The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (28 page)

We talked about God, instead of what had happened that day. “I pray more now,” she said. “I pray for my friends whom I’ve lost. I pray so the perpetrators get arrested. It was all because of God I survived, not because of me.”

On some Christian blogs and on YouTube, Noviana Malewa had become a heroine: an earnest Christian girl with a round, scarred face and a clear, child’s voice
talking about her faith made stronger by suffering, and about persecution by Muslims. The story came to support the notion that Muslims were persecuting Christians. After the attack, Noviana received letters from evangelical Christians worldwide that reflected this. “Hello Noviana I am 20 years old. Jesus loves you so much. I love you too! I will pray for you!” They sent her Bible verses, including
one from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians, written from prison: “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound.” All of the letters drew parallels between the suffering of the early Christians and what Noviana had endured. One person had sent her the pink rubber bracelet she was now wearing. The gift reminded me of the shoe boxes from the Reverend Franklin Graham’s Operation
Christmas Child in Sudan—gifts intended to reach people with the Gospel at vulnerable moments. They made me uncomfortable; to me, they seemed less about supporting Noviana than about promoting the sender’s worldview. But they had worked. In the midst of her suffering, Noviana had surrendered her life to Christ and been born again. She now believed that we were living in End Times, and that the
attack against her signaled the coming of the end of the world. She cast back in her memory for warnings or threats she had missed. Once, before the attack, she said, she had passed a woman’s house on the way to school and had heard the woman joking with her grandson outside their house, teasing the girls about murdering them. This casual threat, she now believed, was a hint, a forewarning.

“The conflict has a huge effect on children,” Rinaldy Damanik, the Protestant pastor, said when I found him at home the next morning. Damanik was elected president of the Christian Church of Central Sulawesi while in prison for two years, charged with arms possession during the religious violence. During the crisis, Damanik had become a reluctant leader, he explained. In fact, he never wanted to be
a pastor; he wanted to be a doctor, but had twice failed his medical exams. He came from northern Sumatra and belonged to one of the country’s largest ethnic groups, the Batak. As a pastor, he was also essentially a missionary among these people.

Since the fighting, the Christians had tried art therapy, offering kids pen and paper and having them draw whatever they wanted. “They drew
war, people
with crosses attacking mosques,” he said. In clashes, the children witnessed Muslims yelling,
“Allahu Akhbar!”
while the Christians yelled,
“Alleluia!”
Now, the community was self-segregating. “Even now, if you ask a child why he moved up here to Tentena, he’ll say he was attacked. Ask by whom, he’ll say Muslims,” he said. To an outsider, Christians and Muslims looked exactly the same. Their ethnicities
were different in that the Christians came from inland indigenous peoples and the Muslims had lived along the coasts often visited by traders. But it was really deliberate choices in their appearance—clothing sometimes, and sparse beards on Muslim men—that told them apart to an outside observer like me. The pronounced differences in dress were relatively new, one more aspect of the revivals
in both faiths that had made believers increasingly conscious of who they appeared to be.

“People seem to get used to the conflict, and that’s dangerous,” Damanik said. Here in Tentena, the Christians were competing day to day with Muslims over fertile forestland for ebony and cacao. Yet simultaneously, the two struggled over which worldview and way of life would dominate in Poso. This was both
a spiritual and a material conflict, and one storyline really couldn’t be separated from the other. During the fighting, a little anonymous book circulated among the Christians of Tentena that retold the Bible story of David and Goliath to argue that the Christians were duty-bound to fight against the oppressive Muslim population. These days, there was no way to separate the practical tensions
from the ideological ones. As one group grew more violent, the other responded in kind. They were creating each other.

Local people had accused Damanik of a curious charge: of “internationalizing” the conflict—self-consciously employing globalization as a means of defense. He had contacted Western churches and tried to gain their attention and support with stories of Christian persecution. He
didn’t deny it. This was a battle fought locally and exploited globally, he explained. When Damanik saw that the Muslims were bringing in fighters such as Ibnu Ahmad—and funds—from outside, through a worldwide Christian network he alerted churches about the threat against Sulawesi’s Christians by their Muslim neighbors. If the Muslims could sound the warning and get outside help, then the Christians
could, too.

Soon this complex, small-scale conflict became part of the larger narrative of a global clash between Christianity and Islam, and Damanik knew he was partly responsible for this escalation. When the Western
churches responded to his call, they retold his story in terms of a jihad against Christians, which he admitted was only part of the story.

“I’d say, wait a minute, hold, but
since they have their own international network, they immediately spread the word to the world,” he explained. This was a marked difference between mainline Protestant churches like his, and the more conservative evangelical and fundamentalist ones, he said. “The difference between me and the evangelicals is that I don’t hate Muslims, and they see nothing good in them.” In some ways, he seemed to
be the mirror image of Hunter down on the coast—welcoming outside help, only to learn that help came with an agenda.

Damanik’s concern about Christian militancy could have been convenient hindsight, but others told me that jail had sincerely changed the minister. He had been imprisoned with Ibnu Ahmad’s bosses, the founders of Jemaah Islamiyah, and in the close cells, the leaders on both sides
of this violent revival passed the time discussing religion. But JI’s kind of Islam—the violent kind—came from outside, not from this island, he said. These outsiders with their funny seventh-century short pajama pants and strict ideas were creating problems for local Muslims who did not like being forced to change their ways. From the hills, Damanik explained, he was watching cracks appear in the
Islamic community below.

Before we left, Loebis told Damanik that she belonged to the same ethnic group as he—Batak. It has a checkered history with Christian missionaries. In 1834, the Dutch colonialists assigned American Baptist missionaries to the Batak to block Islam’s spread among them. The Baptists refused to learn the local language, and were generally disliked for their haughty ways.
The Batak turned against the missionaries and, according to locals, ate them.
³

Until the eighteenth century, the term
trade winds
had little to do with commerce; the phrase simply meant “to blow trade,” which meant to move steadily in the same direction. The trade winds consistently blew toward the equator from both the northern and southern hemispheres, making
it possible for early explorers and merchants to travel vast distances on predictable winds. These winds carried first Muslim, then Christian explorers southeast over the Indian Ocean to Torrid Zone islands more than five hundred years ago. In a sense, the trade winds blew Christianity and Islam together. For more than five centuries in Southeast Asia, Christians and Muslims have gone through periods
of peaceful coexistence and moments of intense competition and conflict, which have usually begun as a scramble for economic power in a political vacuum. This pattern began with the sixteenth-century competition over the nutmeg and cloves of the spice trade.

Islam and Christianity, like Hinduism and Buddhism before them, arrived in Southeast Asia over water. All these religions traveled under
the battered sails of traders and missionaries from Yemen, China, India, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. Even before Islam arrived, the archipelago was part of a trade network that linked the Mediterranean to China, East Africa, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Yemeni traders were traveling through these islands on their way to China by 900. By then, Indonesia’s main island, Java, was under
Hindu rule. Indonesia did not adopt Islam until the thirteenth century, and contrary to popular history, it was Muslims from India—not from the Arabian Peninsula—who led most of the trade that drove the religion into new territories. According to the Quran, being a trader is a holy profession, in part because trade was seen by the Prophet as one of the most effective and egalitarian ways to
spread
the new faith: “You who believe, do not wrongfully consume each other’s wealth but trade by mutual consent” (Quran, Women 4:29).

In Indonesia, as across North Africa, intermarriage, not armed conflict, advanced the geographic borders of the Muslim world. Polygamy played a role. Muslim sailors, who traveled without their wives, married local women when they reached the islands of Southeast Asia.
Although these wives took Islamic names, they were typically only nominal converts; their children, however, were Muslims from birth. By the end of the thirteenth century—as Marco Polo noted in his Southeast Asia journals while returning to Venice from China in 1292—much of today’s Indonesia had adopted Islam. Linked to a wide world of culture and trade through Arabic, the language of Islam, Southeast
Asia flourished intellectually and economically. At the same time, local people blended their existing practices of Buddhism and Hinduism with Islam, so that Islam in Indonesia took on a colorful array of expressions, while following the core tenets of the faith.

