Part of review forum on “Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria.”

I thank the reviewers for their incredible generosity in engaging with Entangled Domains through their written comments and for the provocative conversations that preceded those pieces and the issuance of this review issue. This response piece will situate Entangled Domains in context by reflecting on the motivations that inspired the book and the intellectual, scholarly, and political currents that shaped its writing and presumably, its reception. By so doing, I illuminate the stakes of the history chronicled in the book for the present and future of constitutional politics, not only in Nigeria but also in other states grappling with the paradoxes of colonial secular modernity.

Entangled Domains is a product of my perplexity with the deadlock in postcolonial Nigerian constitutional discourse over the relationship between the state and religion. As the book’s research progressed, it became apparent that the contemporary framing of the postcolonial debate masks how the colonial state constituted religion as well as how colonial-era struggles over religion constituted the colonial and later, postcolonial state. Those struggles—over religion and the making of the state— shaped constitutional documents such as the 1960 constitution (and its descendants) and international enactments such as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those historical contestations also continue to predetermine how politics is imagined and contested today.

Entangled Domains is a lament. I lament the limiting of postcolonial constitutional discourse to tenuous binaries—“secular” versus “anti-secular,” “state-religion separation” versus “religious freedom,” “Shari’a” versus “modernity”—and the preclusion of meaningful debate by these binaries’ misremembering of the living colonial history of these categories’ entanglement. Entangled Domains unmasks how precolonial religious forms were transformed by imperial secular governmentality and grapples with the lasting consequences of such transformations. In particular, the book worries about the novel and deeply unequal forms of intra-religious, inter-religious, and religion-state relations of power set in motion by the colonial state’s liberal secular governmentality and broods over how postcolonial attempts to confront colonial hierarchies continue to overturn rather than dismantle hierarchies. Indeed, as Entangled Domains shows, the irreconcilable memories of the colonial state by postcolonial contestants continue to produce visions of the state that preclude meaningful co-existence. Ultimately, Entangled Domains chronicles the triumph of the state (in its various guises) and of its lasting constitution of inequality.

Different sensibilities are reflected in scholarly attempts to understand law’s interplay with colonialism. One strand of scholarship, and perhaps the earlier wave, sought to unearth how law was an emissary of empire and an instrument of subjugating colonial populations and furthering colonial ends. Another mode of understanding law’s role in the colonial enterprise sought to center the colonized by foregrounding how colonized populations co-opted and deployed the law in seeking to neutralize the colonial state. The inclination to center the colonized is well-meaning and illuminates legal consciousness and struggles in colonial contexts. Still, the bid to center the colonized not infrequently slides into forgetting the “tremendous discursive and institutional power of the state,” to cite one of the reviewers in this issue. Entangled Domains underscores and laments the omnipresent power of the modern state midwifed by colonialism.

Entangled Domains does not preclude hope of a more egalitarian constitutional politics. Indeed, because the book shows how the sacred and the secular, as they manifest in constitutional discourse, were not only historically constituted but are also periodically reconstituted, it opens possibilities for engaging in a new kind of politics. The critical question, though, is of the mode and terms of that new politics. To be emancipatory, that politics has to not only reimagine the specious categories bequeathed by the colonial state—of the sacred and the secular, of the public and the private, indeed of religion and politics—it has to also confront how the state, through seemingly neutral and innocuous governance techniques/regimes like religious liberty, separation, and siyasa governance continues to transform religion and religious lives and in the process, intensify conflict. This new mode of politics must contend with how historical and contemporary constitutional contestations have far too often strived not for egalitarianism but rather to overturn and reinscribe hierarchies. It must, in other words, come to terms with how the horizons of what is possible in Nigeria, and too many other postcolonial states, continue to be shaped by late colonialism and the liberal technologies it bequeathed. By insisting that secularism is a domain of contestation, even if it reveals that that space has historically been one for inscribing and reinscribing domination, Entangled Domains frees up space for reimagining a new and egalitarian mode of constitutional politics.