The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (6 page)

At COCIN headquarters,
a framed photograph of Karl Kumm hung from a nail in the main office. Here was the pale-eyed hero in profile. With the swept-back locks of a romantic poet, he fixed his gaze beyond the frame. I asked the church’s information officer, whom I’ll call Pastor J.,
¹⁰
if he knew what Kumm was supposed to be looking at.

He glanced at the picture and said he wasn’t sure. But Kumm’s prediction, the pastor
added, had come true: the Middle Belt now stood as the last line of defense against Islam’s domination of the country, the continent, and the world. As the pastor had written in one of his many books on the subject,
Shari’a: The Hidden Agenda
: “In a nutshell, the main objective and motive of the Muslims, is TO CRUSH THE CHRISTIANS SOCIALLY, POLITICALLY, AND ECONOMICALLY, OR CONVERT THEM BY FORCE
TO ISLAM” (emphasis his).

Pastor J. belonged to one of the hill tribes, the non-Muslim ethnic groups that had fled to the plateau to protect themselves from Muslim raiders, and he carried the air of a wilderness prophet. “The moment they can crush Christianity here, the country will fall,” he warned. A short, thickset man with bloodshot eyes, Pastor J. told me that the confrontation between Christianity
and Islam foreshadowed Judgment Day. This was a matter of both scripture and geography, he pointed out. The Middle Belt’s fault line was a microcosm of a global struggle—a long-standing threat to which the West was just waking up.

“I may sound like a prophet of doom, but I’m thankful for 9/11—if it had not happened, the United States would have been in the dark about
the Muslim world,” he said,
reminding me that, as far as Christians in his congregation were concerned, Nigeria’s religious crisis began “a few days before yours,” on September 7, 2001. On that Friday, a Christian woman walked through a group of Muslims who were praying with their foreheads to the ground outside a mosque full of worshippers. Her interruption was immediately seen as an act of disrespect, and, within hours,
Muslim and Christian mobs were attacking each other in the town of Jos.
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Thousands on both sides were killed, but the world, distracted by events in New York City, paid little attention.

Some people believe that Christian militants sent the woman to walk through the middle of the mosque’s Friday prayer—that the act was intended to incite violence. Later that day, in self-defense, said Pastor
J., he killed a Muslim man with an axe. He felt no remorse. To him, being a Christian meant being a soldier for Christ. He said, “We teach our members to be alert and to defend themselves—if not, it would be suicide.

“I am ready to die for my faith. All we can do is to prepare our people for martyrdom. Remaining here to fight is the only solution,” he added. He paged through the Bible lying open
on his desk and fished a thick pair of glasses from his breast pocket to read the story of Jesus being struck by a Roman soldier before being crucified. In this story, Pastor J. said, Jesus never turns the other cheek. Instead, when the soldier slaps him, Jesus demands an explanation: “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why do you strike Me?” (John 18:23). The pastor
believed that Christians had the right to defend themselves. In order not to be crushed, Christians had to outpace Muslims by winning souls faster. He saw the Great Commission as not only a mandate to reach new believers with the Gospel but also a survival strategy.

More than Kumm’s legacy, Pastor J.’s thinking reflected a global movement in Christianity and Islam. Both are in the midst of decades-long
religious reawakenings—global revivals that, like their namesakes in America and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are calls to return to an idealized past. These revivals encompass a breadth of beliefs and points of view—from liberal to conservative. Some conservatives like Pastor J. consider themselves “fundamentalists.” The name, which has become a catchword for
both Christians and Muslims, comes from the title of twelve pamphlets, called “The Fundamentals,” written in 1902 by
evangelical leaders who formed the American Bible League to counter the threat that Darwin and modern science posed to their faith. The various authors, who argued that the Bible was God’s inspired word, sent the pamphlets to three million readers between 1910 and 1915.
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Since
then, the word
fundamentalism
has been subject to a wide range of interpretations. Yet one hundred years ago, the term outlined what it still does today: a desire to return to a past when religion and its tenets were absolute. These theologies—driven by narratives of good pitted against evil—graft easily to competition over land and resources.

