The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (15 page)

In the early 2000s, as news of the 10/40 Window
reached the Internet, it caught the attention not only of like-minded evangelical activists but also of conservative Muslims, who saw it as one more component in the Christian West’s scheme to convert the world’s Muslims. This was no small thing; in my reporting, from Nigeria to Indonesia, I have heard Muslims rail against the 10/40 strategy again and again. In their view, evangelism and neocolonialism
go hand in hand, two aspects of a global effort to curb Islam’s power by converting Muslims to Christianity. As Amir Abdullah, one such thinker, wrote in the Australian revivalist magazine
Nida’ul Islam
: “Like a cancerous growth, we are seeing Christians gain a foothold in the lands of the believers. The first time these crusading forces came with swords and suits of armor, this time they arrive
with credit cards and million-dollar aid cheques. To the modern crusaders of the Christian missions it is exactly what China is to the Coca-Cola Company—one billion people just dying to hear the message.”
¹⁸

Khartoum lies within the 10/40 Window, and although Samaritan’s Purse stresses that the organization works
wherever
there’s need, while I was traveling with Graham in December 2003, one of
his longtime employees, Barry Hall, told me, “We are now 10/40 Window–focused, especially since the war on terror began opening so many doors for the Lord in Afghanistan.” This conflation of war with “opening doors” has disturbed some observers. In it many see a desire to take advantage of suffering among the world’s poor in order to advance the evangelical Christian theology.

“I would never
take advantage of them for personal gain,” Graham wrote in his book
Rebel with a Cause
. “But you better believe I will take advantage of each and every opportunity to reach them with the gospel message that can save them from the flames of hell.”
¹⁹
Later, Graham’s colleague Dr. Richard Furman, the head of World Medical Mission, the medical arm of Graham’s organization, told me that in one of Samaritan’s
Purse’s African hospitals, the doctors will draw a plus or minus sign on a patient’s chart to indicate whether he is an evangelical Christian. If not,
his operation may be postponed until someone shares the Gospel with him, lest he die without an opportunity for salvation.

“The main thrust is on telling them about Jesus Christ, not getting the operation done,” Furman said. The drive to make the
Gospel heard—not to make converts—is Graham’s mission. Samaritan’s Purse also does some of the most effective relief work in the world, Christian or otherwise. An operation of 450 employees worldwide, the group is especially known for its work in the Balkans. “In Kosovo, we put thirteen thousand people under a roof before that first winter,” Barry Hall told me. “Go ask those folks, ‘Was anything
required of you—to take a Bible or make a decision for Christ?’ and they’ll tell you no.”

The day after Graham’s visit to Ahmed Gasim Children’s Hospital, I returned on my own, hoping to speak with Nada. She was staying on the grounds with her husband, Youssif, until Shirain died. I found the two of them sitting on Shirain’s cot. Had the “Greatest Gift of All” pamphlet made her consider converting
from Islam? “No,” she said, shaking her head and smiling at the question. Youssif added, “A Christian will bring a Bible, and a Muslim, a Quran. But it won’t change our religion at all—everyone has his own faith.” Nada added that when Muslim missionaries visited the hospital, they brought blankets. “It’s only natural that they give us something, because they want something in return.”

Across
the blanched stone courtyard, the hospital’s director, Dr. Monim, was sitting at a desk in a plain, beaten-up office. It was early, but the day’s desert heat made the air leaden. “This work is exhausting and depressing,” he said. The hospital had no intensive care unit, no postnatal facilities, and no X-ray gear. It was the only pediatric hospital for a million square miles. The minister of humanitarian
affairs had grumbled about Graham’s distributing “The Greatest Gift of All,” Dr. Monim said, but the government provided the nonprofit hospital with little aid. “We’ll take what we’re given,” he said. “Mr. Franklin can do whatever he wants.” Within the next few years, Samaritan’s Purse would transform the hospital into a state-of-the-art intensive-care facility—with ventilators and heart and
lung monitors. On February 22, 2007, former senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, a medical doctor who is also an evangelical Christian, traveled to Khartoum with Franklin Graham and visited the hospital. He blogged about his visit for Fox News in an article entitled “Religious, Medical Progress in Khartoum Sudan.”
²⁰

