To justify the moral

legitimacy of their video

films, several filmmakers

have recast their work in

religious terms as admoni-

tion or preaching, and liken

themselves to religious

teachers.

Conversion on Screen: A Glimpse at Popular Islamic Imaginations in Northern NigeriaMatthias Krings

This article discusses several northern Nigerian video feature films that depict stories about conversion to Islam. Based on three months of fieldwork in 2003 and a close reading of Hausa videos and video magazines, it suggests reading these films against the backdrop of the current process of religious and cultural revitalization associated with reformist Islam and the reintroduction of the shari’a legal code within the northern states of Nigeria since 1999. Video filmmakers have used religious themes—and foremost, conversion stories—to give a “religious flair” to their products, a flair that resonates with the permeation of public culture with fundamentalist Islam. Far from addressing potential future converts, conver-sions on screen are geared toward a Muslim Hausa-speaking audience. The invention of heroic jihads and successful con-version campaigns may have helped assert northern identities at a time when, on the national level, northern Muslim soci-ety felt politically and economically deprived at the hands of a federal government led by a southern born-again Christian president. In a wider context, the link between religion and media suggested by the material warrants a comparison with similar processes in southern Nigeria and elsewhere, where Pentecostal practices have migrated beyond the religious domain to become part of public culture.

Introduction

More than fifty years ago, Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of Nigeria’s Northern Region from 1954 to 1966, toured the Nigerian Middle Belt and other regions adjacent to the Muslim north with a mission to convert to Islam the so-called “pagan” people, who had been left behind by the spread of Islam during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth

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century. These public ceremonies were highly formalized. Invited by a local authority, the Sardauna presided over the conversion of whole congregations, sometimes up to several thousand people. After lecturing about the tenets of Islam, he would distribute large numbers of copies of the Qur’an, prayer beads, and booklets with prayer guidelines and other Islamic instructions written in Hausa (Paden 1986:566–569). Soon the press picked up the story and provided “running scores of numbers of converts in the north,” and “literally dozens of feature stories” were delivered by northern media on the conversion campaigns in 1965 alone (Paden 1986:568). Today, still, Ahmadu Bello is remembered as a great lover of Islam, who led the last unbelievers from their mountain hideouts, to which they had fled during the slave-raiding times of the nineteenth century. Until recently, these were the last conversions to Islam in northern Nigeria to be mass-mediatized and delib-erately politicized within Nigerian ethnoregional politics. In the meantime, conversions among the same ethnic groups and Hausa-speaking Maguzawa, non-Muslims living in rural areas of Hausaland, are sure to have occurred (Last 1979), albeit in a quiet and publicly almost unnoticed manner.

The latest mass-mediatized conversions are popular fictions on screen, which began to hit the video market in 2002. Products of the Hausa video industry, these conversions are told within the frameworks of different video film genres. Within the epic, set in precolonial times, Muslim mujahids fight against pagan tribes and convert them to Islam, thus only vaguely relating to the nineteenth century’s jihads. Within the framework of the romantic melodrama, pious Muslim boys have to choose between a pagan and a Muslim girl, and in a genre crossover of Western vampire, science-fiction, and police films, a poor pagan has to be cured from vampirism before he can convert to Islam and return to his tribesmen on a proselytizing mission. These fictions, of course, are far from resembling historical or current pro-cesses of religious change; their recent occurrence, however, can be related to the current process of religious and cultural revitalization associated with the reintroduction of the shari’a legal code in many northern states of the Nigerian confederation since the year 2000.

In this context, conversions on screen may serve several purposes. Far from addressing potential future converts, these films are geared toward a Muslim Hausa-speaking audience. Inventing heroic jihads and successful conversion campaigns on video may have helped to assert northern Muslim identities at a time when—on the national level—large segments of the northern society felt politically and economically deprived at the hands of a federal government that until the elections of 2007 was led by a southern born-again Christian president. In this regard, Muslim conversion videos can be understood as a reaction to similar southern Nigerian films that propagate Christianity. The videos serve both an inner and an outer religious mission, which somewhat mirrors the motivations for the reintroduction of shari’a. The Islamic reform of the legal system was intended to serve as a basis for an all-embracing social and cultural reform of the northern Nigerian Muslim society in religious terms. Since it aimed at religious reversion of nominal

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Muslims, rather than at conversion of non-Muslims, it shares at lot with earlier movements of religious reform dating back as far as Dan Fodio’s jihad at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under the new law, prostitution and consumption of alcohol are sentenced with draconian punishments. Witchcraft and “worship or invocation of any subject other than Allah” are punished by death (Peters 2003:41). Other regulations relate to dress codes and the conduct of women and men in public. Through reversion—the pious reorientation of their everyday lives—many Muslims expected Allah’s blessings and as an effect communal as well as individual prosperity (Last 2000:147). In constructing an “evil other” of the pious Muslim, conversion films may serve their Muslim audiences as proof that their own reversions, their attempts at becoming better Muslims, are the right option, lest they turn “pagan” themselves.

Since the logic of the shari’a project is based on binary oppositions, it stimulates the construction of religious and cultural boundaries through processes of radical inclusion and exclusion. Christians and other non-Muslims have to be excluded from the community of the faithful under construction or included by conversion.1 Thus, some of the videos contain sequences that may serve as conversion manuals, didactic instructions on how to win a non-Muslim over to Islam, and all films reward Muslim piety, for it is always the most pious who successfully proselytizes and therefore gains divine blessing.

Apart from that, films about conversion can be understood as proof of their producers’ religious commitment. Even before the reintroduction of shari’a, Hausa filmmakers were accused of undermining the moral standards of Islam, and it is to this period of heated debates about the video industry I shall turn before exploring the conversion videos in more detail.

