The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Eliza Griswold
one hundred years ago, the term outlined what it still does today: a desire to return to a past when religion and its tenets were absolute. These theologies—driven by narratives of good pitted against evil—graft easily to competition over land and resources.
For Christians like Pastor J. who see themselvesin theological and worldly conflict with believers of all other stripes, population growth helps to determine their survival. So do large numbers of believers. Religion grows stronger only if it can be practiced, Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born Roman Catholic who has written extensively about both Christianity and Islam, explained to me. If the church or the mosque is empty, there is no religion. “Forboth a Sufi leader and a Pentecostal preacher in Africa, this is a no-brainer,” Sanneh said, and scripture supports this idea. God says to his people in Genesis, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and many reawakened Christians see their duty to reproduce as a duty to God, as do Muslims. In the chapter of the Quran called “The Bee,” God also commands Mohammed, “[Prophet] call [people] to the way of yourLord with wisdom and good teaching” (The Bee 16:125). 13 For both, the instruction is clear: by procreation and conversion, spread the faith.
3
THE FLOOD
When I returned to the Middle Belt in September 2007, the rainy season had begun. Low white mist shrouded the escarpments and burst open into midday deluges the likes of which I’d never seen. Sheets of blinding rain turned the red roadsinto cataracts. One morning, before the skies broke open, I walked around Jos searching for the thousands of religious advertisements I had seen along the roadside a year earlier. The local authorities had ordered them removed, I learned; they thought that so much signage intensified religious conflict. I stopped in one Internet café for a quart of vanilla yogurt and picked up a week-old localpaper. Through the smudged newsprint I read that a flash flood in a nearby town had driven tens of thousands from their homes and killed scores of others. The death toll was unknown. The town, I read, was Wase.
I left Jos the next morning, in the same borrowed gold minivan with the bald and barrel-chested Haruna Yakubu at the wheel again. After a two-hour drive through a sea of brilliant, rain-fedgrass, we reached the Wase River. The bridge was gone, and the gulley between the riverbanks swarmed with young men naked to the waist, flinging heavy white sacks of salt across their backs. They waded up to their chests through blood-colored water, reddened from runoff. On one bank, someone had lashed oil drums together to make small rafts. I left the van and climbed onto one, to be draggedacross the river. Even on the open water, the air felt different; the mild breeze of a year earlier had turned to fetid stillness. As the waves hit the empty oil drums, it sounded like something was banging on them from below.
The Wase River had spilled over its bank one Friday in August, about three weeks earlier, and continued to rise. By early evening, the water was neck-high and still climbing.To escape the rising floodwaters, the several thousand people who lived in thirteen villages along the river began to hoisttheir babies into the trees. Children of one and two years old, who could hold on to branches, were hoisted up alone. Mothers climbed up with their infants. By nightfall, the elders estimated, altogether about two thousand babies were hanging from branches. They spent twodays without food or water. Some were silent. Others cried from hunger. Below them, in the slick, black water, cows, goats, pigs, and a few human bodies floated past.
“All of our food is gone,” Fakcit Alexander, one survivor, told me when I reached what had been her village after the water receded. She was in her early thirties but looked at least fifty. Her short hair was copper-colored fromeither mud or malnutrition, and her skin was ashen. She walked me around the
For Christians like Pastor J. who see themselvesin theological and worldly conflict with believers of all other stripes, population growth helps to determine their survival. So do large numbers of believers. Religion grows stronger only if it can be practiced, Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born Roman Catholic who has written extensively about both Christianity and Islam, explained to me. If the church or the mosque is empty, there is no religion. “Forboth a Sufi leader and a Pentecostal preacher in Africa, this is a no-brainer,” Sanneh said, and scripture supports this idea. God says to his people in Genesis, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and many reawakened Christians see their duty to reproduce as a duty to God, as do Muslims. In the chapter of the Quran called “The Bee,” God also commands Mohammed, “[Prophet] call [people] to the way of yourLord with wisdom and good teaching” (The Bee 16:125). 13 For both, the instruction is clear: by procreation and conversion, spread the faith.
3
THE FLOOD
When I returned to the Middle Belt in September 2007, the rainy season had begun. Low white mist shrouded the escarpments and burst open into midday deluges the likes of which I’d never seen. Sheets of blinding rain turned the red roadsinto cataracts. One morning, before the skies broke open, I walked around Jos searching for the thousands of religious advertisements I had seen along the roadside a year earlier. The local authorities had ordered them removed, I learned; they thought that so much signage intensified religious conflict. I stopped in one Internet café for a quart of vanilla yogurt and picked up a week-old localpaper. Through the smudged newsprint I read that a flash flood in a nearby town had driven tens of thousands from their homes and killed scores of others. The death toll was unknown. The town, I read, was Wase.
I left Jos the next morning, in the same borrowed gold minivan with the bald and barrel-chested Haruna Yakubu at the wheel again. After a two-hour drive through a sea of brilliant, rain-fedgrass, we reached the Wase River. The bridge was gone, and the gulley between the riverbanks swarmed with young men naked to the waist, flinging heavy white sacks of salt across their backs. They waded up to their chests through blood-colored water, reddened from runoff. On one bank, someone had lashed oil drums together to make small rafts. I left the van and climbed onto one, to be draggedacross the river. Even on the open water, the air felt different; the mild breeze of a year earlier had turned to fetid stillness. As the waves hit the empty oil drums, it sounded like something was banging on them from below.
The Wase River had spilled over its bank one Friday in August, about three weeks earlier, and continued to rise. By early evening, the water was neck-high and still climbing.To escape the rising floodwaters, the several thousand people who lived in thirteen villages along the river began to hoisttheir babies into the trees. Children of one and two years old, who could hold on to branches, were hoisted up alone. Mothers climbed up with their infants. By nightfall, the elders estimated, altogether about two thousand babies were hanging from branches. They spent twodays without food or water. Some were silent. Others cried from hunger. Below them, in the slick, black water, cows, goats, pigs, and a few human bodies floated past.
“All of our food is gone,” Fakcit Alexander, one survivor, told me when I reached what had been her village after the water receded. She was in her early thirties but looked at least fifty. Her short hair was copper-colored fromeither mud or malnutrition, and her skin was ashen. She walked me around the
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