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Zina 1 and transgressive heterosexuality in northern Nigeria
Abstract
implementers of some expressions of illicit sex, and not others, as a sexual crime. Zina is transgressive according to Sharia criminal law. While the Sharia does not explicitly name zina as transgressive heterosexuality, it is clear from significant elements of its conceptualisation, that is, its status as consensual sex between a man and a woman who are not married to one another, that zina involves heterosexual sex and that the source of its transgression is its occurrence outside marriage. I begin by addressing the legal and political contexts for the particular form that Sharia has taken in northern Nigeria, before proceeding to examine pre- vailing understandings of zina. Legal formulations of zina are juxtaposed with non-formalised, common-sense understandings, to point to the distinction between formal expressions of principles in Sharia criminal law on zina and popular understandings of such principles. Highlighting this distinction pre- cedes the elaboration of a further distinction, which is that between principle and practice. In this instance, this is the distinction between Sharia and between prevailing Hausa sexual culture as lived cultural practices, engaged in by particular social categories of women and men. Muslim women's struggles against the various controls that have been imposed on them in the name of Islam have taken diverse forms. The interna- tional solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) provides a forum for strengthening women's struggles in diverse contexts of "the Muslim world". These include contexts in which Islam is the state religion; Muslim communities governed by minority religious laws; and secular states where an expanding political presence is manifested in the rising demand for religious laws. WLUML recognises that women within the network will have
... Feminist Dissent 2018 (3), pp. 114-146 (Pereira, 2005). 7 Restrictions on sexuality are not confined to heterosexual women alone. ...
... Pereira (2005, p. 55) shows the distinction between Shari'a codes and prevailing Hausa sexual culture as lived cultural practices in the context of 'state-sponsored efforts by the Muslim religious right to reconstruct discourses of heterosexuality. ' Pereira (2005) writes of modern courtship including spending time in the potential bride's house engaging in sexual intercourse to test compatibility and how these practices contrast with prosecutions for zina. She writes about tsarance, common in the early 20 th century but no longer practiced, where village groupings of girls and boys would engage in cuddling and sleeping together, and kawance or angwance, where friends of the bride or groom would gather for the wedding away from parents and have sexual freedoms with neither religious scholars nor anyone else condemning this practice. ...
This article examines the binary of culture/ religion/ tradition and modern/ secular/ foreign and its impact on women’s human rights struggles in particular in northern Nigeria. This binary is commonly perpetuated by state and non-state actors, including politicians, community leaders and religious leaders, who weaponise culture, religion and tradition to resist the struggle for gender equality. It highlights how progress around some concerns, such as rape of young girls, has occurred concurrently with attacks on other rights, particularly sexual and reproductive rights including abortion and sex outside marriage, and of those with non-normative sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions. This hardening of attitudes and narrowing of what is seen as permissible not only obscures the diversity of how people lived and thought in the past but is also far from the reality of how people live their lives presently. It further reflects the increased influence of religious fundamentalism and conservatism in northern Nigeria.[1] [1] I used the term religious fundamentalism as distinct from religious conservatism and to signify the project whereby those engaged in it ‘construct ‘tradition’ in a way that is highly selective, at the same time as dogmatically insisting that their reconstructions of text are ‘sacred’ and so unable to be questioned’ (Cowden and Sahgal, 2017, 15), deny ‘the possibility of interpretation and reinterpretation even while its adherents engage in both’ (Bennoune, 2013, 16) and centre the importance of control of women’s bodies and sexuality and rigid gender roles. Religious fundamentalists ‘believe in the imposition of God’s law, something called the Sharia – their version of it rather than others’ – on Muslims everywhere and in the creation of what they deem to be Islamic states or disciplined diasporic communities ruled by these laws,’ denounce secularists, seek to bring politicised religion into all spheres, want to police, judge and change the behaviour, appearance and comportment of others and aim to sharply limit women’s rights, sometimes in the name of protection, respect and difference (Bennoune, 2013, 16). In contrast, while religious conservatism remains problematic, it does not make claims to possessing the only true interpretation and can be ‘protective of certain traditional spaces for women as well as being capable of reform and change’ (Cowden and Sahgal, 2017, 18).
... All these constructions through socialization have been accepted by these former colonies including Ghana. The acceptance of this foreign culture has now shaped the way families bring up their members; how Christians and Muslims train their members which has also influenced how educational curricula and the media present the ideals of the society (Oduyoye & Ammah-Konney, 2009;Pereira, 2005). Cultural teachings in the Ghanaian society right from home, school, through to the religious bodies and the media have placed the appropriate avenue for sex in marriage. ...
