government, parliament, and electronic and print
media has been disproportionately lower than that
of their male counterparts (Callaway and Creevy
1994, Djibo 2001, Hamani 2000, 127–69).
If the development of pluralist politics has had
implications for women’s education, however, it
has also affected the expression of their identities.
Nowhere is this development more evident than in
dress discourses, especially in urban landscapes.
The rise of political Islam in this new context has
led to the emergence of a dress code, such as ™ijàb
(veiling), to which Muslim women are expected to
adhere. Women who choose not to express their
Muslim identity through the ™ijàbcode have some-
times been victims of verbal and physical assault by
extremist Islamist males. In Kenya, Muslim women
of the coastal areas who did not wear buibui– a
wide, black floor-length cloak with attached veil
(Hirsch 1998, 48–56) – suffered physical assault
from young male members of the Islamic Party of
Kenya.
In contrast, especially in societies where Muslims
are in the minority, Muslim women in ™ijàbhave
experienced discrimination and hostility in educa-
tional institutions and places of work. For exam-
ple, in inland Kenya, Muslim women students took
their schools to court to challenge their suspension
on the ground of wearing the ™ijàb (Coastweek
17–23 April 1999).
The 11 September 2001 tragedy in the United
States has also had implications for the dress
expression of identity in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Several African countries, including Kenya, Tan-
zania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, have been
under pressure by the United States government to
enact “anti-terrorist” legislation that bears a strong
resemblance to the United States Patriot Act (Kelley
2003). This has certainly included Muslim profil-
ing through bodily appearance. The ™ijàbamong
Muslim women and the jallàbiyya(long white
robe) among bearded Muslim men as expressions
of Islamic identity have now become a political lia-
bility in the post-September 11 dispensation. Spring
and summer 2003 saw a massive student demon-
stration in the capital city of Gambia, Banjul,
against a high school superintendent who dis-
missed female students wearing ™ijàbto school
(Independent[Banjul] 3 June 2003).
If the expression of Islamic identity has suffered
under certain conditions, Muslims themselves have
sometimes violated the freedom of expression of
others. It is widely accepted, for example, that
spirit possession and exorcism, both predominant
among women in Sub-Saharan Africa, are sacred
spaces for the expression of women’s feelings,182 freedom of expression
ideas, and desires that are taboo for women to
express in other domains within Islamic patriarchy.
In many Islamic cultures there was, for a long time,
a co-existence and even a symbiosis between Islam
and indigenous African spirituality such as Bori in
Hausaland (McIntyre 1996, 257–74, Cooper 1998,
28–31). But some Islamist movements in Niger,
Nigeria, Mali, and Senegal have in many cases led
to a new antagonism against these important ritu-
als, condemning them as expressions of bid≠a (inno-
vation) that are antithetical to authentic sunna
(tradition) of the Prophet Mu™ammad. In the same
spirit of Islam, Niger even went to the extent of
passing a law in the 1980s that criminalized rituals
of spirit possession, especially in the holy month of
Ramadan. It was only under the pressure of plural-
ist politics of the 1990s onwards that the law
became dormant and the rituals, which had become
clandestine in urban areas especially, regained their
free space of expression.
In spite of instances of hostility generated by reli-
gious fundamentalism of all types and the short-
comings of the new democratic experiments in
Sub-Saharan Africa, the new politics of pluralism
has, without doubt, granted Muslim women the
space to inscribe their agency in an overt expressive
manner, sometimes at the risk of being victimized.
A case in point is the national tension arising from
the women’s campaign for the constitutional adop-
tion of an egalitarian family law in Niger (Dunbar
1991, Niger Republic 1995, Reynolds 1997). It has
also offered, in a number of countries, new possi-
bilities for Muslim women to join other women in
coalitions across boundaries of religion to advocate
for the rights and freedoms of women, as in the case
of the horrifying so-called Sharì≠a trial of Amina
Lawal in Katsina, North Nigeria, on charges of
adultery. This is clearly illustrated by the com-
mendable work of women activists and scholars
such as Ayesha Imam of Baobab (a human rights
non-governmental organization) and others work-
ing in the African Center for Democracy and Human
Rights Studies in Mali to educate Muslim and
Christian as well as non-Muslim and non-Christian
women about religious and secular laws and poli-
cies that violate women’s rights and freedoms.Bibliography
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cursive practices in Niger, paper presented at the
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