Author ORCID Identifier

Rabiate Akande: 0000-0001-7536-4018

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-17-2026

Source Publication

The American Journal of Comparative Law, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avaf022

Keywords

Islamic law; legal borrowing; legal imaginaries; religion-state relations; legal modernization; juristic authority and political power; British Colonial Northern Nigeria

Abstract

The final years of British imperial rule in Northern Nigeria witnessed efforts to source appropriate models of legal modernization from the Muslim world. The models afloat in constitutional discourse, those of Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and Egypt, were held up by respective proponents as ideal for resolving the long-fraught question of the relationship between Islam and public law in a modern state. Yet, the evocations of these foreign models were idealized imaginaries; by framing these models as settled facts, the Northern Nigerian evocations flattened the constitutional experience of these states and obscured unfolding struggles over the nature of legal modernity. Against the backdrop of contestations between juristic and political elites, colonial officials, and other actors, this Article chronicles the outsourcing of Northern Nigeria’s legal modernization to foreign imaginaries. Even as the Northern Nigerian legal borrowing debates were conducted in the language of (competing visions of) decolonization and modernization, that discourse limited the realm of possibilities to an uncritical and, in the end, imaginary copying from postcolonial jurisdictions. The ultimate consequence was the trumping of juristic power by political authority, and the foreclosure of emancipatory possibilities for the future of law.

Comments

"© The Author 2026. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Comparative Law."

"This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com."

Download

Request a copy that is accessible using assistive technology (link opens in a new window)

Share

COinS