... More women than men have been convicted of "Zina" or adultery in Islamic communities (Pereira, 2005). Women have different standards of evidence applied to them. ...
ABSTRACT
This study ascertained perceptions on forced sex in marriage in six communities in the Cape Coast Metropolis’ of Ghana. Themes explored include the respondents’ perception on sexual rights in marriage; the category of persons who experience forced sex in marriage; factors that lead to forced sex in marriage; how to deal with forced sex in marriage and the construction of sexuality in the metropolis.
In all a total of 27 male and female respondents irrespective of marital status and educational background were used. Out of this, 20 were conveniently selected while the remaining 7 representing opinion leaders were purposely selected to respond to items on construction of sexuality. There were also 3 focus group discussions comprising of an all male, all female and mixed sex groups. The study adopted African feminist Sylvia Tamale’s argument on the construction of sexuality as its theoretical underpinnings while inductive analysis and creative synthesis was used to analyze responses.
The study clearly showed that the issue of forced sex in marriage which became a debate in Ghana and subsequently taken out while the Domestic Violence (DV) Act of Ghana exists and is recognized by all, though its occurrence is not reported. The study further ascertained the construction of sexuality which gives differential sexual roles to males and females in the community creating the overall status of these two groups on sex, contribute to the issue of non-reporting of forced sex in marriage. The study therefore recommended the enactment of specific laws to be passed towards dealing with forced sex in marriage.
... Her sentence was announced on 23 March 2002, but subsequently withdrawn on 23 September 2003, in large part due to national and international advocacy by women's rights organisations. Pereira (2005) underscores the significance of history and politics in the interpretation of cultural practices, including practices integral to heterosexual culture. Lawal's case above is characteristic of a region where religious and cultural norms intersect to define women's status through social reproduction. ...
This article draws on a qualitative study piloted in Maiduguri, Northern Nigeria, to unpack the gender logics that shape why women join Boko Haram, their roles, how they are perceived by their communities on their return and how these dynamics inform the ‘deradicalisation’ programmes of the Nigerian government and civil society organisations. The study reveals that the absence of a gender power analysis reproduces the dominant tropes evident in radicalisation theories and programmes about who is radicalised and why, thus limiting a holistic response to the factors that drive association with Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria. The article points to the opportunities that a more nuanced reading of women’s experiences of associating with armed groups and their return to their communities offers to re-conceptualising integration programmes. Awino Okech, SOAS, University of London. Email: ao21@soas.ac.uk
... In the northern part of Nigeria, for instance, where more than half of the population is Muslim and Islamic jurisprudence has dominated and shaped the cultural practices, sex work is largely perceived as a corrosive behaviour that portends the moral dignity of the larger society, particularly of the upcoming generations (Pereira, 2005). Religious sensitivity in this zone promotes intense animosity against sex work and makes it difficult for sex workers to operate freely (Fawole & Dagunduro, 2014). ...
Sex work within the Nigerian context is generally regarded as a crime and shameful behaviour commonly perpetrated by women and/or girls who exchange sexual services with different people usually men for monetary or other benefits. This present study investigates an approach initiated by some communities in Ilorin metropolis of Kwara, Nigeria to eradicate sex work activities. The study adopted a qualitative research method. Three hundred and seven residents from 5 communities where brothel-based and street-based sex workers are predominant participated in the study. A range of sampling methods including criterion, convenience and venue-based sampling methods were used; in-depth interview was the instrument employed in data collection, and data analysis was done using thematic analysis. Results indicate that while the approach is effective in controlling sex workers’ activities, it inspires violence and normalises human rights abuses of sex workers in Ilorin metropolis. The paper suggests a need for a public campaign aimed at sensitising members of the communities about the fundamental rights of their fellow citizens which they are obliged to venerate as Nigerians.
... So for example in northern Nigeria, while the culture of sexual relationships between unmarried couples was widespread and tolerated, the implementation of sharia law across northern states from 2000 onwards has sought to constrain and re-shape gender relations and matters of sexuality. Many of the earlier customs are now seen as transgressive, with charges of zina (criminalising sex outside marriage) being levelled at so-called perpetrators as women's sexuality is increasingly viewed as a source of immorality (Pereira, 2005). These social shifts are linked to the radicalisation of northern Nigerian Islam through its contact with zealous and fundamentalist Islamic sects in other parts of the world from the 1970s onwards, leading to more puritanical and stricter interpretations that had previously been played down (Best, 2001). ...
