The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (43 page)

Reverend Abdu’s name, like those of so many other people I had met—Ahmed Santos, the Muslim revert in the Philippines’ version of Guantánamo Bay; or Mujahid Masih, the warrior for Christ at the Voice of the Martyrs conference in Franklin, Tennessee—held together a complicated
identity. Abdu was a cowless Fulani herder, a citizen of Niger, a former Muslim. It mattered most to him that he was a Christian, and yet he wouldn’t say why he was a Christian, other than that he had met Jesus and, in his own fashion, followed Him.

I had first met Reverend Abdu by following a signboard for a mission outpost—a square of white wood reading, “The Great Commission,” with an outline
of Nigeria split by a cross, the crossbar running along the tenth parallel. I’d first seen this sign a year earlier, while driving around the hilly Middle Belt capital of Jos in the gold minivan I’d borrowed from Pastor James Wuye and the imam Nurayn Ashafa. I hadn’t had time on that trip to visit the offices of the Great Commission, so when I returned to Jos the next summer, I went looking for
the signboard. But the governor had ordered all such signs taken down, lest they contribute to the ongoing religious violence. With Haruna Yakubu, the minivan’s savvy driver, I spent hours pulling off the road and peering behind locked gates, until I spied the displaced sign leaning against a compound’s high wall. We found the gatekeeper of the place, who let us in, and there I met Reverend Abdu
for the first time.

He had just completed a training course at the Great Commission compound, learning how to evangelize Muslims from an American missionary who had translated the New Testament into Fulani. He was about to hitchhike home—to a shanty a five-hour drive northwest of Jos. I offered him a ride, and he took me along to watch him in action, evangelizing among the nomads.

We had set
out long before dawn. At daybreak, somewhere on the road
northwest of Jos, we left the minivan by the roadside and headed on foot into the six-foot-high cornfields, searching for nomads’ cattle camps. Now, as we hiked along the ordered grids of other people’s crops, the sugary scent of sweet corn gave way to the muskier smell of livestock. Then we spied their dull coats in a wallow off to the
right: thirty cows moving tightly around one another like a school of hungry fish waiting for food to drop from the sky. The reverend turned left and cut through the bush, and I followed him. Within minutes we had broken into a clearing of pounded earth large enough to hold two grassy igloos. A bicycle was propped against one, and a man, a woman, and a girl of maybe ten, the last holding a baby, crawled
out of a low doorway to greet us.

The father eyed the reverend narrowly. He looked to be in his forties. He was broad and thick-muscled, and did not seem thrilled at the arrival of visitors. His name, he told us, was Mallam Ibrahim. (
Mallam
, like
mullah
, is a general term for “Islamic teacher” or “scholar.”) His was a family of nomads, he said. “We don’t have our own land.” It was too dry for
them to stay among their own people in the northeast of Nigeria, and drought had driven them, twenty members in all, to these trammeled cornfields, where they hoped to go unnoticed. That was impossible. Even I could see that the cows had already flattened someone’s harvest. The situation would not remain peaceful for long.

The last thing these nomads needed was attention from a freestyle Fulani
evangelist and a white Western reporter. To try to ease the tension, I asked Ibrahim how many cows he had, a question that Reverend Abdu translated into a mixture of French and Fulani, indicating that this group had likely made it as far as neighboring Chad, or Niger, both former French-speaking colonies. He didn’t want to answer—I had misjudged the question, thinking it was as harmless as discussing
weather. As it turned out, asking these herders about their cows was akin to asking how much money they had, since the cows were all the wealth they had in the world. “It’s a secret,” Mallam Ibrahim said, his eyes thinning to slits, as if I were trying to take the cows from him.

The reverend pulled a portable solar-powered DVD player from his backpack and set it up on a stump. “Who is Jesus?”
he asked Ibrahim, translating the questions and answers for me as he posed them.

“I don’t know,” Mallam Ibrahim said.

