reading

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

—JELALUDDIN RUMI

A self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I have gifts that you do not have, so consequently I am unique—you have gifts that I do not have, so you are unique. God has made us so that we will need each other …

—ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU

I stopped asking such questions as
is he white or black
an anarchist or monarchist
fashionable or outmoded
ours or theirs
and I began to ask
what in him is of human being

and is he

—RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER

PROLOGUE

The chief was spending Easter Sunday in his hut, which smelled of stale smoke from a cooking fire and of something more glandular: panic. When the visitor from Washington ducked inside, the chief, a man in his midfifties named Nyol Paduot, rose stiff-kneed from a white plastic lawn chair. He had spent several days keeping watch against an approaching dust cloud kicked up by horsemen and Jeeps. It would mean his village of Todaj, teetering on the fraught and murky border between northern and southern Sudan, was under attack again. He was grouchy and unkempt: his eyes pouched, his salt-and-pepper beard scruffy, his waxy green-and-yellow shirt stained with the tide lines of dried sweat. He glowered at the American visitor, Roger Winter, whose bare legs poked out from khaki shorts. One leg bore the scar of a snakebite he had gotten not far away while helping to broker a peace on behalf of the United States. The 2005 deal was supposed to end nearly forty years of intermittent civil war between northern and southern Sudan, which had left two million people dead. In some places, the peace agreement had stanched the bloodshed, allowing the south to form a nascent government that described itself as “Christian-led.” Under the terms of the deal, the north was supposed to make it attractive for the south to remain part of a unified Sudan by giving it a voice in the national government, and a fair share of oil revenues. But the north ignored most of the terms. The peace deal proved to mean nothing here on the boundary between the two Sudans, which jigs and jags like an EKG reading along the straight, flat latitude of the tenth parallel.

The tenth parallel is the horizontal band that rings the earth seven hundred miles north of the equator. If Africa is shaped like a rumpled sock, with South Africa at the toe and Somalia at the heel, then the tenth parallel runs across the ankle. Along the tenth parallel, in Sudan, and in most of inland Africa, two worlds collide: the mostly Muslim, Arab-influenced north meets a black African south inhabited by Christians and those who follow indigenous religions—which include those who venerate ancestors and the spirits of animals, land, and sky.¹ Thirty miles south (at a latitude of 9°43'59"), the village of Todaj marked the divide where these two rival worldviews, their dysfunctional governments and well-armed militaries, vied inch by inch for land. The village belonged to the south’s largest ethnic group, the Ngok Dinka. But in 2008, when Roger Winter paid Nyol Paduot a visit, the north was threatening to send its soldiers and Arab militias to attack the village and lay claim to the underground river of light, sweet crude oil running beneath the chief’s feet.

Oil was discovered in southern Sudan during the 1970s, and the struggle to control it is one of the long-running war’s more recent causes. The fight in Sudan threatened to split Africa’s largest country in two, and still does. In 2011, the south is scheduled to vote on whether it wants to remain part of the north or become its own country, made up of ten states that lie to the south of the tenth parallel and border Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Chad. This looming split—which, if it happens, would likely occur largely along the tenth parallel—meant that Todaj and the nearby oil boomtown of Abyei, about ten miles south, were vitally important. Whichever side controlled them would control an estimated two billion barrels of oil.

Other than Paduot, and six elders gathered in his hut, the village appeared deserted. Prompted by gunfire and rumors of war, the five hundred families who lived there had fled south, terrified that Todaj was about to be wiped off the face of the earth. Their fear was well founded: three times in the previous twenty years, soldiers from the north had laid siege to Todaj, raping women and children, killing and carrying off young men, and burning to the ground the villagers’ thatched huts and the Episcopal church made of hay.

It was the end of the dry season, and a breeze stirred the air over this colorless plot of parched earth, bare but for these empty dwellings and a few gaunt cows trawling for loose hay. The cows wandering hungrily around the village didn’t belong to the people of Todaj, but to northern Arab nomads, the Misseriya, who, because of seasonal drought up north, came south at this time of year to graze their cattle. Paduot was afraid that when the rains began a few weeks later, and the nomads could return home to their own greener pastures, there would be nothing to keep the northern soldiers (cousins and sons of the nomads) from attacking Todaj.

