Yahaya Sharif-Aminu shared song lyrics in a private WhatsApp group in 2020. A Sharia court in Kano sentenced him to hang for it. Six years, three courts, and one canceled hearing later, Nigeria's Supreme Court still has not said whether the law that condemned him is constitutional.
A mob burned down Yahaya Sharif-Aminu's family home in Kano not long after his arrest in March 2020. He was a young Sufi Muslim musician, and the act that brought the crowd to his door was ordinary enough to be almost invisible: he had shared song lyrics in a private WhatsApp group, lyrics that were deemed to elevate himself, in the eyes of those who reported him, above the Prophet Muhammad. By August of that year, an Upper Sharia Court in Kano State had sentenced him to death by hanging.
Six years later, he is still alive, still imprisoned, and still waiting for Nigeria's highest court to decide whether the law used to condemn him can survive contact with the country's own constitution. That question has now been pending before the Supreme Court of Nigeria for more than a year, and as recently as June 2026, a scheduled hearing on it was canceled without explanation, with no new date set.
Sharif-Aminu's original conviction did not survive its first appeal. In January 2021, the Kano State High Court overturned it on procedural grounds, chief among them that he had faced his original trial without legal representation. But the High Court did not free him. It ordered a retrial, under the same capital blasphemy statute that had produced the death sentence in the first place. The Court of Appeal upheld that approach in August 2022, declining to strike down the underlying law and affirming its constitutional validity, a ruling his lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court that November.
The case has since drawn an unusual amount of international legal attention for a matter still pending before a single national court. The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States ruled that Nigeria's blasphemy laws violate both international law and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, calling for their repeal. The European Parliament has twice passed urgency resolutions demanding Sharif-Aminu's immediate and unconditional release, the second in February 2025, a step Brussels rarely takes twice for the same individual case. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention added its own opinion in late 2024, finding violations of his rights to religious freedom and expression and calling on Nigeria to remedy the situation.
The Supreme Court held its first substantive hearing on the case on September 25, 2025, allowing the appeal to proceed and setting the stage for briefs to be resubmitted that November. A hearing was then scheduled for June 25, 2026. On that date, according to Sharif-Aminu's legal team, the Court abruptly canceled the proceeding without explanation. No new hearing date has been announced since. He remains in custody without bail, having now spent more than six years behind bars over a private message he never intended to reach a wider audience.
The question of whether a state can execute a man for song lyrics shared in a private chat has now sat before Nigeria's highest court longer than the trial that first condemned him.
What began as a local blasphemy prosecution in Kano has become, over six years, something closer to a referendum on the constitutional status of capital blasphemy law across a dozen northern Nigerian states that maintain Sharia criminal codes alongside the federal penal system. Advocacy groups on both sides of the case have said as much. ADF International has described the pending Supreme Court appeal as one likely to "shape religious freedom in Africa" regardless of which way it is decided, precisely because a ruling on Sharif-Aminu's case would be the first time Nigeria's apex court squarely addressed whether a state blasphemy statute carrying a death sentence can coexist with the constitutional guarantees the federal government is bound to uphold.
For now, the case remains exactly where it has been for more than a year: pending, unscheduled, and unresolved, with a young man who has already spent a sixth of his life in custody waiting to learn whether the country's highest court will ever actually decide the question it agreed to hear.
Sharif-Aminu was reportedly twenty two years old at the time of his original sentencing, a musician from a Sufi religious tradition rather than the hardline strain of political Islam more commonly associated with blasphemy prosecutions in northern Nigeria, a detail advocates have repeatedly noted as evidence that these prosecutions target theological difference within the Muslim community as readily as they target non-Muslims. Kano is one of roughly a dozen northern Nigerian states that maintain Sharia-based criminal codes running parallel to the country's federal penal system, a dual structure that has produced blasphemy prosecutions with real capital exposure even though Nigeria as a whole has not carried out a judicial execution in over a decade. Whether that informal moratorium would hold if the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Sharif-Aminu's conviction is a question that, six years into his imprisonment, nobody has yet had to answer.