as a way of keeping control and enforcing colonial order. That would have created a parallel judicial system outside the purview of colonial law and outside European appellate oversight. No colonial power would have allowed that. Accordingly, they limited Sharia to family matters and crafted European-modeled secular legal institutions to deal with criminality. I work on Northern Nigeria, where this was a big issue. In a few cases where the British allowed the application of sharia to criminal infractions committed in family settings, the ensuing scandal of sharia-prescribed public floggings forced the British to withdraw their permission. In other African contexts, the colonialists were more proactive, banning the criminal aspects of sharia law and their prescribed punishment ab initio under the guise of not tolerating punishments that "offended Victorian morality."
Reading over this paragraph again I get the impression you are making the common confusion between Islamic law and certain punishments, as if there were nothing to Islamic law and legal procedure besides those punishments. You do understand that there are other aspects to Islamic law besides amputation, flogging, stoning etc.?
John Edward Philips <http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/philips/>
International Society, College of Humanities, Hirosaki University
"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." -Terentius Afer
<http://www.boydell.co.uk/www.urpress.com/80462561.HTM>
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