IM KREBSGANG (2002) addresses the topic of German wartime suffering, which was for the country's left-liberal consensus a taboo rooted in guilt over the country's past. As I have previously argued, Im Krebsgang was not truly a taboo-breaker. Yet Grass's recent Nobel Prize and his decades of public presence predisposed both critics and the writer himself to receive the novella as a groundbreaking text on the Federal Republic's memory politics. Im Krebsgang portrays layered remembrance of the 1936 assassination of Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff by a Jewish student, David Frankfurter, and relates these entangled memories to the sinking on January 30, 1945, of the ship named after Gustloff. Originally a cruiseship commissioned by the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization, the Wilhelm Gustloff had been converted to serve various military functions and was torpedoed off the Baltic coast by a Russian submarine while ferrying more than ten thousand refugees and soldiers to the West. Im Krebsgang follows Grass's previous post-Wall works in examining characters’ interactions against the background of memorial structures. The teenaged Konny Pokriefke's fascination for the Gustloff's dramatic history leads him to reenact the past on a revisionist website that contains a “discourse of hatred.” The portrayed encounters and conversations on German history mirror Grass's fears that right-wing ideas would gain acceptance after 1990.

Generational Dialogue: Distortions in Cultural Memory

Im Krebsgang suggests that the Third Reich's habits of thought and speech cast long shadows onto post-Wall Germany. Tulla Pokriefke, who first appeared in Katz und Maus, narrowly survived the Gustloff's sinking. This event leaves her understandably traumatized, but her incessant stories of suffering also cause her son Paul, and even more so her seventeenyear-old grandson Konny, to wrestle with second-hand recollections of the tragedy. Konny's shooting of another teenager, whom he takes to be Jewish, in 1997 at the site of a former monument in Schwerin honoring Gustloff exemplifies Grass's fears of a resurfacing of right-wing politics in the wake of unification. This murder, as Grass portrays it, arises from the inability of each of the characters to be heard, in part because their communicative deficiencies irritate and provoke others, in part because they refuse to engage with positions other than their own.

Introduction

In Chapter 1, this volume began with the admonition that narratives and representations of northern Nigeria's interfaith encounter feed into the real everyday interactions of Muslims, Christians, and other believers and non-believers throughout this region. Breaking through the stylized representation of Christian-Muslim confrontation, the volume's chapters have presented a mosaic of different interfaith encounters: from the constructive accommodation of informal market interactions to the full-blown insurgency of Boko Haram. This concluding chapter highlights three key arguments about northern Nigerian interfaith relations that resonate with the empirical material presented in the preceding analyses. In doing so, it hopes to outline fertile and important avenues for further research, as well as possible entry points for policy approaches.

Firstly, we will reiterate that, since the 1980s, religious confrontations between Muslims and Christians have intensified. The material presented in the various chapters of this volume highlight the religious violence connected to this confrontation, including around the declaration of full Sharia law, Boko Haram, and the series of crises in urban Jos and its hinterland. These developments support the contention by Marshall (2009, 214) that greater religious polarization is resulting from ‘competing theocratic projects’ in Nigeria. However, the chapters also demonstrate that this polarization, and its recurrent violent confrontations, are not a product of inherent antipathies between the faiths, but of a particular mix of historical, economic, social and, in particular, political processes. These processes can be the target of public policy if there is a will to change the situation.

Secondly, the argument is made that, despite religious polarization, there may still be common grounds for transcending the zero-sum logic of religious intolerance and engendering traditions of friendly competition, compromise and cooperation. There is nothing inevitable about the violence and fear that have characterized the religious encounter in more recent years and, in fact, most Muslims and Christians live together rather harmoniously. In this vein, Dowd (2015, 96) warns that we should be mindful of the conclusions we draw because while ‘religious diversity appears to lead to intense religious competition that results in extremism in Nigeria, it is important to remember that appearances may be deceiving’.