Prelude: Shari’a and Censorship

After the reintroduction of shari’a to Kano State in December 2000, radi-cally minded members of the religious establishment called for a total ban on video production. Kano, situated in the heart of the Muslim north of Nigeria, was already the center of the Hausa video industry, which had taken off in the late 1990s; today, “Kanywood,” as the city is sometimes called, hosts plenty of small production companies specializing in the production of Hausa-language feature films, distributed as VHS cassettes or VCDs and con-sumed by Hausaphone audiences all over West and Central Africa (Adamu 2002; Adamu, Adamu, and Jibril 2004; Larkin 2000, 2004). In their formative years, the dominant genres of Hausa videos were the romantic melodrama, and, to a lesser extent, comedy. Inspired mostly by Indian films, video film-makers, some of whom had a background as dramatists and writers of popu-lar prose, elaborated on the foreign concepts of “romance” and “love mar-riage,” which stand in sharp contrast to the traditional concepts of arranged and forced marriage. Since many films explored novel gender and generation

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relations, they worked as cultural critiques. The feature that perhaps most distinguishes Hausa videos from their southern Nigerian twins, which have received much more scholarly attention so far (e.g., Haynes 2000; McCall 2004; Okome 2002), is the frequent use of song-and-dance sequences—a legacy of the longtime engagement of northern Nigerian popular culture with Indian cinema (Larkin 1997). With their tendency toward cultural cre-olization, Hausa videos ran counter to the fundamentalist discourse of the shari’a campaigns, which advocated religious and cultural purity. The rein-troduction of shari’a not only implied an Islamic reform of the legal system, but stood as the prerequisite for an all-embracing social and cultural reform in religious terms. Against the background of this discourse, many people considered video dramas and the behavior of video film stars—onscreen and off—most inappropriate: they were said to pollute Hausa culture and pro-mote foreign ideas and lifestyles. Local criticism especially focused on the representation of the female body and gender relationships, which (at least partially) contradict Islamic politics relating to the human body:

For the sake of Allah, actors, you should remember Allah! Remember the religion of Islam! In particular, girls should stop revealing their bodies in films. They should remember that the female body should be covered completely, but instead they dress in blouses and trousers, and smooth out their hair as if they were Europeans; such attire does not fit into the Muslim tradition. So you should stop it, because your behavior dis-turbs us, since you too are Muslims, as we are. Be cautious in filmmaking to prevent going against God Almighty. (Bamalli, Muhammad, and Namaibindiga 2000, my translation)

A total ban on video production—as called for by fundamentalist hardlin-ers—would have meant the loss of income for thousands of young women and men employed in the industry. Such a move would surely have led to a severe political crisis. Therefore, the Kano State government, with liberal scholars and leading video filmmakers, advocated an Islamic reorientation through censorship (Bature 2003; Mohammed 2003). Liberal-minded scholars considered video technology a neutral tool, whose influence upon consumers solely depends on content. Malam Yahaya Faruk Ce’di, an Islamic scholar who takes part in the local debate through public sermons, pointed out the following to me:

We don’t think that the video drama is bad generally. It can be used to educate and to teach moral lessons, but only if it is employed in such a way that it doesn’t destroy our religion and culture, but the way it is used by videomakers right now is bad. Therefore, the harm of video dramas to our society is currently greater than their potential benefit. (Ce’di 2003, my translation)

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By pointing out traditions of the prophet Mohammed’s life (the hadith) and certain suras of the Qur’an, where dramatic forms are employed for didactic purposes, Malam Ce’di and other scholars argue that drama—and by exten-sion video drama—can be considered a legitimate educative tool from an Islamic point of view. Therefore, a video film can be considered legitimate if its overall purpose is educative. In contrast, entertainment and escapism are considered deviations from Islamic traditions.

Before the implementation of the new censorship law and the estab-lishment of the Kano State Censorship Board, in March 2001, filmmakers faced a difficult and most uncertain situation. Video production and distri-bution were banned for four months. The board’s guidelines made clear that censors would closely scrutinize mixed-gender song-and-dance sequences in particular. In early 2003, rumor had it that such sequences would be pro-scribed completely. Rigid censorship of song-and-dance sequences, however, turned out to be almost impossible. According to some filmmakers with whom I spoke in 2003, videos that do not contain song-and-dance sequences are likely to sell badly. Since huge numbers of video films with lots of mixed-gender singing and dancing have been on display in recent years, it seems as if the initially announced censorship has given way to a more or less flexible process of negotiation between censors and filmmakers (A. U. Adamu 2004). In 2006, however, the Kano State government began to sponsor video film production in an attempt to finance what it deemed morally proper films and thus beat independent filmmakers on their own ground (O’Brien 2007:65). But at the moment of the board’s implementation, in March 2001, film-makers had to overcome a serious problem. What they felt were necessary ingredients to sell their films—melodramatic plots, with song-and-dance routines—censors deemed offensive to the moral standards of Islam.

Filmmaking as Preaching

To justify the moral legitimacy of their video films, several filmmakers have recast their work as religious admonition (fa’dakarwa) or religious preach-ing (wa’azi), and liken themselves in press interviews to religious teachers (malamai). According to the new terminology, the credits of a number of video films no longer list actors under the rubric of “players” (‘yan wasa) but as “admonition deliverers” (masu fa’dakarwa / masu wa’azi). Opening credits usually start with a line that reads, “In the name of Allah,” thus legitimizing a video film as sanctioned by divinity. In a similar manner, many video films end with a text line reading, “Thanks be to Allah the Mer-ciful and Almighty.” Unlike the Christian Ghanaian filmmakers with whom Birgit Meyer (2003:18, 2006:304) spoke, however, filmmakers in Muslim northern Nigeria do not claim divine inspiration through visions and dreams. Within the current context of fundamentalist Islam, the reformulation of filmmaking as revelation and prophecy, which can be observed in Chris-tian Ghana and southern Nigeria, would be considered heresy; rather, by

