Procession, pilgrimage and protest : a historical study of the Qadiriyya-Nasiriyya and Islamic movement in Nigeria, public religiosity in Northern Nigeria, 1952-2021
Date
2023-03
Authors
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Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
ENGLISH SUMMARY : This dissertation explores the changing history, mode of organization and conduct of the Maukibi (procession) of the Qadiriyya-Nasiriyya (QN) Sufi group and the Muzahara (procession and protest) and the Tattaki (pilgrimage) of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) Shia group. The former was introduced in 1952 and practiced within the confine of urban area of Kano state while the latter in 1981 and staged in varied spaces across northern Nigeria, particularly from 1996. Practiced differently, the Tattaki, unlike urban-based Muzahara, members trekked across state borders to Zaria via designated meeting points within the region. Analyzed in different historical contexts, these public religious rituals have since become defining practices of these two religious groups which, among multitude of religious groups in Nigeria, pattern their public religiosity. While the extant historical and anthropological studies on religious groups in Nigeria pay more attention to their evolution, transformation, sectarian fragmentation, and entangled relations among them, motivated by different socio-political and economic atmosphere, they hardly explore the phenomenon of public religiosity⸺ Maukibi, Muzahara and Tattaki ⸺of the QN and IMN.
The dissertation fills this historiographical gap by exploring the culture of veneration of saints as the underlying genesis of all these public practices and the way in which, in the long run, the practices are instrumentalized in the making and revitalizating of collective identities in the saturated northern Nigeria’s religious landscape. By locating these practices within the broader scholarly conversations on nationalism, identity, politics, public order policing and violence, the dissertation posits that the practices constitute a new dimension of popular religiosity and represent the intricate nexus between religion, identity construction, commemoration and security in the region. With their distinctive features of appropriation of public spaces, massing of bodies, mass mobilization and transcendence, the dissertation demonstrates that different government(s) deployed various uneven regulatory measures to tame them. These regulatory measures ranged from confinement, postponement, restriction, repression and ban. While the application of these measures varies: the Maukibi was regulated by confinement, postponement and restriction; Muzahara by repression and ban, the latter measures resulted in the death of many of the IMN members over the last three decades and many more injured or incarcerated. Multitude of sources and methodologies have been used: primary and secondary sources, qualitative method, content analysis and observation.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING : Geen opsomming beskikbaar.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING : Geen opsomming beskikbaar.
Description
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2023.
Keywords
Qadiriyya-Nasiriyya (QN), Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Public religiosity, Islamic identities