The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (17 page)

The missionaries’ monopoly on health care and education in the south was such that anyone who resisted evangelization risked being left out of the modern world entirely. With Wingate’s blessing, many missionaries focused on educating young men, or “Mission Boys,” as they were called.
This group of new Sudanese Christians was meant to form a barrier
against the southern spread of Islam, and to create a new generation of military leaders, the Equatorial Corps, allied with the Christian West.
²¹
For these young Christians, the fact that Christianity was an intrinsically African religion was crucial to their identity. The biblical conversion story of the royal eunuch, and the legacy
of the Sudanese Christian kingdoms to the north in what was once Nubia, empowered their fight for equality. The stories of early Christian suffering helped to make sense of what it meant to be marginal people.

But Christianity never caught on as a cohesive identity in the south, as Islam had in the north, for several reasons. First, the partitioning of the south divided Christian denominations
and bred competition over converts. Whichever group offered more in goods and services attracted more potential Christians.
²²
The British effectively set the Christians against one another. Second, the greatest impediment to Christianity’s spread in the south was that the so-called border pagans were hostile to outsiders and their beliefs. As Karl Kumm had found when he evangelized at the base
of Wase Rock, the border warriors who’d successfully defied Islam for centuries were not so eager to become Christians. The same power that had enabled them to resist Islam now created opposition to Christianity.
²³
The indigenous traditions of the south were very strong, and remain so today.

Lack of infrastructure deepened the north-south divide. For decades, vast tracts of land in the south
were left undeveloped while the British colonial forces continued to build bridges, roads, and other infrastructure in the north. These unequal patterns of development also led to Sudan’s civil wars. On the eve of independence in 1956, the British—who saw the south as still a backwater, and the mission-educated southern elite as too unsophisticated to lead—handed power to the north. When the southern
leaders (many of them former Christian Mission Boys) mutinied, the Americans and the British largely ignored them. As Jefferson Caffery, appointed the U.S. ambassador to Cairo in 1949 during the Truman administration, put it nakedly, “I do not understand why anybody should be bothered about the fate of ten million niggers.”
²⁴

When Islam entered the central parts of Africa,
it clothed naked human beings, civilized them, brought them out of the deep recesses of isolation, and taught them the joy of work in exploring material resources. It brought them out of the narrow circle of tribe and clan into the vast circle of Islamic community, and out of the worship of pagan deities into the worship of the Creator of the worlds. If this is not civilization, then what is?
¹
—
SAYYID QUTB

One evening during my trip to Khartoum with Franklin Graham, I paid a visit to Hassan al-Turabi, the architect of the most violent jihad of modern times. At his invitation, Khartoum became a hub for many militant Islamist groups banned in their home countries during the nineties. One was bin Laden’s then little-known cadre of Arab veterans from the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
I arrived after 9:00 p.m., during visiting hours, when Khartoum comes to life in the relative cool, but al-Turabi, now seventy-two, sat alone in a formal salon in his home, gripping a cane with papery hands. The salon’s thirty red velvet chairs stood pushed against the walls. This once-bright room—frequented by a broad array of terrorists, including bin Laden—was fusty and gloomy. The air seemed
choked with savage, disappointed ghosts, arguing with one another over which of their failed versions of history would have saved Sudan.

Al-Turabi, too, had fallen out of power after a spat with President Bashir in 2001. Hoping to placate America, Bashir had cast him out of the government that year, but ever the political survivor, al-Turabi formed a new alliance (tactical, at best) with the
southern Sudanese, so Bashir had the old man thrown into jail. Al-Turabi had been in prison many times over the past two decades, and now, two months after his most recent release, he seemed diminished; the spareness of his frame accentuated
his giant teardrop eyeglasses and prominent buckteeth. He was desperate for visitors, especially Americans, for whom he could audition his kinder, gentler
approach to the West. Tracing his cane against the carpet, he groused about the government he had brought to power, the jihad, and his own infirmities. A vengeful Sudanese martial arts expert who spotted al-Turabi on the escalator in Ottawa’s international airport in 1992 and attacked him, holding him responsible for so much death and destruction in Sudan, inflicted the worst of his sufferings.