“We know when they burn our village, they want the land,” said the chief, a Ngok Dinka translator rendering his words into English. These patterns sounded like the ones unfolding less than fifty miles northwest, in the region of Darfur, because they were the same. Three decades ago, while Sudan’s current president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was a military general stationed on this border, the Khartoum-based northern government perfected the methods of attack, using the paramilitary horsemen called the Janjawiid, whom it was now deploying in Darfur. Todaj faced this same threat, but other than Roger Winter, very few knew anything about the impending disaster. On BBC radio, Paduot heard much talk about Darfur. Although the same thing was happening here along the border, it rarely made international news. The two fronts had much in common, since all of Sudan’s wars boil down to a central Khartoum-based cabal battling the people at the peripheries. The only differences between Darfur and Abyei, the chief explained, were religion and oil. In Darfur, there was no oil and both sides were Muslim, a confrontation he did not understand. “Why would Muslims fight against Muslims?” he asked aloud.

Here, the north had mounted its assaults in the name of jihad, or holy war, claiming that Islam and Arab culture should reign supreme in Sudan. Chief Paduot, who had survived several such conflagrations, had come to see Islam as a tool of oppression, one the northerners were using to erase his culture and undo his people’s claim to the land and its oil.

“People hate Islam now,” he said. Having stepped into the hut behind Winter, I glanced around to see if any of the elders was startled by the chief’s remark. If they were, no sign of it crossed their faces, which showed only dread and exhaustion.

To defy the north, most of the villagers had been baptized as Episcopalians—they prayed daily, attended church on Sunday, and had cast off loose, long-sleeved Islamic dress in favor of short-sleeved Western-style button-down shirts, or brilliant batiks. For them, Islam was now simply a catchall term for the government, people, and policies of the north.

Race, like religion, was a rallying cry in this complicated war. The paler-skinned Arab northerners looked down on the darker-skinned people of the south, Paduot explained slowly. He seemed tired of giving tutorials to outsiders. What good were earnest, well-meaning people like us, who came with our water bottles and notebooks to record the details of a situation but could do nothing to stop it?

The divisions between north and south along the tenth parallel date back centuries, and colonial rule simply reinforced them. One hundred years earlier, the British colonialists who governed Sudan had virtually handed this swath of land south of the tenth parallel to the Roman Catholic Church. Daniel Comboni, a beloved nineteenth-century Italian missionary who was canonized as a saint in 2003, headed Catholic efforts in Central Africa with the expressed aim to “save Africa through Africans.”² Under Comboni’s direction, the Catholic Church ran all schools and hospitals (and forbade Protestant missionaries from proselytizing), until, in 1964, the northern government, employing Islam as a form of nationalism, expelled all missionaries from the country. African Christians—not Westerners—were left to lead the local church, which was then, as now, under fire from the north as an alien, infidel institution. This attitude has not changed, the local Catholic priest, Father Peter Suleiman, told me. “Every day we experience the misery of the south. You still hear the promise of death.” And oil has made things worse. “The north believes that oil is a gift from God for the Muslim people,” he said. Although the Catholic Church still held some sway along this border, Father Suleiman told me that an influx of more charismatic Protestant churches was gaining ground. In the village of Todaj, many of the villagers were convinced that they were still alive solely because they had prayed to Jesus Christ for protection.

Born into a family that prayed to ancestral gods, Chief Paduot became a nominal Muslim in order to gain admission to school (a practice begun by Christian missionaries and now emulated by Khartoum). Through a process of forced Islamization, the north had made it compulsory for people to declare themselves Muslims by saying the Shahada—“I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Mohammed is his messenger”—and adopting Muslim names in order to attend school, get a job, or avoid jail or violent death. In his forties, Paduot, chief by birth, decided that he wanted to leave Islam and become a Catholic. But the northern security forces threatened the local Catholic priest, one Father Marco, saying they would torture him if he baptized the chief. (They told Paduot they’d stone him if he became “a backslider from Islam.”) He refrained from converting to Catholicism to safeguard his village from further trouble. “I kept Islam to protect my people,” he said, but, to show his independence, he had returned to the indigenous practices of his youth—called the noble spiritual beliefs. Christians and Muslims alike disparaged the local indigenous religion on the ground that it didn’t teach adherents to follow the one, true God. That was ignorance on their part, Paduot said. “We worship one Creator God, too, then smaller gods.”

He had also married an Episcopalian. Now he led us out of the hut—its thick, round walls like a muddy mushroom stem—and pointed to a line of what looked like tiny corn-husk scarecrows along the roofs of his and other huts. “They are crosses,” the chief said. Their frayed edges glowed in the afternoon’s pewter light; they were symbols marking the beginning of the south, and visual reminders to anyone entering the village that it was a Christian place, the chief explained. Squinting into the overcast sky to look at them, I thought the threadbare totems were also bids for divine protection.

