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Sharia and Nigeria’s constitutional democracy 06 Mar 2026

The Sharia law system has been brought back into the national debate. On 23 February 2026, US Congressman Riley Moore submitted a congressional committee report to President Trump, urging the United States government to pressure President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reverse Sharia criminal law and blasphemy offences in Northern Nigeria. Expectedly, this recommendation has triggered another round of debate about the place of Sharia in Nigeria’s constitutional democracy. As usual, there is so much ignorance and misrepresentation about the Sharia crisis in Nigeria. This is a modest effort to put the debate into context and show why the US Congressman may be right about his verdict on Sharia law in Nigeria.

When Zamfara State enacted both the Sharia Criminal Act and Sharia Criminal Court System Act in 2000, President Olusegun Obasanjo rightly considered it a political gambit by the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) to harass the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and decided to wait out the political outrage. But he was dead wrong not to recognise the strategic implications of the enactment of a criminal Sharia in Nigeria’s secular republic, and how it undermined the constitutional bargain that sustained modern Nigeria from 1914 to 2000. Give it to Obasanjo; his inattention to the conceptual aspect of leadership meant that he did not appreciate how the success of the revision in Zamfara would convulse Nigeria for a long time to come. It did not take long for eleven other northern states to follow suit and establish a Sharia criminal law system. For a long time, things remained normal as the political incentives weakened and Obasanjo’s political enemies became associates. 

But the genie is out of the bottle. The Zamfara disruption was an appeasement to the gods of ‘political Islamism’. During the 1999 general elections, desperate politicians played up the growing clamour for authentic Sharia. For decades, many Muslims have felt that only the comprehensive implementation of the sharia would appease their religious sensibilities. This movement had political traction in the run-up to the 1999 elections. Governor Yerima played the game and promised to implement Sharia criminal law if elected Governor. When he won, he delivered. It was all politics. But the politics had clouded the constitutional crisis it had unleashed. 

The US congressional committee is right that criminal Sharia is a violation of Nigeria’s constitution and incompatible with democracy. The argument against the US congressional recommendation is two-fold. The first is whether the recommendation is an infringement of the rights of Nigerian Muslims. The second raises a question about whether the President has the power to nullify laws enacted by the state legislature. Both are intertwined. But they should be disentangled to clarify the issue.

It is important to state that there is no problem with the Sharia law itself. In fact, making Sharia law accessible to Muslims in Nigeria is a constitutional obligation of the Nigerian state under the right to freedom of religion. The right to freedom of religion means that the Nigerian state authority should not hinder any Nigerian from the free exercise of religion. In constitutional language, there are two aspects of the right to freedom of religion in a democratic society. The US Constitution and the jurisprudence that has come from the First Amendment make them explicit. They are the ‘Free Exercise’ and ‘Non-Establishment’ clauses. The free exercise clause relates to Section 38 of Nigeria’s constitution, which obligates the state to allow all Nigerians and residents in Nigeria the right to freely express their religious beliefs. Free expression is also in the form of religious observances. So, having a Muslim dispose of his personal matters like marriage and custody in line with Islamic injunctions and prescriptions in the Sharia is a fundamental right of a Muslim. The non-establishment clause relates to Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution. It forbids the establishment of a state religion by the federation or by any state in Nigeria. 

What are examples of the establishment of religion? Of course, the obvious example is when the state mandates a single religion, as in Saudi Arabia or the Vatican. Establishment includes the less-obvious case in which the state uses its resources to promote a particular religion to the detriment or neglect of another. The US Supreme Court provides a good test to determine whether there is a violation of the non-establishment clause. The test is whether a state action places an extra advantage or an extra burden on a particular religion. In this sense, state neutrality in religious affairs requires that the state not use state resources to promote a religious belief or give it an advantage over another religion or even no religion. 

Now, let us use these features of freedom of religion and secularity of the state to assess the enactment of Sharia criminal law in northern Nigeria. Before 2000, there was a constitutional bargain to settle for personal Sharia. This is the constitutional accommodation of Sharia. It started with colonial rule, where the law recognised customary law to the extent that its provisions are not contrary to ‘equity, justice and good conscience’, the so-called incompatibility test. The constitution accepted this logic and classified Sharia as a customary law. This classification was revisited in 1957 when the government of the Northern Region asked a special expert committee comprising Professor Anderson of London University, the Chief Imam of Sudan, and other Islamic clerics to review the position of Sharia as Nigeria moved toward independence. The committee recommended that Northern Nigeria should not have a criminal Sharia system but rather keep the personal Sharia relating to marriage and custody. After much debate, this recommendation was revalidated at the London Constitutional Conference of 1959 and enshrined in the 1960 Independence Constitution.

So, the foundational pillar of Nigeria’s federation and constitutional governance is that Sharia would be treated like any other customary law and would apply to the private affairs of a Muslim in Nigeria. It shall never apply to criminal offences. To ensure that no one is prosecuted for violations of Sharia or other religious or customary crimes, the constitution prohibited criminal liability for any offence not defined in a written law. Of course, sharia law is not written law. This constitutional bargain remained in the 1979 Constitution, after a serious debate between Islamists and secularists. It was kept in the current 1999 Constitution. 

Therefore, enacting criminal sharia undermines Nigeria’s constitutional democracy. By elevating the religious beliefs of a section of Nigerians into statutory crimes prosecuted by the state with public resources, the various state legislative houses have declared their states Islamic states and converted other citizens of the states who are not Muslims into second-class citizens. This violates the constitutional prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. This is part of the argument that Muslim clerics and leaders in Northern Nigeria often misunderstand.

Sam Amadi, PhD, a former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, is the Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts.