The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (30 page)

Zakaria, who was about to turn fifty, wore her dark wavy hair sensibly short. She had wispy sideburns and a gentle, jowly face that transformed
with righteous anger as she explained that all of the parents knew exactly what was going on at Happy Sundays. “These are children of low intelligence, poor children. Some of their mothers were prostitutes, and we fed them milk,” she said. The milk was beyond some parents’ means. Happy Sundays came under scrutiny after Muslim teachers at school overheard the children singing Christian songs
and greeting each other with “Shalom” instead of “Salam”; the schoolteachers alerted the authorities. The language of a different culture was dangerous. At the trial, the children had to sing the songs Zakaria had taught them, while busloads of protesters shouted her name outside the court. They carried an empty coffin, which they had built for her.

“We must not be afraid of this kind of persecution,”
Zakaria said. Although Christians from the West had shown support by sending her fifteen thousand letters filled with bubblegum, bookmarks, and currency from America, the United Kingdom, and Israel, Zakaria did not believe that Western Christians really understood the cost of faith here along the edge of the Muslim world.

“They think freedom is free,” she said, smiling bitterly.

Zakaria believed
that Christianity and Islam were locked in a global contest for souls. Unlike Western Christians, she believed, who could afford to think about God only on Sundays, believers along the tenth parallel did not have the luxury of doubt, or of interpreting scripture as anything but the infallible word of God. “Many people considered us martyrs, but we didn’t consider ourselves as such,” Zakaria said.

“Because we’re close to the tenth parallel we feel more pressure here,”
she said. The 10/40 Window was a battle map facing all frontline Christians, including herself. As she saw it, the fight playing out in her town was a part of a global battle for this world and the next. Gains on her side, the Christian side, meant more people—more children—in heaven. She said, “We pray for the children, because
they’re going to hell.”

On my return from the prison to Jakarta, I stopped along the highway to visit one of the community elders who had led the fight against Zakaria. Hajji Jamali was sitting in his darkening living room, a walking cane leaning against his leg. It was hard to imagine him helping to lead a violent protest, but he had. He quietly explained that if the Christians were going to
impose their beliefs on Muslims, then the Muslims had the right to push back. “She has violated children’s rights, human rights, and the child protection law,” he said, indignantly emphasizing human rights. The Western concept cut both ways. “She taught these things to Muslim children in the largest Muslim country in the world,” Jamali said, explaining that here, due to numbers, Christians were the
Muslims’ guests. “If a guest is polite to the host, the host is polite. If the guest is impolite, the host can be as rude as he chooses to be,” he said. “There will be no more Happy Sundays.”

The case of Happy Sundays also deepened a rift within Indonesia’s Christian community, which had about twenty-four million members, both Protestants and Catholics. “This extreme evangelical voice is leading
to increased violence,” said Father Franz Magnis-Suseno, a German-born Catholic priest. The priest, who had worked in Indonesia for nearly fifty of his seventy years, wrote his dissertation on Karl Marx. “Mission now has to be understood as bearing witness, but not trying to convert people.” Over the past several decades, the Christian awakening in Indonesia has led to a mushrooming of churches.
New congregations kept splitting from old ones, which looked to Muslims like a rapid expansion of Christianity—not like what it was: an increasing number of divisions within the religion.

In the Jakarta courthouse in October 2008, I met with about a dozen members of the Islamic Defenders Force, a militant group that enforces the closure of churches and, on occasion, Christian nightclubs. Clad
in all-white fatigues, white berets, and white combat boots, its members
looked like storm troopers as they sat in the empty courtroom and ate bag lunches behind the tables for the prosecution and the defense. Up on a platform, a few sat quietly behind the magistrate’s desk. One was reading an Indonesian bestseller by Andrea Hirata,
Laskar Pelangi
, or “Rainbow Warrior,” about a group of poor kids
struggling to go to school.

On this afternoon, the members of the Islamic Defenders Force were awaiting trial for beating up human rights advocates and members of Indonesia’s Jaringan Islam Liberal, or “Liberal Islam Network.” JIL had been marching to defend Indonesia’s religious freedom, including the freedom within Islam to choose different modes of expression. But religious diversity, these
members of the Islamic Defenders Front believed, was a hazard to their faith.

