The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (12 page)

The imam and the pastor now travel the world telling their story. I caught up with them in New York before Thanksgiving 2006, and they wanted to return to Ground Zero,
where they had been in 2003 after receiving another peace award. We took an elevator into the pit where the base of Tower Two had been.

“What a tremendous act of ego,” the imam said, as he peered through wire mesh into the wreckage. “Ask him where the cross is,” he instructed me, pointing to a policeman standing nearby. I had not been back to the site since reporting there in September 2001,
and had no idea what he meant.

“What cross?” I asked.

“The
cross
, the iron cross,” he said. “He’ll know what I mean.”

I spoke to the policeman, and we took the escalator back up to the street and walked north two blocks until we reached the two sections of broken girder welded into the form of a thirty-foot cross. “God bless our fallen brothers” had been scratched into the steel many times
over. For a few moments, no one said anything.

“It symbolizes that God is with the American people,” the imam said, “and that the American people have to return to God.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked. “Last time I was here a young guy told me that,” he said, watching me reach for my notebook. “No, not a young guy, say, an elder.” He looked up at the cross. “Just say ‘an anonymous American
citizen.’ ”

The imam loved his stories, and both men were aware—especially here in the rich belly of America—that their calling was also their business. This was not the case in Nigeria, where they worked tirelessly to quell fights between neighbors and families without any chance of gain. I had watched the pastor puzzle for hours over how to distribute an environmentally friendly stove that
burned almost no wood. (Buying wood currently costs as much as one dollar a day in the deforested north, so the stoves, as well as being environmentally sound, would save people money, and potentially keep them from fighting over land.) Dealing with the
stoves was just as important as dealing with scripture. The pastor and the imam also understood too well how a fight between the neighborhoods
Baghdad and Jerusalem over electricity could quickly envelop the city, or the country. In Nigeria, they were saints; here . . . well, here they seemed like businessmen. So what—weren’t they, too, allowed to have more than one identity?

I hailed a yellow cab and we all piled in. As the taxi rattled over the cobbled streets of lower Manhattan, the pastor and the imam traded verses from the Bible
and the Quran, competing good-naturedly for my attention. However, this was no parlor game: it was their most earnest attempt to understand each other, since scripture, more than any other element, determined who each man was. God created people poles apart, Ashafa mused, so that, through contrast, they could understand each other. At least that’s what the Quran says; he quoted: “People, We created
you all from a single man and woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another” (The Private Rooms 49:13). “The Bible says almost the same thing,” Pastor James interrupted, citing Acts 17:26: “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth . . .” This, Pastor James clarified, did not mean that all religions were the same, as
liberal Westerners tried to assert. Mutual understanding could not mean denying exclusive salvation. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life,’ ” he repeated. For both these men, homosexuality was anathema. “We see same-sex marriages in the United States as signs of end times: it’s Sodom and Gomorrah,” James told me. “But I also want to say you can believe what you want to believe. We
have to find a space for coexistence.”

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the
Father except through me.
—
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
14:6

If anyone seeks a religion other than complete devotion to
God
[Islam]
,
¹
it will not be
accepted from him: he will be one of the losers in the Hereafter.
—
THE QURAN, THE FAMILY OF ‘IMRAN
3:85

Philosophers and cartographers began to orient themselves by drawing
imaginary lines around the earth in the third century
BCE
. Latitude, the horizontal lines that ring the globe—not the vertical
measure of longitude
¹
—was the first such scale. Early philosophers divided the earth into five horizontal bands: there were two frigid zones, one at either pole; two temperate zones, between the poles and the tropics; and near the equator, the Torrid Zone. Since their
inception, latitudes have carried social and moral connotations, and cartographers have used them to separate one “type” of human from another. For more than two thousand years, the tenth parallel has served as such a dividing line; in its history begins the contemporary contest between Islam and the West.

The tenth parallel falls within the Torrid Zone—between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic
of Capricorn (from a latitude of 23°26′22″ north to a latitude of 23°26′22″ south). In the third century
BCE
, although he had never been there, Aristotle defined this region as a heat-blasted badland rich in resources—gold, ivory, cinnamon—yet inhabited by dangerous monsters scorched black by the tropical sun. “Yet we know the whole breadth of the region we dwell in up to the uninhabited parts,”
he wrote in his text on the subject,
Meteorologica
, “in one direction no one lives because of the cold, in the other because of the heat.”
²
From Aristotle to the twelfth-century Arab philosopher and scientist known as Averroës,
³
to the twentieth century, astronomers and cartographers have drawn maps to reflect their sense of geographic and racial superiority. Hebrew scripture reinforced this divide
from the first century onward, when Philo, a Jewish scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, argued that the people who lived in the Torrid Zone descended from Noah’s accursed grandsons, the sons of Ham.
⁴
This malediction occurs in the Book of Genesis, when a drunken Noah awakes in his tent to learn that his youngest son has peered at his nakedness. Noah curses his son, saying he will be “a servant of
servants” (Genesis 9:25). As Philo and other ancient philosophers interpreted it, God afflicted the sons of Ham, who lived in the Torrid Zone, with the double hex of both slavery and blackness.