Yet the crosses seemed to be proving as ineffective as the chief’s satellite phone, which hung by its power cord from two portable solar panels on the thatched roof of his hut. There was no one left for him to call for help. Though his cousin, Francis Deng, was serving as the United Nations Special Representative for the Prevention of Genocide, and though Paduot met regularly with local UN officials, representatives of the southern government, and visitors such as Roger Winter (a longtime head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees who had lobbied hard for the south in Washington and Khartoum), no one could do anything to stop the impending assault.

On the surface of this conflict, two groups, northern and southern, Muslim and Christian, were competing for land and water. Yet at a deeper level, the people were now pawns of their respective governments, and Paduot knew it.

He produced a worn map softened with use and pointed to three annotations in English: PUMP 1, PUMP 2, PUMP 3. These indicated the oil fields of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company—a consortium of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and Sudanese interests operating in Sudan with the blessing of President Bashir. At the same time, Bashir was exhorting his holy soldiers, or Mujahideen—whom he called “the legitimate sons of the soil”—to re-up for jihad. Once again, he was making use of race and religion to safeguard oil interests before the country faced the impending split.

Some of his soldiers were stationed two hundred yards away, acting as sentries on the north-south border, the location of which was determined by whoever was strong enough to push it a few inches one way or another. Around their makeshift barracks, camps of nomads were springing up, as if preparing for war. Over the past few weeks, as Paduot looked on, the soldiers had received shipments of automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. If a full-scale rift between north and south occurred, it would begin right here with these weapons, Paduot warned. A village sentry came in and whispered in his ear. Abruptly, he stopped talking: soldiers were slouching against the hut’s outside wall, listening to his every word.

In Africa, the space between the tenth parallel and the equator marks the end of the continent’s arid north and the beginning of sub-Saharan jungle. Wind, other weather, and centuries of human migrations have brought the two religions to converge here. Christianity and Islam share a fifteen-hundred-year history in Africa. It began in 615 when Mohammed, his life at risk at home on the Arabian Peninsula, sent a dozen of his followers and family members to find refuge at the court of an African Christian king in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Within a decade of Mohammed’s death (in 632), the first Muslim armies landed in Africa, proceeding south from Egypt to today’s Sudan. There they made a peace pact—the first of its kind—with the ancient Nubian Christian kingdoms along the Nile River. The pact lasted for six centuries. Then religious wars broke out. By 1504, the last of the Christian kingdoms in Sudan had fallen to Muslim armies.

From the seventh century to the twentieth, Muslim traders and missionaries carried Islam inland over the northernmost third of Africa, carving trade routes from the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to the West African kingdom of Timbuktu. Away from the coasts, crossing the landlocked region south of the tenth parallel proved difficult; the pale, grassy savanna thickened to bush, and the bush gave way to a mire of emerald swamp and jungle. Along the tenth parallel, the tsetse fly belt begins: and these blood-sucking insects, each the size of a housefly and carrying African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness),³ virtually stopped Islam’s southern spread.

To the east, five thousand miles off the African coast and over the Indian Ocean, natural forces also shaped the encounter of Christianity and Islam in the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The trade winds—high-pressure air currents that move steadily from either pole toward the equator—filled the sails of both Muslim and Christian merchants from the northern hemisphere beginning in the eighth century. These reliable winds propelled Christian and Muslim ships to the same islands, beaches, and ports, then returned them either to Europe or to the Arabian Peninsula, their ships heavy with cargoes of cinnamon and cloves.

The trade winds are part of the intertropical convergence zone, a weather system that moves to the north or south of the equator, depending on the season. In this zone, wind currents from the northern hemisphere run into those from the southern hemisphere. As the two cycles meet head-on, they generate cataclysmic storms. In Asia, these storms begin during monsoon season and generally spin west to Africa, where the most tempestuous of them move west off the African coast at Cape Verde, across the Atlantic Ocean, and become America’s hurricanes. Within this band, Asia, Africa, and America are part of a single weather system.⁴ (A dangerous year of monsoons in Asia and storms in Africa’s catastrophe belt, for instance, can mean a disastrous year of hurricanes for the U.S. eastern seaboard.)

As the earth grows warmer, preexisting cycles of flooding and drought around the tenth parallel grow increasingly unpredictable, making it impossible for African nomads, most of whom are Muslims, and farmers (Christians, Muslims, and indigenous believers) to rely on centuries-old patterns of migration, planting, and harvesting. They must move into new territory to grow food and graze their livestock. Consequently, between the equator and the tenth parallel two groups with distinctly different cultures and cosmologies unavoidably face off against each other—as they do in the Sudanese village of Todaj.

