The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (38 page)

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
—
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW
16:24–25

[Prophet], do not think of those who have been killed in God’s way as dead. They are alive with their Lord, well provided
for, happy with what God has given them of His favor . . .
—
THE QURAN, THE FAMILY OF ‘IMRAN
3:169–71

Gracia Burnham marched up the ridge at gunpoint behind her husband, Martin. Their captor, Abu
Sulaiman, a top lieutenant of Abu Sayyaf, “Bearer of the Sword,” a criminal gang tied to Al Qaeda, had summoned the Burnhams, who were evangelical missionaries, up to his high-ground camp.
Night after night in 2001 and 2002 amid wild cinnamon bushes and wet ferns, he tried to break their absolute and unwavering faith in Jesus Christ. Abu Sayyaf, like Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, had begun in the nineties with the return of homegrown jihadis from Afghanistan, where they had gone to fight the Soviets. The groups are still interwoven through training camps, intermarriage, and violent
common purpose.

“We thought that at first the fact we were Christian missionaries would be held against us, but we found that to not be true at all,” Gracia Burnham told me when I met her at a conference in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2007. “In fact, they really admired us, because Martin explained that our organization, New Tribes, goes into places where people are normally worshipping rocks and
trees, their ancestral spirits. They’re not worshipping the one true God, and we tell them who the one true God is. So Abu Sayyaf felt we were kind of doing the same thing, which shocked me, because we are as far from Islam as I think you can be.”

Before Abu Sayyaf captured the Burnhams in May 2001, the couple had evangelized in remote regions of the Philippines for seventeen years. New Tribes
focuses on fulfilling the Great Commission by planting churches among the twenty-five hundred ethnic groups worldwide that have not yet been reached with the Gospel. These remaining communities are either in remote places or hostile to Christian teachings. Although their missionaries receive extensive training in language, survival, medicine, and dentistry before going into the field, they still
have one of the highest death rates of any religious organization. Also, their website,
www.ntm.org
, has caught the attention of Muslims: it receives twenty thousand hits a day from the Arab world, a New Tribes staff member in the Philippines told me. After seventeen years in the field, the Burnhams coordinated New Tribes’s work all over the roughly seven thousand islands of the Philippines. Martin,
a bush pilot, delivered mail and supplies and shuttled the sick over the dense jungle; Gracia, a radio operator, homeschooled their three children, Jeff, Zach, and Mindy, who were fifteen, thirteen, and eleven at the time of their parents’ abduction.

During the 376 days the two Burnhams were held captive, Martin Burnham and Abu Sulaiman repeatedly debated the nature of God. As the two men hunkered
down on the jungle’s spongy floor and spoke into
the night, Gracia said neither wavered. Three times Abu Sulaiman asked Burnham to submit to Islam with the simple profession of the Shahada: “I bear witness to the fact that there is no god but God, and I bear witness to the fact that Mohammed is His messenger.” Each time, Burnham refused. “My great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father were
all committed Christians,” Gracia heard him say. “I’ll die as a believer.” Burnham told Sulaiman that only through belief in Jesus Christ would Sulaiman go to heaven. Jihad—the so-called escalator to heaven—would carry him to eternal damnation. The missionary knew such talk could cost him his life: one of their fellow American hostages had been taken down the mountain and beheaded. Yet he believed
that his duty as an evangelical Christian was to share Jesus’s message—to bear witness—no matter the cost.

Sulaiman excluded Gracia from these debates because she was a woman, which suited her fine. The other women taken uphill at night were raped, or
sobayed
, meaning taken as war booty. Gracia never was. Perhaps Martin’s presence protected her; perhaps her white skin did. According to the kidnappers’
millennial worldview, Islam would war with anything other than itself until Judgment Day. “Abu Sayyaf thought of themselves as pious and holy,” Gracia Burnham told me. “All this lofty chivalry crumbled before our eyes. Anything they wanted or desired, all they had to say was, ‘This is jihad and the rules don’t apply.’ ”

