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

converts—from either among other religions or their own less ardent believers, which creates new frictions.
    These movementsare already reshaping Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the region we used to call
the third world
, or even
the developingworld
. 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 developingwithin 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 alienstructures 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 securityin 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 holywar. 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 whoshare 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 godlessplace 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 hisnemesis, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose regime was waging the world’s most violent modern jihad against Christians and Muslims alikein 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 fundamentalismsbased 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 plateof 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