For Christians like Pastor J. who see themselves
in theological and worldly conflict with believers of all other stripes, population growth helps to determine their survival. So do large numbers of believers. Religion grows stronger only if it can be practiced, Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born Roman Catholic who has written extensively about both Christianity and Islam, explained to me. If the church or the mosque is empty, there is no religion. “For
both a Sufi leader and a Pentecostal preacher in Africa, this is a no-brainer,” Sanneh said, and scripture supports this idea. God says to his people in Genesis, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and many reawakened Christians see their duty to reproduce as a duty to God, as do Muslims. In the chapter of the Quran called “The Bee,” God also commands Mohammed, “[Prophet] call [people] to the way of your
Lord with wisdom and good teaching” (The Bee 16:125).
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For both, the instruction is clear: by procreation and conversion, spread the faith.

When I returned to the Middle Belt in September 2007, the rainy season had begun. Low white mist shrouded the escarpments and burst open into midday deluges the likes of which I’d never seen. Sheets of blinding rain turned the red roads
into cataracts. One morning, before the skies broke open, I walked around Jos searching for the thousands of religious advertisements I had seen along the roadside a year earlier. The local authorities had ordered them removed, I learned; they thought that so much signage intensified religious conflict. I stopped in one Internet café for a quart of vanilla yogurt and picked up a week-old local
paper. Through the smudged newsprint I read that a flash flood in a nearby town had driven tens of thousands from their homes and killed scores of others. The death toll was unknown. The town, I read, was Wase.

I left Jos the next morning, in the same borrowed gold minivan with the bald and barrel-chested Haruna Yakubu at the wheel again. After a two-hour drive through a sea of brilliant, rain-fed
grass, we reached the Wase River. The bridge was gone, and the gulley between the riverbanks swarmed with young men naked to the waist, flinging heavy white sacks of salt across their backs. They waded up to their chests through blood-colored water, reddened from runoff. On one bank, someone had lashed oil drums together to make small rafts. I left the van and climbed onto one, to be dragged
across the river. Even on the open water, the air felt different; the mild breeze of a year earlier had turned to fetid stillness. As the waves hit the empty oil drums, it sounded like something was banging on them from below.

The Wase River had spilled over its bank one Friday in August, about three weeks earlier, and continued to rise. By early evening, the water was neck-high and still climbing.
To escape the rising floodwaters, the several thousand people who lived in thirteen villages along the river began to hoist
their babies into the trees. Children of one and two years old, who could hold on to branches, were hoisted up alone. Mothers climbed up with their infants. By nightfall, the elders estimated, altogether about two thousand babies were hanging from branches. They spent two
days without food or water. Some were silent. Others cried from hunger. Below them, in the slick, black water, cows, goats, pigs, and a few human bodies floated past.

“All of our food is gone,” Fakcit Alexander, one survivor, told me when I reached what had been her village after the water receded. She was in her early thirties but looked at least fifty. Her short hair was copper-colored from
either mud or malnutrition, and her skin was ashen. She walked me around the wrecked village about a mile down the road from Wase Rock’s two humps. The mud walls of a school still stood, but nothing else. The village had also lost all its corn, which had been just about ready for harvest. The cornstalks’ height had hidden the flash flood’s monstrous wave, so no one had time to run, Fakcit said. She
led me to a fallen log in a clearing. I looked down and saw that she was barefoot. The flood had taken her shoes. The village gathered around her to listen as we talked. Two men were fixing a bicycle; the others were sipping from gourds filled with home brew. The only thing to do was drink, and they weaved around the village dazed with loss.

Like most of the communities at the edge of town, Fakcit’s
was Christian—a fact anyone could tell from the potent smell of sour mash fermenting in the sun nearby; most Nigerian Muslims do not drink alcohol. There were other traits that sometimes told Muslim from Christian. Fakcit belonged to one of the historically non-Muslim hill tribes, and although it was a generalization (and sometimes inaccurate), they tended to be shorter and broader than their
rivals, the ethnic Fulanis, who looked taller and more angular, like the Emir of Wase. Many carried the spare air of nomads from the arid north, even though they had settled one hundred years ago.

