The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (4 page)

The emir’s earthen
castle stood atop a hill about five miles from Wase Rock. The clay forecourt swarmed with courtiers in billowing robes, and the clatter of hooves rang from the royal stable. On days like this one, when the emir was granting an audience, supplicants came from hundreds of miles away to ask his help with school fees or in solving disputes with neighbors. They waited in an octagonal two-story chamber,
where a dozen members of the palace guard read the newspaper on the chilly floor. The king’s advisor, or
waziri
, with a pink lace turban set on his head like a bicycle helmet, waited for the emir to summon his visitors, as his grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him. Most royal posts
are hereditary, and the emir’s bloodline has been a source of loyalty and honor since 1816, when
his ancestor founded the kingdom at the base of Wase Rock.

This ancestor, a mysterious figure named Hasan, was a follower, a jihadi, of Nigeria’s most famous Islamic reformer and a hero among African Muslims to this day: Uthman dan Fodio, a religious teacher and ethnic Fulani herder who launched a West African jihad in 1802 to purify Islam and promote the education of women. Dan Fodio, like most
North African Muslims, was a Sufi. His was the first in a series of holy wars to rage across the center of the continent during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Most of these jihads began as religious rebellions within Islam, uprisings against African kings who the Sufi reformers believed had corrupted the faith. Yet time and again, as Europe’s Christian colonial powers
arrived in Africa, these holy wars morphed into battles against the infidel West. These jihads, while largely forgotten, represent some of the earliest and bloodiest confrontations of Islam with the West; they drove colonial policy toward Muslims not only in Africa but worldwide. They also laid the groundwork for Islam’s opposition to the modern West.

By 1810, seventy-five years before the British
would claim Nigeria as their protectorate, Dan Fodio’s followers, called his flag bearers, had conquered a large swath of West Africa as their own Islamic empire. The vanquished generally welcomed the flag bearers, who came riding south over the Sahel’s high, pleasant plateau, on horses and camels and with Dan Fodio’s pennant fluttering before them. When they neared the tenth parallel, the desert
air moistened and the ground grew wetter. Here, the notorious tsetse fly belt began, and sleeping sickness killed off the jihadis’ horses and camels, effectively halting their religion’s southward advance. One of these jihadis, the emir’s ancestor, established his kingdom on his favorite grazing land in the shadow of Wase Rock. For thirteen generations, the emir’s family has occupied this leaking
keep. A place out of time, it feels more like an ancient oasis in Arabia than a palace in modern-day Nigeria; the only objects in the anteroom to signal the passage of two hundred years are the newspapers and a white plastic wall phone that buzzes when the emir is ready to hear petitions.

In his traditional dress of pistachio robes and a gauze turban that tucks under his nose and culminates in
two wilting rabbit ears, the Emir of Wase is the only man allowed to wear shoes—gold-buckled loafers—in
his castle. According to custom, his courtiers must sit barefoot on the floor below him. When I first met His Royal Highness Haruna Abdullahi, in 2006, however, he insisted I remain on his level, and sent his chief advisor to fetch my sneakers so we could speak as equals. Fine-boned and elegant,
with dark skin and sharp features, the emir, like his ancestors, is an ethnic Fulani, and most of his people are still herders. An erudite man, he seemed bored in his clammy throne room and eager to set aside the usual supplications in order to discuss how his territory had been caught up in a religious conflagration.

For all his ancient trappings, the emir is a modern intellectual and a liberal
religious scholar who traveled to Pennsylvania during the 1960s to study at the University of Pittsburgh, earning a doctoral degree in public administration. “I didn’t tell anyone I was a prince in Pittsburgh,” he said, laughing deeply. He sent a minion to a stack of old papers in the corner of the cold room to root out a copy of his dissertation, the title of which he could not remember and which
the courtier never found. Instead, the courtier returned with a slim yellow booklet. Dropping his head, he fell to his knees and offered it to the emir. Together with a local Catholic bishop, the emir had compiled this collection of verses from the Christian Bible and the Quran to try to correct religious misunderstanding.

“These verses command believers to live together peacefully,” he said,
holding up the small pamphlet and setting it beside him on the antique couch that served as his throne. More than a decade earlier, when his father died at the age of 102, Abdullah had been working as a bank manager in the capital of Abuja. When he ascended the throne in 2001, the crisis had just begun, and from mosque loudspeakers and church pulpits, religious leaders on both sides were using the
holy books to call for blood.

