Religion in Kano

Kano is a predominantly Muslim city although there is a sizable Christian population as well. A coworker estimated that Kano is 80% Muslim / 20% Christian so in a city of several million people that still leaves a large minority. From my experience here, no matter what religion people subscribe to, they're devout.


When sharia law was adopted in Kano State in 2000 (eleven other  Northern Nigerian states adopted sharia law as well), there was anxiety that it would exacerbate tensions between Muslims and Christians. A New York Times article from 2007 and an Economist article from 2010 both report that sharia law has not been applied with the severity that some people feared. My experience showed the same - I was of course treated like an outsider but it was more because I was a white Western woman than because I was a non-Muslim. 


Still, you can feel the effect of Islam every day. On my first Friday in the country, as we visited a project site outside Kano city, we were twice stuck in traffic jams caused when men stopped their vehicles on the road to say Friday prayers, which they also did on the road. In those instances I realized that I was the only woman in crowds of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men. 

Here are some men and boys performing ablutions on the roadside:

And saying Friday prayers:

On one occasion I saw a line of Muslim girls leaving school. They stretched so far down the street that I guessed there were several hundreds of them.

And wherever you go in Kano you see road signs like this, painted with Islamic phrases:

According to one coworker, Kano hasn't experienced religious violence for several years. In 2004, when an episode violence broke out, he sheltered 30 people in his house for two weeks until the violence settled. When mass killings happened last August in Bauchi State and in January in Jos, he said that things were tense in Kano but nothing occurred.


I went to church when I was in Kano (everyone here goes to church or mosque). One Sunday - the same Sunday that a priest noted in his sermon that he saw me, a non-Nigerian, in the crowd! - prayers were said for congregants to "appreciate the presence of the Holy Spirit at work among those of other faiths." I wondered if the violence that religion has fueled in Nigeria has also made some Christians and Muslims have more accepting attitudes toward each other.