Growing populations intensify these competitions. Due to the explosive growth of Christianity over the past fifty years, there are now 493 million Christians living south of the tenth parallel—nearly a fourth of the world’s Christian population of 2 billion.⁵ To the north live the majority of the continent’s 367 million Muslims; they represent nearly one quarter of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. These figures are an effective reminder that four out of five Muslims live outside the Middle East. Indonesia, with 240 million people, is the most populous Muslim country in the world. Malaysia is its tiny, rich neighbor; the Philippines, its larger, poorer one. Together, the three countries have a population of 250 million Muslims and 110 million Christians. Indonesia and Malaysia are predominantly Muslim countries, with vocal Christian minorities. The Philippines—with a powerful Catholic majority (population 92 million) mostly to the north of the tenth parallel and a Muslim minority (population 5 million) to the south—is the opposite. It has been a strongly Christian country ever since Ferdinand Magellan planted a cross on an island hilltop there in 1521. Yet Islam, which arrived hundreds of years earlier, has remained a source of identity and rebellion in the south for the past five hundred years.

Africa’s and Asia’s populations are expanding, on average, faster than those in the rest of the world. While the global population of 6.8 billion people increases by 1.2 percent every year, in Asia the rate is 1.4 percent, and in Africa it doubles to 2.4 percent.⁶ In this fragile zone where the two religions meet, the pressures wrought by growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water, over practices and hardening worldviews.

The particular strain of religion that’s growing the fastest also intensifies these problems. Christianity and Islam are in the throes of decades-long revolutions: reawakenings. Believers adopt outward signs of devotion—praying, eating, dressing, and other social customs—that call attention to the ways they differ from the unbelievers around them. Yet these movements are not simply about exhibiting devotion. They begin with a direct encounter with God.

For Sufis, who make up the majority of African Muslims, and for Pentecostals, who account for more than one quarter of African Christians, worship begins with ecstatic experience. Sufis follow a mystical strain of Islam that begins with inviting God into the human heart. Pentecostals urge their members to encounter the Holy Spirit viscerally, as Jesus’s followers did during the feast of Pentecost when they spoke in tongues.

Such reawakenings demand an individual’s total surrender, and promise, in return, an exclusive path to the one true God. “These movements aren’t about converting to a better version of self,” Lamin Sanneh, a theologian at Yale and the author of Whose Religion Is Christianity?, told me. “They are about converting to God.” They say the believer can know God now in this life and forever in the next. In return, they expect the believer to proselytize—to gain new converts—from either among other religions or their own less ardent believers, which creates new frictions.

These movements are already reshaping Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the region we used to call the third world, or even the developing world. Nowadays, liberal and conservative Western analysts, and many of the region’s inhabitants as well, use the term Global South instead. This somewhat clunky moniker is intended to cast off the legacy of the West, to challenge the assumption that the entire world is developing within a Western context. It is also meant to highlight a marked shift in demographics and influence among the world’s Christians and Muslims. Today’s typical Protestant is an African woman, not a white American man. In many of the weak states along the tenth parallel, the power of these religious movements is compounded by the fact that the “state” means very little here; governments are alien structures that offer their people almost nothing in the way of services or political rights. This lack is especially pronounced where present-day national borders began as nothing more than lines sketched onto colonial maps. Other kinds of identity, consequently, come to the fore: religion above everything—even race or ethnicity—becomes a means to safeguard individual and collective security in this world and the next one.

In many cases, then, gains for one side imply losses for the other. Revival provides not only a pattern for daily life but also a form of communal defense, bringing people together, giving them a shared goal or purpose, and inviting them to risk their lives in the pursuit of it. Often the end is liberation, and the means to liberation include martyrdom and holy war. With Islam, it is perhaps easier to understand how believers could see a return to religious law as undoing the corruption sown by colonialism. Yet in Christianity, too, religion has become a means of political emancipation, especially between the equator and the tenth parallel, where Christianity and Islam meet. Many Christians living in these states belong to non-Muslim ethnic minorities who share the experience of being enslaved by northern Muslims, and perceive themselves as living on Christianity’s front line in the battle against Islamic domination. In Nigeria, Sudan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and elsewhere, Christians have lost churches, homes, and family members to violent struggle. At the same time, they, like their Muslim adversaries, see the developed West as a godless place that has forsaken its Christian heritage.

I began investigating this faith-based fault line as a journalist in December 2003, when I traveled with Franklin Graham—Billy Graham’s son, and head of a prosperous evangelical empire—to Khartoum, to meet his nemesis, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose regime was waging the world’s most violent modern jihad against Christians and Muslims alike in southern Sudan. Bashir was also beginning the genocidal campaign in Darfur. (In 2009, the International Criminal Court at The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity.) In Bashir’s palace’s sepulchral marble reception room, the two men argued pointedly over who would convert whom. Each adhered to a very different worldview: theirs were opposing fundamentalisms based on the belief that there was one—and only one—way to believe in God. At the same time, their religious politics spilled over into a fight between cultures, and represented the way in which the world’s Muslims and the West have come to misunderstand each other. Being a witness to this conversation was like watching emissaries from two different civilizations square off over a plate of pistachios.