The emir, by his own count, had cared for between 350,000 and 400,000 Muslims, many of whom showed up at the palace gates and demanded his protection during the conflict. “I can’t tell you how much money I spent on feeding all those people,” he said. “Everyone who enters my domain, I have to account for before the Creator.” For example, the jackknifed truck on the
bridge—“If anyone falls off that bridge today, it’s my responsibility,” he said. This was his duty as a king, and what his Muslim name, Abdullahi—
abd
, “servant” or “slave,” of Allah—commanded.

“Anytime people come to the palace, I have to open the door. I have no choice,” he said. His voice was slightly muffled by gauze. Being a king was exhausting and expensive, and he could not afford to fix
his own dripping
roof. At the moment, there was a lull in the violence. On both sides, people had lost too much—land, livestock, and loved ones—to keep pummeling one another. No one could afford to keep fighting. This peace had been mandated by money, not mutual religious understanding, and the emir feared it would not last.

He picked up the yellow booklet beside him. In it, he had highlighted
(in his native language of Hausa) the Quran’s universal messages of coexistence for all of humankind, many of which were revealed to Mohammed early on in his life as God’s messenger, when he was forty-something and a wealthy trader living in his Arabian hometown of Mecca.

“Religion is personal; it is in the mind,” the emir said, smiling. “The books aren’t written in straight language—you need
not only to read but to understand.” Tapping his college ring against the couch’s edge, he relished these kinds of riddles, and seemed more at ease talking about the nature of power and the lessons that God had revealed to the Prophet Mohammed than discussing upcoming elections or the price of rice or the availability of drinking water.

“We know Jesus taught that if someone slaps you on the right
cheek, turn to the left,” he said ruefully. “We know that Mohammed was sacked from his village and stoned at Ta’if, but he quietly left for Medina.” In 619, according to the Hadith, the reports of what the Prophet said and did during his lifetime,
⁴
Mohammed traveled to Ta’if, a mountainside town in Arabia about seventy miles southeast of the holy city of Mecca, to invite its people to become Muslims.
Instead of welcoming him, the farmers stoned him and drove him, bleeding, out of town. Afterward, the archangel Gabriel—“Gibriel” in Arabic—came to the Prophet and asked him if he wanted revenge against Ta’if. Wiping blood from his face, the Prophet refused, saying, “Lord, forgive thy people, they do not know.”
⁵
Mohammed knew about Jesus and his teachings; before his death, he instructed his followers
to act as Jesus had, to be willing to die for their faith. Mohammed’s words echo Jesus’s plea from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The emir made the point that if both of these men, beaten and bloodied—the incarnations of their respective faiths—asked God to forgive their aggressors, then who were today’s religious leaders to advocate holy war?
The two religions were deeply linked, the emir said, but leaders did not know of, or else had forgotten, their common bonds. The Quran also tells the story of the Virgin Mary giving birth alone beneath a date
tree. When she returns in shame to her family’s house, the newborn Jesus speaks: “God is my Lord and your Lord; so serve Him: that is a straight path” (19:36).
⁶

Yet which was the right path:
Christianity or Islam? Despite the emir’s best intentions, this conflict over whose beliefs were sanctioned by God caught fire as soon as local Muslims and Christians began to see each other as objects of competition and obstacles to survival. And that came down to the economy. “People have no way to get jobs,” the emir said. “Children are being taught not to go back to farms; they’re not taught
to survive practically, but to get white-collar jobs that don’t exist.” There are more than sixty million jobless Nigerian youth—including many of the boys who carried the minivan over the bridge—a ready army free to man the front lines in any religious conflict. Before elections, or at any opportune moment, the same corrupt politicians embezzling millions of dollars pay these youths to act as
righteous and intimidating thugs. The first places destroyed in these battles are places of worship, then banks and cars—the symbols of worldly power to which these young people have no access.