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invoking Allah’s name, filmmakers seek divine protection, as every faithful Muslim should do before commencing any kind of work. Above all, such invocations have a pragmatic aspect, since they may serve to appease critics who consider video films as religiously illegitimate. After all, filmmakers claim to help malamai in teaching morals. The terminology of wa’azi and fa’dakarwa is significant in this context. In current Hausa, both terms are employed interchangeably to provide a moral justification to any kind of activity. Writing books and performing music, for instance, have been rela-beled similarly. Wa’azi (sermonizing, preaching, warning)—much more than fa’dakarwa (admonishing, drawing attention to ill-considered behavior)—connotes religious authority, since it uses quotations from the Qur’an to support its arguments. Wa’z (Arabic root of Hausa wa’azi) differs from both khutba, the ritualized sermon during Friday prayer, and da’wa, a didacti-cal sermon to encourage fellow Muslims in the pursuance of greater piety, insofar as it is full of polemics and aggressive critique, and as such it is much more inflammatory and fomenting. Wa’z is the genre of Islamic preaching that comes closest to religious agitation. Though part of northern Nigeria’s Islamic vocabulary for a long time, of late wa’azi is more closely associated with northern Nigeria’s Wahhabi-inspired reform movements. The most popular of these was the Jamâ’at Izâlat al-Bid’a wa Iqâmat as-Sunna (Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition), founded by Abubakar Gumi in 1978, better known under the Hausa acronym of ‘yan Izala (followers of Izala) (Kane 2003; Loimeier 1997). In their fight against bid’a, un-Islamic innovations mostly associated with Sufi Islam, members of the movement developed an aggressive style of preaching, characterized by rhetorical attacks against the Sufi brotherhoods and their sheiks. Agita-tion through public sermons was one of Izala’s pillars, as expressed in the society’s constitution of 1978:

We shall devote our time to preaching so as to enlighten the people in various ways such as printing pamphlets, or using the media, or by any other means which can help to extend to people what their obligations are in matters concerning the worship of Allah. (Translated into English by J.H. Yola and reprinted in Loimeier 1997:353)

Izala and other reform groups, such as Sheik Aminudeen Abubakar’s Daawa and Sheik Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky’s Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers), founded in the late 1970s on university campuses, employed cassette-based media to spread their messages. This combination of wa’azi and cassette technology (first audio, later also video) must have been inspired by similar uses of cassette technology by Iranian revolutionists (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994) and Saudi-Arabian wahabi and Egyptian da’wa preach-ers (Hirschkind 2006). In Nigeria, wa’azi-tapes, which began to circulate far and wide since the early 1990s or before, helped reformist Islam gain ground among northern Muslims outside intellectual circles. Though most

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filmmakers whose work I discuss below do not belong to any of the religious groups mentioned above (the producers of Shaheed being the only exception), it is the reformists’ strategy of preaching through cassette-based technol-ogy that is at the heart of the filmmakers’ claim to preach through films. Just the use of the same technology, however, is merely enough to liken feature films to wa’azi. Therefore, video filmmakers are at pains to derive the legitimacy of their craft from religious sources, such as the Hadith and the Qur’an. A paper given by producer and actor Hamisu Lamido Iyan-Tama at the First International Conference on Hausa Films, which took place in Kano in 2003, illustrates this point. In his paper, “Matsayin Fina-Finan Hausa a Musulunci” (The Place of Hausa Films in Islam), itself built upon the rhetorical form of wa’azi, he addressed both the religious critics of video filmmaking and his fellow video filmmakers (Iyan-Tama 2004). Whereas he admonishes the latter to produce films with a moral message and abstain from mixed-gender singing and dancing, he tries to beat the former with their own weapons—through quotations of the Qur’an—and thus demonstrates en passant the legitimacy of video filmmakers’ claims of being similar to religious teachers. Among the critical issues publicly discussed about film-making is the religious status of human inventions, such as stories told in films: shall they be considered “lies,” and therefore be forbidden, or are there conditions under which telling “false” stories is legitimate? Iyan-Tama tackles this problem as follows:

A useful speech or visualization in the name of Allah (SWT)2 which is done to admonish the community is lawful, and to do so greatly helps strengthen Islam; because the Creator said: “A meaningful speech or visualization or warning that causes people to abstain from moral ills and correct their behavior is better than to make a present followed by injury” ([sura] 2:263). To invent a story which actually has never taken place with the intention of making someone realize that he has to correct his way of living—either in written, oral, or perfor-mance form—has to be considered as teaching by making use of an example, as Allah (SWT) did in the story about someone who should be made to realize the importance of generosity in sura Ba’kara, where Allah (SWT) says: “Would any of you wish to have a garden of palms and vines, with rivers flowing beneath it, and all manner of fruit there for him; then old age smites him, and he has seed, but weaklings; then a whirlwind with fire smites it, and it is consumed?” (2:266). One has to take into consideration that the farmer whom Allah (SWT) uses as an example never existed: it is only an example that Allah (SWT) has shaped for us as an imaginative photo story so that the admonition may better enter into our body. (Iyan-Tama 2004:425–426, my translation).3

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With regard to the content of Hausa videos, many participants in the same conference voiced their opinion that, to count as legitimate (halak) before Islamic law, video films should represent the culture and religious consti-tution of the Muslim north (Yusha’u 2004), and thereby propagate Islamic reform within and outside northern Nigeria. Such calls come not only from conservative critics, but also from video film fans, who express their views in letters published in Hausa-language video film magazines:

I am writing this letter to you, in order to support one Umar Idriss Hassan, who said (in Fim, 6 June 2000) that it is time to make films about the religious knowledge of Islam. That is absolutely right. One only has to think of films from Lagos, like Karashika, Gozilla, and Blood Money. These films are produced by Christians, and they heavily demonstrate the meaning of their religion. For example, you can see witches or spirits in these films, who seem to be invincible, but as soon as one reads the Bible to them, you can see that they dissolve or disappear. That is why I am 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, my translation)

As in Ghana (Meyer 2006), video culture constitutes a new public sphere in Nigeria—a sphere highly contested by opposing religious actors. In south-ern Nigeria, Christian producers and even pastors and evangelists-cum-producers (the most prolific and well known of whom is Helen Ukpabio) have effectively used the new technology and form of the video feature to propagate their religion (Oha 2000). Northern filmmakers took to this idea comparatively late. Although there were video films with religious subtexts before the implementation of shari’a and censorship, it was this religious intervention that worked as a catalyst and led to full-blown religious video films focusing on the topic of conversion. These films, some which I shall discuss in more detail below, show many similarities to southern produc-tions. Like their southern Christian counterparts, Hausa filmmakers address the fears local societies have of traditional or neotraditional syncretistic magical practices, pejoratively labeled “pagan.” While southern Nigerian video films employ Christianity as the ultima ratio to fight “paganism,” northern films employ Islam.

