The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (21 page)

Almost all Somalis,
like most North Africans, are Sufis, and for most, religion is a personal, not a political affair. But the Islamic Courts Union was burning and banning the mild leafy stimulant
qat,
outlawing movies, and demanding that men wear beards and keep their hair short. In January 2005, al-Shabab raided the graves in an Italian colonial cemetery, dug up the bones of the “infidels,” and dumped the human
remains by the airport.

Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion, tacitly backed by the United States, aimed to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. Ethiopia fears, above all, having a hostile Muslim government next door because the Christian-led government is afraid of its own restive and growing Muslim population. (Of Ethiopia’s eighty-five million people, 50 percent are Coptic [called Orthodox] Christians,
10 percent are Protestants, and more than 30 percent are Muslims.) Ethiopia’s leaders have long viewed their country as “a Christian island in
a Muslim sea.” President Meles Zenawi told the U.S. senator Arlen Specter in August 2002 that the American-led “war on terrorism” was “something of a godsend.”
¹
The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was supposed to send thousands of Somali fighters and a handful
of suspected terrorists down the Somali coast, where U.S. and allied forces would kill or capture them. But the invasion backfired, and so did the Bush administration’s policies in Somalia, such as backing loathed warlords and launching Tomahawk missile strikes against civilians.
²
By the end of 2009, the fighting had left at least 8,500 people dead. According to the UN, 1.5 million had lost their
homes and 3.8 million were at risk of famine. America and its allies had created the very enemy they had sought to destroy.

Al Qaeda, like America, hoped to plant a friendly flag on this strategic battlefield—an effort waged as much by Al Qaeda’s aptly named media wing, As-Sahab (“Clouds”), as by actual militant boots on the ground. This ideological tug-of-war filled the vacuum the cold war had
left behind; as Al Qaeda cast it, the battle between communism and capitalism had given way to “the eternal struggle” between the godless and the faithful. As bin Laden has claimed in the past, “God is the real superpower.”
³
Now his lieutenant, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, called for Somalis “to be steadfast in this new Crusader battlefield [
sic
], which America, its allies, and the United Nations
are waging against Islam and Muslims.” He called for ambushes, the laying of mines, and “martyrdom-seeking campaigns”—endorsing suicide bombings and exhorting the “lions” of Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, and the rest of Muslim North Africa to send their brothers money to fight against America and “its slaves.”
⁴
(To insult the Ethiopians, he used
abd
—the word for “slave” and a Torrid Zone slur against blacks.
Months later, he would call President Barack Obama
abd-al-beit
, which translates to “house nigger.”)

And al-Shabab responded to this call: on September 20, 2009 (six days after the United States killed a thirty-year-old Kenyan Al Qaeda member, Saleh Ali Saleh al-Nabhan, in a helicopter air strike), the group issued a forty-eight-minute video entitled
Here I Am at Your Service, Oh Osama.
Amid
local scenes of Somali battle, the video replays George Bush’s September 16, 2001, comment that the war on terrorism is “a crusade”; then it cuts in Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, seated in front of a large, brightly lit crucifix. The video’s highly sophisticated visuals and screen grabs call for little translation.

_____

For Al Qaeda, Somalia, “the gateway to the Arabian peninsula,”
is a strategic fault line; it is a doorway marking the end of Dar-ul-Harb, the profane land of war, and the beginning of Dar-ul-Islam, the holy land of Islam. This worldview is partly a matter of geography, of the divide between Christians and Muslims in East Africa, created, once again, by century-old patterns of trade driven by weather.

The Horn of Africa is a dry, knobby jut on the continent’s
easternmost edge. It includes Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Ethiopia. The Horn stretches west into Sudan and south into Kenya. Here, the demographics of Christianity and Islam shift from the north-south divide that defines most of inland Africa, to a west-east split between highland Christians and lowland Muslims. More than two thousand years ago, Judaism arrived by way of a diaspora from Israel.
⁵
Christianity, then Islam, followed. Today, Africa’s Jews have largely disappeared. Much of Africa’s east coast is predominantly Muslim, with Christians living inland. Arab traders began traveling to the East African coast before Islam even existed, beginning around the year 500, when they dubbed the coast the land of
Zinj,
another Torrid Zone term for “black.” As Christianity spread inland with
European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a divide opened up between the Muslim coast and the Christian heartland here and in countries such as Kenya and Tanzania. In the years since Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in those countries, that divide has sharpened, and thousands of East African Muslims have been rounded up, interrogated, and detained in the name of counterterrorism.
Many Muslims living along the coast say that they feel like suspects—not citizens—in their own countries. This is part of a hardening of religious identity that has occurred along the coast over the past decade; it has led, once again, to the importance of religion surpassing that of nation.