Some members also called themselves the Alliance of the Anti-Apostasy Movement, and did a kind of self-styled moral policing, which entailed exacting bribes from business owners in order not to destroy their livelihoods. But they took special pride in shutting down churches, one forty-year-old member named Sunarto told
me, since Christianization and Westernization are equally a menace to Islam.

It struck me, as they quietly ate the lunches their lawyers had brought them, how pervasive the Western presence is in places and ways we do not even imagine. Whether it was hymns wafting from a jungle church, or the backbeat of a Britney Spears video, both appeared to these men to be part of the Christian West’s effort
to spread its influence. “A few years ago, it was food,” Sunarto said, referring to the cropping up of fast-food chains, including Kentucky Fried Chicken, which he saw as a plot by the Christian West to tempt Muslims away from religiously sanctioned snacks. In general, their war against Christianization really implied a struggle against globalization—and that was a struggle they were not going
to win.

In late May 2006, I went by plane from Jakarta to the central Java city of Yogyakarta to meet with one of Indonesia’s most notoriously radical clerics, Irfan Awwas, who was head of the Indonesian Mujahideen Council. Awwas was hostile in general to having Westerners in Indonesia, and demanded a hundred-dollar “donation” and a copy of my passport before we met. That morning, I rose before
dawn to climb around Borobudur, one of the world’s most ancient Buddhist stupas, a layer cake hewed from stone and dating back to the 800s, with 504 Buddhas tucked into its mossy hollows.
It was abandoned in the fourteenth century, when Islam supplanted Buddhism and Hinduism in the region. Even at dawn, it was hot and tiring to circle its three tiers and make the sweaty climb from desire through
form to formlessness. Each tier represents a ring of the universe, and by climbing up out of the darkness, I was supposed to be moving toward enlightenment. Unfortunately, the effort of the sacred walk shortened my temper. By the time I arrived at Awwas’s office that evening for the long-awaited meeting, I was feeling impatient.

Awwas believed that it was the responsibility of Indonesian Muslims
to safeguard this edge of Dar-ul-Islam, the Land of Islam, against incursions from Dar-ul-Harb, the Land of War, which he saw as beginning to the south, in neighboring Australia. Awwas told me that Australian churches were behind the Christian separatists inside Indonesia—those seeking to secede from the Muslim country. In order to penetrate and defeat Islam, the Christians were trying to foment
chaos and war in the east, he said, including in places such as Sulawesi and in the Indonesian region of Papua. The practical details of such efforts did not interest Awwas; he, like the leaders of the Islamic Defenders Force, still believed that Christianization and Westernization were one and the same, and had been since the Portuguese invaded five hundred years ago.

“As long as there is imperialism
in Indonesia, there will be Christianization,” he pronounced. Tired of his monologue, I mistakenly thought this might be the moment to ask about his unorthodox procedure of demanding payment for an interview, which displeased him. He insisted that the practice was nothing out of the ordinary: “Anytime you go to a hospital or school to talk to someone, they will ask you for a donation,” he
said, ending the interview. As I walked down the driveway an aide came running after me with a hundred-dollar bill. Awwas now wanted to return the cash. “Here is your money,” he said. “Now you must say you never met him.”

I left town for Malaysia the next morning. Later that day—May 26, 2006—an earthquake struck Yogyakarta, leaving more than five thousand people dead, tens of thousands injured,
and more than one million people homeless. Now, only an hour’s flight away, there was no way to return. In one of the glimmering high-rise hotels of Kuala Lumpur, I reeled. I picked up the phone to find that everyone I had met had survived, including Awwas. People feared that Borobudur, the Buddhist temple, was going to collapse, but remarkably it was still standing.

When the 2004 tsunami struck Indonesia, the province of Aceh—jutting like a thumb into the Indian Ocean a few hundred miles north of the equator—bore the brunt of the tidal wave. One hundred and thirty thousand people lost their lives. Whole families were wiped out, towns disappeared, and a society lay in ruins. Many survivors saw it as a sign of God’s vengeance. To them, the tidal wave was God’s
retribution for their sinful ways, not merely a consequence of an undersea earthquake.

