Paper long abstract:

Legal systems in Africa are often multi-layered, with an outward secular veneer and a deeper sub-stratum of family and civil law governed by versions of "tradition" inherited in may ways from hybrid colonial systems of governance. Wherever Islam has had a long influence, "tradition" is a slippery referent. Much customary law in West Africa has integrated significant elements of shari'a law as it touches on family, marriage, and inheritance. "Tradition," then, serves as a screen for religious law in secular societies. On the other hand reformist Muslims assail the opportunistic use of "tradition" to forward heterodox interpretations of Islam, family life, gender relations, and property. They correctly point out that much that is defended as "traditional" and therefore "Islamic" does not conform to orthodox Islam. Under Islamic law while a daughter may inherit less than her brothers, she is nevertheless to be included within the division of property. Yet "traditional" practice in much of West Africa excludes women from the inheritance of land altogether, and then defends the inequity as religiously ordained. "Traditional" interpretations of law, within reformist critiques, become a kind of Trojan horse for occidental values (wherever women are treated as equal citizens before the law) and for paganism (wherever paternalist protections for women are neglected).

In my presentation I would like to discuss current tensions over authenticity in Islam and in "tradition" in West Africa today, with particular emphasis on the law as it is practiced in Nigeria, Niger, and Senegal. This work emerges out of a longstanding interest in gender and religion in Niger. I would like to step back and take a broader comparative perspective and focus on slightly more contemporary issues (from 1990 to the present) than I have been able to do in my historical publications on Maradi, Niger.