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Nigeria’s Islamic police in Kano State have made dozens of arrests since the beginning of Ramadan, detaining Muslims found eating, drinking, or selling food during daylight hours, and extending their sweep to include residents with what officers described as inappropriate haircuts, people wearing shorts above the knee, and commercial tricycle drivers found transporting male and female passengers together.
The Kano State Hisbah Board said it had detained Muslims for consuming food and drink in public during fasting hours.
Unlike in previous years, the board has signalled that lenience is off the table. Last year, some offenders were released after pledging to observe the fast, while others were placed under the supervision of family members for monitoring through the end of the month. This year, Aminudeen said those arrested would face legal consequences. All 25 suspects detained for eating or selling food during fasting hours have been charged in a Sharia court, where they will face punishment under Islamic penal provisions operating in Kano State. No specific penalties were stated publicly.
The Hisbah also confirmed it acts on information from members of the public. “We do get calls from people who are enraged after seeing people eating in public, and we act fast by going to the area to make arrests,” Aminudeen said. The agency said the operation that began at Ramadan’s start would continue daily until the month ends.
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The Kano State Hisbah Board sits at the intersection of religious authority, state power, and contested civil rights. Kano formalised its Hisbah Board in 2003, giving it semi-official status as part of a broader expansion of Sharia criminal jurisdiction that swept across 12 northern Nigerian states between 1999 and 2002. The first state to adopt the expanded framework was Zamfara, in January 2000, and within two years, eleven others including Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Bauchi, and Niger had enacted similar legal structures. The move was enormously popular in some quarters of the Muslim-majority north and deeply controversial in others, sparking deadly riots in mixed-religion cities such as Kaduna.
The Kano State Hisbah Corps was established in 2000 and now numbers approximately 9,000 male and female officers. Formally, the corps does not have authority to execute arrests and officers are armed only with non-lethal weapons such as batons; Hisbah officers who observe violations are expected to alert the Nigeria Police Force, rather than detain suspects themselves. In practice, the agency has frequently made arrests directly, and its relationship with the federal police has at times been contentious.
Human Rights Watch has noted that Hisbah activities bear similarities to other Nigerian vigilante groups in that they are made up mostly of locally-recruited young men who sometimes administer punishments on people suspected of an offence without handing them over to the police.
Observations and interviews conducted in 2022 with people arrested by the Hisbah documented potential human rights violations, including reports of forced HIV and pregnancy tests, physical beatings, and prolonged detention of minors.
Several of those interviewed said they were non-Muslims who did not consider themselves subject to Sharia, though the state government has maintained that all residents of Kano fall under the Hisbah’s jurisdiction regardless of faith. The agency has publicly stated that it targets only Muslims, but critics say the line in practice is not clearly observed.
Kano-based Islamic scholars have pushed back on criticism of the institution, arguing that it enjoys firm legal footing under state laws enacted by elected legislative assemblies, that it draws its mandate from Islamic teachings, and that it has served a broader community function including protecting places of worship and supporting security operations during periods of inter-communal tension. A coalition of Ulama and Islamic organisations said the system has operated alongside Nigeria’s secular courts for years without eroding constitutional guarantees.
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That constitutional question has never been fully resolved. Sharia criminal law applies only to Muslims in the 12 adopting states, but Nigeria’s federal constitution guarantees freedom of religion and equal protection, and civil liberties advocates have long argued that criminalising personal religious conduct, particularly without the procedural safeguards of the secular courts, sits in tension with those guarantees. Appellate courts have intervened to moderate some of the harshest applications of Sharia, and over time enforcement has become less dramatic and more bureaucratic, with a greater emphasis on community mediation and minor infractions than on headline-grabbing prosecutions.
The Hisbah’s Ramadan enforcement operations, however, have remained consistent year after year. Kano is a sprawling city of several million people and Nigeria’s second-largest commercial centre. Amid its predominantly Muslim majority, it contains significant Christian communities, largely concentrated in specific districts, where food establishments remain open during fasting hours and are not subject to Hisbah oversight. The agency has said its authority does not extend to non-Muslims.
Ramadan holds particular significance in Islam as the month in which the faith’s foundational text, the Quran, is believed to have been first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Fasting from before sunrise to after sunset is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the core obligations that define Muslim religious practice. For those who cannot fast due to illness, pregnancy, travel, or age, Islamic jurisprudence provides for exemptions and alternative forms of observance.
