Read Online The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold - Free Book Online Page A
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
Ads: Link
candidates stood on opposite sides of the barren soccer field as the people of Yelwa, a townof thirty thousand about an hour north of Wase, lined up to vote. For the past hundred years, Yelwa has been a mostly Muslim trading town. This May morning in 2002 was shaping up to be tense, as the town’s Muslim traders milled between the field’s iron goalposts. So did their historic enemies: the non-Muslim ethnic groups who were gaining in numbers and political power, and were now Christians. Mostbelonged to the church that Karl Kumm founded a century ago, the Church of Christ in Nigeria.
As the two groups waited in the heat to be counted, the meeting’s tone soured. “You could feel the tension in the air,” said Abdullahi Abdullahi, a fifty-five-year-old Muslim lawyer and community leader. A tall, angular man with a space between his two front teeth and shoulders hunched around his earsin perpetual apology, he was helping to direct the crowd that day. The gap in numbers, he said, was painfully easy to see.
“Let’s face it, a Christian comes with his one wife; I come with my four. Who do you think has more people?” No one knows what happened first. Someone shouted
arna
(“infidel”) at the Christians. Someone spat the word
jihadi
at the Muslims. Someone picked up a stone. Chaosensued, as young people on each side began to throw rocks. The candidates ran for their lives, and mobs set fire to the surrounding houses. “That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely and the conflict became just about religion,” Abdullahi said.
Soon after, the Christians issued an edict that no Christian girl could be seen with a Muslim boy. “We had a problem of intermarriage,” Pastor SundayWuyep, Abdullahi’s community counterpart and the head of Kumm’s church, told me when I first visited the town in 2006. “Just because our ladies are stupid and attracted to money,” he sighed. Economics lay at the heart of the enmity between the two groups: as merchants andherders, the Muslims were much wealthier than the minority Christians. But Pastor Wuyep, like many others, felt that Muslimswere trying to wipe out Christians by converting them through marriage. So he and the other elders decided to punish the women. “If a woman gets caught with a Muslim man,” Wuyep said, “she must be forcibly brought back.” The decree turned out to be a call to vigilante violence as both Christian and Muslim patrols took to the streets.
Mornings in Yelwa begin with prayer for both Muslims and Christians.One Tuesday morning in February 2004, seventy people were performing their morning devotions at Kumm’s church. As the worshippers finished their prayers, they heard gunshots and a call from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door: “
Allahu Akhbar
, let us go for jihad.” “We were terrified,” Pastor Wuyep recalled. He had been standing outside the gate as the churchyard swarmed with strangers posingin fatigues as Nigerian soldiers. He stayed near the church gate, but many others fled toward the road behind the church. There, the men dressed as soldiers reassured them that they were safe and herded them back to the church. Then they opened fire.
Pastor Sunday Wuyep fled. The attackers—who were never identified—set the church on fire and killed everyone who tried to escape. They chased thehead of the church, Pastor Sampson Bukar, to his house next door and ran him through with the long machetes that are called cutlasses in Nigeria. They set fire to the nursery school and the pastor’s house. His burned Peugeot was still in the compound in 2006, though the church had been rebuilt and painted salmon pink. Boys were playing soccer, each wearing one shoe so that everyone could kick theball. “Seven in my family were killed,” Wuyep said in the churchyard. “We call them martyrs.” He pointed to a mound of earth not far from where we were sitting. On top was a small wooden cross: it marked the mass grave for the seventy-eight
As the two groups waited in the heat to be counted, the meeting’s tone soured. “You could feel the tension in the air,” said Abdullahi Abdullahi, a fifty-five-year-old Muslim lawyer and community leader. A tall, angular man with a space between his two front teeth and shoulders hunched around his earsin perpetual apology, he was helping to direct the crowd that day. The gap in numbers, he said, was painfully easy to see.
“Let’s face it, a Christian comes with his one wife; I come with my four. Who do you think has more people?” No one knows what happened first. Someone shouted
arna
(“infidel”) at the Christians. Someone spat the word
jihadi
at the Muslims. Someone picked up a stone. Chaosensued, as young people on each side began to throw rocks. The candidates ran for their lives, and mobs set fire to the surrounding houses. “That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely and the conflict became just about religion,” Abdullahi said.
Soon after, the Christians issued an edict that no Christian girl could be seen with a Muslim boy. “We had a problem of intermarriage,” Pastor SundayWuyep, Abdullahi’s community counterpart and the head of Kumm’s church, told me when I first visited the town in 2006. “Just because our ladies are stupid and attracted to money,” he sighed. Economics lay at the heart of the enmity between the two groups: as merchants andherders, the Muslims were much wealthier than the minority Christians. But Pastor Wuyep, like many others, felt that Muslimswere trying to wipe out Christians by converting them through marriage. So he and the other elders decided to punish the women. “If a woman gets caught with a Muslim man,” Wuyep said, “she must be forcibly brought back.” The decree turned out to be a call to vigilante violence as both Christian and Muslim patrols took to the streets.
Mornings in Yelwa begin with prayer for both Muslims and Christians.One Tuesday morning in February 2004, seventy people were performing their morning devotions at Kumm’s church. As the worshippers finished their prayers, they heard gunshots and a call from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door: “
Allahu Akhbar
, let us go for jihad.” “We were terrified,” Pastor Wuyep recalled. He had been standing outside the gate as the churchyard swarmed with strangers posingin fatigues as Nigerian soldiers. He stayed near the church gate, but many others fled toward the road behind the church. There, the men dressed as soldiers reassured them that they were safe and herded them back to the church. Then they opened fire.
Pastor Sunday Wuyep fled. The attackers—who were never identified—set the church on fire and killed everyone who tried to escape. They chased thehead of the church, Pastor Sampson Bukar, to his house next door and ran him through with the long machetes that are called cutlasses in Nigeria. They set fire to the nursery school and the pastor’s house. His burned Peugeot was still in the compound in 2006, though the church had been rebuilt and painted salmon pink. Boys were playing soccer, each wearing one shoe so that everyone could kick theball. “Seven in my family were killed,” Wuyep said in the churchyard. “We call them martyrs.” He pointed to a mound of earth not far from where we were sitting. On top was a small wooden cross: it marked the mass grave for the seventy-eight
Similar Books
