The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (18 page)

Copeland died in 1991, and the definitive truth as to his role in the United States’ early entreaties to militant Islamists died with him. However, Copeland’s son Miles Axe Copeland III told me more of his father’s story. (He is a music executive who started
I.R.S. Records, and has managed bands, including his brother Stewart’s band, The Police.) As a teenager,
Miles Copeland III traveled to Egypt in the fifties with his father, tagging along at meetings with Nasser and other leaders. His father believed that religion could be a strategic asset in controlling other nations. America could further its interests by playing to the irrational devotion
of foreign powers. “My father was always interested in manipulating religious conviction. It was part of what he liked to call his bag of dirty tricks,” his son said. He recalled his father as an amoral man who saw morality as a perversion—an obscuring of the cold, hard facts of human behavior—and religion as an ideal cold war weapon, which enabled spies to exploit believers’ weakness and naïveté.

The author Robert Baer, who served with Copeland while working at the CIA, never heard Copeland speak of a search for a Muslim Billy Graham. “It’s absolutely possible that he could have this idea; it is right up Copeland’s alley,” he told me, “but spooks are always talking about things they never do, and war is ninety percent myth.”

Much has been written about the CIA’s next move: after the Soviets
invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the agency, along with the Saudis, decided to back a group of Islamic holy warriors, the Mujahideen, against the Soviets, channeling money to them through Pakistan’s intelligence service. One of those holy warriors, Osama bin Laden, would prove that Copeland’s dream of tugging the strings behind a Muslim Billy Graham could backfire incalculably.

In 1965, when Sayyid
Qutb was on trial in Egypt for attempting to overthrow Nasser’s government, the acerbic and quick-witted Hassan al-Turabi took the Brotherhood’s helm in neighboring Sudan, with no Nasser to outlaw the organization, the Muslim Brotherhood thrived. He then married Wisal al-Mahdi—the Mahdi’s great-granddaughter—thus securing his connection to one of Sudan’s most powerful families, and one with impeccable
religious credentials. His ideas about Islam served as the basis for the nascent Sudanese state and its vision of “civilizing Africa.” For the next four decades, he would connive to head the militant Islamist movement in Africa, becoming, in the nineties, the “pope of terrorism.”
⁸

Like any other political ideology, Islam’s role in the Sudanese state was not foreordained. After independence in
1956, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of a number of players—Communist, nationalist, Islamist—all bidding to determine what political shape the new state would take. With
the platform that Islam should build the new nation, Hassan al-Turabi rose above them all, gaining influence both politically and theologically, until, in 1983, the military dictator Jaafar Mohammad Nimeiri—a former socialist
conveniently turned Islamist—began to fear al-Turabi’s political reach. Although the two were ostensibly allies, Nimeiri had to show his religious authority to secure his grip on power. So in order to outdevout al-Turabi, he declared his brand of Islamic law the law of the land. His chosen form of Sharia proved brutal for Muslims and Christians. For arbitrary crimes—and to perpetuate a state of fear—“Courts
of Prompt Justice” ordered cross-amputations, such as cutting off a hand and an opposite foot, and other extreme punishments sanctioned by the Mahdi a century earlier. Apostasy, or leaving Islam, was punishable by death.

In Sudan’s most infamous case of apostasy and sedition, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a Sufi mystic and powerful Muslim reformer, went on trial for the last time in 1985. Taha was the
leader of a small but influential movement called the Republican Brothers, whose progressive theology threatened the rigid dogma that was shaping Sudan’s political future. Nimeiri, acting on al-Turabi’s instructions (or so he later claimed), ordered Taha hanged in prison. A helicopter spirited his body away immediately. “Up to this day no one knows his burial place,” Abdullahi An-Na’im, Taha’s
most influential student and one of Sudan’s leading religious reformers, told me.