Video Conversions: Same Story in different Genres

Within the context of the Hausa video film industry, conversion can be considered a type of narrative told according to the conventions of different video film genres, or as a topic that can be used in different generic frame-works; genre in itself, however, is a problematic and woolly concept (Neale

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1990). Here, I wish to use it as vaguely as it is employed in film studies and everyday conversation, as a tool to talk about films by grouping them into generic categories—categories constituted through filmic conventions, such as specific settings, props, storylines, and character-and-conflict constel-lations. Following Leo Braudy (1977:112) I understand genre as a form, a specific framework, in which a variety of somewhat variable narratives can be told. Hausa filmmakers draw upon foreign genres as well as their own, most of which have been well established in other (and earlier) media, such as ritual, stage drama, book, and television. These genres are then updated and appropriated through remediation, and often blended with generic con-ventions from Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Bollywood. Similar to a common Western stereotype about Indian films, which has it that Bollywood knows no genres but is all one big genre, characterized by the mixing of generic conventions that, from a Western perspective, belong to different film genres (Ganti 2004:139), Hausa video films seem to belong to one genre. Many of them combine melodrama, martial arts, the musical, and comedy; however, differentiations are made locally. Most people—from producer to critic and consumer—distinguish at least two major video genres: romantic melodrama (soyayya) and comedy (mai ban dariya). Other, less prolific genres, are ghost films (concerned with human–spirit relations), action-saturated gangster movies, and films about Muslim–pagan relations, set in precolonial times and most likely inspired by a similar southern Nigerian genre, called “cul-tural epic.” Since filmmakers compete for customers and prestige within the industry, a new topic, after its original treatment, is retold in as many ways as possible, and will be dropped only if it no longer sells. The conversion topic is no exception to this rule. In addition, however, this new topic had further value—it could be used to demonstrate the religious commitment of the video industry, which many filmmakers felt was necessary after the implementation of shari’a.

In its purest (almost generic) form, conversion is treated in Farar Aniya (Righteousness, 2003), one of the first conversion films to appear on the market, in 2002 (A. U. Adamu 2003:2). Though a fictional feature film, it resembles educational cinema, with its strong dose of didacticism. It can be understood as an elaboration on a proverb—a genre with similar didactical implications. The title is made up of the first part of the bipartite proverb “farar aniya—laya” which can be translated as ‘righteousness—protective amulet’, or, as the blurb on the cassette cover has it, as ‘honesty is the best policy’. Similar to other conversion films, Farar Aniya addresses a Muslim Hausa audience, not potential future converts.4 Its aim is twofold: in terms of a call for individual Islamic reorientation, it is concerned with a mission internal to Hausa Muslim society. In addition, it provides a manual for the conversion of so-called pagans, in this case Maguzawa, rural Hausa-speaking non-Muslims—a constant reminder of modern Muslim society’s own animist past (Last 1979). The plot recalls colonial cinema’s Mister Wise and Mister Foolish (Smyth 1979), and involves a pious town-based Muslim grain merchant, Alhaji Salihi, his dubious business associates (who, though

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Muslims too, demonstrate all sorts of ill-manners a good Muslim should not cultivate), and Dantaroro, a well-to-do pagan grain farmer. Dantaroro first deals with the bad guys, who constantly mock him and treat him as a foul-smelling drunken rube, easy to cheat. When he comes to town to take revenge for their cheating, he meets Alhaji Salihi, who generously steps in for his dubious business associates and covers their debts to him. In contrast to the bad guys, Alhaji Salihi treats Dantaroro nicely. He later on becomes the pagan’s main grain buyer, invites him to his house, and gives him (and the audience) a didactic lecture about the tenets of Islam. This and Alhaji’s righteousness are treated as catalysts for Dantaroro’s wish to convert to Islam. He turns up at Alhaji’s place of business and states that he wants to begin praying. Against the mockery of the bad guys, Alhaji Salihi takes him to the local imam, who performs a simple conversion ritual, names him Mahmut, and informs the intra- and extrafilmic audience that an elaborated ceremony is not required—“dispelling a popular notion that a ram has to be slaughtered for a new adherent to Islam to signify his ‘naming’ ” (A. U. Adamu 2003:9). Since winning a convert to Islam ensures Allah’s blessing, wise Alhaji Salihi turns out to be spiritually rewarded, while the foolish bad guys go empty-handed.

Within the genre of the melodramatic love story, love’s potentially antisocial force, its selfish dark side, is sometimes coupled with the equally undesirable forces of witchcraft and “pagan” magic. In such films, witchcraft is associated with women. In a typical love triangle, a good and pious female protagonist willing to accept her fate meets an evil female antagonist, who, though nominally Muslim, does not hesitate to employ pagan magic to reach her own selfish ends—to gain the hero’s love and wealth. At first, the evil antagonist is successful, usually with the aid of a boka, a traditional magi-cian, but finally, when the proper moral order has to be reinstated, the amoral forces whose help the antagonist employed turn against her. If she does not die, she will be robbed of her senses, or at least of her wealth. Some plots have an Islamic scholar who fights against the occult—a Muslim double of the Pentecostal pastor who fights witches and magicians in many southern Nigerian videos.

This general storyline is varied in Ruhi (Soul, 2002), in which the bad woman is a non-Muslim pagan named Kindir, a student who falls madly in love with her Muslim classmate Nasihu. In her evil machinations, she is aided by the old sorceress Tatsutsu, who, as becomes clear in a flashback, has formerly helped Kindir cast a spell on an envied enemy, pious Nasiba, a former female classmate, who has been seriously ill ever since. On hearing this story, Nasihu, who through the sorceress’ powers becomes attracted to Kindir, lectures her about the moral standards of Islam:

In the past, you said that you would try to become a Muslim, isn’t that so? And in fact, Islam does not accept if you say you will never forgive someone who has done you wrong. It’s a religion that preaches forgiveness, because even Allah forgives

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his believers if they have done him wrong; then who is man not to do so? Consider our love and forgive that poor girl. Look at the condition in which she is. To tell you the truth—if you won’t do so, marriage between us will be impossible. (My translation)

