Tiktoker Murja Kunya has clashed with Sharia police in the northwestern Nigerian city of Kano, where “hisbah” units enforce Islamic law that runs alongside common law.
Earlier this year, units arrested Kunya and other influencers for offensive media posts and parodies that the agency deemed indecent.
But now the morality police are trying a softer approach to crack down on online celebrities like 24-year-old Kunya, whom they see as a moral hazard in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north.
The controversy with influencers is just one area where conservative religious sensibilities in Northern Nigeria are being tested by new trends.
Earlier this month, Hisbah invited Kunya and dozens of influencers to a meeting to “raise awareness of the negative effects of immoral content,” Abba Sufi, Hisbah’s director general, told AFP.
Kunya, who has a million followers on Tiktok, attended the meeting wearing the hijab headscarf commonly worn by women across the north.
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This is in stark contrast to the less modest videos, some filled with obscenities, he posted, which earned the ire of Hisbah.
“The meeting with Murja Kunya and other Tiktokers is a change in Hisbah’s strategy in dealing with immoral online content,” Sufi said.
“It is better to show compassion and care to someone you want to reform than to insult and stigmatize them.”
Kunia declined to speak to AFP about the Hizba meeting. Other influencers have also not commented.
But on Sunday, Kunya unleashed a Tiktok tirade against Hisbah.
“Now that you don’t know what to do, you resort to preaching? You need to stop wasting your saliva,” he said. “I don’t care about your preaching.”
Carrot and stick
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Hisbah rejects criticism that they violate freedom of expression by targeting influential people. The agency says it is simply carrying out its mandate to protect society.
Abdallah Uba Adamu, a professor of anthropology and popular culture at Kano’s Bayero University, told Hisbah that the carrot and stick approach alone had not curbed the influencers.
“The dialogue approach is very good,” he said. “They can use the stick, they can use the carrot, but it can never stop people from doing what they think they want to do to survive, because they rely on that for survival.”
For influencers, the meeting was likely seen as another way to gain more followers, part of their online theater, he said. And also why most people hadn’t commented.
“What do you want them to say? That they were invited by Islamic authorities and they didn’t like it?”
Repressions
Kano is one of 12 predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria where sharia courts operate alongside civil and criminal law.
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Hisbah enforces sharia with periodic crackdowns on what it considers immoral acts, including raids on brothels and beer halls or wedding parties where men and women mingle.
Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, is home to a growing Kannywood film industry, which produces films in the Hausa language spoken in parts of West Africa.
Kano also has hundreds of studios that play songs by local artistes like Gwanja that deal with love, marriage and money.
Kannywood is already under close scrutiny by Muslim clerics and officials who believed it promoted anti-Islamic foreign values, prompting the authorities to set up a censorship board.
But the increasing number of Kannywood skits and songs online has prompted the council to extend its authority to social media.
Kunya was among 10 local celebrities a Sharia court in the city ordered arrested and investigated for immoral behavior on social media deemed capable of corrupting the youth.
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Lawyers filed a lawsuit to prosecute them for singing and dancing online, prompting uproar in the city and condemnation from hard-line clerics.
Police arrested Kunya in January at a hotel while she was preparing her much-publicized birthday party.
In March, she was sentenced to three weeks of community service by the Sharia court, which ordered her to work as a janitor at Kano’s largest medical facility.
Sufi said they had a private conversation with Kunia at the meeting where he showed her the implications of the “obscene and immoral” videos.
According to Sufi, the state government was also ready to help influencers by paying money for training or starting new businesses.
Muhsin Ibrahim, a Nigerian who teaches Hausa, culture and film at the Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne, said it was too early to say whether the new approach would affect influential people like Kunya.
“Many people believed that she would stop or reduce some of her ‘delinquent’ acts after the previous court sentence,” he said.
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“He did not do it.”
Source: AFP