Philip Ostien

Independent scholar

As it affected the courts of Nigeria's sharia states, the sharia implementation programmes enacted in 1999-2001 had three main aspects: to replace the old Area Courts with Sharia Courts; to bring back Islamic criminal law, abrogated since 1960, for application in the Sharia Courts to Muslims; and to direct all appeals from Sharia Courts, in both ci...

Since 2010, the news from northern Nigeria has been dominated by Boko Haram, the radical sect that has been terrorizing the north-east in particular. But notwithstanding all the people they have killed and the other kinds of damage they have caused, Boko Haram comprises only a tiny fraction of northern Muslims. They are discussed in this chapter; b...

This paper is about metropolitan Lagos—under the British only a "township", though long Nigeria's capital. From early in its history the percentage of Muslims living in Lagos has been high, somewhere around fifty percent. There is a long history of attempts by activists among the Lagos Muslims, none yet successful, to persuade the authorities pro t...

This report surveys the Muslims of the North Central geo-political zone of Nigeria, namely, in alphabetical order, Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, and Plateau States, plus the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. In ethnic and religious terms this is a very heterogeneous part of Nigeria. To try to get a sense of the diverse Muslim populations o...

The last Nigerian censuses that gathered data on religious affiliation were those conducted in 1952 and 1963. The country was then divided for administrative purposes into regions, provinces, and divisions, with further subdivisions into districts and Native Authorities. The smallest units for which data on religious affiliation are given in the ce...

The population of Lagos State of Nigeria is upwards of ten million. About half of this large number are Muslims. In 2002, Muslim activists in Lagos State took it upon themselves to set up what amounts to a private arbitration tribunal — the Independent Sharia Panel (ISP) of Lagos State — to which Muslims are invited to submit their civil disputes f...

The relations between sharia and national law in Nigeria have varied widely from time to time and from place to place within the country – which after all was first brought under a single administration only in 1914. In sections 1-4 of this paper the complex history of our subject is sketched, culminating in the programmes of ‘sharia implementation...

Cet article etudie l'application du code penal islamique dans le Nord-Nigeria ainsi que les programmes de mise en oeuvre de la charia lances dans douze Etats du Nord en 1999-2000. Les nouvelles lois du Code penal islamique promulguees par les douze Etats pratiquant la charia sont detaillees pour exposer les anomalies constitutionnelles liees a...

Conflict between 'indigenes' of particular localities, and 'settlers' there, is widespread in Nigeria. Sometimes religious difference compounds the problem. This essay studies the indigene-settler tensions in Jos, the capital of Plateau State, which twice now, most recently in November 2008, have erupted into violent clashes claiming many hundreds...

In the years just before and just after Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960, the Muslim leaders of the Northern Region agreed to and implemented a number of changes in the Region’s legal and judicial systems which affected the application of Islamic law in particular. This was “the Settlement of 1960”. At the time, Muslim opinion w...

In the years just before and just after Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960, the Muslim leaders of the Northern Region agreed to and implemented a number of changes in the Region’s legal and judicial systems which affected the application of Islamic law in particular. This was “the Settlement of 1960”. This paper (a) gives lists of...

This is an annotated bibliography with introductory essay. It comes from Chapter 6 of P. Ostien, ed., Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria 1999-2006: A Sourcebook (2007). Chapter 6 is entitled “Two Famous Cases”; its principal contents are translations into English of the records of proceedings and judgments of all the courts that heard and de...

The essay begins with a brief history of the penal law of the northern states of Nigeria, from the colonial period up to 1999/2000, when twelve northern states began their programmes of sharia implementation. The new Sharia Penal Codes enacted at that time are then described and discussed. Differences between them and the Penal Code of 1960, and va...

The essay begins with a brief history of the law of criminal procedure in the northern states of Nigeria, from the colonial period up to 1999/2000. Particular attention is paid to criminal procedure in the Muslim courts in the colonial period, the sources in the fiqh on which it was based, and the problems it raised as Independence approached. Chan...

The purpose of this essay is to discuss changes in the laws of Nigeria’s Sharia States, made since 1999 as parts of their programmes of Sharia implementation, with the goal of eliminating certain un-Islamic practices and other besetting 'social vices.' The essay deals with these matters under five substantive headings: Corruption, Liquor, Sexual Im...

The place of Islamic law in Nigeria has undergone three significant adjustments in the past half-century. The first, the “Settlement of 1960”, was brokered by the British in the run-up to Nigerian independence. The second, the “Debacle of 1979”, resulted from the constitution-making process that preceded the birth of the Second Republic. The third,...

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on “Comparative Perspectives on Shari‘ah in Nigeria” held at the University of Jos, Nigeria, in January 2004. “The conference attracted, as main speakers and commentators, first-rate scholars from Europe, America, and around Nigeria, giving the audience the opportunity...to he...

Nigeria's 1999 constitution contains a 'no state religion' clause. This is sometimes said to imply a regime of strict separation of religion and state such as obtains under the 'establishment clause' of the U.S. constitution. The three-part test for establishment clause violations used in the U.S. is articulated and illustrated through the cases. I...

The sharia implementation programs of twelve states of northern Nigeria are briefly described. Reasons for concern are noted. But ten reasons are given for thinking that sharia implementation on the whole represents progress for the states concerned and for Nigeria. Three reasons relate to the fact that the political units implementing sharia are s...

The British took over Northern Nigeria in 1900. Early enactments included statutes establishing two types of courts. “English” courts, of which there were only a few, primarily applied “English” law to “non-natives”; over the course of a century they have developed into today’s state High Courts and Magistrate Courts, plus federal High and appellat...

Three factors complicate the study of the compensation of Nigerian judges over time: the ever-growing number of jurisdictions and of types of courts within them; the ways in which the judges are compensated for their services (basic salaries, in-kind compensation, and, more recently, cash allowances); and bad recordkeeping. By various means describ...

H.L.A. Hart's central criticism of John Austin's command theory of positive law was that most of what are unquestionably laws in modern states cannot plausibly be analyzed as commands, as "orders backed by threats". What Hart calls "power-conferring rules" appear to be particularly vulnerable to this criticism. Offering a new analysis of the logica...

Quine has moved toward "naturalism" in philosophy, which I applaud; at the same time his work has touched off a new round of pseudo-problems in philosophy, which I lament. I read the pseudo-problems as evidence that the shift toward naturalism has not been thorough-going enough. In this paper I undertake an extended discussion of sane of the proble...

The related notions of “observationality” and of “observation term”’ have played important roles in recent philosophical discussions. In a series of publications James Cornman has stated, defended, modified, and deployed his own definition of ‘observation term’. In this note I argue that Cornman’s definition suffers from two serious defects. First,...

Feyerabend and others have been defending for some time the thesis that even observation sentences depend for their meanings on the thegries in which they play a role. According to the most radical version of this thesis, if two theories contain incompatible theoretical statements, then even if the observation terms and sentences associated with th...

Professor Plantinga's “scandalous” conclusion that If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter rests in part on the twin claims that the best reason we have for belief in other minds is the analogical argument, and the best reason we have for belief in God is t...