“Who is Mohammad?”

“A Muslim.”

The mother tried to tell me something, and the reverend translated. “She says that I have come here once before to show this.” She did not look pleased. He searched in his backpack for the Jesus film—the two-hour 1979 film that its promoters at
the Jesus Film Project claim has been shown to six billion viewers.
¹
When Reverend Abdu opened the DVD cover, however, it turned out he’d brought a disc of Christian music videos by mistake. He slid it into the machine anyway. Singing and dancing people appeared on the screen for a few seconds, and then the screen went blank.

“I forgot to charge it,” Reverend Abdu said sheepishly. The American
at the Great Commission compound had given him this high-tech machine, he said, but in order to make it work here in the bush, he had to leave it in the sun for several hours beforehand, and this he had forgotten to do. In the sticky silence, he turned to Ibrahim and asked, “Will you accept Jesus?”

“No,” Ibrahim answered. “It will unsettle our Muslim prayers. I like the way I pray, and I am not
changing it.”

There was silence but for the crickets rubbing their legs together and the cows swishing their fly-and-shit-covered tails. There wasn’t much else for the reverend to say. He changed the subject, telling me, “These children do not go to school. Their father refused to let them go.”

“I’m not afraid of school,” Ibrahim said. “But if the children go to school, they may not come back.”

It turned out that Ibrahim had more pressing concerns. “The cows are sick,” he told us. “Their livers are swollen. Do you have any medicine for them? Do you have any food?”

The reverend said nothing and began to pack up the DVD player.

“How did you come here?” the mother asked.

“Why did you come here?” Ibrahim asked.

Reverend Abdu did not answer these questions. He crooned goodbye, and we
left the clearing; he seemed torn, as if he were taking leave of his own family for a long journey.

We plodded through the cornfields, found the minivan, and drove off. And a few minutes later we were at the reverend’s cement-block home—an isolated two-room shack that stood atop a mild rise. In a tiny enclosed courtyard, his daughter, who looked about ten, was washing china teacups in a metal
bucket. The reverend showed us into the narrow room that served as everything but the bathroom. And we sat on his only chairs, in
front of a poster of Noah’s ark he had nailed to one wall. “They always ask me for medicine and food for the cows,” he said, subdued.

I thought at first that he was embarrassed at how badly the mission had gone. The Jesus Film Project claims that two hundred million
people have accepted Jesus Christ as a direct result of watching the film—a claim I found incredible. Was it the film itself that was supposed to impress the would-be convert? Was it the DVD player? I looked around the reverend’s shanty. The device in his backpack cost at least two hundred times as much as the teakettle, the wash bucket, and his wooden chairs. The reverend saw no personal gain from
working for the Great Commission; he had no interest in the prosperity gospel, or in improving people’s material lives, including his own. To him, numbers were about souls in heaven, not the conquest of earth. I asked him what made days like this day worth it. “People ask me why I left my heritage,” he said, pausing. “Jesus is the only way.” He had nothing else to say; faith couldn’t be explained,
or wrapped in a tidy life story, or cast aside as an inconvenience on a hot, embarrassing day.

