The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold

Nigerian Muslims went to the Arab world to study, and returnedpreaching the tenets of a more conservative Islam; other students went to Iran, where they began to follow Shiite Islam. The Shia, who make up just over one-tenth of the world’s Muslims—163 million—believe only the Prophet Mohammed’s blood descendants can be Islam’s legitimate rulers. In Nigeria, however, being Shia means mostly whatever you want it to. A group of young intellectuals (only afew of whom have studied in Iran), the Nigerian Shia hang posters of faraway firebrands, such as Ayatollah Khomeini and now Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr, on their mud walls. To most of them, being Shia means being, above all, a revolutionary committed to social justice. In another context, they might be coffeehouse Marxists; in this one, they are determined to cast off class hierarchies and improve thequality of life in their communities. At least, these are the dreams they discuss when they sit around and talk, which, as jobless Nigerian men, they do quite a lot, over bottomless cups of weak tea.
    The fragmenting ideologies among Nigerian Muslims sometimes turnviolent. For decades now, different Islamic groups have competed for authority in the religious marketplace that dominates daily life.Predictably, the young, hard-line Sunnis and the self-described Shia often view one another as enemies. Both, however, also oppose the predominant Sufi traditions of most North Africans. Since Sufi practice is influenced from place to place by local traditions, this new generation of globalized Sunnis and Shias tend to view Sufi devotion as corrupted and “un-Islamic.” Furthermore, Sufi brotherhoodsare usually based on traditional class hierarchies, which the young Shia, who preach a radical social justice, vehemently oppose. From Sunni to Sufi to Shia, religious reawakening is further dividing Muslims in Nigeria.
    Despite a huge outcry from local Christians and Western human rights groups, the implementation of Sharia, currently on the books in the northernmost third of Nigeria, has hadvery little practical impact. The criminal codes of the
hudud
, the harshest punishments allowed by Islamic law, have proven, for the most part, impossible to implement. This is perhaps the greatest lesson: that people will idealize religious law until they have experienced the limits of its application. Northern Nigerians have now seen that Sharia has not stanched the corruption they face everyday. In fact, many of the politicians who backed Islamic law have been linked to massive corruption; these include its biggest advocate, the former governor of Zamfara state, who is rumored to have paid a man to let the state amputate his hand.

 
     
8
“RACES AND TRIBES”
    “When the West sneezes, Africa catches a cold.” I first heard this expression from a Nigerian pastor named James Movel Wuye,who works alongside his former mortal enemy, Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa, to bring about a change of consciousness in the way Nigeria’s Muslims and Christians view one another. During the eighties and nineties, the two leaders taught thousands of young people to kill, and now they “reprogram” them to tolerate each other’s differences.
Tolerance
is a word of which both are wary, since to them,it smacks of a moral relativism to which they do not subscribe. To them, it suggests they should tolerate heresy and falsehood. Each strictly adheres to the tenets of his respective faith and unabashedly calls himself a fundamentalist. The imam’s followers lopped off the pastor’s arm with a machete more than a decade ago. Now they are partners in an effort to foster amity among the Nigerian youththey once taught to fight in the name of their respective religions. The reason, first and foremost, is to ensure their mutual survival, since fighting has cost each community so much.
    The two men travel to religious conflict zones all over the world—they have visited the World Trade Center site together several