Out of love for Nasihu, she accepts the lesson and, with the aid of Tatsutsu, the spell on Nasiba is broken. A series of crosscutting sequences shows us Nasiba’s sudden recovery at home. At school, everybody wonders whether Kindir will convert to Islam to enable her marriage with Nasihu. Holidays start, and everyone leaves the campus. At home, Nasihu learns that a mar-riage with another girl has been arranged for him. After meeting the girl, he consents, and the marriage soon takes place. The couple leads a happy life until Kindir learns about the marriage and discovers that Nasihu’s bride is none other than her old enemy, Nasiba. She then meets the old, now dying sorceress again, and inherits her powers—which turns her into a sorceress herself. Part one of the film (released in two parts, as is typical of Nigerian videos) ends with a cliffhanger—Kindir mad with jealousy on Nasihu’s doorstep, declaring that she will take revenge, he shouting back that he will protect himself with suras from the Qur’an. Part two deals with the battle between good and evil, and ends with a showdown between Kindir and Nasihu. With the aid of a prayer, Nasihu survives the onslaught of Kindir’s occult powers, which then turn against her, and she dies in his arms, uttering the Islamic creed. Thus, at least, she dies a Muslim, and her soul is saved.

The topic of conversion is intimately linked with a recent Hausa ver-sion of the southern Nigerian genre of the “cultural epic” (Gruber 2005). Set in the precolonial past, these films contain storylines of Muslim heroes who conquer pagan tribes and convert them to Islam. In this way, filmmakers relate to the history of Islamic conversion in Hausaland and avoid censor-ship. Against the backdrop of recent violent shari’a-related conflicts between Muslims and Christians (or so-called animists) in the Nigerian Middle-Belt, films that celebrate battles between Muslims and pagans in choreographed fighting sequences, if set in the present, would likely have been forbidden by both state and national censors. The first film of this genre which appeared on the market was Shaheed (The Martyr, 2002–2003; see plate 1), although the foundations of the genre seem to have been laid by director and script-writer Dan Azumi Baba, who had begun to shoot his film Judah! (2003) as early as 2001. Unlike Judah!, built around a story about a faithful Muslim falling in love with a pagan princess, Shaheed is more puritanically oriented; it avoids the romantic pitfalls of the standard Hausa video. It was produced by a production company closely associated with the Muslim Brothers. Sheik Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky, leader of this so-called shi’ite brotherhood, openly advocates the use of video films to propagate the sectarian religious stance of his movement, which has for a long time pursued the transformation of Nigeria into an orthodox theocracy, modeled after the Islamic Republic of Iran. I suspect that it is his knowledge about the Iranian revolution that

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makes him advocate video films as tools of religious propaganda.5 Through his personal contacts with Iran, he must be well aware of the revolution-ary capacity of small media, such as audio and video cassettes (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994).

Shaheed is heavily influenced by shi’ite religious doctrine. It idealizes the figure of the martyr who dies for his religion during his efforts to pros-elytize. He sacrifices himself to free unbelievers from their submission to cruel, blood-thirsty idols and unjust kings, and to lead them on the path of a just and merciful deity. His sacrifice is rewarded by his immediate ascension into paradise; since it serves as proof of the superiority of his faith, it causes a young pagan warrior to convert. The first convert succeeds the martyr and successfully proselytizes two of his fellow tribesmen. Their conversion takes place in the nearby Muslim village, where the first martyr’s father serves as imam. Before the three converts can succeed in winning the rest of their fellow tribesmen over to Islam, they have to overcome the pagan king’s opposition. In a showdown between the king and the first convert, the con-vert shows his willingness to die for his new religion as the first martyr did. Facing the king, who points his spear at him, he tells him that he will be able to kill him only if God Almighty permits. “If you want to kill me, you have to say, ‘In the name of Allah.’ ” Otherwise unable to move his spear, the king unwillingly utters the phrase and subsequently kills the convert. A fade shows his ascension into paradise: in a blue sky, two translucent images appear: the first martyr and a girl holding a bowl of fruits (likely one of the many virgins who people the Muslim paradise). Together, they welcome the second martyr. Down on earth, the pagans are impressed by the martyr’s bravery, desert their king, convert en masse to Islam, and destroy their idols.

As in Shaheed, though stripped of the notion of martyrdom, a pagan convert is the lead character in Qarni (The Century, 2003; see plate 2). In this most extravagant story, director Hafizu Bello, a well-known figure in

Plate 1. VHS-cover Shaheed (2002).

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Kanywood, couples paganism with vampirism and inserts the topic of con-version into a generic mixture of vampire, police, science fiction, and epic films. The story of Qarni is set in the present. It shows a Muslim city plagued by a mysterious vampire, who kills virgins by sucking their blood during nights of the full moon. The police apprehend him and bring him to a hos-pital, where he is connected to a machine that is able to make his memory visible—a scene inspired by the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day (2000). Realized as a flashback, the journey into the vampire’s memory reveals the poor creature’s biography: he comes from a pagan tribe, whose chief priest intended to kill him as a young boy because an oracle foresaw him as the bringer of a new religion in the future. He escapes and grows up at the hands of a witch, who feeds him with human inner organs, the cause of his later vampirism. Surgery transforms him into a human being, and his conversion to Islam soon follows. He returns as a missionary to his pagan village, where he faces fierce opposition from the idol worshippers:

Convert: Are you out of your minds? You think you can defy Allah’s religion? The idol you are worshiping—what is it good for? You have carved it with your own hands! . . .Pagan: Who are you to bring us a new religion? Our religion was already practiced by our parents and their ancestors . . .

Plate 2. VCD-cover Qarni (2003).

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You are nothing!Convert: Your parents and your ancestors—the idol has pro-vided nothing for them. Till now, you walk about naked. You don’t even have clothes to cover your nakedness, and that is only the fault of your religion. By God, I am telling you, Allah’s religion has come to your country—whether you like it or not. (My translation)

Films like these portray Muslims as salvationists, who free pitiful pagans from their religious ignorance by bringing true religion and civilization. The difference between Allah, a just and merciful god, and pagan idols, who demand human sacrifices, could not be greater. Conversion to Islam not only has a civilizing effect, but runs much deeper: conversion stands for becoming human. Qarni neatly expresses this equation through the transformation of a pagan vampire into a Muslim human being.

