Religion, Governance, and Public Administration in Northern Nigeria: An Original Historical and Contemporary Framework

This dissertation develops an original framework for analysing the relationship between religion, governance, and public administration in Northern Nigeria across three historical periods: the pre-colonial Islamic governance of the Sokoto Caliphate (1804 to 1903), the colonial adaptation of Islamic institutions through indirect rule (1903 to 1960), and the post-independence negotiation of religion's place in governance through sharia implementation in twelve Northern states from 1999 to the present. Existing scholarship treats each period in isolation, missing the historical institutional continuities and transformations that explain contemporary Northern Nigerian governance culture. A historical institutionalism and ethnographic methodology is employed, combining systematic analysis of primary source materials from all three periods including Caliphate Arabic administrative texts, colonial district office records, and contemporary sharia court decisions, with 75 elite and community-level interviews with Islamic scholars, emirate officials, state government administrators, and civil society leaders in Kano, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Kaduna States. Process tracing, comparative historical analysis, and critical discourse analysis provide the analytical toolkit. The dissertation proposes the Islamic Governance Institutionalisation Theory, which traces how Islamic governance norms originally embedded in Caliphate administrative practice were selectively preserved through colonial indirect rule and re-asserted through sharia implementation as a constitutional governance claim in the democratic period. Keywords: religion and governance, Northern Nigeria, Sokoto Caliphate, sharia, Islamic administration.