Nigeria: Muslim Youth and Internal Others in a Multi-religious Nation

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of the ways that Muslim youth from Northern Nigeria construct, assert and navigate their identities. It locates this analysis within the contested social and political landscape and the complex distinctiveness of the population. Importantly, this contextualisation includes reference to the colonial history and its significance to the formation of the Nigerian State. The data gathered largely through focus groups discussions were used to explore how youth understood and articulated their sense of belonging in national, ethnic, religious and gender terms as well as their sense of difference and distinction from others. Despite the strong sense of national allegiance and pride, many Muslim youth expressed dissatisfaction with democratic and government processes. In their identity narratives religion was a dominant discursive axis of belonging and of differentiation. While as Muslims they were keen to distance themselves from extremism, terrorism and the actions of Boko Haram, they constructed Christians as the ‘internal other’. This discursive Fracturing of the nation revivified the birth scars of the Nigerian state and its uneasy historical emergence as a postcolonial, multi-religious democracy. At the same time a conflation of region and religion (Northern Muslim—Southern Christian) worked to flatten local ethnic differences. As region and religion did not map neatly on to one another, Northern Muslim youth invested considerable effort to ‘other’ their Muslim compatriots from the south. This was accomplished through the derision of Southerners including Muslims for their westernisation and loss of culture, in opposition to the superior and more ‘pure’ Islamic identity and practice of Northern Muslims. Turning to gender, the lack of an explicit reference to this within youth narratives of identity stood in stark comparison with the way it structured everyday life. Gender relations were an important symbol of religious identity. These conjoined with dominant masculinities to find expression in projections of subservient, modest femininities although these were at times resisted by some female youth. Finally, this case study illustrates the importance of the local context to the ways that young people try to produce themselves as intelligible subjects, and the significance of the complex political and geographical histories of nation-state formation as the backdrop to the youth identity narratives.