Rabiat Akande. Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 338 pp. Bibliography. Index. $34.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9781009055048.

Part of review forum on "Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria."I thank the reviewers for their incredible generosity in engaging with Entangled Domains through their written comments and for the provocative conversations that preceded those pieces and the issuance of this review issue.This response piece will situate Entangled Domains in context by reflecting on the motivations that inspired the book and the intellectual, scholarly, and political currents that shaped its writing and presumably, its reception.By so doing, I illuminate the stakes of the history chronicled in the book for the present and future of constitutional politics, not only in Nigeria but also in other states grappling with the paradoxes of colonial secular modernity.Entangled Domains is a product of my perplexity with the deadlock in postcolonial Nigerian constitutional discourse over the relationship between the state and religion.As the book's research progressed, it became apparent that the contemporary framing of the postcolonial debate masks how the colonial state constituted religion as well as how colonial-era struggles over religion constituted the colonial and later, postcolonial state.Those struggles-over religion and the making of the state-shaped constitutional documents such as the 1960 constitution (and its descendants) and international enactments such as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Those historical contestations also continue to predetermine how politics is imagined and contested today.Entangled Domains is a lament.I lament the limiting of postcolonial constitutional discourse to tenuous binaries-"secular" versus "anti-secular," "statereligion separation" versus "religious freedom," "Shari'a" versus "modernity"and the preclusion of meaningful debate by these binaries' misremembering of the living colonial history of these categories' entanglement.Entangled Domains unmasks how precolonial religious forms were transformed by imperial secular governmentality and grapples with the lasting consequences of such transformations.In particular, the book worries about the novel and deeply unequal forms of intra-religious, inter-religious, and religion-state relations of power set in motion by the colonial state's liberal secular governmentality and broods over how postcolonial attempts to confront colonial hierarchies continue to overturn rather than dismantle hierarchies.Indeed, as Entangled Domains shows, the irreconcilable memories of the colonial state by postcolonial contestants continue to produce visions of the state that preclude meaningful co-existence.