Read Online The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold - Free Book Online
Authors: Eliza Griswold
Tags: Religión, General, Islam, Political Science, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Religion; Politics & State, Relations, Islam - Relations - Christianity, Christianity and Other Religions - Islam, Christianity and Other Religions
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crammed into a single room. Teenage boys hung aroundoutside. Most had metal begging bowls. “You know of any work?” one asked me. His only job, he explained, was to beg for the teacher in the nearby town. With no other education, soon these six-foot-tall, pimplyteenage boys would be too old—and too intimidating—for begging. They were the same ready youth army about whom the emir had spoken—one more reminder that four out of ten Nigerians are unemployed.We stayed only briefly; it was almost dark, and al-Amin feared what might happen when the sun set and the boys were accountable to no one.
Driving back to Abuja, we got stuck in a “go-slow”—a traffic jam. In the middle of the highway, a large crowd had gathered around a boy of about fourteen. He was fighting with an older, bigger man and both of their faces were streaked with blood. Al-Amin pulledover and pushed through the crowd to ask what was happening. The boy, it turned out, was an itinerant Islamic student from the north. His parents had sent him south to find a teacher (and a way to feed himself). “He has come from latitude sixteen to try to find work,” al-Amin shouted in my ear above the fray, but the boy could not pay his one-dollar weekly rent on his bed, so the landlord hadbeaten him, and the boy, in turn, had attacked the landlord with a razor blade. This kind of thing happened all the time, al-Amin explained, pushing back out through the crowd’s hot press and looking down at the lap of his white suit. A splatter of blood had landed on the linen and was drying from red to black.
5
THE TRIBULATION
Nigeria’s troubles between Christians and Muslims beganin the late 1960s, during the Biafran civil war, when Nigeria’s southeast seceded under the banner of Christian emancipation from the Muslim north. The divisions intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom collapsed and the ensuing economic downturn led to widespread violence. But it was really the end of military rule in 1999 and the political free-for-all of weak democracy that ignited religiousviolence. Democracy, paradoxically, fueled the friction between Nigeria’s Muslims and Christians. Elections are often violent, and people have voted along religious lines since democracy began.
Over the last decade, local and global events have fed the ongoing skirmishes—the 1999 and 2000 implementation of Islamic law in twelve of Nigeria’s thirty-six states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in2001, during which Nigerian Muslims lashed out at local Christians as scapegoats for the West’s attack on an Islamic country; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter named Isioma Daniel angered the Muslim community by writing in one of Nigeria’s newspapers that a beauty pageant was no cause for moral concern. “The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeriato ask them to revel in vanity,” she wrote in
This Day.
“What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” This comment, which millions felt smacked of blasphemy, inflamed Nigerian Muslims, and riots broke out on the streets, killing hundreds. In 2006, more riots, this time triggered by the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed—an actmany believe that Islam forbids—left at least sixteen people dead—more than anywhere else in the world. 1 In 2008, in the Middle Belt capital of Jos, several hundred Muslims and Christians were killed in clashes surrounding a local election. At least three hundredmore died in Jos during 2009. Farther northeast, in the town of Maiduguri, a splinter group of
al majari
youth who called themselvesBoko Haram (“Western Education Forbidden”) launched local riots over what they vaguely saw as the rising tide of Western influence. Fighting spread to three other states and left seven hundred dead. By early 2010, hundreds more were killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims outside of Jos.
Two
Driving back to Abuja, we got stuck in a “go-slow”—a traffic jam. In the middle of the highway, a large crowd had gathered around a boy of about fourteen. He was fighting with an older, bigger man and both of their faces were streaked with blood. Al-Amin pulledover and pushed through the crowd to ask what was happening. The boy, it turned out, was an itinerant Islamic student from the north. His parents had sent him south to find a teacher (and a way to feed himself). “He has come from latitude sixteen to try to find work,” al-Amin shouted in my ear above the fray, but the boy could not pay his one-dollar weekly rent on his bed, so the landlord hadbeaten him, and the boy, in turn, had attacked the landlord with a razor blade. This kind of thing happened all the time, al-Amin explained, pushing back out through the crowd’s hot press and looking down at the lap of his white suit. A splatter of blood had landed on the linen and was drying from red to black.
5
THE TRIBULATION
Nigeria’s troubles between Christians and Muslims beganin the late 1960s, during the Biafran civil war, when Nigeria’s southeast seceded under the banner of Christian emancipation from the Muslim north. The divisions intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom collapsed and the ensuing economic downturn led to widespread violence. But it was really the end of military rule in 1999 and the political free-for-all of weak democracy that ignited religiousviolence. Democracy, paradoxically, fueled the friction between Nigeria’s Muslims and Christians. Elections are often violent, and people have voted along religious lines since democracy began.
Over the last decade, local and global events have fed the ongoing skirmishes—the 1999 and 2000 implementation of Islamic law in twelve of Nigeria’s thirty-six states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in2001, during which Nigerian Muslims lashed out at local Christians as scapegoats for the West’s attack on an Islamic country; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter named Isioma Daniel angered the Muslim community by writing in one of Nigeria’s newspapers that a beauty pageant was no cause for moral concern. “The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeriato ask them to revel in vanity,” she wrote in
This Day.
“What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” This comment, which millions felt smacked of blasphemy, inflamed Nigerian Muslims, and riots broke out on the streets, killing hundreds. In 2006, more riots, this time triggered by the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed—an actmany believe that Islam forbids—left at least sixteen people dead—more than anywhere else in the world. 1 In 2008, in the Middle Belt capital of Jos, several hundred Muslims and Christians were killed in clashes surrounding a local election. At least three hundredmore died in Jos during 2009. Farther northeast, in the town of Maiduguri, a splinter group of
al majari
youth who called themselvesBoko Haram (“Western Education Forbidden”) launched local riots over what they vaguely saw as the rising tide of Western influence. Fighting spread to three other states and left seven hundred dead. By early 2010, hundreds more were killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims outside of Jos.
Two
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