The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (40 page)

Manero, who would soon be let out of prison, had converted from Christianity to Islam and back again. The killer had recently written to Geremia to ask the priest for the Catholic Church’s permission
to make a movie of his life story. Reluctantly, Geremia had said yes, hoping the film would spread a peaceful message. But how that could possibly be was hard to see. Geremia, who was born at the end of World War II in Italy, wanted to be a different kind of missionary. Having come of age during the heady, liberal years of Catholic reform in the sixties and seventies, he believed in the Gospel of
social justice: that being a Christian is about empowering the weak to defend themselves against the strong in the feudal Philippines. He did not agree with Pope Benedict XVI’s recent criticisms of Islam’s propensity to advance itself through violence. Nor did he believe that salvation was the exclusive purview of Christians. To him, bearing witness meant speaking out against injustice, not trying
to save souls. As the gap between liberal and conservative Catholics widened, Geremia, though no radical, had found himself positioned farther and farther to the left. The fight, he argued, raged between power and powerlessness, not Christianity and Islam.

According to Father Geremia, America’s recent infusion of more than $100 million in security aid had escalated the local conflict simply by
making higher-caliber hardware readily available. Who wanted a bowie knife when it was possible to procure an M16 with a brand-new night-vision scope, made in the U.S.A.? American money paid for the motorbikes and weapons used to fight the Philippine government’s dirty war, and to kill those who spoke out against it, including the Vigos. “This isn’t a climate of freedom and democracy,” the priest
added. “If this is what the war on terror is, then it is about terrorizing the people.”

In the Philippines, a group of former Christians have embraced Islam with particular verve. They call themselves reverts—not converts—to signify both the historical fact that Islam reached these islands before Christianity did, and the belief among some Muslims that, according to the Quran,
all human beings are born as members of Islam. Over the past several decades, as Islam has come under increasing pressure as a local minority and a global threat, more than two hundred thousand Filipino Christians have left their churches to “return” to Islam. Part of this phenomenon can be attributed to economic migration: 8.7 million Filipinos (almost a tenth of the population) have left the
country for work over the last several decades. And many go to the Persian Gulf, where Muslims frequently get better jobs—with higher pay—than Christians, and this disparity creates an incentive for “reversion.”

This, however, was not the case for the fifty former evangelical pastors I met on a July morning in 2006 not far from Geremia’s monastery. This gathering took place in a school that had
been a Protestant mission until several years earlier. (The American mission pastor with watery blue eyes whom I met in a nearby town had left in disgrace. It turned out he’d fathered a dozen illegitimate children among this rural tribe—a transgression uncovered when the brown-eyed mothers gave birth to blue-eyed babies.) Now, with financial help from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY),
a Saudi Arabian nonprofit organization that specializes in converting non-Muslims to Islam, the former Filipino pastors were renting the errant missionary’s compound for their local chapter of Balik Islam, or “Return to Islam.” A poster on the wall read, “Ishmael . . . I Will Make Him a Great Nation” (Genesis 17:20). This biblical verse, the members of Balik Islam believed, foreshadowed the birth
of a great Islamic nation, one that would eventually encompass the entire world. Around the ring of
school desks in the former mission classroom, forty-odd men—most former Pentecostal preachers—had squeezed themselves. “We don’t know where to look!” one shouted as I took a seat among them. They’d recently learned that as Muslims, they were not supposed to meet a woman’s eye, so they gazed at their
hands and fiddled with their stiff new prayer caps. They’d agreed to meet with me to defend themselves against charges of being terrorists. It was true that at the extreme fringe of the movement, a few of their members had joined militant Muslim groups. This was a new trend in jihad: the recruitment of converts who would not raise suspicions among a crowd of Christians, and could carry out attacks.
Willing to undertake more dangerous missions than “born” Muslims, reverts seemed eager to prove their zeal. Yet reverting to Islam had nothing to do with violence, these members of Balik Islam wanted to assure me.

“We are like newborn babies,” one of the movement’s leaders, Brother Abdul Latif Jongay, an ex-pastor at Jesus Is Lord Church, a Pentecostal outfit started by Californian missionaries,
told me. Now in his late forties, he wore his beard uncut, as Mohammed’s companions, the Salafs, are said to have done.

