br anding bin laden 173Muslim north, in particular. I argue that the local signification of bin
Laden as a Muslim hero needs to be understood in the context of the
religious revival in northern Nigeria—epitomized by the reintroduction
of sharia law from 2000 onward. This has sparked conflict on the wider
national level, where the predominantly Christian south met, with con-
siderable anxiety, the quest for religious and cultural self-determination
of the predominantly Muslim north. Large numbers of southerners who
were working and living in the north were particularly anxious about the
consequences of sharia legislation.
As elsewhere, Nigerian producers and consumers of bin Laden mer-
chandise appropriated the al-Qaeda leader as an icon of political Islam,
which could be used for purposes of boundary making (Noor 2004). I
argue that this appropriation process was substantially facilitated by a
transformation in Nigeria’s visual public in the early 2000s, which saw a
marked increase in the promotion of commercial products and religious or
political ideas based on the faces of prominent figures. Due to the ubiqui-
tous presence of this strateg y of v isual communication in Nigerian urban
spaces, consumers of bin Laden merchandise were perfectly prepared to
turn Osama bin Laden’s face into an icon for a new brand of radical Islam.
I read this as an attempt to evoke a powerful external identification fig-
ure for use in domestic power struggles. On the national level, references
to bin Laden could be used to increase Muslim agency and bargaining
power at a time when Nigeria was headed by a Christian president; on the
regional level, within the Muslim north, bin Laden evoked the notion of
unselfish leadership, and many of the urban poor made use of his image
to remind local elites of their duty to share their wealth with the common
people, just as bin Laden was believed to have done.
A word of caution in terms of the methodology and scope of this chap-
ter seems indicated. W hen writing this essay, I had to overcome certain
limitations of my data based on my somewhat belated entry to the field.
In 2003, I carried out three months of fieldwork in Kano and Lagos (in-
cluding March, when the war on Iraq was going on), but I did not have
the opportunity to do research in 2001 and 2002, when the production
and consumption of bin Laden merchandise reached its peak. As a con-
sequence, I was unable to obtain a proper audience ethnography. At the
time of my fieldwork in 2003, circulation and consumption of bin Laden