“An educated idle mind can be dangerous,” as the emir put it. This maxim could easily refer to the emir himself—trapped in his crumbling castle, his management degree rendered useless by a conflict for
which he was not prepared. His grasp on power, however, was more complicated than it looked, and it was tied to the British colonial legacy. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885—known as the Scramble for Africa, when Europe’s colonial powers met to divvy up the continent—much of the vast tract of “the Soudan,” including the territories of contemporary Nigeria and Sudan, fell to the British. In
these territories, Muslim North Africa met the “pagan” black African south. (On medieval Arab maps, this was the beginning of the “Land of the Blacks”—
Bilad-as-Sudan—
from which Sudan takes its name.) In Nigeria’s Muslim north, the British faced some resistance from Dan Fodio’s former jihadis, whom they managed to subdue by the early twentieth century. In Nigeria, the British were able to use the
system of indirect rule that had proven so successful in India, and that meant bolstering the power of leaders such as Wase’s emir.

Spread thin elsewhere by the demands of empire, the British left local leaders—such as the emir—in place to carry out their policies. The emir served as a buffer between the colonialists and the people. These were classic techniques of divide and conquer. Indirect
rule also allowed the British to exercise power covertly and to turn Nigerian Muslims against one another. Many such leaders came to be seen as colonial agents, losing their religious legitimacy even as they amassed power and wealth. For the Emir of Wase, colonialism may have diminished his religious legitimacy, yet it had also increased the scope of his worldly power. This was exactly the kind
of erosion of traditional authority that sent the citizens of the Middle Belt looking to new leaders, many of them claiming their authority from God.

Indirect rule also extended the emirs’ control over other groups whom Islam had not managed to conquer. Chief among them were the hill tribes, the non-Muslim minorities who followed their own indigenous traditions, many venerating spirits as their
neighbors did in Sudan. The hill tribes were warriors who faced a constant threat of being enslaved by their more powerful Muslim neighbors. Over centuries, they had fled to the high, dry escarpments of the Middle Belt to protect themselves from slave raiders. But British indirect rule made them the subjects of Muslim kings, such as the Emir of Wase, who sowed a legacy of hatred and mistrust that
is still very much alive in the Middle Belt.

Over the past century, most of these non-Muslim minorities have converted to Christianity, many finding within it freedom from the legacy of Muslim oppression. A large number follow a new generation of Pentecostal preachers. Pentecostalism, like Islam, is growing faster worldwide than the global population (both religions at an estimated rate of almost
1.8 percent a year).
⁷
Its members try to encounter the Holy Spirit, as Jesus’s disciples did on the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on them. Because it is spirit-based, Pentecostalism grafts easily onto many indigenous cosmologies, and its practices—such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and ecstatic worship—are familiar to its new members. For Muslims who find Christianity’s
explosive growth threatening, the Pentecostal language of being saved by the Holy Spirit is especially difficult to fathom. The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—smacks of polytheism,
or
shirk
; and the idea that God could father a son is blasphemy. Moreover, most Pentecostal pastors preach about overcoming your enemies, which, in Nigeria, has come to mean Muslims.

The emir found such Pentecostal
preachers troubling, especially since most demanded believers’ money for prayers. “The more you give, the closer you are to God!” he said skeptically. Since successful pastors can earn huge salaries, competition between them can be fierce, and in Nigeria this led them to fight one another. “The Pentecostals are dangerous because they preach against each other,” he said. Churches split in two,
with each new band of believers erecting a church of its own. In the eyes of those who did not recognize the pattern, the mushrooming of churches did not look like division, but growth. And their rivals’ growth led to more Muslim fear, which led to more violence, the emir said. On it went, while the emir, in his castle, was powerless to stop the countryside from burning around him.

The temperature drops in the shadow of Wase Rock. A butter-yellow stone church stands flanked by sturdy acacias and surrounded by a web of pebbled cow paths. The church marks the place where, in 1904, two early evangelical Christian missionaries, a thirty-year-old German named Herman Karl Wilhelm Kumm and his thirty-seven-year-old Irish wife, Lucy Kumm (née Guinness), built a handful
of grass huts—a station for their new organization, Sudan United Mission. This was the first of fifty they hoped to build across the continent, along the border where Muslim North Africa ended and the Land of the Blacks began. They intended to stop Islam from spreading south among “the border pagans”
¹
—the non-Muslims living along this fault line. By baptizing them as Christians, the Kumms would
build a human bulwark against Islam’s “winning” Africa.