The bustling ports of Southeast Asia welcomed a host of international traders. Indian dhows jostled for moorings among Chinese junks
and, eventually, the galleons of the Portuguese, which carried Christianity to the islands in the sixteenth century. Although the crusades had ended two hundred years earlier, Spanish and Portuguese explorers still stitched crosses to their sails to display their vociferous opposition to Islam. As in East Africa, they cast their mission in terms of their search for the fabled Christian king Prester
John. Somewhere among the savages of the Torrid Zone, the legend went, there was a lone and isolated Christian kingdom, and it became a Portuguese mission to find it. In the meantime, the Portuguese wrested control of Muslim shipping lanes. At last, in 1511, after a month-long siege, they defeated the Islamic kingdom of Malacca (part of contemporary Malaysia), exiled Muslim traders from the city,
and razed the great mosque. To drive home the message of their newfound power, they built their Catholic fort, A Famosa, atop the mosque’s ruins.

To defend themselves from such attacks, Southeast Asian Muslims turned to Islam as a unifying force and source of rebellion. Muslim scholars, religious teachers, and traders fled west to the Sumatran province of Aceh, nicknamed the Porch of Mecca, as
millions of Muslims set out from its shores for the hajj.

_____

Soon after the Dutch landed in 1596, their Protestant influence replaced much of the Catholicism left behind by the Spanish and Portuguese. Like their predecessors, they were vehemently opposed to Islam as a rival religion and found, much to their dismay, that Muslim kingdoms flourished along the coasts. Intent on stopping “Mohammedanism”
from spreading any further among their new subjects, the Dutch encouraged Protestant missionaries to sail eastward toward the peninsula’s far-flung islands, which Islam had not yet claimed.
¹
Many Dutch colonial officers and missionaries, as with their counterparts in Africa, sought to establish a human bulwark against Islam by evangelizing among non-Muslims and baptizing them as Christians. Since
Muslims already lived along the coasts as a result of trade and intermarriage, the Protestant missionaries forded rivers and pushed inland up steep ridges to reach indigenous non-Muslims. If the race to stop Islam looked like a line of converts across Africa, then here in Southeast Asia, conversion began with a series of bull’s-eyes: islands on which a Muslim coast ringed around a staunch Christian
core, as on the island of Sulawesi.

Also, as in Africa, conversion to Christianity offered indigenous people a link to a powerful new world, one in which they would no longer be isolated and marginalized as they had been under an Islamic system. The Dutch were more aggressive than the British in their attempts to undermine Islam. One Dutch provincial authority openly paid people (two crowns and
forty pennies) to be baptized. This was to “stimulate others to adopt the reform faith as well, and to show how we appreciate that our pagan and Moorish [Islamic] community attempt to seek their salvation through our only savior, Jesus Christ.”
²
The government banned any religious practices other than Christian ones, and publically referred to Islam as “evil” and from “the Devil.”
³
Christian instruction
was mandatory in all government schools, and the colonial authorities tried to weaken Islam’s grip on society by subverting Islamic law and promoting the use of
adat
, “customary law,” instead.
⁴

The Dutch were especially keen to keep a tight grip on their territories after the discovery of oil in 1883. Indonesia is home to some of the world’s first functioning oil fields, and for more than a century,
oil has been one of the country’s main sources of wealth. A twenty-year-old Dutch tobacco farmer discovered oil on Sumatra in 1880, and in 1907 the Dutch and British together formed Royal Dutch Shell.
⁵
(The name comes from one
of the founder’s family businesses, importing seashells to London.)
⁶
Indonesia currently has reserves of 3.8 billion barrels of oil, and currently exports 977,000 barrels
of oil daily, making it the world’s twenty-third-largest exporter.