Soon afterward, I started to travel in the band between the equator and the tenth parallel. I visited places where the two religions often clash: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and the Horn of Africa; Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Over the past decade, there has been much theorizing about religion and politics, religion and poverty, conflicts and accommodation between Christianity and Islam. I wanted to see how Christianity and Islam are actually lived every day by huge numbers of vulnerable, marginal believers—individuals who are also part of the global story of poverty, development strategy, climate-change forecasts, and so on.

No theory of religious politics or religious violence in our time can possibly be complete without accounting for the four-fifths of Muslims who live outside the Middle East or for the swelling populations of evangelical Christians whose faith is bound up with their struggle for resources and survival. I wanted to go where such lives are actually led, where wars in the name of religion are not Internet media campaigns to “control a global narrative” but actual wars fought from village to village and street corner to street corner.

Most of all, I wanted to record the interwoven stories of those who inhabit this territory, and whose religious beliefs pattern their daily perseverance. Although it’s easy to see Christianity and Islam as vast and static forces, they are perpetually in flux. Over time, each religion has shaped the other. Religion is dynamic and fluid. The most often overlooked fact of religious revivals, of the kind now unfolding between the equator and the tenth parallel, is that they give rise to divisions within the religions themselves. They are about a struggle over who speaks for God—a confrontation that takes place not simply between rival religions, but inside them. This is as true in the West as it is in the Global South. Religions, like the weather, link us to one another, whether we like it or not.

PART ONE

AFRICA

NIGERIA

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE 23:34¹

“Lord, forgive thy people, they do not know.”

—SAHIH AL-BUKHARI, ISTITABE, 5

THE ROCK: ONE

Wase Rock is a double-humped crag that towers eight hundred feet above the green hills of Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Wase (“wah-say”) means “all-embracing” in Arabic, and it is one of Islam’s ninety-nine names for God. Majestic and odd, the freestanding stone is smack in the center of the country, which, with 140 million people, is Africa’s most populous. It is the largest in the world to be almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims. There are forty-five to fifty million members of each respective faith, but no exact figures, since the Nigerian government deemed questions about religion too dangerous to ask during the most recent census in 2006.¹ As in Sudan, fifteen hundred miles to the east, Nigeria’s Muslims live predominantly in the desert north, and its Christians, to the swampy south. (There are some important exceptions, including the southwest, where the ethnic Yoruba have adopted both religions.) For the most part, Christianity and Islam meet in the Middle Belt, a two-hundred-mile-wide strip of fertile grassland that lies between the seventh and tenth parallels (from five hundred to seven hundred miles north of the equator) and runs from west to east across most of inland Africa.

This pale grassland belongs to the Sahel, which means “coast” in Arabic. The Sahel forms the coast of a great sand sea: the north’s immense Sahara Desert. And the Middle Belt sits on a two-thousand-foot-high plateau of russet tableland; as the ground rises, the air freshens and cools. Depending on the season, the terrain ranges from bone-dry steppe to luxuriant green bush. On most days, a mild breeze blows down from the Middle Belt’s knobby escarpments, over the savanna’s glossy burr grass, and across a patchwork of small cassava and dairy farms, which produce milk that is an ambrosia of butter, honey, and sun.

The Middle Belt could be an earthly paradise, but it is not. I first arrived there in August 2006, to visit a local Muslim king called the Emir of Wase. As I approached Wase, the plateau became blistered with ruins. Almost every village had been burned to the ground, both the round thatched huts of the Christian farmers and the square mud houses that belonged to Muslim traders and herders. Since 2001, Nigeria’s Middle Belt has been torn apart by violence between Christians and Muslims; tens of thousands of people have been killed in religious skirmishes. Almost all of these began over something other than religion—from local elections to fights over land, to mob violence that broke out between Muslims and Christians in reaction to America’s invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Yet these small street fights, infused with deeper hatred, have often given way to massacres in churches, hospitals, and mosques. With each side determined to eradicate the other, the skirmishes have assumed the rhetoric of faith-based genocide; one Christian writer called Nigeria’s Muslims “cockroaches,” a deliberate reminder of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Blessed with some of the world’s richest oil reserves, Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s major petroleum producer. It is America’s fifth-largest supplier of oil, a factor in the pronouncement by the U.S. assistant secretary of state Johnnie Carson that Nigeria is “undoubtedly the most important country in Sub-Saharan Africa.”² But if Nigeria is one of the continent’s wealthiest and most influential powers, it is also one of its most corrupt democracies. Since the end of military rule in 1999, politicians have reportedly embezzled between $4 billion and $8 billion annually.³

Despite the country’s vast oil wealth, more than half of Nigerians live on less than one dollar a day, and four out of ten are unemployed. Being a citizen in Nigeria means next to nothing; in many regions, the state offers no electricity, water, or education. Instead, for access to everything from schooling to power lines, many Nigerians turn to religion. Being a Christian or a Muslim, belonging to the local church or mosque, and voting along religious lines has become the way to safeguard seemingly secular rights.