On May 27, 2001, masked men had burst into the Burnhams’ bungalow at the
Dos Palmas resort on Palawan Island. The Philippines, the second-largest archipelago in the world after Indonesia, is divided between a majority Christian north and a minority Muslim south. The island of Palawan lies in the middle of the two, directly on the tenth parallel. It is home to a panoply of odd fauna, among them the bearcat, the mouse deer, and the scaly anteater. World War II made Palawan
infamous; on December 14, 1944, before surrendering to the United States, the Japanese army massacred 139 American prisoners of war by setting them on fire here. Yet Palawan’s relevance to the Christian West stretches back several hundred years. When the Portuguese first landed on Palawan during the sixteenth century, they unearthed shards of Chinese pots—evidence that travelers had been arriving
on these islands from China since the ninth century. But it wasn’t until the fourteenth century, when Malay sailors arrived from
the nearby western islands of the future Indonesia and Malaysia, that Islam really gained ground here, and Muslim kings began to govern the coasts. On his way to circumnavigating the world, Ferdinand Magellan, a Spanish Catholic, conquered the islands with the express
purpose of converting their people and christening the country in the name of King Philip II of Spain. On April 21, 1521, Magellan planted a huge iron cross on the island of Cebu, also on the tenth parallel, to celebrate the mass Catholic baptism of a Muslim king and hundreds of his followers. Subsequently, the Muslims rose up against the Catholic invaders. And despite Portuguese and, later, Spanish
efforts to conquer and subdue Islamic rebels—whom the invaders named Moros, after their North African enemies the Moors—the southern Muslims held their ground into the nineteenth century.

In 1898, the United States claimed victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War, and bought the Philippines for $20 million. The Moros hoped America would grant them an independent homeland in the Muslim south.
President William McKinley, a devout Methodist who’d planned to become a pastor early in his life, had other plans. Baffled, at first, with what to do with the islands, one night he had the notion that America would establish something like a Christian civilization. He told a Methodist delegation visiting the White House that it was the United States’ duty “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift
and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ died.”
¹
This story, largely lost to history, is but one instance of the role Christianity has had in American foreign policy.

Today, the Philippines is Asia’s only Christian country—nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-six million citizens are Christians (80 percent are Roman
Catholics; 11 percent are Christians from other traditions, including Evangelicals and Pentecostals; 5 percent are Muslims). Since independence, along with the military, the Roman Catholic Church and various Catholic religious orders have taken a strong hand in the running of the country. The Muslim south has continued to rebel against the north’s Christian-led government, over time forming regular
armies to fight (unsuccessfully, so far) for an autonomous Islamic homeland.

In some ways, this conflict resembles Sudan’s in that the southern Philippines is also a source for raw materials, left undeveloped while the more powerful north thrived. In the Philippines, however, the north belonged
to the Christians, and the country’s five million Muslims lived in the south. In much the same way
that Christianity served as a vehicle of liberation for Sudanese Christians, Islam provided a means of self-determination for Filipino Muslims—a source of power in opposition to the Christian-supported government. For the Muslims, Islam harks back to a time when they held power. Today, they find inspiration in this history, much as Sudan’s Christians look back to their ancient Christian kingdoms of
Nubia. The armies of the Muslim south and the government of the Christian north first attempted to make peace in 2003, but that deal, and subsequent efforts—brokered by Malaysia—failed.

Abu Sayyaf was born out of this cycle of endless, fruitless rebellion. When the group’s founder, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, an eloquent young Filipino teacher, returned from Afghanistan in the early nineties,
he split from other, older Islamic groups fighting for independence in the Philippines’ Muslim south. Claiming that the other groups were not Islamic enough, Janjalani preached the merits of martyrdom: the Moros had to be willing to die for their cause. In 1991, his splinter group launched its first attack, targeting a Christian missionary ship called the MV
Doulos.
(The ship, christened the SS
Medina
in 1914, belongs to the German organization Good Books for All, and contains between three and five thousand Christian books. It is the largest floating library in the world.) As Abu Sayyaf saw it, all Christians were their enemies. The group was an example of global jihad gone awry, even by Al Qaeda’s standards. Their stealing, kidnapping, and killing earned them such a bad reputation that
eventually one of their benefactors, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa (who’d moved to the Philippines in the 1990s and married a Filipina), told them to clean up their act. Still, they continued filling their militant coffers by crime—the most lucrative of which was kidnapping for ransom, especially nabbing foreigners vacationing at expensive resorts.