This essay lays out the historical and intellectual lineage of the idea behind the journal Feminist Dissent. As the “Rushdie Affair” was both the backdrop and the catalyst for a group such as Women Against Fundamentalism, the current conjuncture characterized by an exponential expansion of fundamentalism, neo-liberal austerity, rollback of the rights of women and sexual minorities, and racist control of borders and migration has necessitated a different kind of analysis, one that is absent from academic and popular discourse at the moment. This essay is an attempt to propose a new way of looking at the intersection of gender and fundamentalism and underscores the importance of highlighting dissent as a crucial feminist strategy.
This article examines the admissibility of evidence generated from CCTV and DNA tests as a means of proving adultery according to Islamic Law with a critical and argumentative study. This article reveals that hadd punishment cannot be imposed based on evidence generated from CCTV and DNA tests because the admission of such evidence will erode and neutralize the Qur'anic requirement of four reliable eyewitnesses before punishment. On the other hand, such evidence cannot be used to replace the provisions of the Qur'an and Sunnah because they are circumstantial and therefore subject to doubt. The author's main finding is that the only acceptable evidence for adultery is that prescribed by the Qur'ān or Sunnah, namely the oral testimony of four reliable eyewitnesses and confession. The article recommends that evidence generated from CCTV and DNA tests should be good evidence and equally admissible in all non-hudud offenses especially when there is no human interference or interruption tainting or affecting the evidence.
The aim of this essay is to interrogate gender relations in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency in a way that recognizes continuities as well as discontinuities across multiple dimensions of social relations. The essay begins by outlining the changing trajectory of the Boko Haram insurgency and scholarly efforts to understand it as a social phenomenon. The second section discusses how research and media recognition of Boko Haram’s violence in relation to women led to a focus on spectacular events, such as mass abductions and suicide bombings. It is critical to recognize the politics of visibility and nonvisibility regarding women in the gendered dynamics set in motion by Boko Haram’s spectacles of violence. Finally, the essay points to ways in which feminist analyses of conflict and militarism throw light on the more suppressed yet critical dimensions of gender relations that surface in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency.
Fieldwork in the social sciences is, by its nature, a messy and complicated process. Human relationships established between researcher and participants must be forged and maintained across social boundaries. Notions of difference, perceived through our bodies as they interact with other bodies, can often complicate these experiences in the ‘field’. Because of this, it is important that we remain aware of the effects our own positionalities can have on our research, as demonstrated in the experiences described in this article. Coming to terms with our own privileged identities, be it class, race, gender, nationality or educational background, in peripheral contexts, has demanded a degree of introspection from each of us. Many of us have often questioned our own legitimacy in the field and find ourselves wondering what right we have to enter communities and write about lived realities that we ourselves often do not experience.
In seminar groups, hallways and coffee rooms of UCT, we often interrogate our positionality as young researchers in the field. This ‘identity crisis’ is partly because we are conscious that, in the context of the field, the researcher is continuously challenged with the implications of what her/ his body represents – difference and privilege. For some, this discussion may be dismissed as middle-class, guilt-ridden, self-involved drivel. However, the topics addressed in this collective piece continue to be unresolved in terms of how we, as up-and-coming researchers, rationalise the “body politics” of our own work. Here, we reflect on and respond to this real and permeating challenge which continues to emerge in our experiences and lives as global citizens and academics. The notes which we kept during our ‘fieldwork’, as a method to track and reflect on these issues in our research experiences, were key sources for the article.
This is not a discussion that will necessarily bring new insights into the various themes we explore, but it does provide a critical forum in which we can collectively highlight some of the internal tensions we grapple with in the field as we interact with different and not so different communities. It might also intimate ways of tackling how we may transcend these challenges by moving towards a communicable purpose for those involved in the research process.
This article threads together stories of language, nationality, gender, class and race, exploring how they feed into our individual and collective research experiences. These reflections also make use of Elaine Salo and Sophie Oldfield’s core course and its analytical ‘toolbox’ – a course in which all of us were participants between 2007-8. Moving from the narrated experiences of obvious outsiders to those included in some ways, and not in others, to an experience of doing research ‘at home’, the piece weaves together various experiences of difference. Perhaps these experiences of difference are linked to something more than just overt identity markers – that of simply being a researcher in the first place.
Women’s Bodies: The Common Ground between Islam and Christianity in Nigeria
This paper explores the common ideological ground between Islam and Christianity in Nigeria, in the ways in which gender and sexuality are configured in relation to women’s bodies. The latter constitute key sites for the inscription of social norms and practices inherent in particular interpretations of religion. We proceed by examining the interplay between religion and politics in historical context and in specific concrete instances. Whilst the religious right among Muslims and Christians share the view that women’s bodies are sexually corrupting and therefore in need of control, this perspective is also found in secular institutions. The linkage made between women’s bodies and ‘public morality’ produces diverse forms of gender inequality. The moralising of political economy that these processes entail complicates the terrain on which challenges to the politicisation of religion and its gender politics need to be sustained.
