The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2 page)

Other than Paduot, and six elders gathered in his hut,
the village appeared deserted. Prompted by gunfire and rumors of war, the five hundred families who lived there had fled south, terrified that Todaj was about to be wiped off the face of the earth. Their fear was well founded: three times in the previous twenty years, soldiers from the north had laid siege to Todaj, raping women and children, killing and carrying off young men, and burning to the
ground the villagers’ thatched huts and the Episcopal church made of hay.

It was the end of the dry season, and a breeze stirred the air over this colorless plot of parched earth, bare but for these empty dwellings and a few gaunt cows trawling for loose hay. The cows wandering hungrily around the village didn’t belong to the people of Todaj, but to northern Arab nomads, the Misseriya, who, because
of seasonal drought up north, came south at this time of year to graze their cattle. Paduot was afraid that when the rains began a few weeks later, and the nomads could return home to
their own greener pastures, there would be nothing to keep the northern soldiers (cousins and sons of the nomads) from attacking Todaj.

“We know when they burn our village, they want the land,” said the chief, a
Ngok Dinka translator rendering his words into English. These patterns sounded like the ones unfolding less than fifty miles northwest, in the region of Darfur, because they were the same. Three decades ago, while Sudan’s current president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was a military general stationed on this border, the Khartoum-based northern government perfected the methods of attack, using the paramilitary
horsemen called the Janjawiid, whom it was now deploying in Darfur. Todaj faced this same threat, but other than Roger Winter, very few knew anything about the impending disaster. On BBC radio, Paduot heard much talk about Darfur. Although the same thing was happening here along the border, it rarely made international news. The two fronts had much in common, since all of Sudan’s wars boil
down to a central Khartoum-based cabal battling the people at the peripheries. The only differences between Darfur and Abyei, the chief explained, were religion and oil. In Darfur, there was no oil and both sides were Muslim, a confrontation he did not understand. “Why would Muslims fight against Muslims?” he asked aloud.

Here, the north had mounted its assaults in the name of jihad, or holy
war, claiming that Islam and Arab culture should reign supreme in Sudan. Chief Paduot, who had survived several such conflagrations, had come to see Islam as a tool of oppression, one the northerners were using to erase his culture and undo his people’s claim to the land and its oil.

“People hate Islam now,” he said. Having stepped into the hut behind Winter, I glanced around to see if any of
the elders was startled by the chief’s remark. If they were, no sign of it crossed their faces, which showed only dread and exhaustion.

To defy the north, most of the villagers had been baptized as Episcopalians—they prayed daily, attended church on Sunday, and had cast off loose, long-sleeved Islamic dress in favor of short-sleeved Western-style button-down shirts, or brilliant batiks. For them,
Islam
was now simply a catchall term for the government, people, and policies of the north.

Race, like religion, was a rallying cry in this complicated war. The paler-skinned Arab northerners looked down on the darker-skinned people of the south, Paduot explained slowly. He seemed tired of giving tutorials to outsiders. What good were earnest, well-meaning people like
us, who came with our water
bottles and notebooks to record the details of a situation but could do nothing to stop it?

The divisions between north and south along the tenth parallel date back centuries, and colonial rule simply reinforced them. One hundred years earlier, the British colonialists who governed Sudan had virtually handed this swath of land south of the tenth parallel to the Roman Catholic Church. Daniel Comboni,
a beloved nineteenth-century Italian missionary who was canonized as a saint in 2003, headed Catholic efforts in Central Africa with the expressed aim to “save Africa through Africans.”
²
Under Comboni’s direction, the Catholic Church ran all schools and hospitals (and forbade Protestant missionaries from proselytizing), until, in 1964, the northern government, employing Islam as a form of nationalism,
expelled all missionaries from the country. African Christians—not Westerners—were left to lead the local church, which was then, as now, under fire from the north as an alien, infidel institution. This attitude has not changed, the local Catholic priest, Father Peter Suleiman, told me. “Every day we experience the misery of the south. You still hear the promise of death.” And oil has made
things worse. “The north believes that oil is a gift from God for the Muslim people,” he said. Although the Catholic Church still held some sway along this border, Father Suleiman told me that an influx of more charismatic Protestant churches was gaining ground. In the village of Todaj, many of the villagers were convinced that they were still alive solely because they had prayed to Jesus Christ
for protection.

Born into a family that prayed to ancestral gods, Chief Paduot became a nominal Muslim in order to gain admission to school (a practice begun by Christian missionaries and now emulated by Khartoum). Through a process of forced Islamization, the north had made it compulsory for people to declare themselves Muslims by saying the Shahada
—
“I bear witness that there is no god but God,
and I bear witness that Mohammed is his messenger”—and adopting Muslim names in order to attend school, get a job, or avoid jail or violent death. In his forties, Paduot, chief by birth, decided that he wanted to leave Islam and become a Catholic. But the northern security forces threatened the local Catholic priest, one Father Marco, saying they would torture him if he baptized the chief. (They
told Paduot they’d stone him if he became “a backslider from Islam.”) He refrained from converting to Catholicism to safeguard his village from further trouble. “I kept Islam to protect my people,” he said, but, to show
his independence, he had returned to the indigenous practices of his youth—called the noble spiritual beliefs. Christians and Muslims alike disparaged the local indigenous religion
on the ground that it didn’t teach adherents to follow the one, true God. That was ignorance on their part, Paduot said. “We worship one Creator God, too, then smaller gods.”