Between Entertainment and Education

Asked to evaluate the educational value of films about conversion compared with that of romantic melodramas, Kabiru Maikaba, the actor who appears as the pagan king in Judah! and Shaheed, responds in an interview with the Hausa-language magazine Bidiyo: “I think these films help the government [of Kano State] in its endeavor to strengthen the shari’a, since the people may learn what the shari’a is all about and how it is put to work” (Finafinan arna da Musulmi 2003, my translation). To be sold and reach an audience, however, video films that treat conversion cannot break totally with the stylistic conventions of the average Hausa video. How then, do filmmakers negotiate between their new sense of mission and their economic interests, between education and entertainment?

To guide their audience, filmmakers draw upon stereotypical images of the savage pagan and the pious Muslim, well-established through older media of popular culture, such as folklore, stage drama, TV-series, and the ritual drama of spirit possession (Furniss 1996:94). The transcription into the medium of video remediates these stereotypes and renders them meaningful under the terms of the current video culture. Paganism serves as antithesis to Islam. Beyond the narrative, filmmakers express this opposition on several cinematic levels. In accordance with Hausa color symbolism, where white stands for the positive, black for the negative, and red for danger and power (Ryan 1976), Muslims wear white garments, and pagans are dressed in black or dark colors (that is, if they are not depicted half-naked). Qarni clothes the pagan chief priest and the main antagonist of the Muslim hero in red. The set design too is guided by color symbolism: pagans are preferably depicted at night, while Muslims congregate in daylight. The place of the civilized Muslims is the city or the village, but unbelievers are settled in the wilder-ness, preferably on rocky hilltops—in an environment that, having served

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as a refuge for non-Muslim groups following Dan Fodio’s jihad in the nine-teenth century, still carries pagan connotations. Language, too, is used to mark differences: Muslims speak proper Hausa, while pagans either speak an artificial language, which has to be subtitled in Hausa (as in Qarni), or revert to a corrupt form of Hausa known as gwaranci. Insofar as the savage pagans on screen do what a Muslim audience in front of the screen cannot, or at least should not, do, these films confer upon their audience the voyeuristic delight of seeing the forbidden without being seen.

It is Allah’s superior power that assists the faithful Muslims in their proselytizing endeavors and causes the non-Muslims to convert. Allah is made known through signs and wonders that do not fail to impress potential converts. To render visible what their Muslim audiences always knew but were never able to see—the “wonderful power of the Qur’an” (as demanded by the video film fan quoted above)—filmmakers employ special effects, ranging from simple jump cuts to blue-screen montages. In Shaheed, the future convert has to fight against a bush monster. About to be killed by the monster, he remembers a Muslim prayer he has heard before, utters the words, and throws a stone against the monster. This stone turns into a gre-nade which sets the monster on fire. Deeply impressed by this miracle, the pagan is ready to convert. The power of prayer is similarly made visible in Judah!, where the Muslim hero, captured and laid in chains by pagan war-riors, prays and miraculously gets his chains turned into dry leaves. Another sequence of Judah! shows a girl under duress who can climb to the sky after praying to Allah.

Local film style requires interruptions of the narrative frame by sequences that, following Martin Rubin (1993), I call showstoppers. They come along either as song-and-dance or choreographed fighting routines and open up a nonnarrative space of spectacle and attraction. They are rooted in a cinemato-graphic tradition that film historian Tom Gunning (1990) calls the “cinema of attractions.” Constructed in an awareness of the spectator’s gaze and confer-ring the pleasures of looking and listening, they invite the audience to partici-pate, and thus address spectators differently from the narrative frame, the place for didacticism. Local critics assume that the attraction of spectacle distracts spectators from paying attention to any moral lesson that the narrative frame may contain. Since it is the showstoppers that determine the marketability of the average Hausa video, filmmakers had to learn to balance their notion of “the market” against the demands of critics and censors.

Farar Aniya and Ruhi have no showstopper at all. Although Ruhi won the “Best Hausa Film” Award 2002 from an internet discussion group, its sales did not live up to director-producer Hafizu Bello’s expectations. Qarni, Shaheed, and Judah! still contain showstoppers, albeit in a modified form. Shaheed has three song-and-dance routines, showing women and men dressed in proper white Muslim garments chanting praises of the martyr and begging Allah to have mercy on him. The religious legitimacy of these sequences is stressed by the use of the bandir drum, associated with Sufi Islam and therefore carrying religious connotations. Judah! has a song-and-

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dance sequence (though dance is rather reduced to walking) in which the Muslim hero Anwar succeeds in opening up the heart of his pagan heroine, Judah, not only for his love, but also for the love of his religion:

Judah, stop worshiping this idol.Come, let us worship Allah.I am following him.If you will also follow him,I will surely marry you.Believe that Allah is One and Only.Don’t say there are two [gods].Stop this worship, even if it is your custom.If you will follow him, (2x)Allah will never leave you.Repent! Allah is forgiving [?],And he is beneficent.He forgives us our sins.He is your creator. (2x)And he will surely not ignore you. (My translation)

While song and dance is Islamized in Judah! and Shaheed, Qarni does quite the opposite: it portrays a pagan ritual in a showstopper sequence, and thus confines song and dance to the sphere of non-Muslims.

Another new and religiously inspired form of the showstopper is mod-eled after the form of religious sermons and resonates with the reformulation of filmmaking as “preaching.” These showstoppers interrupt the narrative flow with lengthy didactical monologues. Such sequences, more or less elaborate, can be found in all films discussed here: Nasihu in Ruhi and the Muslim hero in Judah! educate their pagan girlfriends about the principles of Islam, and likewise Farar Aniya’s imam, who teaches the audience about the simplicity of the ritual of conversion.

