The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (8 page)

Soon after, the Christians issued an edict that no Christian girl could be seen with a Muslim boy. “We had a problem of intermarriage,” Pastor Sunday
Wuyep, Abdullahi’s community counterpart and the head of Kumm’s church, told me when I first visited the town in 2006. “Just because our ladies are stupid and attracted to money,” he sighed. Economics lay at the heart of the enmity between the two groups: as merchants and
herders, the Muslims were much wealthier than the minority Christians. But Pastor Wuyep, like many others, felt that Muslims
were trying to wipe out Christians by converting them through marriage. So he and the other elders decided to punish the women. “If a woman gets caught with a Muslim man,” Wuyep said, “she must be forcibly brought back.” The decree turned out to be a call to vigilante violence as both Christian and Muslim patrols took to the streets.

Mornings in Yelwa begin with prayer for both Muslims and Christians.
One Tuesday morning in February 2004, seventy people were performing their morning devotions at Kumm’s church. As the worshippers finished their prayers, they heard gunshots and a call from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door: “
Allahu Akhbar
, let us go for jihad.” “We were terrified,” Pastor Wuyep recalled. He had been standing outside the gate as the churchyard swarmed with strangers posing
in fatigues as Nigerian soldiers. He stayed near the church gate, but many others fled toward the road behind the church. There, the men dressed as soldiers reassured them that they were safe and herded them back to the church. Then they opened fire.

Pastor Sunday Wuyep fled. The attackers—who were never identified—set the church on fire and killed everyone who tried to escape. They chased the
head of the church, Pastor Sampson Bukar, to his house next door and ran him through with the long machetes that are called cutlasses in Nigeria. They set fire to the nursery school and the pastor’s house. His burned Peugeot was still in the compound in 2006, though the church had been rebuilt and painted salmon pink. Boys were playing soccer, each wearing one shoe so that everyone could kick the
ball. “Seven in my family were killed,” Wuyep said in the churchyard. “We call them martyrs.” He pointed to a mound of earth not far from where we were sitting. On top was a small wooden cross: it marked the mass grave for the seventy-eight people killed that day.

“This is about religious intolerance,” he went on. “Our God is different than the Muslim God . . . If he were the same God, we wouldn’t
fight.” For Pastor Wuyep, the clash was grounded in Christian scripture. “It’s scriptural, this fight,” he said. “The Bible says in Matthew 24, the time will come when they will pursue us in our churches.” Wuyep and his followers, like many conservative Christians, believed that Jesus Christ would
return to earth after one thousand years of bloodshed and war. This was the doctrine of premillennialism
as foretold in Matthew 24. They believed the chaos of the Tribulation would precede the world’s end and herald Christ’s return. Because they believed they were living during last days, the Christians found meaning in their suffering, and in their own violence.

A few hundred yards down the road from the church is a cornfield, and in it a row of mounds: more mass graves. Green-and-white signs tally
the piles of Muslims buried below: 110, 50, 65, 100, 55, 25, 60, 20, 40, 105. Two months after the church was razed, Christian men and boys surrounded Yelwa. Many were bare-chested; others wore shirts on which they had reportedly pinned white name tags from the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organization founded in the 1970s to give Christians a unified voice as strong as that
of Muslims. Each tag had a number instead of a name: an identification code. They attacked the town. According to Human Rights Watch, 660 Muslims were massacred over the course of the next two days, including the patients in the al-Amin clinic. Twelve mosques and 300 houses went up in flames. Young girls were marched to a nearby Christian town and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many were raped,
and 50 were killed.
²

Yelwa was still a ghost town in 2006. In block after burned-out block, people camped where their homes had stood. The road was lined with more than a dozen ruined mosques and churches, the rubble hidden by hip-high elephant grass and canary yellow morning glories climbing the old foundations. When I arrived at the home of Abdullahi Abdullahi, the Muslim human rights lawyer,
his street was mostly deserted. He stooped on his way out of a low-ceilinged hut. Behind him, I could see the sour faces of a man and woman sitting on the floor by his desk. “Marital dispute,” he said.

It was the rainy season, so I waited out the noon deluge in another small lean-to on his compound. Finally, Abdullahi ducked inside, a worn accordion file under his arm. His wife followed, carrying
a pot of spaghetti, its steam rising against the cold, wet air. In the beginning, he explained, the conflict in Nigeria had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. “Let me give myself as a case study,” Abdullahi said. He went to Christian mission schools and federal college, and never, as a Muslim, had any problem. “Throughout this period, I’d never seen religious segregation, because at that
time the societal value system was intact. We were taught
to respect each other’s beliefs and customs.” But as the population grew and resources shrank, people began to fight over who had come to Yelwa first, and who had arrived more recently as a “settler.” Abdullahi held up an old sheet of newsprint on which an editorial’s headline read, “We Are All Settlers!” Everyone who lived here came from
somewhere else; everyone had settled.

Both sides had perpetrated atrocities, he admitted. “We could not control our own boys.” Outside in the courtyard, three of the local “boys”—men, actually—sat against the hut shivering against the cold rain of the plateau in thin, well-pressed shirts. I wanted to know if they thought this was really about religion.

“Any Muslim struggling to protect himself
is fighting in a jihad,” Lawal, a thirty-nine-year-old headmaster, said. His cheeks were cut deep with three slashes; they looked like a cat’s whiskers. He was wearing a purple shirt. “If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself—call it jihad or whatever you want—but this was Christians attacking Muslims,” he continued. He believed the Christians were plotting to eliminate the
Muslims long before the church attack. “The Christians came in the sense of crusade. By the nature of the attack and the weapons they used, they attacked with a view to eliminating the Muslim community and leveling the town.” Crusade, genocide—the goal was to eradicate a community, a people, a religion. Lawal lost everything: his family, his house, his cattle, his job as a headmaster. “There’s no
justice here; no one has been caught, punished, or arrested, so there’s no security.”