Nigeria’s population is also growing at a rate of 2 percent a year—dramatically faster than the global average. This growth is particularly remarkable for Christians; high birth rates and aggressive evangelization over the past century have increased the number of believers from 176,000 to nearly 50 million. When it comes to religious competition, population is an undeniable asset. Due to these staggering numbers of new believers, many African Christians argue that, as the Middle Belt Anglican archbishop Benjamin Kwashi told me, “God has moved his work to Africa.”

To visit the emir, I had borrowed a gold minivan that belonged to a one-armed pastor and an imam, former sworn enemies who had started an interfaith organization in the nearby city of Kaduna. Decals on the rear window read, “PEACE IS DIVINE.” The minivan’s driver was bald, barrel-chested, and in his mid-forties; Haruna Yakubu had formerly led Muslim gangs in Middle Belt clashes. Now he was seeking to deprogram the young men he had taught to fight in defense of their religion.

Wase lay on the far side of a river of the same name, and the only way to reach the tiny Muslim kingdom was to cross a narrow, one-lane concrete bridge. As we drove along the devastated floodplain toward Wase, some of the Christian farmers were beginning to rebuild. Tethered awkwardly outside the Christians’ huts were muddy white cattle. Before the fighting, the farmers had hardly any cows; they belonged to the Muslim herders. The cattle were war booty.

When we reached the bridge, an orange truck was jackknifed across the lane, listing over the edge. A man in a Mylar suit and a matching peaked hat—like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz—pantomimed a traffic cop, but he was only playing at order. Cars were backed up behind the accident for several miles. The truck’s heavy cab dangled off to the right and over the cataract rushing below, like a huge steel creature lowering its exhausted head for a drink. A market had sprung up: among the jam of people and cars, women sold peanuts and blackened corn from tin trays on their heads, the commerce of daily catastrophe. Radio chatter drifted from the open doors of trucks and cars. Nobody knew how long the wait would be—a week, maybe more. It would take a special winch to lift the truck, and it was days away. Until the winch arrived, all travel—to work, to the hospital, to buy clean water from the nearby town (Wase had none)—stopped dead. But the emir was not a man to be kept waiting, so we had to find a way across the bridge. Savvy Yakubu, the minivan’s driver, quietly gathered a group of teenage boys hanging around—more than half of Nigeria’s population is under eighteen—as I heaved open the van’s sliding door and got out to walk. Somehow, the boys managed to lift our gold Toyota van, inch it around the jackknifed truck, and place it safely back onto the rickety bridge.

The emir’s earthen castle stood atop a hill about five miles from Wase Rock. The clay forecourt swarmed with courtiers in billowing robes, and the clatter of hooves rang from the royal stable. On days like this one, when the emir was granting an audience, supplicants came from hundreds of miles away to ask his help with school fees or in solving disputes with neighbors. They waited in an octagonal two-story chamber, where a dozen members of the palace guard read the newspaper on the chilly floor. The king’s advisor, or waziri, with a pink lace turban set on his head like a bicycle helmet, waited for the emir to summon his visitors, as his grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him. Most royal posts are hereditary, and the emir’s bloodline has been a source of loyalty and honor since 1816, when his ancestor founded the kingdom at the base of Wase Rock.

This ancestor, a mysterious figure named Hasan, was a follower, a jihadi, of Nigeria’s most famous Islamic reformer and a hero among African Muslims to this day: Uthman dan Fodio, a religious teacher and ethnic Fulani herder who launched a West African jihad in 1802 to purify Islam and promote the education of women. Dan Fodio, like most North African Muslims, was a Sufi. His was the first in a series of holy wars to rage across the center of the continent during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Most of these jihads began as religious rebellions within Islam, uprisings against African kings who the Sufi reformers believed had corrupted the faith. Yet time and again, as Europe’s Christian colonial powers arrived in Africa, these holy wars morphed into battles against the infidel West. These jihads, while largely forgotten, represent some of the earliest and bloodiest confrontations of Islam with the West; they drove colonial policy toward Muslims not only in Africa but worldwide. They also laid the groundwork for Islam’s opposition to the modern West.