“We are born-again Muslims!” he added. Their new religion governed every aspect of life—clothing, daily schedule, diet. Many members of Balik Islam were searching for a code of total certainty, or what they called “universal guidance.”

“Have you met Cat Stevens?” another former
preacher asked. The folk singer had “reverted” to Islam years earlier. “Cat Stevens, the most famous Balik Islam in the world!” Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, had visited the Philippines several years before and they assumed that I would know him personally, and were disappointed that I did not. Latif hushed their sighs as he told his life story as a case study of this revivalist movement. Raised
a Catholic and a Christian settler fighting for his family’s land, Latif grew up hating Muslims. “We were forced to leave the area we thought we’d inherited,” he said. “On the grounds of that, from the radio and the TV, we thought that Muslims thought they go to heaven if they kill people.” About a decade earlier, Brother Latif met a group of American missionaries from Faith Bible College in San Jose,
California, who converted him from Catholicism to Pentecostalism. He became a Pentecostal pastor and wanted to preach to Muslims, but the American missionaries forbade it. “They told me the Muslims would kill me.” As a preacher, Latif spoke in tongues, and when filled with the Holy Spirit, he fainted. Both, he confessed, were
a sham, just part of a desire to feel connected to God. “Our listeners
wanted to feel something.” Latif had doubts about Christianity. There were twenty-three thousand sects, he claimed, an ever-expanding figure—so many fissures—how could they all be right? I’d heard this argument many times: Christianity, especially in the fast-growing Pentecostal churches, was subject to so many schisms, and the groups were always battling and starting new churches just down the
road from each other. To those Muslims who did not understand the splintering of identity, as I had seen in Indonesia, these splits looked like a rapid and threatening proliferation of the rival faith. The core tenets of Islam were so universal, they told me, that true Muslims did not fight one another. As new Muslims, they firmly believed there would be nothing about which to argue.

What’s more,
the evangelical practice of praying to Jesus, instead of God the Father, seemed suspect to Latif now. How could there be two Gods, God the Father and God the Son, let alone three, if you threw in the Holy Spirit? It was the nonfamiliar issue of the Trinity, which sounds to outsiders like polytheism. Curious about these questions, Latif asked a friend to take him to a conference on Islam. As soon
as he heard the words “God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful” (The Family of ‘Imran 3:2), which sounds a lot like “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), Latif decided to revert. Islam offered him a more absolute way of life and, ultimately, God’s certain favor. Now he believed that Islam, not Christianity, was the exclusive doorway to everlasting freedom.
His personal conversion had political connotations, too. Latif saw the Philippines in terms of a larger struggle for dominance between Islam and the West. Whoever had more members would win. When it came to religion, believers were pawns in a zero-sum game. He called this the “plus/minus factor”: a plus for one side was a minus for the other. “The conflict here and in the rest of the world isn’t
just political,” he said. “It’s economic, social, everything a person needs.” Islam, for him, was essentially a means of liberation—a way to be free of the oppressive West, which was ruled by the United States.

“America is interested in economic power. We can’t stop America. They need to dominate us economically in order to survive,” he went on. “But we can’t separate out the universality of
our religion. Economic repression is a spiritual repression.” Their responsibility, as Muslims, was to resist. “We Balik Islam play a different role than warriors.”
Da’wa
drove their mission, in much the same way as evangelizing had when they were
Pentecostal preachers. The only difference was that they were Muslims now. “We fight and defend by conveying the message to unbelievers, and that’s
our war. This is our jihad.”

About six hundred miles north of Mindanao, in the seamy capital of Manila, the most notorious member of Balik Islam, Ahmed Santos, was awaiting trial in the Philippine version of Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, the Special Intensive Care Area of Taguig Prison. During a recent riot at Camp New Horizons—another optimistic handle for the place—the militants successfully seized
control of the prison. Twenty-two inmates were killed and five policemen were injured. Among the dead was the prisoner accused of beheading the American hostage held captive alongside the Burnhams.
¹
I tried to visit Camp New Horizons many times and was turned away, until I secured the support of a Filipino congressman. Finally, reluctantly eyeing the congressman’s faxed permission letter, the
warden agreed to admit me to the prison camp, but he doubted the three-hundred-odd men, most of whom had been found guilty of terrorism, would speak to an American woman. We marched down the dirt track to the entryway of the cavernous warehouse. Inside a three-story chimney of open-air blocks—a multitiered Guantánamo—long-bearded men in tangerine jumpsuits peered down at me.