Taha’s crime was distributing a Christmas Day pamphlet entitled “Either This or the Flood.” In it, he made the case that Islamic law could never be applied justly in Sudan’s plural society, because Christians were
dhimmi—
non-Muslims living under Islamic law—and so were second-class citizens by definition. This was
in line with his broader contention (set out in his revolutionary book
A Second Coming of Islam
) that Islamic law was in dire need of reinterpretation. Taha highlighted the tension between two sets of verses in the Quran. First, there were those supposedly revealed to Mohammed in his forties and early fifties in his hometown of Mecca, in which he calls himself simply a “warner,” and preaches to
a beleaguered minority of believers. Second, there were those revealed later in the so-called Prophet’s city, Medina, where Mohammed acted as a warrior statesman. The Meccan verses contain a universal prophetic message about humanity and Judgment Day. The Medinan verses are more legalistic and address the codes and conflicts of a new Muslim state.

Taha believed that the time had come for modern
Muslims to move away from the strictures of the Medinan verses and return to the earlier, more inclusive Meccan verses. In his interpretation, the Meccan verses represented an egalitarian message to all of humankind, regardless of sex, race, or religion.

Many scholars, including Hassan al-Turabi, saw this argument as heretical, a challenge to the infallibility of God’s message as given to Mohammed.
Some analysts hold that al-Turabi—Sudan’s most senior religious scholar at the time—signed Taha’s death warrant. Others, including Abdullahi An-Na’im, think this is unlikely, given the tensions at the time between President Nimeiri and al-Turabi, and conclude that the latter had little to do with the actual execution. Either way, al-Turabi and the hard-line machine of the state benefited from
the silencing of one of their most potent critics.

Sudan’s recent history is littered with such missed opportunities—moments at which a Khartoum-based cabal destroyed efforts at reform from the periphery, striking down those who had risen to challenge centralized power in the name of Islam, Christianity, or any other means of self-determination. In 1989, backed by Hassan al-Turabi, Hassan Omar
al-Bashir, then a general stationed along the north-south border, seized executive power through a military coup. Shortly after, in the name of purifying Sudan and advancing Islam, Bashir declared a jihad against the Christian and non-Muslim south. By unifying the north under the banner of religion, and in a war against the south, Bashir, under al-Turabi’s direction, set the north at common purpose
and made a bid for the country’s oil in the name of Islam—murdering thousands with al-Turabi standing by.

Al-Turabi is known as a tyrannical talker, and that night in December 2003 he wanted to hold forth on his new enemy, Bashir, and how foolish America would be to believe a word the president said. “This current government cannot be trusted,” he snapped. He was bitter and eager to deflect blame
for decades of organized campaigns of rape, murder, and scorched villages away from his former militant platform and onto the government. “I am indebted to Human Rights Watch for getting me out of prison,” he said, but his professed fondness for America and its human rights groups eroded as he spoke about the civil war. He had only contempt
for the backward, non-Muslim south, and for the American
evangelicals who, in calling for an end to the civil war, envisioned a fictitious peace that would never arrive.

“The people are tired of war—they want anything called peace, even if it’s a dream,” he said. But in assessing the popular mood, al-Turabi would be proven wrong once again—as he had been wrong about building a successful militant Islamic state in Africa, wrong in offering Osama bin
Laden safe haven as a way to strengthen Sudan, wrong in publicly backing Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War in the hope of garnering support in the Arab world. And in point of fact, a peace—if a wobbly one—did arrive in the form of a 2005 deal between north and south.

For al-Turabi, the steady stream of American evangelical leaders visiting Khartoum at Bashir’s behest was evidence of a
historical cycle repeating itself. One hundred years ago, the colonialists took Africa in the name of Christianity. Nowadays, with neocolonial America at war with the world’s Muslims, as he saw it, men like Graham and Bush were using religion to mask their desire for conquest.