Al-Turabi personifies the history of Islamic rebellion in Africa, and in the rest of the world. It began in Sudan and neighboring Egypt. Much of this history unfolds in direct response to the West, and its missionaries. Born in a northern village in 1932, he grew up as the son of a prominent Arab judge and expert on Islamic law. After earning a B.A. from Khartoum University, he furthered his education
in the West—getting an M.A. in law from the London School of Economics, and then a Ph.D. in law at the Sorbonne. Like his spiritual brother, the disaffected Egyptian poet and supreme head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb (al-Turabi would later become the Brotherhood’s head in Sudan), al-Turabi grew convinced while in the West that Islam should be the foundation for a new, postcolonial
Sudan.

Al-Turabi’s place in history was born of World Wars I and II. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire, already in decline, sided with Germany. After the Allied victory, Muslims watched in anger and humiliation as France and Britain divvied up huge swaths of Ottoman territory in the new “Middle East”—a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a U.S naval officer and a vocal evangelical Christian.
²
Suddenly the Muslims of this “Middle East” found themselves living under illegitimate rulers in arbitrarily established new nations, and powerless in the face of distasteful new policies, such as the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain called for the establishment of a new Jewish state right in the heart of the Arab world, Palestine.

American internationalism is a relatively new phenomenon.
So is government-sponsored humanitarian aid. Until the middle of the twentieth century, missionaries, not foreign-service officials or aid workers, led
the bulk of the world’s relief and development efforts. As early as the 1920s, to many Muslims, Christianity appeared to be the principal instrument of their oppression. Apart from colonial authorities, most of the white faces in the new Middle
East belonged to missionaries, who quickly became the straw men for imperialism. The most frequent flash point was education. Out of fear that Christian missionaries were trying to convert their children, Egyptian and Sudanese Muslims took to the streets in protest.
³
These protests became a part of a larger revivalist movement to call Muslims back to their faith. They were based on the Islamic
equivalent of evangelization—the Arabic
da’wa,
translated as “the invitation” or “the call.” Islamic leaders modeled their organizations on the Christian ones they were attempting to supplant. The Young Men’s Muslim Association, the YMMA, founded in Egypt in 1927, created a summer program modeled in part on the YMCA’s Bible camp. Like the YMCA, the YMMA hosted soccer games, held lectures on health and hygiene, promoted social welfare,
and reached out to the poor with food and medicine.
⁴

The YMMA’s most influential member was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna grew up during the first years of the twentieth century, when American missionary zeal and influence in Egypt were at their apex. Galvanized by this experience, he argued that Islam as a way of life was under threat of extinction at the hands of
Western missionaries. He called for Muslims to guard themselves against missionaries and their imperial poison in order to combat the West’s growing influence among them. An early and outspoken proponent of this new religious liberation, he went on to found Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928. (Four years later and a few hundred miles away, the Sudanese intellectual Hassan al-Turabi
was born.)

For al-Banna, the 1948 defeat of Arab armies and the founding of the state of Israel provided more evidence that Muslim lands were under threat. Later that same year, members of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Egypt’s prime minister Al-Nuqrashi, whom the movement considered too secular. And in retaliation, King Farouk’s henchmen assassinated the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, al-Banna,
in 1949. The Brotherhood then went underground, but al-Banna’s deputies carried on his religious revival. Al-Banna intended to reach every Muslim, not just a scholarly few, and restore Islam’s rightful place in the world. He sowed fear of a shared threat—a common enemy—and argued that in order to be a good Muslim, a believer had to be willing to fight. He preached to young men that
by dying in
battle against unbelievers, they would bypass God’s judgment at the end of the world. Those who fought were assured of salvation. Jihad was a shortcut to heaven. His concept of jihad was not only about admission to heaven; it involved bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. The Quran, al-Banna stressed, provided a comprehensive life manual: a seventh-century how-to guide for what to wear, how to
pray, what to eat.

