The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 rightcheek, 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 followersto 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 datetree. 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 taughtto 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 asrighteous 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 forwhich 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. Inthese 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