“The American Right seems to have inherited the worst of ‘The White Man’s Burden,’” al-Turabi declared, pausing to be
sure I had caught the allusion to Kipling, who coined the phrase in 1899 at the apogee of the British Empire’s power, and a year after the United States had bought the Philippines from the Spanish for $20 million. By this he was calling attention to what he saw as the Christian right’s moral imperialism in American foreign policy, its role in a war against Muslims, and a new crusade for oil. Kipling’s
poem begins:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
⁹

Although no one told Franklin Graham, many of Sudan’s Muslims objected to his visit following his “wicked and evil” comments.
While the comments had ricocheted around the Arab-language press, criticism of Graham’s visit did not. There is virtually no press freedom in Sudan, and the Bashir government had threatened the handful of independent papers, saying that if they reported negatively about Graham’s visit, they would be shut down. Apparently not knowing this, Graham held a press conference at his guesthouse in Khartoum,
and Ni’ma al-Baghir, a northern Sudanese Reuters reporter in her late twenties, raised her hand.

“You say that you are here to promote religious tolerance and coexistence between the faiths,” she began, “but bearing in mind your documented views on Islam and your vehement criticism of it, do you not think that your visit to Sudan at such a sensitive time is miscalculated and is liable to inflame
matters?” The room was silent. “I just want to be really clear about this,” Graham said, fixing al-Baghir with his inscrutable smile, “I was
asked
to come to Sudan. Dr. Mustafa Ismail [the minister of foreign affairs] called
me
up and asked
me
to come and I was worried that if I refused to come it would be seen as me not supporting the peace process. So I prayed to Jesus and decided that I should
come.”

After the conference, as the rest of the reporters filed out of the guesthouse, al-Baghir scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper for me, and several days later I called her. With her elder brother at the wheel of a Land Rover, she picked me up and we drove around the colonial city listening to Stevie Wonder. “You have this person blundering in, believing that he can use the might
of Jesus and the might of the American administration to protect something he doesn’t even understand,” she said. Her question had been a deliberately pointed one: her father was the editor of
one of Sudan’s independent newspapers,
Al Khartoum;
before Graham’s arrival, he had written an editorial about the infamous evangelist, entitled “We Do Not Believe What You Believe,” and the government had
threatened to shut down the paper, as it had many times in the past.

Khartoum lies within the 10/40 Window, but proselytizing to Muslims here is strictly illegal, and Christians caught doing so can be arrested—an issue Graham had raised with President Bashir. Sometimes entering closed countries requires an undercover mission, or “creative access.” Teaching, nursing, running fabric mills—some
missionaries adopt these or other legal businesses in order to share the Gospel. I asked al-Baghir if she knew of any such business; she thought for a minute. “The aerobics studio,” she said.

The next day she took me to a wealthy old colonial district of Khartoum. The homes were set back from the streets and hidden by the neem trees’ feathery leaves. Inside a one-story bungalow, a Sudanese woman
stood behind a wood-paneled reception desk on which a Christmas tree twinkled with tiny colored lights. A schedule for aerobics (4:30–5:30 p.m.) and a kickboxing class, Tae-bo (6:00–7:30 p.m.), sat on the desk. When I asked her if I could speak to the Americans who owned the place, she looked at me nervously and picked up the phone.

I poked around their computer room while we waited. Al-Baghir,
who had recently returned from studying finance at the London School of Economics, sat outside on a café’s brick terrace hidden from the street by eight-foot-high walls. The café, in the same building as the aerobics studio, did not allow men, which meant that the women could order pizza and smoke cigarettes there without being bothered or scolded by the brothers or male cousins normally obliged
to escort them in public at night. Al-Baghir and her friends chatted about their courses and blew smoke rings into the air.

The dust was constant here, especially in the summer, when its heavy gusts stung like fiberglass splinters. Sudan lies within the catastrophe belt, where the dry air dropping from the northern hemisphere and the wet air rising from the equatorial south collide. Khartoum,
a desert city, lies in Africa’s arid north, where the desert is advancing. On the terrace, a late fall breeze blew in from the barren north and drew the smoke rings skyward through red dust.

At last a woman approached me—a large-boned and harried woman, an American, her high auburn ponytail swinging in synch with her no-nonsense
gait.
¹
She had two rambunctious redheaded boys, of four and five,
in tow. When I told her I was an American writer, she blanched and said that she could not speak to me without her husband there.