On sports fields and in study groups, al-Banna laid the foundation for what would eventually become violent global jihad. Sayyid Qutb would follow in his footsteps—and al-Turabi would follow in Qutb’s—building the Brotherhood into both an effective model for social welfare and an organization that would give birth to the likes of Al Qaeda.

The Brotherhood also vehemently opposed
the secular Arab nationalist movement founded by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who rose to power beginning in 1952 with a political coup d’état (they tried to assassinate him in 1954). Nasser did not like the Brotherhood much either, and outlawed religious organizations that threatened his authority. But in the fifties and sixties, Nasser’s authority also alarmed America. As the
cold war began in 1945 out of the aftermath of World War II, Washington watched anxiously as the Soviets attracted to communism those newly independent African nations that had thrown off the bonds of colonial rule, by offering aid and arms across the continent. By refusing to ally Egypt with either the United States or the Soviets, Nasser challenged the dominance of Western powers in the new “Middle
East” and throughout Africa. Alarmed by his popularity, America looked for a means to challenge his power. At the time, America’s enemies were communism and Arab nationalism—not Islam.

The presence of U.S. missionaries unwittingly fanned the flames of militant Islam in Africa. So, too, early U.S. efforts to employ Islam as a political weapon helped birth a movement that would grow to antagonize
the West. In Europe, following World War II, the United States supported many Islamic defectors from the Soviet Union who laid the foundations of Islamism—the political and religious movement that opposes the West.
⁵
In the emerging “third world” of the time, the cold war contest was especially heated. There, too, the United States and its agents attempted to employ Islam against the Soviets. In
the East African nation of Somalia, for instance, during the sixties, the former intelligence director Abdiqani Dahir Haashi received American books that supported the cause of Islam against the Soviet-backed military regime. (The Soviets sent him Mao Zedong.)

In Egypt, one curious footnote to history lies in the so-called search for the Muslim Billy Graham. As the flamboyant former CIA officer
Miles Copeland, Jr., tells it in his memoir,
⁶
he was sent by the agency to West Africa’s Ivory Coast during the 1960s to see an anthropologist named Dr. Hans Gruber. The doctor convinced him that “Africans were suckers for ‘charismatic’ leadership of the kind fundamentalist preachers used to entrance audiences in my own Deep South.”
⁷
Copeland, who had been born in Demopolis, Alabama, left Ivory
Coast convinced that he had seen the future for “winning” Africa. Once again, the West’s approach to “winning” Africa would be built on religion; yet this time the religion was Islam. Copeland, who called himself a Unitarian but had little religious conviction of his own, figured that a Muslim preacher sympathetic to the evils of Communist expansion could mobilize his followers to support the United
States against the forces of atheistic communism. After all, this was working at home in America, and not just in the Deep South; much of the country was enthralled with the charismatic revivalist preacher Billy Graham. As the most outspoken anti-Communist preacher in the world, Graham was rallying millions of American Christians to oppose the Soviets, thereby saving souls and advancing U.S.
foreign policy at the same time.

So began what Copeland called “the Search for the Muslim Billy Graham,” which took him to Cairo in the mid-fifties. Under the guise of an analyst evaluating Egypt’s cotton industry, Copeland visited the haunts of various Islamic holy men—including a basement speakeasy called Milo’s Den, where he watched Sufi dervishes bite the heads off live chickens. Later, with
the help of a guide, he stumbled into a Muslim Brotherhood meeting, where saw Sayyid Qutb’s successor, a spellbinding preacher named Sheikh Hassan al-Hudaybi. (The Egyptian government had executed Qutb in 1966.) Al-Hudaybi was “one hell of a speaker,” and Copeland planned to recommend him to the CIA, but found out shortly thereafter that another officer had done so already. According to Copeland,
his boss, Kermit Roosevelt, a director of the CIA’s Near East Division, had already put the search for the Muslim Billy Graham into play.