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

twentieth century. In Nigeria, the British were able to use thesystem of indirect rule that had proven so successful in India, and that meant bolstering the power of leaders such as Wase’s emir.
    Spread thin elsewhere by the demands of empire, the British left local leaders—such as the emir—in place to carry out their policies. The emir served as a buffer between the colonialists and the people. These were classic techniques of divide and conquer. Indirectrule also allowed the British to exercise power covertly and to turn Nigerian Muslims against one another. Many such leaders came to be seen as colonial agents, losing their religious legitimacy even as they amassed power and wealth. For the Emir of Wase, colonialism may have diminished his religious legitimacy, yet it had also increased the scope of his worldly power. This was exactly the kindof erosion of traditional authority that sent the citizens of the Middle Belt looking to new leaders, many of them claiming their authority from God.
    Indirect rule also extended the emirs’ control over other groups whom Islam had not managed to conquer. Chief among them were the hill tribes, the non-Muslim minorities who followed their own indigenous traditions, many venerating spirits as theirneighbors did in Sudan. The hill tribes were warriors who faced a constant threat of being enslaved by their more powerful Muslim neighbors. Over centuries, they had fled to the high, dry escarpments of the Middle Belt to protect themselves from slave raiders. But British indirect rule made them the subjects of Muslim kings, such as the Emir of Wase, who sowed a legacy of hatred and mistrust thatis still very much alive in the Middle Belt.
    Over the past century, most of these non-Muslim minorities have converted to Christianity, many finding within it freedom from the legacy of Muslim oppression. A large number follow a new generation of Pentecostal preachers. Pentecostalism, like Islam, is growing faster worldwide than the global population (both religions at an estimated rate of almost1.8 percent a year). 7 Its members try to encounter the Holy Spirit, as Jesus’s disciples did on the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on them. Because it is spirit-based, Pentecostalism grafts easily onto many indigenous cosmologies, and its practices—such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and ecstatic worship—are familiar to its new members. For Muslims who find Christianity’sexplosive growth threatening, the Pentecostal language of being saved by the Holy Spirit is especially difficult to fathom. The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—smacks of polytheism,or
shirk
; and the idea that God could father a son is blasphemy. Moreover, most Pentecostal pastors preach about overcoming your enemies, which, in Nigeria, has come to mean Muslims.
    The emir found such Pentecostalpreachers troubling, especially since most demanded believers’ money for prayers. “The more you give, the closer you are to God!” he said skeptically. Since successful pastors can earn huge salaries, competition between them can be fierce, and in Nigeria this led them to fight one another. “The Pentecostals are dangerous because they preach against each other,” he said. Churches split in two,with each new band of believers erecting a church of its own. In the eyes of those who did not recognize the pattern, the mushrooming of churches did not look like division, but growth. And their rivals’ growth led to more Muslim fear, which led to more violence, the emir said. On it went, while the emir, in his castle, was powerless to stop the countryside from burning around him.

 
     
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THE ROCK: TWO
    The temperature drops in the shadow of Wase Rock. A butter-yellow stone church stands flanked by sturdy acacias and surrounded by a web of pebbled cow paths. The church marks the place where, in 1904, two early evangelical Christian missionaries, a thirty-year-old German named Herman Karl Wilhelm Kumm and