On medieval Arabic maps, the tenth parallel marked the northern boundary of the territory called Bilad-as-Sudan, the Land of the Blacks, a land beyond Islam’s reach,
⁵
which was believed to have little
or no culture (despite the African kingdoms that flourished there), but a multitude of resources: gold, salt, ivory, and human slaves. In Greek mythology,
Aethiopia
means “the land of burnt faces” and refers not to the modern-day country of Ethiopia, but more often to sub-Saharan Africa—another forsaken place of “backward” peoples. In his
Metamorphoses
, the Roman writer Ovid, born in 43
BCE
, recounts
the story of blackness caused by
heat so extreme, it boiled human blood and rendered North Africa a desert.
⁶
As late as a hundred years ago, British and American mapmakers labeled the vast tracts lying to the south of the tenth parallel “Negroland,”
⁷
tacitly writing off millions of people and thousands of years of culture and history. Many of the names of contemporary African nations along this
line—Guinea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Somalia—in some way mean “black.”

When Columbus first set sail, Europeans believed it was impossible to travel to the Torrid Zone and return safely. Yet Columbus, who undertook his voyage in part to spread the “Holy Faith”
⁸
of Christianity, discovered territories in the Torrid Zone that were far more temperate and irenic than philosophers had imagined.
⁹
Nevertheless,
he concluded that the sun-blackened people he met were innately childlike and savage, and prone to consuming human flesh. (It was Columbus who coined the word
cannibalism
, after mishearing one indigenous group defame their enemies, the “Canibes” or, more probably, “Caribs,” as flesh-eating monsters.) His observations helped justify enslaving the peoples of these lower latitudes in the service
of empire.

Many African Christians believe that the Bible came to the continent straight from Jerusalem through the conversion of a eunuch—a castrated slave—in the year 37.
¹⁰
According to 8:26–38 of the Acts of the Apostles, a book in the Christian Bible that chronicles the doings of Jesus’s followers after his death and resurrection, this unnamed eunuch was a high-ranking and literate servant
who oversaw the treasury of the Kandake, a queen of Sudan. He traveled from Sudan, which lay within the Roman Empire, to Jerusalem on business, and one day he went by chariot from Jerusalem to Gaza, reading aloud along the way. On the road he passed an early Greek evangelist named Philip, who overheard his reading: “Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” Philip
recognized this passage from the Book of Isaiah (53:8). The eunuch was reading from the Hebrew scriptures, which predate Jesus’s birth; the passage in Isaiah is one that the first Christians believed foreshadowed their savior’s life and death. Philip ran into the road, as the Holy Spirit prompted him to, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” “How can I,” the eunuch replied, “unless
someone explains it to me?” He invited Philip into the chariot, where Philip shared the gospel’s
evangelion
,
or “good news”—that this ancient prophecy had been fulfilled in Jesus, and the time had come to follow his teachings. Then he baptized the eunuch as a follower of Jesus in a roadside river.

The eunuch, as tradition has it, then returned to Africa, where he became “the first evangelizer
of Sudan,”
¹¹
preaching in secret and under penalty of death the way most of Jesus’s early followers did. Under the Roman Empire, the practice of Christianity was punishable by death until 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine officially legalized it. By the end of the century, Christianity became the creed of the Holy Roman Empire. But the first three centuries of Christian history are rife
with stories of the suffering and martyrdom of Jesus’s first followers, who were thrown to lions, torn apart by wild dogs, or subjected to other excruciating deaths. For many Christians along the tenth parallel, these early stories inform their view of Islam and the secular West as modern-day oppressors.

Christianity’s nearly two-thousand-year history in Africa is a story of splits and schisms,
of crusades and excommunications. In Africa, as in other places, Christians have come under greater pressure from other Christians than from any outside force, including Islam. In Egypt, it was in part Christians’ fear of their fellow Christians that made Jesus’s followers amenable early on to Muslim rule. The first Muslim armies arrived during the decade following the Prophet Mohammed’s death
in 632. Orphaned soon after he was born (in 570), Mohammed grew up in the bustling Arabian trading town of Mecca. According to his early biographers, Mohammed’s charisma and commercial acumen earned him the name “Al-Amin,” the trusted one.
¹²
During the sixth century, his tribe, the Qureysh, was growing rich from the burgeoning Arabian trade routes, as luxury goods—ivory, spices, medicine, and
slaves—were now traveling north from the Land of the Blacks through the desert. The once-nomadic Arabs, who prayed to a number of gods, were settling down to make their fortunes. By the age of forty, Mohammed was married to an older, wealthy widow named Khadijah, to whom he would turn, terrified, when God began to speak to him in a cave on Mount Hira.

As he began to preach about the one, single
God—as God had commanded him to—he drew followers mostly from among the poor and the powerless, much as Jesus had done. He also created enemies among the wealthy Qureysh. In 622, thirteen years after his first revelation, he fled in
secret from his hometown of Mecca to the city of Yathrib and renamed it Medina, “the city of the Prophet.” During this first flight—or
hijra
—the Prophet, as he was
now called, entrusted his family to the care of an East African king—the Christian ruler of the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia, which lies in today’s Ethiopia and Eritrea. Mohammed didn’t seek safety for those he loved on the Arabian Peninsula, but across the Red Sea, in the court of a Christian king. So Islam reached Africa during the Prophet’s lifetime by way of a Christian. This was not under the
standard of a conquering army, but through a shared belief in the oneness of God, and the mutual understanding and trust born of that fundamental principle.

In his new home in the city of Medina on the Arabian Peninsula, Mohammed became the political ruler, the religious leader, and the military commander of the first Islamic state. His movement grew so powerful that eventually he returned to
Mecca and reclaimed the capital city without a fight. At the time of his death in 632, his followers dominated the Arabian Peninsula. As they conquered tribe after Arabian tribe, they required their new subjects to submit to the Islamic faith. Within ten years of Mohammed’s death, Muslim horsemen sailed from the Arabian Peninsula to Africa and landed in Egypt.