The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (41 page)

In some ways these skirmishes resembled those six thousand miles away in Sudan, yet the Philippines has much less oil. With 138.5 million barrels of proven reserves, the Philippines exports only 23,910 barrels a day, ranking it an unimpressive seventy-first in the world. These figures, however, don’t stop locals from vying to control the marsh’s future. If Sudan was a scrap
of parched earth where fishermen waded in shallow puddles made by the oil companies, then the Philippines was its opposite. Everything—the mangroves, my fingers, and the boat’s worn green gunwales—swelled in the humidity. When it comes to prospecting, Sudan is a place of aftermath, and the Philippines one of “not yet.” Along the bank jungle leaves rot. Flat, low, wet, and hot—it is a place of intrigues.
All manner of rebels and criminal gangs have found safe haven by terrorizing villagers and building training camps in the marshland along inaccessible
rivers. Islam, and Islamic rebellion, like its Christian counterpart, meant whatever anyone wanted it to, and could be manipulated accordingly. I had seen this in Nigeria, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Sudan: religious identity as a way to guarantee
and control resources. But religion meant other things, too.

“In the Philippines, Islam is feudal,” Amirah Ali Lidasan, a Muslim human rights worker on Mindanao, told me. Liberal activists such as Lidasan were attempting to reclaim the religion, to argue that Islam could function as the basis of a moral society, a set of shared principles—such as equality and social justice—that could be used
to protect people against a rapacious government. This was not so different from Father Geremia’s view of Christianity, which was supposed to guarantee the rights of the poor and powerless.

That July morning in 2006, following instructions from a rebel go-between, I had driven to a rural bodega. Inside, a heavyset shopkeeper wearing a black
abeya
barked, “Move to the back of the store quickly
and stay out of sight.” It was disorienting. Too many strains of the world intermingled at once—Latin America and Islam, as odd and improbable as a dry goods store in El Salvador run by a devout Yemeni woman. In the back of the shop, a large door in the storeroom opened unexpectedly onto the river, where a boat was waiting to take me to visit a man in hiding, the most powerful commander of the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front. Although the MILF has harbored Abu Sayyaf and other militants, it signed a cease-fire with the central government in 2001, and denounced terrorism in 2003, to stay out of America’s crosshairs. More recently, the MILF has been vying for control of oil prospecting in the deposits that underlie their land.

Pakila Datu Zaid, the MILF commander I was hoping to meet, was recuperating
somewhere along this river after a bloody battle with a local governor over control of a swath of potentially oil-rich swampland. Weeks earlier, sixteen thousand people had fled their homes, the MILF commander vanished, and a $100,000 bounty was placed on his head. To punish the escaped commander, government toughs had shot his wife dead while she was on her way to the mall on July 5.
The wreck of her car sat on the wharf outside the bodega. In this war, wives and family members were frequent targets. Word had it that the commander had spirited her body away up the river to be buried at his hideout, and when he heard
that I had been asking around about her death, he got in touch through a MILF spokesman and invited me to come meet him.

I hadn’t expected an entourage, but five
or six veiled women climbed into the boat after me, including the heavyset shopkeeper. All were relatives of the murdered woman, and this was their first chance to visit her grave. We passed small villages along the water: clusters of shacks on stilts surrounded by groves of coconut seedlings and jackfruit trees. A few children bathed in the river; they didn’t look up as we passed. We were chugging
southward toward the equator: deeper into the heart of Moro land. A fifty-three-year-old bespectacled schoolteacher named Rhuyaga Daud, sitting beside me, explained that no government troops would dare come onto this land. This was MILF territory, she said, and everyone who lived here, the farmers and fishermen, supported the rebels’ cause.

“We want an Islamic state,” Daud said, frankly. These
days the rebels were rarely this forthright as they tried to soft-pedal their attachment to Islam in order to convince America they posed no security threat. To my surprise, the schoolteacher had recently traveled to Washington, D.C., as part of a delegation of Muslim teachers trying to convince the U.S. government that the MILF are not terrorists. This war was as much about freedom as it was religion,
Ghansali Jaafar, the MILF vice-chairman for political affairs, explained to me. The Moro struggle was more like the Vietnam War than the Iranian Revolution.