In post-colonial Zambia and post-apartheid South Africa, citizenship is assumed to be universal and to carry rights. Yet, in practice, in the everyday context in which ordinary women and men live out their lives, its meanings and values are differentiated in bodies and their politics, reflecting the social, spatial, gendered, and racial nature of inequality. Framed by global processes and national discourses, the crafting of citizenship and the substantiation of rights in urban Southern Africa remain fraught. In this issue of Feminist Africa, we elaborate on contesting body politics and the gendered crafting of urban citizenship in Lusaka and Cape Town. The notion of 'crafting' citizenship is central to our analysis. The lived negotiation of citizenship and the ways it is made meaningful in everyday peripheral parts of Southern African cities are neither static nor decreed through law. Instead, citizenship and its meanings are negotiated in mutually constitutive processes that interlink individuals, communities and representatives of the state. Through such processes, agency is progressively nurtured in relationships within homes and through the quotidian activities that constitute everyday life. At times it is fought for in the public sphere, in open opposition to the state. The meanings of citizenship and the manner in which it is contested or embodied through oppositional action, are thus not the predictable outcomes of structural configurations of power, or a romantic reflection of agency- through-revolt. The flows and processes of power cannot be read in formulaic fashion from a model of asymmetrical social geometry where the powerless are simply dominated by the powerful. The notion of 'crafting' allows us to analyze the processes of negotiation and lived substantiation of citizenship in local contexts - places and times - saturated with gender relations, where meanings are found in and fought for through embodied everyday practices
In this article, I consider how women in the former colony of Southern Rhodesia and contemporary Zimbabwe were and still are defined as “respectable” or “unrespectable”. These terms carry different meanings, but for purposes of this discussion, a “respectable” woman in Zimbabwean society is one who is treated with deferential esteem, and who is perceived as an honourable and dignified member of her community or society. An “unrespectable” woman, however, is seen as dishonourable and lacking in dignity; she will attract social opprobrium and her behaviour may not be emulated. I go on to draw out the implications of such definitions of respectability for gender struggles in Zimbabwe. Occasional parallels are drawn with other post-colonial African states. This discussion encompasses three phases of Zimbabwean history: the colonial era (from about 1890 to the early 1960s); the liberation struggle period (late 1960s to independence in 1980); and the postcolonial and contemporary situation (1980 to the present). The role of women in the public and private spheres during these three phases is considered in order to show how definitions of respectability have shifted over time, with certain women gaining or losing respectability. I focus on the term “prostitute” and the ways in which it is used not only to describe sex workers, but as a marker to denote any supposedly “unrespectable” woman, particularly those who move into space that is considered to be male territory (Gaidzanwa, 1995). This “branding” is carried out by both men and women.
Anyone who is passionate about women, gender and development in African contexts needs to interrogate discourses about African sexuality. These dis- courses have long histories of academic authority that have assisted in ensuring that hegemonic discourses about sexuality were at the heart of the continent's underdevelopment during colonialism. And as contributors to Feminist Africa 5 (on Sexual Cultures) point out, sexuality remains central to contemporary con- flict about citizenship in postcolonial and post-apartheid contexts. Even a cursory glance through the many travel diaries of European explorers in the Cape Colony reveals these early colonial adventurers' voyeuristic preoc- cupation with local women's sexuality. More importantly, as Yvette Abrahams indicates, Linnaeus' (the 18th-century Swedish scientist and taxonomist) and others' "scientific" examination and classification of indigenous women's geni- talia in the Cape informed colonial science's classification of the local popula- tions as sub-human species: "Linnaeus classified the Khoekhoe as not quite part of the human species on the basis of his perceptions of their genitals" (2000: 102). Social Darwinian systems of classification located these popula- tions in the lower echelons of a racial hierarchy, on the basis of categorising these men and women according to their genitalia. This provided key moral justification for genocide and enslavement. These descriptions of the genitals of Khoekhoe and Khoi women obliter- ated the rich texture and nuanced quality of their everyday sexual, social and economic lives. Instead, in what would become hegemonic discourses, as well as in the texts alluded to above, these women became hyper-sexualized bodies, devoid of names, individual personalities, personal opinions, vital relations with kin, or membership in social groups. The undressed Khoekhoe woman with her "strange" elongated genitalia and protruding buttocks became a trope that justified colonial racism and the economic underdevelopment of Africa, and implicitly sustained the power and the glory of the Empire. Scientific and legal
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