br anding bin laden 177served support for bin Laden. During Friday prayers, imams called upon
the faithful to pray for their brothers in faith who were fighting the Ameri-
can invaders in Afghanistan (Kazaure 2001). These and similar actions
can be interpreted as expressions of a strengthened sense of belonging to
the umma, t he g loba l com mu n it y of Musl i ms. I n t h is contex t, Last (2008:
59–60) refers to a “dual citizenship” that has emerged in the Islamic world
in the past decades. Religious allegiance may thus eventually transcend
sentiments of national belonging. This happened by October 2001 at the
latest, when Nigeria, governed by a Christian president, joined the inter-
national antiterror alliance headed by the United States. Following the
outbreak of the Afghanistan war, anti-American demonstrations in Kano
turned into virtual proxy wars in which Muslim protesters vented their
anger over the actions of the United States by committing extreme acts
of violence against members of southern Christian migrant communities
living in Kano and other northern cities.
POLITICSPLOITATION AND THE VISUAL PUBLICThe fact that the catch images of the terrorist attack were efficacious
in Nigeria was a function of both the globalized news channels—such
as cnn, bbc, Al Jazeera, and the internet—and the local cottage culture
industries that processed the global news material at the local level and
turned it into videos, posters, and stickers. W hile it is true that cottage
culture industries are based on “small media” (Sreberny-Mohammadi
and Mohammadi 1994: 20–40), their commercial logic is by no means
different from that of more formalized cultural production disseminated
by “ big media.” Cottage culture industries, too, need a steady stream of
“hot” new items to sell their products on a limited market.
Within the commercial logic of popular cultural production, a topic
such as 9/11, which kept the world in suspense, and a character such as bin
Laden, who was perfectly suited as both an identification foil for radical
Muslims and a bogeyman for Christians, were ripe for commercial exploi-
tation. Nigeria was no exception in this respect; similar phenomena have
been observed in other parts of the Islamic world as well (in Malaysia, for