On the Monday morning of December 8, 2003, Graham
set out for the palace to meet President Bashir. Graham’s motorcade crawled through the clogged streets of downtown Khartoum, where Land Rovers jostled with donkey carts. Khartoum is no dusty backwater. The air, soaked with diesel, thrums with money from the Arab world, and from China, thanks to Sudan’s oil. It feels in many ways like Dubai; its wealth as a city stands in radical contrast to the
abject poverty of its people. I rode in the press shuttle behind the line of black Mercedes sedans in which Graham and close members of his entourage were traveling. The gray gates of the presidential palace swung open, and our caravan glided through. Inside the gates, it was quiet enough to hear the soles of Graham’s ostrich-skin boots kick along the marble steps. On the palace grounds, in 1885,
Graham’s hero, an evangelical Christian named Charles “Chinese” Gordon, was murdered by the jihadis of Muhammad Ahmad ibn-Sayyid Abdullah, a man who called himself the Mahdi, or “the divinely guided one.” He called himself an Islamic savior who would save his people from the infidel West. Now, more than a century later, the coattails of Graham’s blazer fluttered as he went to meet the man who claimed
to be the modern-day Mahdi. It was like watching history chase its own hundred-year tail; little had changed except for the names.

At the top of the stairs, a glittering hallway led to a meeting room, and at the room’s far end, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir—bald, freckled, and dressed in a sparkling white turban and jellabiya—grinned at Graham from an ornate, mustard-colored sofa. Bashir was
born poor in 1944 in Hosh Bannaga, a tiny village sixty miles northeast of Khartoum, but after almost two decades of military rule, he looked comfortable with the trappings of power. When the famous preacher’s entourage entered the room, Bashir chuckled indulgently like a knowing parent about to chide a petulant child.

“Many people will not believe you are actually here today,” he said in Arabic,
and an interpreter hovering over his shoulder translated. Peanuts and luscious dates covered in cellophane were laid out on porcelain plates around the room, but no one bothered to uncover the fruit. (Bashir’s government has spent more than $1 million a day waging war against the south, and to the west, in Darfur.)
¹

“We know you’re going to love Khartoum,” Bashir added. His men led Graham to
a chartreuse couch.

“I’ve flown above Khartoum, but I’ve never landed here,” Graham responded cheerily in English. Then his own interpreter, a Lebanese pastor, translated Graham’s not-so-veiled reference to his work in the enemy south.

“For many years, you’ve come to Sudan through the back door,” Bashir retorted, not waiting for the translation. (It was clear that he understood English even
though he chose not to speak it.) “Now we welcome you through the front. Many people didn’t understand us as we really are, but now, thank God, we want peace.”

“I want to be able to come back and go from one end of the country to the other, to preach, to evangelize,” Graham said.

“I want freedom of religion because I would like to convert you. We will try to make you a Muslim,” Bashir chuckled.

And so it went until Graham introduced his entourage, including Dr. Richard Furman, the head of World Medical Mission. Graham told Bashir that Furman was a surgeon who had operated many times at their southern hospital at Lui.

“Isn’t that the hospital we bombed?” Bashir asked pointedly in English, turning to an aide.

“Twice. And you missed,” Graham shot back.

Bashir’s aides ushered most of
Graham’s entourage—including his personal photographer and me—into the palace’s sweltering driveway, so the two men could speak privately. In the driveway, an aide removed the cellophane from a plate of nuts for us.

Graham told me afterward that while he was sitting on the president’s couch, he was struck with the idea of offering Bashir a “W–2004” campaign pin he had gotten on a visit to Karl
Rove’s office earlier in the year. Graham knew the White House had scheduled a call with Bashir for later in the day.
So he reached into his jacket pocket, fished out the pin, and said, “Mr. President, I understand you’ll be talking to my president later this afternoon. You might want to tell him you’re wearing his campaign pin.” Then, Graham told me, he offered the pin to Bashir, who reached
forward and took it.

Five years later, the International Criminal Court indicted Bashir for crimes against humanity. Bashir scoffed at his arrest warrant. Dancing before a crowd of ten thousand supporters, he called Americans “the true criminals,” claiming that Sudan would refuse to bend the knee as the United States tried to “colonize people anew and steal their resources.” One day the world
would try America on behalf of the Native Americans, the victims of the Hiroshima bombing and the Vietnam War. “One day we will take them to justice,” he said.
²

This is where my trek along the tenth parallel began: in a marble waiting room with Graham, an emissary of American faith-based foreign policy, and Bashir, the political face of militant Islam in Africa—on the very grounds where Graham’s
evangelical hero Charles “Chinese” Gordon had been beheaded by jihadis a century earlier. Graham and Bashir were perfectly aware that their meeting stood in for the broader encounter of Christianity and Islam along the tenth parallel.