By June 2007, nine million Somalis caught in the middle of this proxy battle were paying the price of
Ethiopia’s occupation. Those injured during the occupation and insurgency filled the sixty beds of the Medina hospital. Dried blood glued sand to the concrete floor—the ground gritty and sticky—and the wounded overflowed into the hospital’s hallway. On one gurney, a former teacher clutched the drainage tube protruding from his own stomach. Ethiopians had shot him, stolen his $1,000 in savings, and
left him in the street to die. An eighteen-year-old rape victim in
another bed had been admitted several days earlier bleeding from his rectum, violated by members of a rival clan so as to humiliate his own. In intensive care—a dank and fetid room with stained curtains half drawn over dusty windows—a woman waited for her sister to wake from a coma after being shot during a carjacking. “Under the
Islamic Courts Union,” she said, “it wasn’t possible for anyone to do this.” Meanwhile, in a crowded room next door, a woman named Rogia poked at the cast on her right knee, where an Ethiopian sniper had shot her. When I asked if she was sure the sniper had seen her, she snorted. “Of course he saw me. I saw him. The Ethiopians hate our religion.” Embarrassed, the hospital’s one doctor translated
for her: “Muslims wouldn’t do anything like this.”

Ashen and haggard, slumped behind the desk of his bullet-riddled office in a Mogadishu suburb, Ahmed Abdi Salem, forty-seven, a prominent businessman and a co-owner of HornAfrik FM radio, had had it with proxy wars. “For most people, this war has nothing to do with Somalia,” he said. “This is all about international issues: Islam versus Christianity,
the war on terrorism, Ethiopia versus Somalia.”

Abdi Salem had returned home to Somalia from Canada several years earlier. In the hallway, there were hopeful cartoon murals of reporters holding microphones: “We Are Responsible to the Public. We Must Treat Them Fairly” and “The Media Are Free” and “Be Aware the Harm That Media Can Inflict on Conflict.” The signs, which looked like children had
painted them, seemed tragic and forlorn; recent relics of one more failed attempt at building a functioning society. It seemed that conflict could inflict harm on the media, too, by the looks of Abdi Salem’s office. Shrapnel had made a moonscape of the plaster walls and shattered windows, the result of an insurgent firebombing months earlier. More recently, the Ethiopians had lobbed mortars at the
station and decimated the BBC satellite dish mounted on the roof. HornAfrik was under fire from both sides. No one wanted a free press. Ignorance served all parties better, Abdi Salem explained. So far that year, seven local journalists had been murdered. In 2007, 2008, and 2009, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mogadishu proved more perilous for local reporters than Baghdad. Salem
was losing colleagues every month. “There has been so much fighting in this city, people do not care anymore,” he said. “The level of hopelessness is worrisome.”

Fueled by this sense of hopelessness, Islam’s role grew larger in Somali life, Salem said. “This is a secular community, but the more they see themselves as marginalized, the more they turn to religion.” Plus, there were no other organizations
to turn to anymore, he added. “When I was growing up, you had other institutions, communities, youth clubs, schools. There are children of children here who haven’t gone to school. What will a father who never went to school teach his children? Religion comes in because it’s education for free and we all have it.”

This pattern began decades earlier, during the eighties, when Siad Barre, the cold
war dictator, used the machinery of a police state to spy on, interrogate, and oppress his people. Islam came to provide a toehold of truth and authenticity in lands ruled by dictatorial regimes such as Somalia’s—regimes based on silence, lies, and a false view of the world. When the Soviets fell, the West stepped in to back these same corrupt dictators. Muslims naturally turned against the West.
By sheer dint of its size, it seemed there was little way for America to win public opinion; the United States was either a foreign invader or a callous Judas.

