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

Philippines. Over the past decade, there has been much theorizing about religion and politics, religion and poverty, conflicts and accommodation between Christianityand 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 Muslimswho 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 thekind now unfolding between the equator andthe 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 itor not.

PART ONE
AFRICA

NIGERIA

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

— THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE 23:34 1
    “Lord, forgive thy people, they do not know.”

— SAHIH AL-BUKHARI, ISTITABE , 5
1
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 namesfor God. Majestic and odd, the freestanding stone is smack in the center of thecountry, 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 toodangerous 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-widestrip 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-highplateau 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