A sequence of Shaheed will further illustrate this point. After the first convert has succeeded in converting several of his fellow tribesmen to Islam, the pagan king answers with fighting. Upon getting news of these events, the imam of the Muslim community calls upon his followers at night. The whole scene is geared toward the figure of the imam, who is delivering a sermon, and who is shown in medium-close and close shots. Inserts of shots of listening members of his intrafilmic audience serve to draw those who watch the video film into the scene. The viewers are thus placed among the imam’s crowd, and what he tells his crowd likewise concerns those who sit in front of the screen. He opens with a lengthy prayer in Arabic, and goes on to relate to his followers that since their brothers in faith are under duress, it is their duty to rise to their rescue, even if they are only few in number and lack weapons. By pointing to the Battle of Badr, mentioned in the Qur’an (3:123–125), the first battle that Mohammed and his followers victoriously fought against the army of the idolatrous Meccans, the imam shows that

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true believers who fight for the cause of Islam will always be assured of Allah’s miraculous help. During his sermon, he frequently quotes from the Qur’an in Arabic. These quotations usually follow and thus legitimize a statement, and are immediately translated into Hausa. He ends by stressing that Allah has promised that those who die during jihad will immediately enter paradise without having their good and bad deeds weighed against one another. Finally, he and his audience shout “Allahu akbar!” and the sequence ends. What is significant about this showstopper is that refer-ences to the film plot are made only at the beginning. Since the major part of this four-and-a-half-minute sequence remains free from references to the filmic narrative, the viewer is encouraged to transfer the meanings of this sermon to any extrafilmic context. Given that “pagans” and Christians are not always differentiated in colloquial Hausa, which (depending on context) subsumes Christians under the category of arna (pagans), the calling for jihad of Shaheed’s imam may well have been read by some of the film’s audiences against the backdrop of bloody local confrontations between Christians and Muslims, which have a long history (Kane 2003:178–206), and which were again aggravated during the years of the shari’a campaigns.

Political Subtexts

Apart from their religious surface, conversion videos may contain a political subtext. Following Ali Mazrui (2001), I understand the northern Nigerian movement for a reintroduction of shari’a, which gained ground following the 1999 elections, as a reaction to widespread fears of a loss of northern religious and cultural identity as a consequence of the new southern Christian politi-cal hegemony. In the eyes of many northern Nigerian Muslims, Christian southern Nigeria looks like an agent of the undesirable forces of Westerniza-tion. The reintroduction of shari’a, understood not only as criminal law but as a divine yardstick for a good Muslim life, seemed to be the appropriate step to counter and exclude undesirable cultural influences from outside and reorganize the Muslim community from within. Against the backdrop of this discourse of closure and revitalization, I suggest reading the Muslim fight against paganism as portrayed in the conversion videos not only as a fight against traditional non-Muslim or syncretistic Hausa culture, but as a fight against the threat of Westernization (or even globalization), which southern Nigeria represents on the national stage. This reading may at first glance look farfetched. Taking into consideration, however, that in colloquial Hausa, Christian southern Nigerians (especially Igbo) are still called arna (that is, “pagans”), this reading may gain some plausibility. Northern Nige-rian Muslims know that most southern Nigerians belong to the Christian faith, but there is the common belief that under the surface of the southern Christian confession lurks a barely concealed paganism. Southern Nigerian video films, whose plots are full of false prophets and bloody ritual killings, confirm this belief in the eyes of northern audiences.

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The video films I have been discussing address the fears of a threat to the Muslim community emanating from within (from their own pre-Islamic traditions, massively attacked within the current fundamentalist discourse), and a threat to the cultural and religious identity coming from outside. Censorship prevents filmmakers from directly addressing the “real” current national conflict between North and South, Islam and Christianity. “Luckily enough, they do not treat the conflicts between Muslims and Christians,” writes a staff member of the Hausa-language video film magazine Bidiyo, who must have been aware of the conversion genre’s potential inflammatory political effect (Tsakanin arna da Musulmi 2003, my translation). Films like Qarni, Judah!, and Shaheed are products of the current fundamentalist dis-course, and their narratives may serve as affirmations of the current project of cultural exclusion and religious reform. The preferred reading encoded in these films is that taking part in that project is the only option for a true believer. Forces that counter the pious transformation of the community of the faithful have to be excluded, or, as the video films suggest, converted and won over for the true cause of Islam.

Video films about conversion did not sell well. By 2003, three years after the reintroduction of shari’a, the religious vigor that had characterized the popular call for its implementation seems to have cooled down, and, instead of watching religious hero tales, video consumers again favored romantic melodramas or comedies. Still, at the “Hausa Home Video Awards 2003,” organized by members of an internet discussion group, Qarni was nominated in the categories “Best Film,” “Best Make-up,” and “Best Special Effects,” and its director, Hafizu Bello, won the prize of “Best Director.” Actor Kabiru Maikaba, who appeared as king of the pagans in Shaheed, won a prize for “Best Actor in a Villainous Role.” At present, conversion on screen looks like a closed chapter within the fast-moving video industry of Kanywood.6

Conclusion

Current research on the relation of religion, media, and public culture has noted that religious idioms and practices have migrated beyond the former confines of their respective religious domains to become part of new and wider public spheres (Meyer and Moors 2006). This process is intimately linked to the liberalization of mass media and the greater accessibility of cheap audiovisual media technologies in many parts of the world since the 1990s, both of which have fostered the development of local culture industries. Thus, liberalization of the media goes hand in hand with com-mercialization, and commercialization implies a preference for formats and styles of media entertainment. To permeate the new and emerging public cultures, religions and their custodians must compromise and—in associa-tion with the forces of entertainment—develop new shapes and forms of religious expression. As Meyer and Moors (2006:19) have pointed out, this

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process is far from being unidirectional: religious forms and elements that are disseminated into the public with the sense to make use of mass media’s communicative potential are increasingly difficult to control by the religious organizations within which they originate; instead, these religious forms and elements “convey a religious flair, a sort of aura, to media entertainment and commodities” (2006:19), and begin to live a life of their own.