In the mid-nineties, the United States and the United Nations left Somalia following the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle, when the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed’s militia shot down two American military helicopters and killed eighteen U.S.
Army Rangers. Although the UN and other Western aid groups had pulled out, Islamic aid groups had not. For many Somalis, this was proof that only Muslims helped Muslims. I’d heard this familiar story while on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the cold war ended and the Soviets left Afghanistan, America pulled out too, ending its alliance with the Mujahideen who had opposed the
Soviet occupation. There, as here, Islam seemed the only solution, and the West’s departure was seen as abandonment.

“Because of Black Hawk Down, because eighteen boys were killed here, America thinks that we are their enemies,” Abdi Salem said, considering his brutalized office walls. He was one of the few who could still leave Somalia if he chose. But he did not, and that decision seemed to
hang around his neck, a yoke stooping him slightly. He took me up to the roof to see the remnants of the BBC’s satellite dish, its bowl crushed and tipped over, its legs in the air, and its shell hollow like a dead bug’s carapace.

Abdi Salem looked out over the city: cheerful sun-bleached pastel houses dozing against a tropical sea. Not a soul was visible. It could have been siesta on the coast
of Spain, but it was siesta in Somalia. There was
nothing to suggest that by night skeletal young fighters would emerge from hiding to assassinate civil leaders or target media outlets such as Abdi Salem’s. “A young generation with no hope; religion gives them a sense of purpose,” he said. So did having an enemy. “America’s against us, they’re infidels,” he mimicked the young militants. His voice
died away. They were responsible for their actions, but the system meant to raise them into responsibility was also broken. “You had every reason to see this was happening,” he said.

“The only way out is to come up with a system that gives people a sense of hope—schools, a government essentially.” Weeks later, Abdi Salem’s business partner and his star reporter were assassinated. By the time
I returned to the city a year later, in 2008, Abdi Salem had become, for a moment, Somalia’s deputy prime minister—the one job more hazardous than that of a reporter or an insurgent.

Later that afternoon, I met an insurgent commander at a deserted compound in the once-wealthy neighborhood called K4, four kilometers from the sea. Until Somalia descended into the chaos of civil war in 1991, the
vast, once-verdant compounds of K4 housed an international community of Russians, Americans, Chinese, and wealthy Somalis. Now refugees had crept into the blasted homes, hospitals, and university buildings; two widows were squatting in what was left of the villa that had been the American embassy.

I was waiting among the wild honeysuckle vines on one abandoned villa’s veranda when the compound’s
iron gate swung open and two men slunk in, their faces mummified in rags. As they passed the cracked, net-less tennis court, one pulled the cloth from his face, revealing skin that clung to his skull like a wet washcloth. This was Ahmed Mohammed Hashim, a twenty-five-year-old insurgent commander; his companion was his bodyguard. We settled beneath the courtyard’s bower, with Dini, the interpreter
and assistant manager of the Peace Hotel, where I was staying. I asked Hashim who he took his enemies to be. “Ethiopia is our first enemy,” he began. “Right now they go into our mosques and shit and pee there.” Second was the Somali government, which Ethiopia backed, “because it is illegitimate.” And third: “America. America is the father of our enemy. America is using the Ethiopians to take over
our country and we are against them.”

Hashim was the product of an older war. He was nine when Siad Barre fell from power in 1991, and the country descended into the chaos of civil war among warlords. One day during the war, while Hashim was at school, a mortar ripped through his family’s clay house. His mother and brother were killed instantly. (His father, a soldier, was already dead.) In hindsight,
he had come to believe that the war was punishment for their being bad Muslims; as he put it, “We had forgotten our religion.” After that, Hashim spent much of his time in mosques, which became safe havens for those trying to escape the violence in the streets—a matter of protection, as well as devotion. Religious rituals, too, grew more popular: people performed ablutions before leaving
the house each day so as to die, if they died, in a state of grace. For Hashim, this war was both global and local. Somalia’s shared religion was the practical, local solution to transcend the rivalries among powerful families that were ruining his country.