In many of Nigeria’s Muslim towns, Christians, like other outsiders, historically had to live outside the city walls, and in some cases they still do. The legacy of being an ethnic minority forced to
the edge of town had embittered Fakcit. “The Muslims call us fools,” she said. Three years earlier, a Muslim mob killed her father and burned this village to the ground. As the Christians sat gathered around a bicycle, two nomadic herdsmen—willowy Fulanis—walked quietly through the clearing and called greetings to the flood victims. As northern nomads, they were undoubtedly
Muslims, yet when I
went to speak to them I noticed a curious marking on one man’s face.

His tattooed cheek bore an indigo Coptic cross. I asked him about its origins; he shrugged and smiled. He did not remember receiving the mark as a child, nor did he know the symbol’s history. Maybe his nomadic ancestors had once belonged to the ancient Christian kingdoms of Nubia, in northern Sudan. Maybe when the last of the
Nubian kingdoms fell to Muslim armies in 1504, his kinsfolk converted to Islam. Maybe over the past five hundred years, his ancestors had migrated here to the southwest, two thousand miles from northern Sudan, bringing their cows and what they carried on their bodies: this symbol of their former faith.

Cross tattoo or no, he belonged to the Muslim herders who had come to blows with the Christians
in the past several years. Despite Fakcit Alexander’s grumbling, the flood seemed to have brought the two groups together—at least for the moment—or else there was simply nothing left to lose, nothing over which to fight. Although the flood had killed most of their cattle, the nomads’ most pressing problem was water. For the past several years the land had become so desiccated that the herdsmen
had begun to dig boreholes right at the edge of the river, where it was easiest to hit water—and most destructive to the bank. The farmers of Fakcit’s village also planted corn right to the water’s edge. Overfarming and overgrazing had destroyed the riverbank, so that when the flood came, the bank fell all the faster. This was one way in which human error compounded environmental pressures. Practically,
the village was ruined, spent; but Fakcit and her fellow villagers were determined to stay.

“This place is our father’s land,” Fakcit said. “This place is our place.” The flood brought with it plagues of insects and illness, including a malaria outbreak.
¹
Each of Fakcit’s eight children had contracted malaria from sleeping in the open air, even the baby; she pulled a warm, dozing lump from the
cloth on her back. “They’re covered with bites,” she said, tugging the baby’s small arm from the cotton folds so I could see the welts. His name was Cheldon, which means, “I am pleading for more from the Creator.”

Two thousand babies in the trees—I pictured this as I stood with Fakcit beneath the harsh dazzle of the overcast sky. I pictured the babies later that night, when I was lying on a foam
mattress in a cheap hotel nearby. I have pictured those babies again and again; they come up behind
my eyes without bidding, in silhouette, like a woodcut, with an eggplant sky behind them, and greasy water licking at the tree trunks. Seen from a distance, the children would have clung to the limbs like strange fruit—the allusion inescapable—not swinging dead, but alive and grasping branches.
According to the local Red Cross representative (one of the emir’s courtiers, who carried a clipboard and kept track of the death toll) all of those babies survived. So far, according to the information he’d been able to gather, forty-seven adults had died, but numbers in Nigeria are usually speculative at best.

That afternoon I climbed the hill to the emir’s castle for the last time, with a
sudden, animal understanding of the difference high ground makes. Although he had been untouched by the flood, the emir was despondent; first the religious fighting, now the flood, and no time in between to recover. Only a few years earlier, he had gathered Muslims and Christians to pray for the end of a terrible drought. That kind of coming together was impossible now. What’s more, there was no way
to explain that this flood was a result of human action, the emir said, leaning his swaddled head against the fraying throne. Before I arrived he had been listening to a BBC radio program about the perils of the Sahel. “This flood is the first sign of climate change,” he said. Yet his people believed such curses came only from God.

Of all seven continents, Africa is believed to be most affected
by climate change. Poverty, overfarming, overgrazing, deforestation, and increasingly erratic weather patterns all contribute to the conservative prediction that, if the world’s temperature rises as little as two degrees by 2100, as many as 250 million Africans will be left without adequate drinking water.
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In Africa and Asia, the band along the tenth parallel is one of the most ecologically precarious
in the world. Here, the inexorable southward spread of North Africa’s desert, which occurs in Nigeria at an estimated rate of between a quarter and a half mile each year,
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meets unpredictable rains in the transition zone from Africa’s dry north to its wet south.