The history of Newcastle upon Tyne and its hinterland has tended to be dominated by the rise and, latterly, the decline of the coal industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the local economy of Newcastle upon Tyne was being driven by this thriving industry, which was underpinned by the demand for coal from the rapidly growing metropolis of London, together with markets served by other east coast and foreign ports. By the eighteenth century Newcastle had become a bustling centre of trade and commerce as a consequence of the impact of the burgeoning coal trade upon the economy of the town and its surrounding communities. Unfortunately, this dominance of the coal industry in the local history of Newcastle has often obscured the detail of the economic and social consequences of this economic dynamism, which fostered the development of many other trade and business networks that extended far beyond the coal sector into many aspects of the more general trades of the town. As Newcastle became a flourishing port with a thriving community of merchants and tradesmen, this coal-driven economic momentum involved an expanding population and the development of an urban ‘middling class’. Among this community relative wealth and disposable spending power grew, with increasing expectations of an improved material quality of life fostering the development of a consumer demand for goods. This demand was expressed in terms of both the import of a wider range of more exotic foodstuffs and an increased availability of a wider range of quality soft furnishings and clothing. Newcastle thus participated in the ‘culture of consumption’ that was becoming a pronounced feature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries across much of north-western Europe. The consumption of goods has been the subject of extensive analysis by historians, relating the increased demand associated with consumption to the development of markets and altered patterns of sociability within the community. The course of these changes in consumption habits and regional culture in the north-east of England has been lucidly presented in a series of essays edited by Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory in which a number of distinct features are highlighted, characterised in part by the local industrial and trading community, which was dominated by the coal trade.

Introduction

The adoption of ‘full’ Sharia – both personal and criminal law – by twelve northern states after 1999 intensified the divide, tension and conflict among the adherents of Nigeria's two major religions, Islam and Christianity. One of the main challenges of designing legal institutions in post-independence Nigeria has been the accommodation of the needs of diverse religious and ethnic groups. Cultural pluralism and access to justice by various ethnic and religious groups have been addressed through different legal frameworks. Every constitution since independence has made provisions for the recognition of customary law and Islamic law, in addition to the English common law inherited through colonization. Balancing the need for an equitable and just legal system, and demand for recognition of religious and ethnic justice systems has been challenging. Customary and Islamic courts were recognized by law because of the support they enjoy at the grassroots level as an effective means of dispute resolution. Today, the three major legal traditions in Nigeria are customary law, Islamic law (Sharia) and English law (common law). Together, these divergent systems comprise the complex body of law that is practised and enforced in Nigeria, making it an exemplary case of legal pluralism. The coexistence of different normative legal orders and enforcement mechanisms under one legal system, as we shall see, presents multiple challenges. Moreover, it should be recognized that each of these systems has considerable legitimacy in (parts of) the Nigerian population. This is particularly true for Sharia, which is widely supported among Muslims – as well as some Christians – in northern Nigeria.

In this chapter we explore the historical roots of the demand for Sharia law within Muslim communities in northern Nigeria. We then proceed to explore the implementation of Sharia law after 1999, drawing attention to substantive and procedural problems that emerged in the process. We then explore the religious violence that occurred in the wake of Sharia declaration. Specifically, we look at the accusations of Islamization and the allegation that Sharia law is undermining the evolution of a single state law for all Nigerian citizens. Finally, we suggest that the experience of Sharia law implementation might best be understood in the context of the concept of legal pluralism. This is a richer historical institutionalist approach to understanding the legal system in northern Nigeria, which has the added potential of defusing religious tensions around Sharia implementation.

Rather little attention has been given to the crusade that led to the French conquest of the kingdom of Sicily in 1266. Partly this is because crusading historians have preferred, until the later twentieth century, to concentrate on crusades to Jerusalem; but it is also because the conquest has frequently been portrayed as a disreputable French land grab at the expense of the local population. In recent years there has been a modest reaction against extreme expressions of either of these views. In relation to the 1266 crusade, more emphasis has been placed on the responsibility of the papacy for initiating the crusade, on the unpopularity of Frederick II in Sicily and Southern Italy (hereafter Regno) in the latter years of his reign, on the number of aristocratic exiles who fled the Regno in the reign of Frederick II's illegitimate son Manfred, and on the extent of support Charles enjoyed in certain areas after his conquest in February 1266. The outbreak of the Sicilian Vespers rebellion against Charles in March 1282 was interpreted in the past as a total condemnation of Charles's endeavours. It certainly was a severe blow to them. But the loss of the island of Sicily which followed that rebellion did not prevent the survival of the Angevin dynasty in Southern Italy until 1435. It cannot totally have lacked underpinnings. The verses written at the time shed some light on the social cement that bound the French in this episode, and therefore they deserve re-examination.

