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To justiy the morallegitimacy o their videolms, several lmmakershave recast their work inreligious terms as admoni-tion or preaching, and likenthemselves to religiousteachers.
Conversion on Screen:A Glimpse at Popular IslamicImaginations in Northern Nigeria
M K
This article discusses several northern Nigerian video eature lms that depict stories about conversion to Islam. Basedon three months o eldwork in 2003 and a close reading o Hausa videos and video magazines, it suggests reading these lms against the backdrop o the current process o religiousand cultural revitalization associated with reormist Islamand the reintroduction o the
shari’a
legal code within the northern states o Nigeria since 1999. Video lmmakers haveused religious themes—and oremost, conversion stories—to give a “religious fair” to their products, a fair that resonateswith the permeation o public culture with undamentalistIslam. Far rom addressing potential uture converts, conver-sions on screen are geared toward a Muslim Hausa-speakingaudience. The invention o heroic jihads and successul con-
version campaigns may have helped assert northern identities
at a time when, on the national level, northern Muslim soci-ety elt politically and economically deprived at the hands o a ederal government led by a southern born-again Christian president. In a wider context, the link between religion andmedia suggested by the material warrants a comparison withsimilar processes in southern Nigeria and elsewhere, where
Pentecostal practices have migrated beyond the religious
domain to become part o public culture.
Introuction
More than ty years ago, Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna o Sokoto and Premier oNigeria’s Northern Region rom 1954 to 1966, toured the Nigerian MiddleBelt and other regions adjacent to the Muslim north with a mission toconvert to Islam the so-called “pagan” people, who had been let behind bythe spread o Islam during the nineteenth and the rst hal o the twentieth
C on v e r s i on on s C r e e n
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century. These public ceremonies were highly ormalized. Invited by a local
authority, the Sardauna presided over the conversion o whole congregations,
sometimes up to several thousand people. Ater lecturing about the tenetso Islam, he would distribute large numbers o copies o the Qur’an, prayerbeads, and booklets with prayer guidelines and other Islamic instructionswritten in Hausa (Paden 1986:566–569). Soon the press picked up the storyand provided “running scores o numbers o converts in the north,” and
“literally dozens o eature stories” were delivered by northern media on the
conversion campaigns in 1965 alone (Paden 1986:568). Today, still, AhmaduBello is remembered as a great lover o Islam, who led the last unbelieversrom their mountain hideouts, to which they had fed during the slave-raiding times o the nineteenth century. Until recently, these were the lastconversions to Islam in northern Nigeria to be mass-mediatized and delib-erately politicized within Nigerian ethnoregional politics. In the meantime,conversions among the same ethnic groups and Hausa-speaking Maguzawa,non-Muslims living in rural areas o Hausaland, are sure to have occurred(Last 1979), albeit in a quiet and publicly almost unnoticed manner.
The latest mass-mediatized conversions are popular ctions on screen,
which began to hit the video market in 2002. Products o the Hausa video
industry, these conversions are told within the rameworks o dierent videolm genres. Within the epic, set in precolonial times, Muslim
mujahids
ght
against pagan tribes and convert them to Islam, thus only vaguely relatingto the nineteenth century’s jihads. Within the ramework o the romanticmelodrama, pious Muslim boys have to choose between a pagan and aMuslim girl, and in a genre crossover o Western vampire, science-ction,and police lms, a poor pagan has to be cured rom vampirism beore he canconvert to Islam and return to his tribesmen on a proselytizing mission.These ctions, o course, are ar rom resembling historical or current pro-cesses o religious change; their recent occurrence, however, can be related
to the current process o religious and cultural revitalization associated with
the reintroduction o the
shari’a
legal code in many northern states o theNigerian conederation since the year 2000.In this context, conversions on screen may serve several purposes. Farrom addressing potential uture converts, these lms are geared toward aMuslim Hausa-speaking audience. Inventing heroic jihads and successulconversion campaigns on video may have helped to assert northern Muslimidentities at a time when—on the national level—large segments o thenorthern society elt politically and economically deprived at the hands oa ederal government that until the elections o 2007 was led by a southern
born-again Christian president. In this regard, Muslim conversion videos canbe understood as a reaction to similar southern Nigerian lms that propagate
Christianity. The videos serve both an inner and an outer religious mission,which somewhat mirrors the motivations or the reintroduction o
shari’a
.The Islamic reorm o the legal system was intended to serve as a basis or
an all-embracing social and cultural reorm o the northern Nigerian Muslim
society in religious terms. Since it aimed at religious reversion o nominal
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