By 1810, seventy-five years before the British would claim Nigeria as their protectorate, Dan Fodio’s followers, called his flag bearers, had conquered a large swath of West Africa as their own Islamic empire. The vanquished generally welcomed the flag bearers, who came riding south over the Sahel’s high, pleasant plateau, on horses and camels and with Dan Fodio’s pennant fluttering before them. When they neared the tenth parallel, the desert air moistened and the ground grew wetter. Here, the notorious tsetse fly belt began, and sleeping sickness killed off the jihadis’ horses and camels, effectively halting their religion’s southward advance. One of these jihadis, the emir’s ancestor, established his kingdom on his favorite grazing land in the shadow of Wase Rock. For thirteen generations, the emir’s family has occupied this leaking keep. A place out of time, it feels more like an ancient oasis in Arabia than a palace in modern-day Nigeria; the only objects in the anteroom to signal the passage of two hundred years are the newspapers and a white plastic wall phone that buzzes when the emir is ready to hear petitions.

In his traditional dress of pistachio robes and a gauze turban that tucks under his nose and culminates in two wilting rabbit ears, the Emir of Wase is the only man allowed to wear shoes—gold-buckled loafers—in his castle. According to custom, his courtiers must sit barefoot on the floor below him. When I first met His Royal Highness Haruna Abdullahi, in 2006, however, he insisted I remain on his level, and sent his chief advisor to fetch my sneakers so we could speak as equals. Fine-boned and elegant, with dark skin and sharp features, the emir, like his ancestors, is an ethnic Fulani, and most of his people are still herders. An erudite man, he seemed bored in his clammy throne room and eager to set aside the usual supplications in order to discuss how his territory had been caught up in a religious conflagration.

For all his ancient trappings, the emir is a modern intellectual and a liberal religious scholar who traveled to Pennsylvania during the 1960s to study at the University of Pittsburgh, earning a doctoral degree in public administration. “I didn’t tell anyone I was a prince in Pittsburgh,” he said, laughing deeply. He sent a minion to a stack of old papers in the corner of the cold room to root out a copy of his dissertation, the title of which he could not remember and which the courtier never found. Instead, the courtier returned with a slim yellow booklet. Dropping his head, he fell to his knees and offered it to the emir. Together with a local Catholic bishop, the emir had compiled this collection of verses from the Christian Bible and the Quran to try to correct religious misunderstanding.

“These verses command believers to live together peacefully,” he said, holding up the small pamphlet and setting it beside him on the antique couch that served as his throne. More than a decade earlier, when his father died at the age of 102, Abdullah had been working as a bank manager in the capital of Abuja. When he ascended the throne in 2001, the crisis had just begun, and from mosque loudspeakers and church pulpits, religious leaders on both sides were using the holy books to call for blood.

The emir, by his own count, had cared for between 350,000 and 400,000 Muslims, many of whom showed up at the palace gates and demanded his protection during the conflict. “I can’t tell you how much money I spent on feeding all those people,” he said. “Everyone who enters my domain, I have to account for before the Creator.” For example, the jackknifed truck on the bridge—“If anyone falls off that bridge today, it’s my responsibility,” he said. This was his duty as a king, and what his Muslim name, Abdullahi—abd, “servant” or “slave,” of Allah—commanded.

“Anytime people come to the palace, I have to open the door. I have no choice,” he said. His voice was slightly muffled by gauze. Being a king was exhausting and expensive, and he could not afford to fix his own dripping roof. At the moment, there was a lull in the violence. On both sides, people had lost too much—land, livestock, and loved ones—to keep pummeling one another. No one could afford to keep fighting. This peace had been mandated by money, not mutual religious understanding, and the emir feared it would not last.

He picked up the yellow booklet beside him. In it, he had highlighted (in his native language of Hausa) the Quran’s universal messages of coexistence for all of humankind, many of which were revealed to Mohammed early on in his life as God’s messenger, when he was forty-something and a wealthy trader living in his Arabian hometown of Mecca.

“Religion is personal; it is in the mind,” the emir said, smiling. “The books aren’t written in straight language—you need not only to read but to understand.” Tapping his college ring against the couch’s edge, he relished these kinds of riddles, and seemed more at ease talking about the nature of power and the lessons that God had revealed to the Prophet Mohammed than discussing upcoming elections or the price of rice or the availability of drinking water.