The conquest was authorized by two successive popes, Urban IV and Clement IV, as a crusade against the tyranny of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, which had been denied the right to rule at the first council of Lyon in 1245. The crusaders came from all over France and also from Provence, where Charles of Anjou was count. Although the Provençaux made up only about a quarter of his army, they were more prepared to settle in the Regno once conquered, and several important families put down roots there. Among the settlers were two distinguished troubadours, Sordello and Bertran d'Alamanon. It might therefore be expected that the conquest and the exploits of the conquerors would be commemorated in Occitan verse.

Introduction: Jos – paradise lost?

The violent politicization of religion has intermittently marked Jos, the capital of Plateau State, from 2001 to 2015. How this came to be, and how it is now gradually being overcome, is a lesson for many communities in northern Nigeria. Jos represented one of the most volatile ethno-religious conflicts in northern Nigeria. Since September 2001, there have been a series of destructive episodes of collective violence in Jos. While the rioting has not been continuous, it has divided much of the religiously plural city into Muslim and Christian areas and created a climate of fear and uncertainty (Danfulani & Fwatshak 2002; Bagudu 2004, 2008; Higazi 2007, 2011; Ostien 2009). Jos is a city in central Nigeria with approximately 1 million inhabitants, situated on the high Plateau in an area of great ethnic and linguistic diversity, with a large number of ‘minority’ ethnic groups and also a century or more long presence of Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri and others. There is also a large presence of people with origins in southern Nigeria in Jos, especially the Yoruba and Igbo. While previously known as a peaceful part of Nigeria, Jos has since 2001 gained notoriety as a communal violence flashpoint. Thousands of people have been killed in the violent conflicts in Plateau State (not just in Jos city) between 2001 and 2015. In addition to the heavy loss of life caused by a series of riots, there was extensive population displacement and damage to property and the city's infrastructure. The riots also led to a collapse of trust between Muslims and Christians in Jos. While interaction continues in markets and can be cordial, mutual suspicion is pervasive. Contrasting with the image of Jos as a picturesque peace-loving destination, the cycle of repeated violence came as a surprise to many Nigerians. The city was regarded as cosmopolitan in both outlook and composition. Muslims and Christians co-existed peacefully for decades, even when – from the 1980s – religious violence escalated in other parts of northern Nigeria (Ibrahim 1989; Kukah 1993; Falola 1998; Gofwen 2004; Last 2007). Many Nigerians remember Jos as a ‘home away from home’ and, even today, write with nostalgia about ‘growing up in a city where your religion or ethnicity never mattered’ (Agboro 2012).

This chapter analyses the role of the Bowes family as gentry entrepreneurs during a time of precocious economic expansion central to the making of an early industrial north-east region. The Bowes experience has wider implications for our understanding of the early modern lead industry, extending the existing body of literature, while expanding our knowledge of lead mining activity in the north-east region before 1700. Other gentry families, notably the Blacketts in Newcastle and Northumberland, were actively involved in the lead industry, particularly in Allendale, and further south in the dales of North Yorkshire. The Bowes’ activity centred on Weardale and Teesdale, in the bishopric of Durham, where their landed estates lay. As a consequence, the Bowes’ relationship to the institution of the bishopric was crucial in their fluctuating fortunes as lead mining entrepeneurs over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The nature of lead mining in the North Pennines, and the particular institutional context of the bishopric, meant that the Bowes’ lead operation was different from lead mining elsewhere in England and Wales, particularly the free mining lead industry in Derbyshire. The family's parallel engagement with coal mining meant that lead exploitation was an integral part of the region's early industrial expansion, albeit an activity that has always been overshadowed by the more prominent and profitable extraction of and trade in coals.

The Bowes were a Durham gentry family who had connections with the Court and were rewarded with lucrative positions for their loyalty through service to the Crown. Their political prestige and reputation was established during the patriarchy of Sir George Bowes, between 1548 and 1580, when the family adopted Protestantism and assisted in the state centralisation process of the Henrician and Edwardian eras. During Henry VIII's reign Sir Robert Bowes (d. 1555) was made Warden of the Middle March for his defence of hostile Border regions, was a member of the Council in the North and of the Privy Council, and was Master of the Rolls; as the family's patriarch he held the position of Steward of the Crown lordship of Barnard Castle. This extensive influence included an episcopal connection with the bishop of Durham, from whom opportunities were ‘provided for enrichment and local influence’.

