World Journal of Islamic History and Civilization, 1 (3): 178-186, 2011 ISSN 2225-0883 © IDOSI Publications, 2011 Corresponding Author: Saheed Ahmad Rufai, Department of Arts and Social Sciences Education, University of Lagos, Nigeria. 178 The Mosque and the State House: Political Islam in Contemporary Nigeria since 1999 Saheed Ahmad Rufai Department of Arts and Social Sciences Education, University of Lagos, Nigeria Abstract: The unsuccessful attempt by Nigerian citizen, Mutallab to bomb a Detroid-bound plane from Amsterdam on the eve of Christian in 2008 and the deportation of a group of Nigerian students from Malaysia in 2010 owing to terrorism-related allegation have attracted the attention of the world to Nigeria, which is the Africa’s most populous country. Such events have been connected by the media with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, which have culminated in the intensification of research and reporting on Islam and particularly on the relationship between politics and Islam. The searchlight of scholars and writers on this subject has been beamed on the Middle East and South Asian countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan both of which have been indicted by the Western media as safe haven for “professional terrorists” and “potential bombers.” The negative image created for Pakistan was later aggravated with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in a military settlement in the Pakistani territory in May, 2011. The purpose of the present article is to examine the dimension of political Islam in Nigeria since the country’s return to full democracy in 1999. The rationale for the paper’s focus on this period lies in the fact that the period witnessed an unprecedented progress in the Nigerian Muslims’ quest for political power, as Muslim scholars, leaders and personalities were elected into a handful of offices as state governors, commissioners, special advisers and other public functionaries which put them in a better stead to fulfill the long-felt need for the implementation of the Islamic legal system in their various states. The paper employs a combination of the historical method and analytic philosophy and concludes that political Islam is systematic in the northern parts of the country where it has yielded meaningful fruits whereas there is need for the systematization of the linkages between Islam and politics in the southern parts of the country. Key words: The Mosque The State House Political Islam Contemporary Nigeria Return to Full Democracy Muslim Linkages with Political Authorities INTRODUCTION towards “the question of the politicization of religion and There have been studies on the linkage between is duly observed that enough inquiry has not been religion and politics in Nigeria. Notable among such advanced on this phenomenon in recent times” [13]. studies are Bienen [1, 2], Clarke [3], Hunwick [4], Enwerem Nonetheless, it cannot be gainsaid that Nigeria, [5], Kukah and Falola [6], Falola [7], Marshall [8], Wakili which had recorded a number of political, economic, [9], Adewanbi [10] and Sodiq [11]. According to Onapajo religious and ethnic crises in the last ten years, has been [12], most of these scholars have only focused on the connected with the global narrative on terrorism by the interaction between Islam and politics during the early “Western Media which has dubbed the current outbreaks political history of Nigeria. He however observes that the as something new, with a label, “Taliban style”[14]. “dramatic and dynamic changes religion has taken in the Consequently, there was a contagious effect of the contemporary global space which has further given much Western style of reporting Nigerian crises, on the impetus to the phenomenon of religion and politics in Nigerian press itself where there is a proliferation of the country and elsewhere” [13]. Yet he insists that privately owned media organization some of which “were notwithstanding the shift of the pendulum of research faith-based or had as their focus the defence of certain religionisation of politics in Nigeria’s new democracy,…it