“We know Jesus taught that if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to the left,” he said ruefully. “We know that Mohammed was sacked from his village and stoned at Ta’if, but he quietly left for Medina.” In 619, according to the Hadith, the reports of what the Prophet said and did during his lifetime,⁴ Mohammed traveled to Ta’if, a mountainside town in Arabia about seventy miles southeast of the holy city of Mecca, to invite its people to become Muslims. Instead of welcoming him, the farmers stoned him and drove him, bleeding, out of town. Afterward, the archangel Gabriel—“Gibriel” in Arabic—came to the Prophet and asked him if he wanted revenge against Ta’if. Wiping blood from his face, the Prophet refused, saying, “Lord, forgive thy people, they do not know.”⁵ Mohammed knew about Jesus and his teachings; before his death, he instructed his followers to act as Jesus had, to be willing to die for their faith. Mohammed’s words echo Jesus’s plea from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The emir made the point that if both of these men, beaten and bloodied—the incarnations of their respective faiths—asked God to forgive their aggressors, then who were today’s religious leaders to advocate holy war? The two religions were deeply linked, the emir said, but leaders did not know of, or else had forgotten, their common bonds. The Quran also tells the story of the Virgin Mary giving birth alone beneath a date tree. When she returns in shame to her family’s house, the newborn Jesus speaks: “God is my Lord and your Lord; so serve Him: that is a straight path” (19:36).⁶

Yet which was the right path: Christianity or Islam? Despite the emir’s best intentions, this conflict over whose beliefs were sanctioned by God caught fire as soon as local Muslims and Christians began to see each other as objects of competition and obstacles to survival. And that came down to the economy. “People have no way to get jobs,” the emir said. “Children are being taught not to go back to farms; they’re not taught to survive practically, but to get white-collar jobs that don’t exist.” There are more than sixty million jobless Nigerian youth—including many of the boys who carried the minivan over the bridge—a ready army free to man the front lines in any religious conflict. Before elections, or at any opportune moment, the same corrupt politicians embezzling millions of dollars pay these youths to act as righteous and intimidating thugs. The first places destroyed in these battles are places of worship, then banks and cars—the symbols of worldly power to which these young people have no access.

“An educated idle mind can be dangerous,” as the emir put it. This maxim could easily refer to the emir himself—trapped in his crumbling castle, his management degree rendered useless by a conflict for which he was not prepared. His grasp on power, however, was more complicated than it looked, and it was tied to the British colonial legacy. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885—known as the Scramble for Africa, when Europe’s colonial powers met to divvy up the continent—much of the vast tract of “the Soudan,” including the territories of contemporary Nigeria and Sudan, fell to the British. In these territories, Muslim North Africa met the “pagan” black African south. (On medieval Arab maps, this was the beginning of the “Land of the Blacks”—Bilad-as-Sudan— from which Sudan takes its name.) In Nigeria’s Muslim north, the British faced some resistance from Dan Fodio’s former jihadis, whom they managed to subdue by the early twentieth century. In Nigeria, the British were able to use the system of indirect rule that had proven so successful in India, and that meant bolstering the power of leaders such as Wase’s emir.

Spread thin elsewhere by the demands of empire, the British left local leaders—such as the emir—in place to carry out their policies. The emir served as a buffer between the colonialists and the people. These were classic techniques of divide and conquer. Indirect rule also allowed the British to exercise power covertly and to turn Nigerian Muslims against one another. Many such leaders came to be seen as colonial agents, losing their religious legitimacy even as they amassed power and wealth. For the Emir of Wase, colonialism may have diminished his religious legitimacy, yet it had also increased the scope of his worldly power. This was exactly the kind of erosion of traditional authority that sent the citizens of the Middle Belt looking to new leaders, many of them claiming their authority from God.

Indirect rule also extended the emirs’ control over other groups whom Islam had not managed to conquer. Chief among them were the hill tribes, the non-Muslim minorities who followed their own indigenous traditions, many venerating spirits as their neighbors did in Sudan. The hill tribes were warriors who faced a constant threat of being enslaved by their more powerful Muslim neighbors. Over centuries, they had fled to the high, dry escarpments of the Middle Belt to protect themselves from slave raiders. But British indirect rule made them the subjects of Muslim kings, such as the Emir of Wase, who sowed a legacy of hatred and mistrust that is still very much alive in the Middle Belt.

Over the past century, most of these non-Muslim minorities have converted to Christianity, many finding within it freedom from the legacy of Muslim oppression. A large number follow a new generation of Pentecostal preachers. Pentecostalism, like Islam, is growing faster worldwide than the global population (both religions at an estimated rate of almost 1.8 percent a year).⁷or ; and the idea that God could father a son is blasphemy. Moreover, most Pentecostal pastors preach about overcoming your enemies, which, in Nigeria, has come to mean Muslims.

THE TENTH PARALLEL

DISPATCHES FROM THE FAULTLINE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

ELIZA GRISWOLD

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

AFRICA

NIGERIA

1

THE ROCK: ONE