In Nigeria, these processes can be observed most clearly in the south-ern parts of the country, where Pentecostal and charismatic churches have developed their own media industries, and where the video film industry has adopted Pentecostal motives and themes on a wider scale. “Pentecostalism sells” might be a shorthand for the market-driven logic of the southern Nige-rian video film industry—appropriate for both Pentecostal companies and non-Pentecostal production firms alike. A similar process can be observed in northern Nigeria, which supports a host of small media production firms that specialize in the production and distribution of Islamic print, audio, and audiovisual material. Many of these are associated with religious organiza-tions of one sort or another (reformist and Sufi alike), but unlike many of the bigger Pentecostal churches in southern Nigeria, Ghana, and elsewhere (Witte 2003), Nigerian Muslim organizations and brotherhoods have not yet turned into media empires that generate a large proportion of their income through the selling of media products. Unlike in the south, there is only one video production firm in the Muslim north—Al-Muhsin in Zaria, associated with Al-Zakzaky’s organization, Ikhwan—that has employed the format of the feature film to propagate the doctrine of a specific religious organization. The other production firms are independent companies, which, to the best of my knowledge, have no relationship to any of the reformist organizations, and no relationship to either of the Sufi brotherhoods. That they have intro-duced religious conversion as a central topic to several of their video films has to be attributed to multiple factors, the most important of which is to be seen in the permeation of the public sphere by reformist discourse recently amplified by the reintroduction of shari’a. Video filmmakers have used religious themes—and foremost conversion as affirmation and central trope for Islam’s assertive powers—to convey a “religious flair” to their products. Whether this has been their conscious decision or should be attributed to a diffuse influence of current public discourse on them cannot be answered precisely. The reformulation of filmmaking as preaching, however, must be understood as a more or less conscious attempt to transfer religious “aura” to video films and the profession of video-filmmaking alike. Although the practice of wa’azi is associated mostly with reformist Islam, filmmakers probably use it rather as a kind of generic Islamic marker.

What springs to mind here is the provocative suggestion that reform-ist Islam operates in a manner resembling that of Pentecostal Christianity. In respect to its theology (i.e., attempts of restructuring the relationship between individual believer and God, fighting saint-worship, and more or less religious authority in general) reformist Islam has indeed been labelled “Pentecostal Islam” or “Protestant Islam” (Loimeier 2005). Muslim preachers

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in many sub-Saharan African countries are well aware of the evangelical practices of charismatic Christians, and have developed “counter-strategies of preaching and da’wa, which look strikingly similar” (Loimeier 2005:219). Still, I doubt that the reformulation of filmmaking as preaching in north-ern Nigeria has the same scope and intensity as the “propagandistic” use of feature films by Pentecostal churches and Pentecostal production firms in southern Nigeria. Although Hausa conversion films “mobilize belief by making use of techniques of make-believe” (Meyer 2005:158) in a quite simi-lar fashion as their southern Nigerian equivalents, it seems as if audiovisual media and especially feature films can be much more easily incorporated into Pentecostal practices and beliefs than into those of reformist Islam. Accord-ing to Birgit Meyer (2005:179), a “techno-religious realism” has taken shape in Christian Ghana, where audio-visual media are employed in the service of religious vision, but Islamic organizations of all backgrounds operating in northern Nigeria (except Ikhwan, probably the most radical, and singular in many respects) have difficulties with the format of the feature film, asso-ciated foremost with entertainment and distraction (Krings 2005). Things might change in the future, though examples from Islamic countries such as Egypt, where reformist Islam has gained ground during the 1990s and criti-cized the earlier blending of religion and entertainment in state-sponsored television programs (Armbrust 2006), point to a different direction.

The relationship between religious organizations and the video indus-try is not so close in northern Nigeria as in the south, but despite significant differences, many commonalities between the regional video industries of Nigeria exist. Conversion and reversion are by far not the only topic that has been treated by both industries. As I have suggested above, it is likely that in regard to the conversion topic, northern scriptwriters (and other sources) have been inspired by southern movies, which had already devel-oped storylines about conversion in the 1990s. At the moment, researchers in Nigerian video films seem to be stuck in regional compartments, and this state of affairs mirrors discourse within the respective industries in Nigeria itself, discourse that tends to ignore the interconnectedness of the regional industries. The divide between north and south (which in itself is divided at least by a Yoruba-based and an Igbo-based industry) is especially highlighted, despite the exchange that is already taking place. Apart from topics—such as conversion—and storylines, which are borrowed and then treated according to the respective regional video film style, this exchange involves personnel (actors, directors, producers) and technical know-how. Exploring the inter-connectedness of the regional video industries of Nigeria might be a fruitful direction for further research.

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aCKnowledgeMents

this article is based on research i undertook as fellow of the research Centre “Media and Cultural Communication” at University of Cologne. i am most grateful to the deutsche For­schungsgemeinschaft for its financial support. i wish to express my gratitude to Birgit Meyer, stephen hughes, tobias wendl, and Jonathan haynes, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article; Jonathan haynes for also fiddling (again) with my english grammar; and abdalla Uba adamu for sharing with me his profound insights into Kano video culture. roman loimeier helped me to understand the differences of islamic preaching genres. all shortcomings remain my own. last but not least, i wish to thank all those involved in the northern nigerian video industry, who welcomed me into their midst during my fieldwork in 2003.

notes

although this might look like a simplification of a very complex situation, and northern 1.

Muslims are far from speaking with one voice, as susan o’Brien (2007) has demonstrated,

this binary thinking was surely prominent during the first years after the implementation of

shari’a.

s.w.t. is the abbreviation of the arabic phrase “subhanu wa ta’ala” which every Muslim is sup­2.

posed to utter after mentioning allah. the english translation is “glorious and exalted is he”.

since the arabic abbreviation is common even if Muslims write in english, i left it as it was in

the original hausa­text.

iyan­tama did not use the standard hausa translation of the Qur’an, the one by abubakar 3.

gumi; instead, he relied on an interpretation by his learned friend sanusi shehu, said to

be a follower of “scripturalist” rashad Khalifa: notably, sura 2:263 differs from commoner

translations, both hausa and english. i am grateful to abdalla Uba adamu for pointing that

out to me.

the english subtitles of the video (a rare feature with hausa videos), however, indicate that 4.

the producers had a wider, non­hausa­speaking audience in mind.

see, for example, the script of his speech at the launching party of the first video film pro­5.

duced by members of the Muslim Brothers, as published by the hausa video magazine Fim

(Zakzaky 2001).

the latest developments of the hausa video industry, however, may turn the pious topic 6.

of conversion into a new option for filmmakers who are currently forced to develop new

storylines. Following a total ban of six month on video film production which was imposed

by Kano state government in august 2007 after a pornographic mobile phone clip of actress

Maryam Usman circulated far and wide in the north, filmmakers are faced with censorship

guidelines much stricter than ever before (ibrahim 2008).

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