The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (10 page)

Later, when the bishop was ready to meet me, I was led across his red shag carpet
to a white fountain tinkling in the corner of his office. He wanted to define the Covenant curriculum, which was based on a term he’d coined: the Total Man concept. “The problem with the African man is that he sees himself as poor, and others see him as poor,” the bishop
said. He walked over to his desk and handed me a stack of his books—he’s written sixty—including one of the bestsellers:
Understanding
Financial Prosperity
. The cover features Nigerian banknotes, naira. The back cover reads, “I am not a preacher of prosperity, I am a Prophet. God spoke specifically to me while I was away in America for a meeting, ‘Get down home and make My people rich!’ ”

When I returned to Canaanland in September 2007, the vice-provost arranged for me to meet the student council. Two dozen young men and women
gathered behind U-shaped desks to answer questions about their faith and their school. They were so quiet and respectful it was more like facing a corporate board than a group of college kids. (In Pentecostal parlance, they called themselves kings and queens.) For a large number—and this was the student council—prosperity didn’t mean just future success, it meant any future at all. Many had left
other schools due to the scourge of gangs—called cults in Nigeria—which, as they told me in horrifying detail, frequently involved initiation rights of rape, theft, and murder. One student council member, who asked not to be named, claimed that he had broken into his math professor’s home and watched in horror as a fellow cult member raped the professor’s wife. Here, they were as safe from harm
as they were from harming others.

The Christian gospel of prosperity is so powerful it has spawned a unique Nigerian phenomenon: an Islamic organization called Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi (NASFAT). The name comes from a verse in the eighth chapter of the Quran, “The Spoils of War,” or al-Anfal, and it reads, “There is no help except from Allah.” The kind of help NASFAT offers begins very much with this
world. The organization is based on economic empowerment and prosperity, with an Islamic spin. Started with about a dozen members in the 1990s, NASFAT now has 1.2 million members in Nigeria and branches in twenty-five other countries. The organization has an entrepreneurship program, a clinic, a prison-outreach program, a task force to address HIV/AIDS, a travel agency, and a soft drink company
called Nasmalt, whose profits go to the poor. It even offers a matchmaking service. NASFAT is not modeled after Islamic charities such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which provides Islamic-based social services to its clients and propagates a conservative form of Islam. It is the opposite: a way for Islam to engage with the West on its own terms. As splits within Christianity are
shaping the future
of the faith, so is splintering within Islam. Most conservatives loathe NASFAT and believe that this engagement with the secular world is
haram
, “forbidden,” and distinctly un-Islamic. Yet faced with the encroachment of Christianity, NASFAT argues that the only way to survive in the religious marketplace is by playing the same game.

“We are competing for faithfuls,” said NASFAT’s executive secretary,
Zikrullah Kunle Hassan, one blistering Sunday in September 2007. “Many people now want God. This is happening especially among the youth, that they feel they need to be committed to faith.” Gesturing to the streets choked with more than a hundred thousand men and women in white as they came from a prayer service at the Lagos Secretariat Mosque, he explained that NASFAT meets on Sundays so
that Muslims have something to do while Christians attend church. “The space on Sunday is usually not dominated by Islam, but other faiths and other values. But when our people come here, they come and drink from the fountain of Islam.”

The prayer ground looked like a fairground—just like the Pentecostal churches did. Everyone among the throngs of thousands was clad in white, and except for the
women’s eyelet head scarves and the men’s small white hats, there would have been no way to tell if this was a gathering of Christians or Muslims. Hawkers sold lemons from a wheelbarrow. Small booths offered those pretty, scalloped
hijabs
, embroidered with “NASFAT” in blue. Men sat on prayer mats eating rice, while women attended a lecture on ways to make money in keeping with Islam. NASFAT’s
primary mission is to reclaim those values the world sees as Western but that its members perceive as integral to the success of the global Islamic community, the
Ummah
. Foremost is education. “We know that the West is ahead today because of education,” Hassan said. NASFAT has its own nursery, primary and secondary schools, and Fountain University. While many orthodox believers say that this new
movement is
bidah
, “innovation,” and therefore dangerously un-Islamic, NASFAT’s adherents disagree, arguing that they are part of a charismatic Muslim movement that addresses social welfare—and is on its way to sweeping the world. This is a form of African Islam, again, born out of interface with the West, and also African Christianity. Unlike many conservative social welfare organizations, its
aim is not to retreat into a seventh-century world, but to engage, engage, engage.