He had also married an Episcopalian. Now he led us out of the hut—its thick, round walls like a muddy mushroom stem—and pointed to a line of what looked like tiny corn-husk scarecrows along the roofs of his and other huts.
“They are crosses,” the chief said. Their frayed edges glowed in the afternoon’s pewter light; they were symbols marking the beginning of the south, and visual reminders to anyone entering the village that it was a Christian place, the chief explained. Squinting into the overcast sky to look at them, I thought the threadbare totems were also bids for divine protection.

Yet the crosses seemed
to be proving as ineffective as the chief’s satellite phone, which hung by its power cord from two portable solar panels on the thatched roof of his hut. There was no one left for him to call for help. Though his cousin, Francis Deng, was serving as the United Nations Special Representative for the Prevention of Genocide, and though Paduot met regularly with local UN officials, representatives of
the southern government, and visitors such as Roger Winter (a longtime head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees who had lobbied hard for the south in Washington and Khartoum), no one could do anything to stop the impending assault.

On the surface of this conflict, two groups, northern and southern, Muslim and Christian, were competing for land and water. Yet at a deeper level, the people were
now pawns of their respective governments, and Paduot knew it.

He produced a worn map softened with use and pointed to three annotations in English: PUMP 1, PUMP 2, PUMP 3. These indicated the oil fields of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company—a consortium of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and Sudanese interests operating in Sudan with the blessing of President Bashir. At the same time,
Bashir was exhorting his holy soldiers, or Mujahideen—whom he called “the legitimate sons of the soil”—to re-up for jihad. Once again, he was making use of race and religion to safeguard oil interests before the country faced the impending split.

Some of his soldiers were stationed two hundred yards away, acting as
sentries on the north-south border, the location of which was determined by whoever
was strong enough to push it a few inches one way or another. Around their makeshift barracks, camps of nomads were springing up, as if preparing for war. Over the past few weeks, as Paduot looked on, the soldiers had received shipments of automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. If a full-scale rift between north and south occurred, it would begin right here with these weapons,
Paduot warned. A village sentry came in and whispered in his ear. Abruptly, he stopped talking: soldiers were slouching against the hut’s outside wall, listening to his every word.

In Africa, the space between the tenth parallel and the equator marks the end of the continent’s arid north and the beginning of sub-Saharan jungle. Wind, other weather, and centuries of human migrations have brought
the two religions to converge here. Christianity and Islam share a fifteen-hundred-year history in Africa. It began in 615 when Mohammed, his life at risk at home on the Arabian Peninsula, sent a dozen of his followers and family members to find refuge at the court of an African Christian king in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Within a decade of Mohammed’s death (in 632), the first Muslim armies
landed in Africa, proceeding south from Egypt to today’s Sudan. There they made a peace pact—the first of its kind—with the ancient Nubian Christian kingdoms along the Nile River. The pact lasted for six centuries. Then religious wars broke out. By 1504, the last of the Christian kingdoms in Sudan had fallen to Muslim armies.

From the seventh century to the twentieth, Muslim traders and missionaries
carried Islam inland over the northernmost third of Africa, carving trade routes from the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to the West African kingdom of Timbuktu. Away from the coasts, crossing the landlocked region south of the tenth parallel proved difficult; the pale, grassy savanna thickened to bush, and the bush gave way to a mire of emerald swamp and jungle. Along the tenth parallel,
the tsetse fly belt begins: and these blood-sucking insects, each the size of a housefly and carrying African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness),
³
virtually stopped Islam’s southern spread.

To the east, five thousand miles off the African coast and over the Indian Ocean, natural forces also shaped the encounter of Christianity and Islam in the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia,
and the Philippines. The trade winds—high-pressure air currents that move steadily
from either pole toward the equator—filled the sails of both Muslim and Christian merchants from the northern hemisphere beginning in the eighth century. These reliable winds propelled Christian and Muslim ships to the same islands, beaches, and ports, then returned them either to Europe or to the Arabian Peninsula,
their ships heavy with cargoes of cinnamon and cloves.

The trade winds are part of the intertropical convergence zone, a weather system that moves to the north or south of the equator, depending on the season. In this zone, wind currents from the northern hemisphere run into those from the southern hemisphere. As the two cycles meet head-on, they generate cataclysmic storms. In Asia, these storms
begin during monsoon season and generally spin west to Africa, where the most tempestuous of them move west off the African coast at Cape Verde, across the Atlantic Ocean, and become America’s hurricanes. Within this band, Asia, Africa, and America are part of a single weather system.
⁴
(A dangerous year of monsoons in Asia and storms in Africa’s catastrophe belt, for instance, can mean a disastrous
year 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 move
into 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 now
493 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 predominantly
Muslim countries, with vocal Christian minorities. The Philippines—with a powerful Catholic majority (population 92 million) mostly
to 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’s
populations 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 sharpening
the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water, over practices and hardening worldviews.