The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold Read Free Book Online

and the world. As the pastor had written in one of his many books on the subject,
Shari’a: The Hidden Agenda
: “In a nutshell, the main objective and motive of the Muslims, is TO CRUSH THE CHRISTIANS SOCIALLY, POLITICALLY, AND ECONOMICALLY, OR CONVERT THEM BY FORCETO ISLAM” (emphasis his).
    Pastor J. belonged to one of the hill tribes, the non-Muslim ethnic groups that had fled to the plateau to protect themselves from Muslim raiders, and he carried the air of a wilderness prophet. “The moment they can crush Christianity here, the country will fall,” he warned. A short, thickset man with bloodshot eyes, Pastor J. told me that the confrontation between Christianityand Islam foreshadowed Judgment Day. This was a matter of both scripture and geography, he pointed out. The Middle Belt’s fault line was a microcosm of a global struggle—a long-standing threat to which the West was just waking up.
    “I may sound like a prophet of doom, but I’m thankful for 9/11—if it had not happened, the United States would have been in the dark aboutthe Muslim world,” he said,reminding me that, as far as Christians in his congregation were concerned, Nigeria’s religious crisis began “a few days before yours,” on September 7, 2001. On that Friday, a Christian woman walked through a group of Muslims who were praying with their foreheads to the ground outside a mosque full of worshippers. Her interruption was immediately seen as an act of disrespect, and, within hours,Muslim and Christian mobs were attacking each other in the town of Jos. 11 Thousands on both sides were killed, but the world, distracted by events in New York City, paid little attention.
    Some people believe that Christian militants sent the woman to walk through the middle of the mosque’s Friday prayer—that the act was intended to incite violence. Later that day, in self-defense, said PastorJ., he killed a Muslim man with an axe. He felt no remorse. To him, being a Christian meant being a soldier for Christ. He said, “We teach our members to be alert and to defend themselves—if not, it would be suicide.
    “I am ready to die for my faith. All we can do is to prepare our people for martyrdom. Remaining here to fight is the only solution,” he added. He paged through the Bible lying openon his desk and fished a thick pair of glasses from his breast pocket to read the story of Jesus being struck by a Roman soldier before being crucified. In this story, Pastor J. said, Jesus never turns the other cheek. Instead, when the soldier slaps him, Jesus demands an explanation: “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why do you strike Me?” (John 18:23). The pastorbelieved that Christians had the right to defend themselves. In order not to be crushed, Christians had to outpace Muslims by winning souls faster. He saw the Great Commission as not only a mandate to reach new believers with the Gospel but also a survival strategy.
    More than Kumm’s legacy, Pastor J.’s thinking reflected a global movement in Christianity and Islam. Both are in the midst of decades-longreligious reawakenings—global revivals that, like their namesakes in America and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are calls to return to an idealized past. These revivals encompass a breadth of beliefs and points of view—from liberal to conservative. Some conservatives like Pastor J. consider themselves “fundamentalists.” The name, which has become a catchword forboth Christians and Muslims, comes from the title of twelve pamphlets, called “The Fundamentals,” written in 1902 byevangelical leaders who formed the American Bible League to counter the threat that Darwin and modern science posed to their faith. The various authors, who argued that the Bible was God’s inspired word, sent the pamphlets to three million readers between 1910 and 1915. 12 Sincethen, the word
fundamentalism
has been subject to a wide range of interpretations. Yet