“We admire the Iranians’ courage,” Jaafar said, “but we are a free people trying to regain our independence.” As one Moro professor told me, the Communist state that Marx outlines in
Das Kapital
could serve virtually the same need as the
Islamic state does for his people. “The problem here is liberating our homeland from a colonial power.”

An hour passed, then most of another, before Ms. Daud, the schoolteacher, leaned forward and said, “We’re almost there.” We rounded a bend, and suddenly more than a hundred soldiers in camouflage were smiling and waving from the riverbank. As we grew closer, I could see that all of them carried
assault rifles. Several carried two rocket-propelled grenade launchers at once—slung like bandoliers over each shoulder. Some were children. I had never seen so much military hardware in my life. With the weaponry by that river, they could have taken a city.

_____

The soldiers helped us out of the boat as a good-looking fortysomething man in a gray T-shirt emerged from among them: Pakila Datu
Zaid. He led us straight to his wife’s grave: just a simple stone set in a dirt patch at the edge of the compound. It would have been un-Islamic to build an ornate grave. “I spoke to her on the phone twenty minutes before she was killed,” he said, looking dazed. The women wept.

His hideout consisted of an unused mosque, a basketball court, and a farmhouse in which he himself was cooking a lunch
of curried chicken. A charismatic chef, he spooned the chicken onto plates and said something to his soldiers, who disappeared. A few minutes later, they returned and placed three brand-new American-made M16s with night-vision sights on the kitchen table. He’d bought them from Filipino soldiers after joint military exercises with the American troops called “shoulder to shoulder,” or
balikatan
. The infusion of high-powered American weaponry on all sides meant that more and more people were dying.

Behind me, a young soldier, his hair stiff with gel, leaned against the kitchen counter, cradling an assault rifle. His name was Ibrahim Daud; he was Pakila Datu Zaid’s nephew.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m fifteen but was fourteen when I joined. We have eight-year-olds who are in weapons
training.” The room was silent but for the clanking of forks against plates. To change the subject, Zaid asked me to come outside into the now-glaring sun. Concerned about the child-soldier revelation, Ms. Daud approached me again to make sure I understood the members of MILF were indeed fighting jihad for a cause. Islam was about justice for the poor.

“They are fighting because the government
stole their land,” she told me as the men lounged around us on hammocks, rocking themselves by pressing their rifle butts in the dirt. Few spoke English, so I asked her to translate the question: Would everyone who had lost their land to the government please raise their hands?

No hands went up. Maybe they didn’t understand, I thought. As I asked her to repeat my question, Zaid leaned over and
interrupted.

“No,” he said, slowly, as if I were missing a very basic point. “The land the government has taken is mine.”

“All
of it?” I asked.

He nodded: 2,500 acres. These “Islamic rebels” were simply his private army. The soldiers were serfs; Zaid was a very rich landowner. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “If you weren’t at war right now, would these men be workers in your fields?”

He beamed.
Exactly.
To these serfs, jihad meant little more than the patch on their jackets, which read, in English, “Victory or Martyrdom.” The patches, like the camouflage uniforms, were simply a way to legitimize war and guarantee that their death would give them a way to reach heaven. And by the way, Zaid asked, pulling me aside as we headed back to the pirogue tethered to the bank, did I
know of any American company interested in prospecting for oil and natural gas on his marshland? He was ready to make a great deal.

Islam here could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future. It could reinforce a family’s feudal power or promise liberation from colonial oppression. This is today’s splintered Islamic rebellion, I thought
to myself. Its leaders are more concerned with oil than either justice or jihad. The Moro people caught in the middle were dying for it: martyred not even for money, but for the prospect of oil.