Seventeenth-century Newcastle upon Tyne is difficult to visualise today. The fashionable shops and handsome merchant houses along Pilgrim Street have mostly been demolished. The guildhall and merchants’ mansions on the Sandhill, the old social core of the city, are dwarfed by the heavy industrial achievement of the iron-framed Tyne Bridge and what survives of the town wall is now more associated with the Chinatown created by Hong Kong émigrés in the late twentieth century. But in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time of relative stagnation in many English and European towns, Newcastle probably saw the most economic and social change, and resultant population growth, of any English urban place outside London. The river bustled with trade of all types being moved by men in single-sailed keel boats, and the stone-built Tyne Bridge groaned under the shops and traffic that crossed from one side to the other. The town, which continued to sprawl outside its thirteenth-century walls in all directions, grew at an astonishing rate. Such vitality was apt to draw breathless hyperbole from even the most weathered early modern travellers, the social commentators of the day. In 1635 the Cheshire gentleman Sir William Brereton put Newcastle ‘beyond all compare the fairest and riches towne in England’, on a par with London and Bristol ‘for wealth and building[s]’. When Celia Fiennes trotted into the city from Hexham, on the ‘hottest day I met with’ in July 1698, she smelled ‘the sulphur of [coal]’, which ‘taints the air’, but she saw ‘a noble town’ that ‘most resembles London of any place in England, its buildings lofty and large … the streets are very broad and handsome’. Daniel Defoe, a Tyneside resident in the 1710s, also noted the industrial sights and smells, but suggested that people and commerce trumped any aesthetic consideration. He praised the town as ‘spacious, extended, [and] infinitely populous’, and remarked that its unpleasant qualities were ‘made amends abundantly by the goodness of the river, which … makes it a place of very great business’.

That contemporary travellers were so impressed makes it all the more surprising that our knowledge of Newcastle's expansion in this period remains patchy. The town has attracted important micro-studies of politics in the ‘Puritan Revolution’ and latterly of the urban experience of plague.

Introduction

In a context of post-civil war constitutional reform and a rapidly expanding oil economy, Nigeria's Second Republic (1979–1983) began as an era full of promise and ambition. Looking back on the last three decades of Nigerian history, some of these ambitions have been realized, most notably in the continuing integrity of the Nigerian federation and its 1999 return to democratic politics. But success has been decidedly uneven: not only is Nigeria still challenged by rampant poverty and corruption, but it has also become notorious for incessant occurrences of localized yet often highly violent conflict. Interfaith relations have been a factor of crucial influence throughout this recent historical period, shaping Nigeria's successes as well as its challenges. In this chapter we seek to outline the most important aspects of the historical and contemporary context in which Muslim-Christian relations in northern Nigeria are taking place.

Nigerians are arguably among the most extrovertly religious people on the planet: religious identities are highly salient, religious groups and institutions are well-organized and fulfil important social and political functions, and religion has an important place in the structures and processes of Nigerian politics. This prominence of religion applies equally to affiliates of Islam, Christianity and African ‘traditional’ religions – although the last group has shrunk tremendously over the past century, due to conversions to the two dominants faiths and their multiple denominations. While relations between affiliates of different religions or denominations are often cordial, there is also an aspect of competition and conflict to Nigeria's interfaith relations. This aspect is, for example, visible in the Boko Haram insurgency and other forms of collective violence, as well as in the political struggles around Sharia. Due to the challenging and destructive nature of the competitive aspect of interfaith relations, particularly around access to resources and representation within the state, many of the chapters in this book discuss violence as part of the repertoire of interfaith interactions. In keeping with this focus, much of this chapter will revolve around Muslim-Christian contention, as it tries to disentangle the roots and historical trajectories of interfaith encounters in northern Nigeria.

In 1213, fresh from victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, King Peter the Catholic of Aragon died at Muret, in a turning point of the Albigensian crusade, while siding with his Occitan vassals against the crusaders. His death left his young son, the future James I, in Simon de Montfort's custody, until Pope Innocent III claimed him and entrusted him to the Templar knights. This was a difficult period for the kingdom and the young monarch, as he recalls in his Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds), but James, known today as the Conqueror, went on to acquire fame as a warrior and crusader. He was involved in several projected expeditions to the Holy Land in the 1260–70s, yet his successful campaigns, which allowed him to enlarge his possessions with Mallorca and Valencia, were all against peninsular Muslims. It was in the early stages of a crusade in Tunis that, after the Vespers uprising in 1282, James's son King Peter the Great, married to Constance of Hohenstaufen, made a detour in order to successfully claim the Sicilian throne from Charles of Anjou. Last but not least, in 1285, briefly before Peter's death, the king of France unsuccessfully tried to invade the Crown of Aragon with papal approval as a direct consequence of the Aragonese intervention in Sicily.