On Palawan, the Burnhams had
splurged on a night of relaxation for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. They were lying in bed half-dressed when their bungalow’s flimsy door burst open. Their kidnappers shoved them onto a waiting speedboat, where, in the ocean’s darkness, they counted more than a dozen other sleepy and scared hostages. As the boat sped away from the island, their captors shouted,
“Allahu Akbar!”
One kidnapper
handed Martin Burnham a satellite phone and told him to call
the authorities. “Tell them you’ve been taken by bin Laden’s group.” Martin didn’t know what that meant and, at that point, early in 2001, neither did most of the world.

“The country had fallen off our radar screen,” a U.S. intelligence officer told me in the Philippine capital, Manila, in 2006. The September 11 attacks exposed the
relationship between Al Qaeda, the kidnappers, and their American missionary hostages. U.S. aid to the Philippines government shot up from $14.5 million to more than $245 million.
²
An elite team of 120 U.S. Special Forces traveled to the southern Philippines. Yet due to a Visiting Forces Agreement between the United States and the Philippines, the Special Forces could only advise and watch a series
of sixteen botched rescue attempts as the Philippine army alternated between colluding with Abu Sayyaf and blindly shooting their way into the Burnhams’ camp.

Abu Sayyaf kept the Burnhams on the move and near starving;
³
they slept on mosquito-infested ground and hiked for hours in circles. The rescue attempts were the worst: the Filipino soldiers shot at anything that moved. It got to the point
where Gracia wished the soldiers would stop trying to save them. When the Filipino television crew hiked into the jungle and shot the famous footage I’d seen reprinted in the Indonesian outfit
JihadMagz
, the injustice of their visit seemed unbearable. How could a TV crew talk to ASG, hike in, film the Burnhams sick and wasting away, and leave the weakening couple to their fate? Gracia believed
God was testing her, and she wasn’t pleased with what she was observing. “The worst part was seeing who I really was,” she said. She coveted food sent into the jungle for them, which Abu Sayyaf refused to share. “There were times when I really hated those Muslims,” she said, so she and Martin prayed for a way to love their captors. “We never forgot they were the bad guys, but they were also our family
for more than a year.”

Tired of praying to “a God who sometimes seemed to have forgotten us,” Gracia would say to Martin, “You know scripture says these words: ‘If you will ask anything in my name, I will do it.’ In my situation, that verse is not true, so why is that in there?” There was no room in their faith for doubt, sweet-tempered Martin told her. “You believe it all, or you don’t believe
it at all.”

Burnham prayed without ceasing for her and her husband’s release.
Since God did not seem to hear her, or to listen, she tried a new prayer: instead of asking for their release, she prayed for a hamburger. There was no way God could deliver the hamburger to the remote Philippine jungle, she figured. If He was going to answer, He would have to free them first.

Toward the end of their
captivity, when it looked like the Burnhams might be released, Abu Sayyaf bustled them closer to civilization. One night for dinner, their captors delivered hamburgers and French fries from a nearby fast-food chain, Jollibee. Awestruck, Gracia believed that God was teaching her a lesson: she had to submit to His will. Not long after, on June 7, 2002, for the seventeenth time in more than a year,
Filipino soldiers blasted into the camp in an attempted rescue. By the time she dropped from her hammock to the ground, Gracia had been shot in the leg and Martin lay dead beside her.

The Sulu Sea’s Chinese blue waters glistening below us formed a jihadi highway. On fishing boats, amid the stink of sunbaked bonefish, an alphabet stew of fighters—JI, ASG, RSM,
and so on—skipped from Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philippines training henchmen, smuggling weapons, and simply hiding out. The Indonesian fighters Ibnu Ahmad and his brother Salahuddin had traveled these routes before Salahuddin went to jail and Ibnu Ahmad started peddling beauty powders. The captive Burnhams had crisscrossed the same waters in the stern of a speedboat.