If the answer to every issue in life can be found in the Quran, Hassan said, then questions about how to survive and prosper must be addressed
in the holy text. When conservative northern clerics kick up a fuss about NASFAT’s growing presence in the communities, NASFAT reaches out to them with gestures such as
involving community youth in business programs.

“To be honest, for us there’s a competition of civilizations, there’s a competition of values, and to me, the roots of the conflict are that we believe all civilizations have collapsed in the face of Western civilization,” he said. “Communism collapsed. All other values collapsed. Islam remained resistant to Western civilization.”

In order to survive,
Islam has to address the contemporary needs of its people and compete with the Christian promise of prosperity. As one young member, who joined the organization to get a job through its business network, told me, “There’s nothing you want to achieve that NASFAT can’t help you get here in this country.” He added, “Success, triumph, and glory are from the Creator.”

“Prosperity gospel is more a
symptom than the disease,” said Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Roman Catholic author of
Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria.
In his view, Nigerians’ resorting to religion to achieve prosperity is a natural response to their corrupt political landscape and the absence of any civil government. Again, when the nation fails, you turn to God. “
You
can buy a car and insure it,” he continued.
“You don’t need a priest to pray over the car, to bless your house to keep robbers away . . . Here, there’s no guarantee. God is being called upon to police a lot of areas of our lives.”

Many Muslims share this point of view. Take the ongoing effort to implement Islamic law in northern Nigeria. Ideally, Islamic law is based on the tenets that God revealed to Mohammed, and that were later committed
to paper by Mohammed’s followers. Yet, over the centuries, four different schools of Islamic jurisprudence have interpreted what the Islamic code actually says. In other words, there’s no such thing as a single form of Sharia. In Nigeria, on a practical level, Sharia, with its promise of local justice, seems to offer an end to the corruption that bedevils the people. And given that many Nigerians
associate that corruption with the failure of Western-style democracy in Africa, “to reinstate the Sharia . . . is not only good religion, it is supremely sound politics,” argues Murray Last, an emeritus professor at University College London. Not only has
Western-style democracy failed Nigeria, some Islamic leaders believe, but it also is a weapon the rapacious West uses to keep down developing
nations.

Some have broadened this argument to include their suspicions that Western vaccines are a form of cultural subjugation—and of population control. For eight months during 2003 and 2004, many Nigerian Muslims believed the West was using the polio vaccine as a weapon against their religion. The northern state of Kano, among others, refused to allow the World Health Organization to vaccinate
their children because they believed the vaccine would sterilize them. In August 2006, I met Dhetti Mohammad, a local Kano doctor who had led the ban. Dhetti, whose own children had been vaccinated years earlier, argued that because population was a source of strength among the world’s Muslims, the West wanted to curb Islam’s growth. The UN was designed to safeguard the West’s global hegemony,
he asserted, and that meant eliminating Muslims. To a Westerner like me, this seemed hysterical, and yet his argument mobilized tens of millions of people not to vaccinate their children. The campaign resulted in a devastating impact on the United Nations campaign to eradicate polio—cases of polio were diagnosed in nine African countries that had earlier been declared polio-free.

“In a developing
world, people want to make other people slaves, second-class citizens—call it slavery, call it neocolonialism,” Khalid Amiyu, a magnetic imam in his thirties, told me in 2006. Amiyu led prayers at a local mosque in the Middle Belt capital of Jos, and I met him at his home. “I’ve been an imam for twenty years. You think I can be a slave, I can be emasculated? No, no, I cannot! We are so obsessed
with the white man. We think whatever he does is the solution for us. Maybe this democracy isn’t right for us.”