This encounter, which had led to war over both religion and resources, was firmly grounded in a series of historical misadventures that began here in Sudan. Gordon’s
death was the culmination of an Islamic rebellion that would prove one of the bloodiest and most embarrassing massacres in the history of the British Empire, and it began as a fight not between Islam and the West but within Islam. In 1871, from Aba Island, on the White Nile near Khartoum, a charismatic Islamic preacher and a boat builder’s son, Muhammad Ahmad ibn-Sayyid Abdullah, preached against
the abuses of the Ottoman Empire—namely its horrendous taxes. Although the Turks and Egyptians were also Muslims, he called for their overthrow in the name of a purer Islam. In 1881, he declared himself the Muslim messiah—the divinely guided one,
al Mahdi al Muntazar
. Carving a space between his teeth to fulfill prophecy about the savior’s appearance, he claimed to be heaven’s hero sent to earth
to liberate true Muslims from the corrupt rule of the Ottomans and, soon after—as the British colonial presence in Sudan grew stronger with industrial advances—from the poisoned presence of the infidel West.

Under the Mahdi, anti-imperialism and religious purification were fused into a single empowering message and delivered by a magnetic messenger. British observers noted the devotion of his
jihadis, bowing like corn before a storm—an expression that used to describe Christian revivals. After the Islamic rebellion of Uthman dan Fodio, the Mahdi was the second Sufi reformer to strive to purify the African faith. Revival meant returning to the past, in the hope of reclaiming an idealized moment when the tenets of the faith were unsullied and true. It meant righting man’s relationship with
God so as to reform the society built upon this relationship. And, in time, it meant turning fury against the new infidel invader, the Christians of the West.

No jihadist was more ferocious than Sudan’s Mahdi, who branded even fellow Muslims who opposed him as apostates, and executed them. He kidnapped at least fifteen Western missionaries in the name of eradicating every kafir, or infidel. Then
he and his forces swept toward the last Ottoman stronghold, the city of Khartoum, where, by the 1880s, the British had established a bustling colonial outpost. The British, fearing the Mahdi’s advance, sent Franklin Graham’s icon, Major General Charles Gordon, to evacuate British occupants of the city. Gordon was an evangelical Christian and a hero of the Second Opium War, which forced China open
to foreign commerce. Having been one of the first missionaries to arrive in Sudan, he had a decade of experience in the territory, and he relished the role of Khartoum’s savior. Wearing a black turban and an unsheathed saber, he scowled for photographs, his muttonchops and walrus mustache clipped to perfection—every inch the romantic hero that Charlton Heston would portray in the 1966 film
Khartoum
.

And yet, like most evangelicals of his moment, Gordon was no unswerving imperialist. Instead, like David Livingstone, he was a staunch abolitionist. During the 1870s he had earned a reputation for battling slave raiders in the sultanate of Darfur. “I am quite averse to slavery, and even more so than most people,” he declared. “I show it by sacrificing myself in these lands which are no paradise
. . . I do what I think is pleasing to my God; as far as man goes, I need nothing from anyone.”
³
He served as governor-general until he grew ill, and returned briefly to England in 1880. His abolitionist policies, while effective, were a highly unpopular challenge to the Arab elite whom the Mahdi represented. Although they opposed the heavy taxes of the Ottomans, many made their fortunes slave
raiding among the black Africans south of the tenth parallel. Gordon’s
vocal stand against African slavery, and all who supported it, helped turn the fury of the Mahdi and his followers away from the Turks and onto the European Christian crusaders, whom Gordon embodied. When Gordon arrived in Khartoum to evacuate the city, he claimed the authority of a higher power, God, and spurned his superiors’
directives to get the British out of Khartoum. He decided, instead, to take a stand against the Mahdi. His prerogative was not just to defend his countrymen—he saw himself as a liberator, seeking to free both Muslims and Christians from the yoke of Islam, and slavery.