The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (11 page)

“When the West sneezes, Africa catches a cold.” I first heard this expression from a Nigerian pastor named James Movel Wuye,
who works alongside his former mortal enemy, Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa, to bring about a change of consciousness in the way Nigeria’s Muslims and Christians view one another. During the eighties and nineties, the two leaders taught thousands of young people to kill, and now they “reprogram” them to tolerate each other’s differences.
Tolerance
is a word of which both are wary, since to them,
it smacks of a moral relativism to which they do not subscribe. To them, it suggests they should tolerate heresy and falsehood. Each strictly adheres to the tenets of his respective faith and unabashedly calls himself a fundamentalist. The imam’s followers lopped off the pastor’s arm with a machete more than a decade ago. Now they are partners in an effort to foster amity among the Nigerian youth
they once taught to fight in the name of their respective religions. The reason, first and foremost, is to ensure their mutual survival, since fighting has cost each community so much.

The two men travel to religious conflict zones all over the world—they have visited the World Trade Center site together several times—but they still live in the Nigerian city of Kaduna, which means “crocodile”
and is named for the river that runs through its center, dividing north and south. The tenth parallel also runs through the town, which is in many ways a microcosm of Nigeria: its population of one and a half million people is split in half between Muslims and Christians. The Muslim neighborhoods—nicknamed Baghdad and Afghanistan—are on the north side of town. The Christian ones—called Haifa, Jerusalem,
and, inexplicably, Television—are on the south side. The inhabitants name the neighborhoods themselves. It is one more way to claim a place in a global religious
order. Over the past twenty years, many of the city’s churches and mosques have been burned down, and thousands of residents have been killed.

When I first arrived in downtown Kaduna in 2006, I climbed five flights of stairs in a nondescript
office building—the elevator did not work, as there was no electricity that day—to track down their Christian-Muslim Interfaith Mediation Centre. Outside, a small plastic plaque read, “Peace Hall.” Inside, Pastor James, a middle-aged man less than five and a half feet tall, had a terrible cold. Before he blew his nose, he wrapped toilet tissue around his bare right forearm, which did not
move. It was made of hard plastic.

The pastor belongs to an ethnic minority called Gbagyi—some of Karl Kumm’s “border pagans.” Before they became Christians, they were aboriginal warriors who fought off Hausa Muslim slave raiders. The arrival of the British actually made things worse, as indirect rule strengthened Muslim dominion over the pastor’s people—much as Karl Kumm and other missionaries
had feared it would.

“They were merciless, the Muslims who were ruling over us,” the pastor said. His people still call the Hausa Muslims
ajei
, which means “those who trouble us.” Pastor James grew up in a military barracks—his father was a soldier—and when he and the other barracks boys played war, their imagined enemies were their Hausa oppressors. As a teenager, Pastor James smoked cigarettes
and wooed a long list of girlfriends. He also joined the Christian Association of Nigeria and, at twenty-seven, became general secretary of its Youth Wing. In 1987, the Middle Belt exploded. When fighting between Christians and Muslims reached Kaduna, Pastor James became the leader of the Christian militia. “We took an oath of secrecy,” he said. “We carried pictures of those who had been killed.
We were martyrs: we felt that we were dying in defense of the Church.” The war, like the faith itself, became a struggle for liberation.

“I used to say, ‘We’ve been beaten on both cheeks, there’s no other cheek to turn,’ ” he said, teaching others to justify bloodshed by relying on the literal, inspired word of scripture. Once it was the call to violence couched in self-defense. “I used Luke
22:36—as Jesus said to the disciples the night before his crucifixion, ‘And if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.’ ” When the pastor was thirty-two, a fight broke out between Christians and Muslims over control of a market. “That day, we were outnumbered,” he said. “Twenty of my friends were killed. I
passed out, so I don’t know exactly what happened.” When he woke up, his right
arm was gone, sliced off with a machete.