Hesitantly, I stepped
up to the bars and called out in English to a skinny, bearded teenager walking around freely outside some of the open cells. “I’d like to talk to Ahmed Santos,” I said. The teenager shuffled off, and soon returned followed by a reed-thin man in his mid-thirties wearing rimless glasses and sporting a T-shirt with the spiky corncobs of Malaysia’s twin towers. I had prepared my case to persuade
Santos to speak to me, but he did not need to hear it. “I’ll talk to you,” he said.

According to U.S. intelligence officers, Santos was the leader of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a radical splinter group of Muslim converts he’d started in 1991, which was now linked to both Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah. RSM was supposedly named for a sixteenth-century Muslim prince who
revolted against the Catholicism of the Portuguese invaders. Before dawn one morning in October 2005, Santos was arrested with weapons, explosives, and maps, all allegedly intended for use in attacks in predominantly Christian areas. By his name alone, Ahmed Santos represented a double helix of religious identity inextricably
bound.
Ahmed
means “worthy of praise” in Arabic;
Santos
means “saints”
in Spanish. Born a Catholic, Santos converted to Islam in the nineties, while working for a computer company in Saudi Arabia. The reversion, he stressed, had nothing to do with any kind of financial incentive he might have had to become a Muslim. It was a purely spiritual decision, he argued. Santos seemed like so many people at once: a bookish rebel, a preacher, and an intellectual who angered
easily when he felt his intelligence was insulted. It was easy to see him in another context, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt in the hills of Colombia, rather than one depicting Malaysia’s Twin Towers.

He had ended up working as a journalist in the southern Philippines, where he interviewed Muslim separatists on the radio. According to American intelligence sources, Santos migrated from journalism
to starting RSM through friendships with members of Abu Sayyaf. After a $500,000 bounty was placed on his head as part of the American Rewards for Justice program, which offers cash to those who identify suspected terrorists, someone turned him in. The U.S. embassy touted his arrest as a victory in the “war against terrorism.”

At a red picnic table outside the cellblock bars, Santos was willing
to confess that he had advocated holy war against the enemies of Islam. Yet he denied any practical role in violence. “I don’t consider this a case about terrorism,” he said. “This is about religion.” He believed that the West was at war with Islam. He put his elbows on the table and rolled up his sleeves to reveal charred circles on his forearms, each about the size of a fingertip: cigarette burns.
He claimed that the Filipino security officers branded them into his arms during interrogations. They were nothing, however, next to his certainty that he would be assassinated. Although the bounty on his head had already been paid once, that didn’t really matter to most Filipinos. Due to the overwhelming poverty of his country, he was certain he would be killed when he left the prison. “In
this country a man can kill a man for a pack of cigarettes. How much can five hundred thousand dollars do?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “The Americans already bought me.”

The long wooden boat pulled out into the open water beyond the ramshackle red-and-white ferries. The boat was chugging toward a destination only the boatman knew. The island of Mindanao,
just south of the tenth parallel, is the Moro Muslim homeland. It is also still feudal, a place where, for centuries, Filipino landowners have controlled vast plantations worked by tenant farmers. The river, the Rio Grande de Mindanao—a relic of the Spanish conquest—used to be the road in the southern Philippines until roads became the roads. Now the ferryboats rot on their moorings. In the water
beneath us, mangrove roots swayed like the matted hair of a drowned woman. We were traveling along the reedy tributaries of the Liguasan Marsh, 850 square wetland miles veined in rice patties and mangroves. A local Muslim leader, a hereditary lord called a
datu
, was feuding with the Christian government over who controlled the rights to potential reserves of oil and natural gas in the marsh’s
watery labyrinth.