vice and videos 133a Musulunci” (The place of Hausa films in Islam), the paper is built on
the rhetorical form of wa’azi. Its author tries to address both the religious
critics of video filmmaking and his fellow video filmmakers (Iyan-Tama
2004). W hile he admonishes his cohorts to produce work with a moral
message and abstain from mixed-gender singing and dancing, he goes
after his critics with their own weapons—that is, with quotations from
the Koran—and thus demonstrates, en passant, the legitimacy of the video
filmmakers’ claim that they are comparable to religious teachers.
With regard to the content of Hausa videos, many participants at the
same conference voiced the opinion that video films should, to count as
“legitimate” (halak) before Islamic law, represent the culture and religious
constitution of the Muslim north (Yusha’u 2004), and as such propagate
Islamic reform within and outside northern Nigeria. Such calls also came
from video film fans, who referred to the example of Christian video films
from southern Nigeria when “calling on [northern] filmmakers... to show
their love for Islam and to make films that demonstrate the wonderful
power of the Qur’an” (Tanko 2000: 10–11; my translation). Although there
were Hausa videos with religious subtexts prior to the implementation of
the sharia and censorship, it was this religious intervention that worked
as a catalyst and gave rise to full-blown religious video films.
Most often set in a precolonial, mythical past, these films feature story
lines about Muslim heroes who conquer pagan tribes and subsequently
convert them to Islam. The first film to be released was Shaheed (The
martyr, 2002/2003), although the foundations of the genre seem to have
been laid by director and scriptwriter Dan Azumi Baba, who had begun to
shoot his film Judah! (2003) much earlier. Unlike Judah!—which is built
around a story about a faithful Muslim falling in love with Judah, a pagan
princess—Shaheed is more puritanically oriented and avoids the romantic
pitfalls of the average Hausa video. Directed by the late Zikiflu Moham-
med, who was also an actor, Shaheed was produced by a production com-
pany closely associated with the Ikhwan brotherhood. Sheik Ibrahim Al-
Zakzaky, leader of this so-called Shiite brotherhood, openly advocates the
use of video films to propagate his group’s religious stance—one that has
long pursued the transformation of Nigeria into an orthodox theocracy
modeled on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Through his personal contacts
with Iran, A l-Zakzaky was undoubtedly well aware of the revolutionary