To understand Kaduna’s faith-based battle lines, I had to see them, Pastor James said, so he summoned an employee. This was the first time I met Haruna Yakubu, the former Islamic militant who now works as the center’s youth coordinator, and who would drive me around the Middle Belt in the minivan. That first afternoon, Yakubu drove me through the former
colonial city, where neem trees line the old roads like ghosts of the bygone British. The colonial polo fields were worn bare but still in use. Mostly wealthy Muslim horsemen play there—others do aerobics in the bleachers. American-style fitness, its own imprint of empire, has also arrived.

Yakubu first took me to see the concrete skeleton of the fire-ravaged Alafia Oluwa Baptist Church. “The
Baptists want to sell it,” he said, as we climbed out of the car. The cross and spire had been sheared off, but the walls and heavy concrete Romanesque arches were still standing. They now enclosed a large grassy field; a cow was tethered to a nearby tree. I walked toward the narthex, but Yakubu stopped me. It stank of human shit. “The locals have turned it into a toilet,” he said, uncomfortably.
On the wall, through a hole blasted into the cement, I could see someone had painted a picture of a naked woman, a penis with “Pastor S” written on it pointed between her spread legs. “We’re trying to convince the Baptists to come back, but they don’t want to.” In 2007, the Christians sold the church to the Muslims after all. When Yakubu and I passed by the next year, the word
masalaci
, which
means “mosque,” had been spray-painted across it in red.

We drove in silence through the neighborhood known as Afghanistan. Yakubu said, “Our religious leaders are some of our most dangerous people. They preach that they want us to go back to Medina, but we can’t go back to Medina.” Here was a contemporary struggle for Islam’s soul: whether believers should cling most tightly to their history
in Medina, the city from which believers battled for their right to self-determination, or whether God’s message to Mohammed in Mecca—more inclusive and universal—reflected the future of the faith.

“Even the Prophet lived with Christians; why can’t we? If we call ourselves true Muslims, why can’t we do that?” Yakubu said. Along the road, red-eyed boys sold jerry cans of petrol. Although Nigeria
is flooded with
oil, corruption and mismanagement force the country to import much of its gasoline. During price hikes and shortages, these young hawkers appear by the roadside; their gas cans become weapons.

Pastor James’s former enemy, Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa, lives on the Muslim side of the river. One Friday morning before afternoon prayer, I went to visit him at home. By the time I arrived,
he had already resolved three neighborhood disputes. Two smiling old men in dark glasses sat on his green sectional couch. They were blind, and Ashafa had started a foundation to help them. His two young wives, Fatima and Aisha—both named for the Prophet’s wives—served tea on top of a tin canister. The windows were shut, and the green-and-white striped curtains drawn in purdah. On one closed
door, a bumper sticker read, “Combat AIDS with Shari’a.” The method was clear: abstinence. The imam and the pastor share the same conservative moral values, which has also helped them to find common ground. Ashafa, tall and narrow, his beard grizzled, grew up equally as steeped in the history of his people. He comes from a long line of Muslim scholars who were powerful under the caliphate of Uthman
dan Fodio, and his story, too, is a tale of oppression and reaction to oppression.

“My family had, all its life, struggled against colonialists and missionaries because they watched the colonialists bring Christianity into the hinterlands. I grew up hearing stories of how our land was stolen and our people were crushed.” When Ashafa was a boy, since missionaries ran the local school, his father
refused to let him go. “Missionaries are evil,” he told his son. But Ashafa’s uncle talked his father into it, saying, “Let the boy go to school. Don’t you trust your God?”

At mission school, Ashafa won the prize for best Bible student. (He had a gift for memorization.) After school, with his slingshot, he flung stones at women showing their bare arms or backs in the streets. When the religious
crisis hit Kaduna in 1987, he became the equivalent of Pastor James on the Muslim side.

“We planted the seed of genocide, and we used the scripture to do that,” Ashafa said. “In Islam, you must fight in defense of any women, children, or old people—Muslim or not—so, as a leader, you create a scenario where this is the only interpretation,” he explained. His mentor, a Sufi hermit, tried to warn
the young man away from violence, telling
Ashafa, “You will not cross the ocean with hate in your heart.” In 1992, Christian militiamen stabbed the hermit to death and threw his body down a well. Ashafa vowed to kill Pastor James, and revenge became his only mission, until one Friday, his local imam gave a sermon on the story of the Prophet Mohammed’s journey to the Arabian town of Ta’if. When
Ashafa heard that the Prophet said to the angel Gabriel, “My Lord, forgive my people; they do not know what they are doing,” he wept. “The imam was talking directly to me,” he said. He knew he had to forgive Pastor James. He went to visit the pastor’s sick mother in the hospital, and although Pastor James remained leery, the two men began to work together, talking to the communities they’d formerly
incited to violence, bringing the young people together to speak to one another, working out an early-warning system so that local religious leaders from different sides called one another when they heard rumors such as “they’re killing our brothers across town.”