He leaned forward. “We want what belongs to us: the right to education, the right to practice my religion—”

Abdullahi raised his palm to clarify. No one was stopping Lawal from practicing his religion, Abdullahi explained, but the younger man wouldn’t listen. In his mind, Islam was still under attack, and there
was no dissuading him.

In 2004, after this spate of massacres, Nigeria declared a state of emergency. But, as the Emir of Wase had said, the fighting really stopped because it was too expensive for either side to continue. Whole communities lay in ruin. Cows, cars, farms, shops—all gone. Since then, Abdullahi has attempted to bring several cases to the government’s attention, but as with the
church massacre, the government has done little to investigate or to bring those involved to justice.

He handed me a folder with depositions from one such case and went
outside. About twenty minutes later, Abdullahi returned with two young women, Hamamatu Danladi and Yasira Ibrahim, who had survived the incident detailed in the files. Danladi, rawboned and wrapped tightly in brown batik patterned
with cowry shells, met my eye as she stood in the doorway; Ibrahim, with long, upturned lashes and a moon face, did not. Except for the fact that they had pulled the fabric over their heads to cover themselves, there was nothing about them to suggest they were Muslims. More often than not, my attempts to classify people according to skin color or height failed entirely. Abdullahi invited the
women in, lowered his head, and left.

During the Christian attack, the two young women and others took shelter in an elder’s guarded home. On the second day, the Christian militia arrived at the house. They were covered in red and blue paint and were wearing those numbered white name tags. The Christians first killed the guards, then chose from among the women. These two and others were marched
toward the Christian village. “They were killing children on the road,” Danladi said. Outside the elementary school, her abductor grabbed hold of two Muslim boys she knew, nine and ten years old. Along with other men, he took a machete to them until they were in pieces, then stuffed the pieces in a rubber tire and set it on fire.

When Danladi and Ibrahim reached their captors’ village, they were
forced to go against their faith by drinking alcohol, eating pork and dog meat. Although she was visibly pregnant, Danladi said that her abductor raped her for four days. After a month, the police fetched her and Ibrahim from the Christian village and took them to the camp where most of the town’s Muslim residents had fled. There, the two young women were reunited with their husbands. They never
discussed what happened in the bush.

“The Christians don’t want us here because they don’t like our religion,” Danladi said. “Do you really think they took you because of your religion?” I asked. The women looked at each other. “In Islamic history, there are times when believers and nonbelievers have fought,” Danladi said. “What happened here is part of this clash.” After the clash, she explained,
their leaders foretold of a time of poverty and suffering. “That’s what’s happening now.” Soon, the world’s end would arrive, and every person on earth would adopt the one true faith. “According to our
ulamas
[teachers], there is no way that the whole world will not be Muslim.”

Later, I looked up Matthew 24, the verses that Pastor Wuyep had
cited, in a soft-bound black leather copy of the King
James Bible—a gift to me from the American evangelist Franklin Graham, after I traveled with him to Sudan in December 2003. Down the rice-paper page, where Jesus’s words were printed in red to show that they were absolute and unerring, one verse caught my eye: “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!” (Matthew 24:19). I thought of Hamamatu Danladi. After
her rape, she told me, she didn’t give birth for four more months, which meant she had carried her child for more than a year.

A year later, in August 2007, I returned to Yelwa to be sure I’d understood her story. This time, I carried along a digital recorder. It must have switched on in my pocket, because later that night, as I went through the audio files after the interview, I heard the sound of my flip-flops approaching her house, then her at the door gleeful, shouting in an unknown tongue. I treasure this recording:
she sounds so joyful, in spite of the horror I had asked her to recall.

When we sat down to talk, I asked her to tell me again how long she had carried the baby in her womb. She repeated the story: she had carried him for more than a year. And even though he had spent more than a year inside her, he was born healthy. Maybe, she thought, he simply refused to come into this world during such tribulation.

At the time of the Yelwa massacre of Muslims in May 2004, Archbishop Peter Akinola was president of the Christian Association of Nigeria. He has since lost his bid for another term, but as head of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of eighteen million Anglicans. He was also a colleague of my father’s, Frank Griswold, when, from 1997 to 2006, he was the presiding bishop of the
Episcopal Church, which has about two million members and is part of a larger network of churches called the Anglican Communion. Three years before I met Akinola, the diocese of New Hampshire had consecrated an open homosexual, the Right Reverend Gene V. Robinson, as bishop, an act without precedent in the Anglican Communion. This raised a hue and cry among Americans and Africans alike. Robinson’s
election was so contentious that my father—whose job it was, as presiding bishop, to consecrate new bishops—had to wear a bulletproof vest under his cassock at the service. The election also antagonized Archbishop Akinola, who saw in it more evidence that the profligate
West was willing to abandon its biblical faith and leave African Christians, already in peril among Muslims, to defend themselves
against the sins of the West. Denouncing Gene Robinson’s election as “satanic,”
³
Akinola suddenly stood at a distance from my father.

When I arrived in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the buzzing stopped and I could hear a man behind the door
rise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a powder blue pantsuit and a darker blue crushed velvet hat, opened the door.

“My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say,” he said, eyeing me. I imagine what he saw was an American bishop’s daughter. But he did have more to say. The fact is, I was asking about the threat Islam posed to Christianity, and this was the great question
of his life. Once he began to answer, he grew expansive, even voluble, as he tried to pull the scales off the eyes of a Western reporter. Archbishop Akinola, who is sixty-six, is Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But his understanding of Islam was forged by his experience in the north, where he watched the persecution
of a Christian minority. He has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Christians, and he was wary of my motives in asking him to comment. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam.