The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (23 page)

“I’m ready to kick the militia’s asses,” Dr.
Deqo Waqaf said to me. She was Abdi’s daughter, a Somali American in her thirties. She had come from Atlanta to help run the camp’s hospital for women. From the life in her eyes, framed by red Prada eyeglasses, I could tell that she had not been here for more than a few months; she still seemed indignant, unwilling to believe she was stuck. She was desperate to talk about America, her home, as if
she feared she had only imagined it. Dr. Abdi came to sit with us. She peeled back her head scarf to reveal a scar on her skull just above her forehead. In the past year, she had battled brain cancer, she told me, laughing at the unlikely list of misfortunes she had survived. That laugh, too, was a celebration that she was still alive. Returning from treatment in the Netherlands, she summoned her
daughter to help, and though Dr. Waqaf wanted desperately to go back to Georgia, her mother needed her too badly, and so she had stayed.

“I am stuck,” Dr. Waqaf said. She was scared. During her years in America, she told me, Somalia had changed profoundly. Recently, al-Shabab had stopped her sister while she was running an errand in town because her face was not covered with a veil. The mother
and her daughters waited in dread for the Islamists to decide that women could not run a refugee camp, or a hospital, because they considered such powerful female roles “un-Islamic.”

“Mogadishu is way more religious,” Dr. Waqaf said. She saw this especially in the growing presence of religious NGOs. Over the past decade, as the UN and other aid agencies moved to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi,
and the conflict in Somalia dropped out of the Western headlines, Somalis had been left to fend for themselves. Religious NGOs—some from Saudi Arabia—stepped in. They now did most of the aid work, and used their funds to spread a more conservative, “Arabized” Islam. Some Saudi
NGOs, for example, gave women fifty dollars to wear traditional Islamic clothing. This was not unique to Somalia; in many
conflict zones with significant numbers of Muslims—Chechnya, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Central Asia—aid workers brought religious revival along with bandages and high-protein biscuits, attempting to plant a more conservative strain of Islam while offering humanitarian aid. In Somalia, most doctors would not even tell patients that they had HIV, Dr. Waqaf said, because the diagnosis carried such
a stigma. This shocked her, and she told the doctors so.

“Don’t use your Western mentality here,” they responded. “They’ll kill you.” This was not paranoia. Insurgents killed thirty-five aid workers in 2008. All of the international relief workers had fled. By 2010, the insurgents controlled the Afgooye Road and Dr. Hawa’s camp was cut off from the outside world.

As in most wars, women bore
the brunt of this conflict, mother and daughter explained. Partly as a result of rapes by militias, but also due to the new religious conservatism, women could not move as freely as they had in the past. As in Afghanistan under the Taliban, women could no longer travel alone. This new step backward for women scared Dr. Waqaf, and she was seeing an unusually high number of miscarriages; the reason,
she said, was that some pregnant women were loath to seek medical care. Many women told her they’d stayed away from the doctor because the militias did not want women in the streets—or anywhere outside the home. This was not the Islam that Dr. Waqaf had grown up with. “The Prophet’s wives were educated,” she said. Until there was a state, things would get worse, her mother said. She retied her scarf
over her surgical scar and got ready to go back to the operating room. “How many millions are being wasted on Somalia in other countries?” she asked. “Aid is a business.”

The next afternoon I came across the aftermath of a food riot. A crowd had thrown stones at a man driving a sugar truck, striking him in the head and causing him to crash the truck. With cups and sacks and buckets, the looters
took what they could before the “police” showed up. Many people were no longer eating every day, but the mayor continued with his plan to beautify the shattered city. He didn’t begin with schools or feeding centers or hospitals, but with the central bank, which he painted robin’s egg blue.

Most of the spoilers, has-beens, and hangers-on who were controlling Somalia’s proxy war
were not in Somalia; they were holed up nearby, in the mile-and-a-half-high, modernist city Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Asmara’s boulevards are lined with airy Bauhaus villas, which Benito Mussolini built in the 1920s and ’30s when he attempted to establish an African empire here. Now all but forgotten, Asmara has become a sarcophagal city, a legacy of empire’s febrile dreams. In one of those
blunt and boxy Fascist-era villas, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the militant commander whom the United States named as a wanted man on November 7, 2001, for his connections to Al Qaeda, was living in open hiding. I paid him an unexpected visit in April 2008.

That summer it was practically impossible for an American citizen to procure a visa to Eritrea. The State Department was threatening to name
Eritrea as a state sponsor of terrorism for hosting Sheikh Aweys, and when I went to the consulate in neighboring Kenya, the Eritrean consul general looked at my U.S. passport and then at me.
“You
cannot apply,” he said, apologizing, and then offering me an espresso.

So I turned to a fellow American citizen living in Asmara: Hussein Farah Aideed, the son of the notorious warlord Mohammed Farah
Aideed, whose militia had shot down the two American Black Hawk helicopters in 1993. The younger Aideed, forty-two, belonged to a group called the Alliance for the Restoration of Somalia, which opposed the ongoing Ethiopian occupation. He was living in Asmara on the Eritrean government’s dime, plotting to kick Ethiopia out of Somalia. But the alliance was coming apart at the very moment I arrived
in Asmara. One faction, led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was becoming more moderate and willing to negotiate with the United States over Somalia’s future. Soon he would become president, and so was distancing himself from hard-liners by moving
to Djibouti. The other faction, led by Aideed’s cousin, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, refused to negotiate with America, and it was stuck in Asmara. By accident,
not conviction, Aideed had ended up as a part of the less-powerful group in Asmara. He hoped that an American reporter like me might bring him much-needed recognition, so he procured me a visa with a few phone calls to high places.

Eritrea and Ethiopia, governed by cousins, loathe each other. They are the Hatfields and McCoys of East Africa. Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia only in
1993; the two are still fighting over their borders. Here, national borders
do
matter, and matter greatly. To undermine Ethiopia, Eritrea was willing to pay for hotel rooms and a breakfast buffet for the Somali opposition indefinitely. This included Aideed, a complicated figure whose mixed-up identity as a Somali, a political refugee, an American citizen, a U.S. Marine, a warlord, and, briefly,
in name, Somalia’s president, made him a toothy, shambling objective correlative for the maddening chaos of Somalia.

More as a court jester than as a king, Hussein Aideed was being dragged through history. He was sixteen when his father was caught scheming to topple Siad Barre’s government and thrown into a Somali prison. Shortly after, Hussein Aideed and his family fled to Washington, D.C.,
as political refugees. They were granted U.S. citizenship and moved from D.C. to West Covina, California, east of Los Angeles, where Hussein Aideed attended both high school and Glendora Community College, learned to cha-cha, and became proficient in martial arts. During high school, he joined the Marine Reserves and hosted weekend barbecues for his fellow soldiers. He was working as a civil engineer
at West Covina’s City Hall in 1990 when he was shipped out to Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. He spent 257 days there, and after the U.S.-led coalition’s victory in Kuwait, Hussein went back to his desk job at City Hall. In August 1992 he said he was tapped to become a Marine interpreter in Mogadishu. The once-picturesque tourist town, with glittering piazzas and al fresco bars, lay in ruins
as a result of the civil war his father was then fighting for control of the city against an archrival, another clan-leader-cum-businessman-cum-warlord named Ali Mahdi Mohamed. When relations soured between the United States and Mohammed Farah Aideed, the Marines sent Hussein back to West Covina. He returned to his engineering job at City Hall, while his father masterminded a battle against America
in Mogadishu’s streets. It was not easy
to have the last name Aideed, and in his bulky frame, two rival identities—embattled Somali and U.S. Marine—squeezed in next to each other, like hostile strangers on the same subway train. “It was like
Apocalypse Now,”
Aideed told me of that dark time when I finally met him in Asmara. In 1995, he returned to Somalia to marry a Somali. “I came back just to
say hello and get a blessing from my father,” he said. But seven months later his father was assassinated, and Hussein took over the leadership of part of the clan, and even, briefly, the title of president—for what it was worth.

The nature of power had changed in Somalia. Blood still mattered, but the cold war era of African big men was over. Without the funding from the Soviet Union and the
United States, would-be leaders were searching for new claims to power. Now for the first time in history, religious authority was the most important credential for leadership. Even Aideed, the Marine and cha-cha aficionado, was looking to shore up his religious credentials. In the ongoing scramble for power, Islamic authority was de rigueur.

When we met on a bracing spring day in Asmara, Aideed
wanted to take me on a walking tour of the seemingly deserted city of glass. At nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, the city’s thin, dry air lifted the hem of his flowing white robe. He lumbered down the staircase of the enormous Italianate Great Mosque, another of Mussolini’s projects, built in the hope of winning Muslim approval for his African empire.

Aideed, like most devout Sufis,
prayed five times a day. He’d come late to Islam, and was taking online classes with a Sufi study group called the Straight Path. The downloaded lessons were part of a larger, progressive mystical Islamic awakening, one more entry in the global religious marketplace. Aideed believed that promoting Sufism, with its tolerance and mysticism, would help to safeguard the continent against Sunni Arab
extremism, which seemed to be gaining ground in war-torn Somalia. These radicalized newcomers disdained Sufi practices. And blood meant nothing to them. “They say you Muslims are not Muslims,” Aideed said. Who were
they
to claim what true Islam was?

From the mosque, Aideed and I forged steeply uphill along Haile Mariam Mammo Street. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched elegant old men in hand-tailored
suits sip espresso at open-air cafés. (At a glance, the
scene seemed idyllic, yet the espresso was probably all the men would consume that day.)

And President Isaias Afwerki, a rebel hero turned tyrant, kept his shipping-container prisons far away from the boulevards. In those prisons, Afwerki routinely imprisoned evangelicals, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and some Muslims, calling all
of their practices a threat to religious stability in a country nearly evenly balanced between Christianity and Islam. (Really, he feared any religion’s ability to mobilize against him.) In Eritrea, reliable religious statistics are impossible to obtain, since the state officially recognizes only four faiths: Islam, Coptic (Orthodox) Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and traditional (not evangelical)
Protestant sects. All other forms of worship are illegal. Religious repression is so virulent in Eritrea that in September 2005, the Bush administration took the first-ever action under the International Religious Freedom Act and imposed new sanctions against military aid to Eritrea.

At the top of the hill, on Harnet Avenue, we could see the dark brick spire of the Orthodox Cathedral (another
gift of Mussolini’s). Heading toward the cathedral, we passed a white-tiled façade inlaid with a large Star of David, its padlocked gates painted UN blue. It was a synagogue, constructed in 1905 and still maintained by sixty-two-year-old Samuel Cohen, an Asmara native and the youngest of Eritrea’s few surviving Jews. This community had swelled to five hundred during the 1950s, with Jews coming from
as far as Sudan and Yemen. Although the Greek-style façade had been recently scrubbed, Cohen was nowhere to be found. The tended-to tiles were still a reminder that despite the current government’s oppression, the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in that order—had existed peaceably for more than a thousand years in the Horn of Africa. In the Bible’s first Book of Kings,
this relationship begins with Solomon, the ancient king of Israel, and the queen of Sheba, Ethiopia, as the Greeks called the Land of the Blacks. (The Quran also tells a similar story, in 27:22.) In the biblical version, from her African kingdom that stretched into Yemen, Sheba hears of Solomon’s devotion to God. Skeptical and curious about his faith, she loads her camels with spices, “and very much
gold, and precious stones,” and heads north for Jerusalem to meet King Solomon and “to prove him with hard questions.”

And when the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants,
the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cupbearers, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the LORD, there
was no more spirit in her. Then she said to the king: “It was a true report which I heard in mine own land about your words and your wisdom” [1 Kings 10:4–6].

The queen of Sheba converted to Judaism on the spot, which meant that her subjects did, too. Although the Bible does not mention any romantic relationship between them, Ethiopian tradition holds that Solomon fell in love with the virgin
queen on sight, and tricked her into sleeping with him. She gave birth to a son, Menelik, and sent him to Solomon for his education. Menelik I became the king of Axum in today’s Ethiopia. For hundreds of years, his Jewish descendants worshipped the God of Israel—until, in the fourth century, a slave named Frumentius of Tyre (Lebanon) converted the king, and much of his kingdom, to Christianity.