One of Ashafa’s greatest challenges is to manage Kaduna’s Muslim groups when they clash over methods of devotion. Sufi mystics gather
to pray and sometimes play music: half chant, half steel drum, amplified, in the streets. (They’re hired to come sing outside a house when a baby is born, for instance.) Sunni hard-liners oppose the Sufi majority as un-Islamic, and claim that these rituals are influenced by African tribalism, not traditional faith. Everyone fears the self-proclaimed Shia, who, thanks in part to Hezbollah’s popular
satellite TV station, have sharpened their revolutionary sensibilities over the past few years. These religious rifts in Kaduna are local and global; many mirror the tensions of the larger Islamic world. The imam tries to stay neutral, but is frequently accused of being a sellout because he associates with Christians. He identifies himself very much as a fundamentalist and sees himself as one
who emulates Mohammed. Although he and Pastor James don’t discuss it, he also proselytizes among Christians. “I want James to die as a Muslim, and he wants me to die as a Christian. My Islam is proselytizing. It’s about bringing the whole world to Islam.”

Sometimes their human differences creep into their religious missions. “Ashafa carries the psychological mark. I carry the physical and psychological
mark,” Pastor James told me. “He talks so much. I’m a little miserly with words. So when he uses his energy like that, he sleeps very deeply.
There were instances where we shared a room. He’s a very heavy sleeper. You can actually take the pillow off his head and he will just go back to sleep. More than once, several times, I was tempted to use the pillow to suffocate him. But this restraining
force of the deepness of my faith comes ringing through my ears.”

James’s transformation came in the mid-nineties, at a Christian conference in Nigeria sponsored by Pat Robertson, one of the most vocally anti-Muslim preachers in the world. A fellow pastor pulled James aside and said, in almost the same words as the Sufi hermit, “You can’t preach Jesus with hate in your heart.” James said, “That
was my real turning point. I came back totally deprogrammed. I know Pat Robertson might have had another agenda, but I was truly changed.” At one of Kaduna’s local television stations, James hosts a TV show about Jesus Christ in Hausa, the language of local Muslims. The station broadcasts both Muslim and Christian programs. When I visited, the studio was little more than a plywood shed, with two
oilcloth backdrops hanging on the wall. One was of Mecca lit up at night, and all white except for the black stone
kaaba
in the center. On the other, an airbrushed image of a luscious desert island shimmered. This was the Christian backdrop—a different version of earthly paradise. James took his seat in front of a palm tree and opened the Bible. It was after ten at night, and as he preached, his
wife, Elizabeth, nodded off on the other side of the shed, in front of Mecca. I marveled at James’s devotion and thought of the people—some of whom would be Muslims—watching him on their crackling, generator-powered television sets for miles around.

For James and Ashafa, their “deprogramming efforts” include reading scripture aloud with former fighters. At first, I did not believe that such a
simple practice could actually work. As an outsider, I doubted that words on the page, no matter the color, could make a substantive difference as to how people viewed one another. But along the tenth parallel, the Bible and the Quran play an integral part in peoples’ daily lives. Scripture often provides a more practical rule of law than the government does. It lays out a social and moral code for
human interaction. It gives meaning to suffering and poverty. It offers a group identity through which followers can secure their worldly needs, and, finally, find some certainty about the hereafter, about Providence.

Yet time and again people’s professions of their beliefs, like James and Ashafa’s work with former militants, baffled me. They were ultimately
mysterious, and could not be explained
away by self-interest, or anything else of this world. As Barbara Cooper, who began her career as a Marxist historian and is the author of
Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel
, put it to me simply, “Faith is the X factor.”