Islam, he argued, defends the greater good by fighting back against the destructive and corrupting power of the West, which, once again, Amiyu asserts, is undermining the power of Islam through a new imperialism. Amiyu lives in a small cement house in Jos—its windows barred and the
path outside laced with blue rivulets of fresh sewage—in an all-Muslim ghetto about one hundred yards up a steep hill so slick it has its own name:
tudun fera
, or “peeled hill,” because the earth has been slickened by people struggling up it. At the top of the hill, a group of Mormon missionaries have built a church hewn in polished stone.

“With the money those Christians have spent here, they
could have
cured malaria,” Amiyu said. “Religion is losing its grip in the West, so they come to Africa and sow bigotry here.” He added, “Why, if they accept that their own people don’t want to be Christians, do they come here to convert Africa?” He led me through the house to the tap in an open courtyard and turned on the water: a thin yellow trickle. “We haven’t had water in a week, and when
it comes, it gives rashes.” Because the neighborhood was a Muslim island in a larger Christian community, the government didn’t attend to the Muslims’ needs, Amiyu said. They had only occasional electricity, no sewage system, no clean water. But this local injustice reflected the global order’s larger inequality. “When there is perceived injustice, the conflict will continue, and so far, there has
been no justice at all.”

Northern Nigeria has one of Africa’s oldest and most devout Islamic communities, which was galvanized, like many others, in the 1980s by the global Islamic reawakening that followed the Iranian Revolution. In the eyes of many Muslims around the world, the Shah of Iran’s 1979 overthrow initiated a moment of global Islamic resurgence. The shah’s defeat was the West’s defeat.
Many Nigerian Muslims traveled to the Middle East to learn about their heritage. These revivals, however, quickly led to a growing debate over what it means to be a legitimate believer. Among Nigerian Muslims, as in other places, the pressures of religious renewal are creating splinters within Islam.

Beginning in the 1980s, many young Nigerian Muslims went to the Arab world to study, and returned
preaching the tenets of a more conservative Islam; other students went to Iran, where they began to follow Shiite Islam. The Shia, who make up just over one-tenth of the world’s Muslims—163 million—believe only the Prophet Mohammed’s blood descendants can be Islam’s legitimate rulers. In Nigeria, however, being Shia means mostly whatever you want it to. A group of young intellectuals (only a
few of whom have studied in Iran), the Nigerian Shia hang posters of faraway firebrands, such as Ayatollah Khomeini and now Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr, on their mud walls. To most of them, being Shia means being, above all, a revolutionary committed to social justice. In another context, they might be coffeehouse Marxists; in this one, they are determined to cast off class hierarchies and improve the
quality of life in their communities. At least, these are the dreams they discuss when they sit around and talk, which, as jobless Nigerian men, they do quite a lot, over bottomless cups of weak tea.

The fragmenting ideologies among Nigerian Muslims sometimes turn
violent. For decades now, different Islamic groups have competed for authority in the religious marketplace that dominates daily life.
Predictably, the young, hard-line Sunnis and the self-described Shia often view one another as enemies. Both, however, also oppose the predominant Sufi traditions of most North Africans. Since Sufi practice is influenced from place to place by local traditions, this new generation of globalized Sunnis and Shias tend to view Sufi devotion as corrupted and “un-Islamic.” Furthermore, Sufi brotherhoods
are usually based on traditional class hierarchies, which the young Shia, who preach a radical social justice, vehemently oppose. From Sunni to Sufi to Shia, religious reawakening is further dividing Muslims in Nigeria.

Despite a huge outcry from local Christians and Western human rights groups, the implementation of Sharia, currently on the books in the northernmost third of Nigeria, has had
very little practical impact. The criminal codes of the
hudud
, the harshest punishments allowed by Islamic law, have proven, for the most part, impossible to implement. This is perhaps the greatest lesson: that people will idealize religious law until they have experienced the limits of its application. Northern Nigerians have now seen that Sharia has not stanched the corruption they face every
day. In fact, many of the politicians who backed Islamic law have been linked to massive corruption; these include its biggest advocate, the former governor of Zamfara state, who is rumored to have paid a man to let the state amputate his hand.