176 african appropriations
sabon garis, the foreigners’ quarters of northern Nigerian towns, which go
back to colonial urban planning. These quarters in particular saw scenes
of bloody con fl ic t fol low i ng t he i mplementat ion of sha r ia law, a s Ch r ist ia n
migrants were made the scapegoats of decades-long mismanagement by
Muslim elites. One possible explanation for the increased propensity to
violence against Christian migrants during the first years of the Fourth
Republic is that for many northern Nigerians, the victory of Olusegun
Obasanjo, a southern Nigerian “ born-again” Christian, in the presidential
elections of May 1999 was tantamount to a loss of political control. Up to
that point, most politicians and military rulers governing Nigeria since
independence had been from the north, and they had made sure that at
least the political elites of the north had a grasp on the national finances.
On the eve of 9/11, an ambivalent mood prevailed in the northern Ni-
gerian cities; on the one hand, people were weighed down with the sheer
struggle for survival; they felt marginalized in terms of national politics
and anxious about the loss of cultural integrity (see also chapter 4). On
the other, there was the millenarian hope that reshaping cultural practices
and public life in a manner agreeable to God would help overcome these
threats. The “catch images” (Diers 1997) of the attack on the World Trade
Center—produced by the terrorists, who claimed to be fighting for Is-
lam, and then disseminated by global media—came just in time to be
transferred to the local interreligious and interregional lines of conflict;
after all, they seemed to bear witness to the power of a potentially violent
Islam. As a result, as early as the evening of September 11, 2001, there were
spontaneous, exuberant demonstrations about the “victory of Islam” in
t he st reet s of Gusau, t he capita l of Z a m fa ra state. I n Jos, a con fl ic t bet ween
Muslims and Christians claimed several hundred lives. The dispute was
about the filling of a local political office that had been smoldering since
September 9 and that was rekindled by the satellite pictures from New
York and Washington (Dan Fulani and Fwatshak 2002).
I n complete accorda nce w it h t he A mer ica n d ic tate, wh ich held Osa ma
bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network directly responsible for the attacks,
the popular imagination in Nigeria, too, began to focus on Osama bin
Laden. Even before the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, representa-
tives of the Nigerian Council of Islamic Scholars proclaimed their unre-