Indonesia lies not only within the storm belt of the intertropical convergence zone but also inside what’s known as the Ring of Fire—an upside-down U of seismic activity that stretches for nearly twenty-five thousand miles from America’s western coast over the Pacific Ocean to Asia’s eastern coast. Although
nine of ten of the world’s earthquakes take place here, they still seem to many to be signs of God’s wrath. This point of view is neither new nor solely Islamic. Long before Noah’s flood wiped the sinful earth clean, the narrative of divine wrath and the command to return to a purer, more devout way of life has informed people’s responses to countless natural disasters. First, catastrophe destroys;
then it offers an opportunity for revival—or renewal. After Hurricane Katrina, some Christian leaders, including Franklin Graham, said they saw a chance for redemption in the storm’s aftermath. In Aceh, for many of the tsunami’s survivors, only divine will could explain the fact that they were still breathing.

Aceh lies in the Indonesian archipelago’s extreme northwest, and the tip of its thumb
points directly across the Indian Ocean, east to Somalia. The only landmass lying in between the two is the very southern edge of Sri Lanka. Aceh has been known as the Porch of Mecca since the sixteenth century, when it became a bustling hub of religious scholarship and rebellion against the Portuguese invaders. For more than three decades
before the tsunami, the Free Aceh Movement fought for
the region’s autonomy from the Indonesian government. The tidal wave cracked open the long-isolated province, ushered in the outside world, and finally brought an end to thirty years of civil war between the government and the rebels.

After the disaster, Christian and Muslim relief organizations descended upon Aceh, feeding and clothing survivors, providing medicine, and building shelter. Franklin
Graham’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, was one of the largest and most effective. At the time, Ken Isaacs—Graham’s tough-jawed second-in-command, who’d asked me about my background in Khartoum—headed up USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. This was just one example of the conservative evangelical community’s interconnectedness with the Bush administration—on domestic faith-based
initiatives and U.S. foreign policy in Sudan and elsewhere. (On my visit to the headquarters of Samaritan’s Purse in Boone, North Carolina, in 2003, I had seen a letter from President George W. Bush to Isaacs framed on Isaacs’s wall. “We are doing the right things in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the president had written.) As Isaacs took the helm of the OFDA, some of his secular counterparts worried
that his claims of Christianity’s exclusive truth would drive his relief agenda to include proselytizing, and so would alienate Muslims. Yet as they watched Isaacs wrestle deftly with the massive relief effort, they stopped worrying. Indonesia’s Islamists did not, however. The Islamic Defenders Front, the same storm-trooper-like group that forcibly closed churches, sent some members by plane to
Aceh to bury rotting corpses and ensure that the dead received an Islamic burial. Then they protested against the Christian aid groups, including Samaritan’s Purse.

At first, as U.S. troops and aid-bearing Western relief workers arrived in Aceh to rebuild bridges, roads, and homes, the community expressed overwhelming gratitude. Once the shock wore off, however, the deaths of so many people compounded by the influx of Westerners and the abundance of foreign aid money seemed to threaten the fabric of Acehnese society. Relief workers brought with them a new
economy—plus bikinis and Chianti. Aid dollars led to massive corruption, as the populace of Aceh watched powerful people skim what seemed to be millions of rupiah off the top of relief projects. Since traditional village leaders were dead,
few actual Indonesians could take the lead in the rebuilding of social structures. The only way to rebuild Aceh, its supporters argued, was to implement Islamic
law.

“Of course, in the beginning people act as if the sky is falling, that it is barbaric,” said Yuni Saba, rector of the State Islamic University. Yet Aceh, he pointed out, has also had Sharia on the books since the fifties. Now, with the place flattened—and under inadvertent cultural siege from the West—the time had arrived to implement it.

“Sharia is about how to mend this torn Aceh. There
is a lot of hanky-panky around—illicit sex, gambling, alcohol—but at least let us have a little law.” Aceh is the only one of Indonesia’s thirty-three provinces to implement Sharia, and although, in theory, Islamic law looked like a solution to reestablishing moral order among the people of Aceh, in practice it has been an inept—and sometimes tragic—affair. The Wilayatul Hisbah, or Way-Hah, as
the locals called the “Vice and Virtue Squad,” which began its moral policing in 2006, two years after the tsunami struck, has been criticized for targeting women and lower-class citizens, who cannot defend themselves.