These pivotal moments in the history of the thirteenth-century Crown of Aragon, all associated with crusading campaigns, did not receive equal coverage in Catalan vernacular historiography, each version often revealing substantial differences, even disparities, depending on the nature of the outcome from a Catalan viewpoint, but also on the chronological distance from the incidents recalled and the motivations behind each report. Composed mainly in the last decades of the century, the earliest chronicles in Catalan are contemporary to the rise of vernacular historiography in neighbouring traditions, such as Alfonso of Castile's historical summae or the translation of the Grandes chroniques de France commissioned by King Louis IX, all undertaken c. 1270. In the Crown of Aragon, monks at Ripoll had been compiling the Gesta comitum Barchinone et regum Aragonie since the late twelfth century, based on which a Catalan version recounting rather swiftly some of the main events up to c. 1268 was drafted.

Introduction

Christians and Christianity are an integral part of the fabric of northern Nigerian society. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this community constitutes a significant minority of the population of different states in northern Nigeria. In this contribution, we synthesize the main findings from the research on ‘Christianity and Democratic Governance in Nigeria’, conducted by Jibrin Ibrahim and his colleagues (J. Ibrahim 2008a; Ojo 2008; Alubo 2008) and two working papers written as part of the Islam Research Programme (IRP) – Abuja project (Ibrahim & Ehrhardt 2012; Ehrhardt 2012b). We introduce the main Christian denominations in northern Nigeria and discuss some of the issues that are pertinent to understanding the Christian communities in the region (diversity, politics and gender). Given the extremely diverse and dynamic nature of Christianity in contemporary Nigeria, it can only fulfil this aim in a modest way by highlighting some of the major issues and developments that characterize the contemporary Nigerian ‘body of Christ’.

With this modest aim in mind, the chapter will focus on a few issues in particular. First, it will give a brief overview of the history of Christianity in northern Nigeria, a demographic sketch of the Christian population of the region, and a typology that helps to differentiate the main Christian denominations and organizations. The chapter will then go on to discuss some of the main issues in the relation between Christianity and politics, followed by an analysis of the internal and external leadership roles of Christian leaders and the corresponding (democratic) challenges related to this. Finally, the chapter will focus on gender in contemporary Christian movements in Nigeria, particularly concerning the role of women in Christian organizations. Before discussing these topics, however, it is important to define what we understand as the Christian religion. Who is a Christian and what is Christianity? In this chapter, we will resist the temptation of attempting to answer this question with reference to any specific religious doctrine, foundational principles, or religious practices. Instead, we will view Christianity as a multifaceted collection of beliefs, individuals, and organizations, which may be analysed through a wide range of analytical lenses. In this way, Christianity may simultaneously be seen as the provider of a social identity, a social group, a religious doctrine, a moral compass, a source of community, or a tool for political competition.

This book is part of the ‘Regions and Regionalism in History’ series produced by the North-East England History Institute, which was an AHRC Research Centre between 2000 and 2005. The publication series is the most enduring legacy of the Centre and continuing activity of the Institute. The contributors to this volume have conducted their research as members of NEEHI, which since its founding in 1995 has been a productive framework for bringing together the work of regional historians in the five universities of northeast England: Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside. We are also grateful to the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham for providing a financial contribution towards the costs of the book's production. The majority of the contributors to this volume completed doctoral projects on aspects of north-east England's early modern history. Our aim in creating this collection of essays is to bring the research conducted for these related PhD theses together and to contribute to the published historical literature on the region; one member of the group of research students at Durham University who has been unable to contribute because of her career in commercial research is Judith Welford, whose ESRC-funded PhD on the production and consumption of consumer goods in North-East England, c.1680–1780 deserves to be highlighted here and is referenced through the volume.

All the contributors would like to thank those who read and offered constructive advice on their chapters. We would all like to thank Pat Hudson for chairing the conference at Durham in 2012 at which many of the findings in this book were first presented and Keith Wrightson for his Foreword. A great supporter of the project, and early modern history in the north-east of England in general, was the late Chris Brooks. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Chris, who supervised or otherwise encouraged many of the contributors to this volume during his time as professor of history at Durham University.

Our ultimate aim, beyond the important task of researching the history of north-east England, is to highlight the ways in which the study of one particular region can illuminate wider debates in economic and cultural history and contribute to a new depth of understanding about the relationship between economic processes and cultural formations.