Martyrdom today may seem like a strictly Muslim phenomenon, but when Martin Burnham was shot to death in the jungle, he became, for many Christians, a modern-day martyr. The two
kinds of martyrdom are related; the Arabic word
shaheed
and the Greek word
martus
both mean “bearer of witness.” And before Mohammed died, he is said to have counseled his followers to be prepared to die for their beliefs, just as Jesus’s did, according to the following Hadith: “Do as the apostles of Isa ibn Maryam [Jesus the son of Mary], they were cut by saw and hung upon wood. Being killed
in obedience to Allah is better than a life of sin.”
¹

Since Jesus’s death, more than seventy million people have been killed for their Christian faith, according to one of the leading sources of Christian statistics,
World Christian Trends
. Its authors estimate that there are currently around two hundred million Christians living under persecution and four hundred million at risk. And for many
Christians today, especially those minority populations in divided communities along the tenth parallel, living and dying for their beliefs is a necessary element of faith.

“People are used to the Joan of Arc type of martyrdom, an individual on trial,” Todd Johnson, one of the world’s most prominent Christian demographers and coeditor of
World Christian Trends
, told me in the fall of 2007. We’d
met that day in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, coffee shop. Johnson is working on cataloging every Christian martyr from the inception of the faith to the present day. “Martin isn’t in here yet, but he will be,” he said, flipping through the pages of
World Christian Trends
. In one chart, the causes of death are listed alphabetically: roasted alive, sawed in two, thrown from airplane. Some of the
statistics are suspect—too high to be believed. For instance, it’s hard to imagine that between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand Christians have been thrown to sharks. Still, much of the data is factual and gruesome. To make sense of
such staggering numbers, Johnson cited the mass killings of Christian men, women, and children in Idi Amin’s Uganda, since the dictator feared their
religious commitment threatened his omnipotence. These types of large-scale targeted killings perpetrated by Amin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Omar al-Bashir, Johnson contends, explain why 60 percent of all Christian martyrs have been killed since the beginning of the twentieth century. Such numbers help to explain how the issues of persecution and religious freedom are now a top priority among human rights
activists.

I first met Gracia Burnham in April 2007. It was 6:30 in the morning and she was eating dry cereal in front of the early morning news at the Comfort Inn in Franklin, Tennessee. Now forty-eight and six years out of the jungle, her once-pinched face had softened and filled out. She turned from the TV and looked up at me with earnest violet eyes that almost swallowed her face. On this
morning, she had not needed an alarm clock. “God woke me up,” she said.

After returning from the Philippines in the fall of 2006, I’d gotten in touch with Gracia to ask her for her thoughts on martyrdom. She’d invited me to come with her to this conference, which was hosted by the Voice of the Martyrs, an evangelical nonprofit organization founded in 1967 by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who’d been
tortured in Romanian prisons for fourteen years. Begun during Billy Graham’s worldwide crusade to rescue Christians behind the Iron Curtain, the Voice of the Martyrs informs fellow believers about contemporary persecution and martyrdom. I had seen its efforts firsthand in Nigeria’s Middle Belt town of Yelwa, where, according to the town’s pastor, Sunday Wuyep, the Voice of the Martyrs had contributed
$40,000 to rebuild the church.

By the time Burnham’s book about her time as a prisoner of Abu Sayyaf,
In the Presence of My Enemies
, made it to the
New York Times
bestseller list in May 2003, she had already become an evangelical superstar. Born in Cairo, Illinois, the daughter of a pastor, she had decided from an early age that she would give her life to Christ and become an evangelical Christian,
much as her parents before her had. When I met her, only her worn, square hands betrayed the harshness of the life she had led in jungles as a missionary and a captive. Thanks to the generosity of fellow believers—and the success of her books—she and her three children had made a new home in Rose Hill, Kansas.

At the Christ Community Church in Franklin that morning, I mixed with a crowd of more
than three hundred other attendees, some of whom had driven for hundreds of miles to meet Gracia Burnham. Tables were set up selling literature and jewelry, including Lance Armstrong–inspired rubber bracelets—just like the pink one that Noviana Malewa wore in Indonesia, which read, “HE IS ALIVE!” These, however, were black-and-gray interlocking rubber handcuffs that read, “Remember them that are
in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity” (Hebrews 13:3). Green T-shirts silk-screened with lions’ eyes—“It Didn’t End with the Coliseum”—were also for sale.