The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam Read Free

Asia and storms in Africa’s catastrophe belt, for instance, can mean a disastrousyear 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 moveinto 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 now493 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 predominantlyMuslim countries, with vocal Christian minorities. The Philippines—with a powerful Catholic majority (population 92 million) mostlyto 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’spopulations 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 sharpeningthe 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—thatcall 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 Islamthat 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