When his daughter finished washing the cups, Abdu lit the burner on a camp stove and set the kettle to boil. He crouched over the flame protectively, as a nomad would guard his fire from the wind, although he had left the open air of his own cattle camp behind decades earlier for the shelter of the
zinc roof above us. At last, he handed me the cup of steaming tea, which, in this stifling outpost along the tenth parallel, I dreaded drinking. To be polite, I took a sip, and the tea’s immediate effect surprised me—somehow its warmth branching out in my chest offered relief from the day’s heat, another paradox. I slumped against the hard chair. I had reached a limit of interpretation, and drank
the tea down without trying to read every object, every gesture, for its significance. Here I was on the tenth parallel with a man who had once been a Muslim and now was a Christian, who had spent his life preaching to his former kinsmen driven south by the need for water. Set against these simple facts, explanation failed. So much history and theology had been grafted onto the people of the tenth
parallel over the centuries: the dramatic images of clashing civilizations and competing fundamentalisms; the demographics and big-picture analyses of the roles played by oil, weather, war, colonial interest, and clan conviction. All of these sought to explain Reverend Abdu and his like, and yet here he was before me, sheltering the gas flame and defying explanation—a man who believed what he believed
for reasons that were
mysterious even to him. He was not a foot soldier in a fundamentalist army or a statistic in some relief agency’s annual report; he was not in revolt against his government, nor was he waging a one-man protest against Western hegemony. He was a walking, talking hierophany, and he embodied the space where the horizontal, secular axis of the everyday intersected with the vertical,
sacred world of God.

I had met many believers like him—those whose religious convictions were emphatic and elusive—and every time I thought I had them classified, they slipped out of my easy distinctions. That such people could accommodate conflicting worldly labels (evangelist, nomad, Muslim, and Christian in Reverend Abdu’s case) was a talent of postcolonial life, evidence of adaptation by
people who have had many different categories foisted on them by outsiders. But it was also born out of nearly fifteen hundred years of religious coexistence, of Christians and Muslims living together, and it had moved far beyond the binary divisions between Saved and Damned, Good and Evil, Us and Them.

Religious strife where Christians and Muslims meet is real, and grim, but the long history
of everyday encounter, of believers of different kinds shouldering all things together, even as they follow different faiths, is no less real. It follows that their lives bear witness to the coexistence of the two religions—and of the complicated bids for power inside them—more than to the conflicts between them.

Reverend Abdu bore his several identities, and all their contradictions, in a single
skin. It wasn’t relativism; his convictions went deeper than that. His was the experience of true religion, which is dynamic because it is alive. Such labels seemed ultimately unimportant to him because he did not belong to himself, or to this world, at all; he belonged to God. The identities that mattered to him told him not simply where he came from, but where, with God’s help, he was going.

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

PROLOGUE

1
. For further reading on the noble spiritual beliefs, see Francis Deng,
The Dinka People of Sudan
, and Wendy James,
The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power Among the Uduk of Sudan
.

2
.
www.vatican.va
.

3
. African trypanosomiasis infects between fifty thousand and seventy thousand people each year, and leads
to about forty-eight thousand deaths, according to the not-for-profit R&D organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.

4
. National Hurricane Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

5
.
www.worldchristiandatabase.org
.

6
. These statistics on population growth are United Nations figures. Unless otherwise noted, aggregate population and religious statistics are from
The
CIA World Factbook 2009.

NIGERIA

1
. All further citations of the Bible taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

1. THE ROCK: ONE

1
. Sola Odunfa, “Nigeria’s Counting Controversy,” BBC News, March 21, 2006, at
news.bbc.co.uk
.

2
. U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., August 11, 2009.

3
. “Corruption, Godfatherism,
and the Funding of Political Violence,”
Human Rights Watch
, October 11, 2007.

4
. The Hadith, collected centuries after Mohammed’s death, fall into different categories, some considered more accurate than others.

5
. Sahih al-Bukhari, volume 9, book 84, number 63.

6
. All further citations of the Quran come from
The Qur’an: A New Translation
by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004).

7
. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Nigeria,” December 22, 2006, at
www.pewforum.org
.

2. THE ROCK: TWO

1
. The term was coined by the nineteenth-century British evangelist John Spencer Trimingham. His popular book,
The Christian Approach to Islam in the Sudan
(London: Oxford University Press, 1948), cast Islam as a threat against
religion and empire, and had a major influence on colonial thinking.

2
. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Nigeria.”

3
. For further reading, see Dana L. Robert’s excellent biography,
Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003).

4
. Luther H. Gulick, “What the Triangle Means,”
Young Men’s Era
, January 18, 1894.