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

fitness, its own imprint of empire, has also arrived.
    Yakubu first took me to see the concrete skeleton of the fire-ravaged Alafia Oluwa Baptist Church. “TheBaptists want to sell it,” he said, as we climbed out of the car. The cross and spire had been sheared off, but the walls and heavy concrete Romanesque arches were still standing. They now enclosed a large grassy field; a cow was tethered to a nearby tree. I walked toward the narthex, but Yakubu stopped me. It stank of human shit. “The locals have turned it into a toilet,” he said, uncomfortably.On the wall, through a hole blasted into the cement, I could see someone had painted a picture of a naked woman, a penis with “Pastor S” written on it pointed between her spread legs. “We’re trying to convince the Baptists to come back, but they don’t want to.” In 2007, the Christians sold the church to the Muslims after all. When Yakubu and I passed by the next year, the word
masalaci
, whichmeans “mosque,” had been spray-painted across it in red.
    We drove in silence through the neighborhood known as Afghanistan. Yakubu said, “Our religious leaders are some of our most dangerous people. They preach that they want us to go back to Medina, but we can’t go back to Medina.” Here was a contemporary struggle for Islam’s soul: whether believers should cling most tightly to their historyin Medina, the city from which believers battled for their right to self-determination, or whether God’s message to Mohammed in Mecca—more inclusive and universal—reflected the future of the faith.
    “Even the Prophet lived with Christians; why can’t we? If we call ourselves true Muslims, why can’t we do that?” Yakubu said. Along the road, red-eyed boys sold jerry cans of petrol. Although Nigeriais flooded withoil, corruption and mismanagement force the country to import much of its gasoline. During price hikes and shortages, these young hawkers appear by the roadside; their gas cans become weapons.
    Pastor James’s former enemy, Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa, lives on the Muslim side of the river. One Friday morning before afternoon prayer, I went to visit him at home. By the time I arrived,he had already resolved three neighborhood disputes. Two smiling old men in dark glasses sat on his green sectional couch. They were blind, and Ashafa had started a foundation to help them. His two young wives, Fatima and Aisha—both named for the Prophet’s wives—served tea on top of a tin canister. The windows were shut, and the green-and-white striped curtains drawn in purdah. On one closeddoor, a bumper sticker read, “Combat AIDS with Shari’a.” The method was clear: abstinence. The imam and the pastor share the same conservative moral values, which has also helped them to find common ground. Ashafa, tall and narrow, his beard grizzled, grew up equally as steeped in the history of his people. He comes from a long line of Muslim scholars who were powerful under the caliphate of Uthmandan Fodio, and his story, too, is a tale of oppression and reaction to oppression.
    “My family had, all its life, struggled against colonialists and missionaries because they watched the colonialists bring Christianity into the hinterlands. I grew up hearing stories of how our land was stolen and our people were crushed.” When Ashafa was a boy, since missionaries ran the local school, his fatherrefused to let him go. “Missionaries are evil,” he told his son. But Ashafa’s uncle talked his father into it, saying, “Let the boy go to school. Don’t you trust your God?”
    At mission school, Ashafa won the prize for best Bible student. (He had a gift for memorization.) After school, with his slingshot, he flung stones at women showing their bare arms or backs in the streets. When the religiouscrisis hit Kaduna in 1987, he became the equivalent of Pastor James on the Muslim side.
    “We planted the seed of genocide, and we used the scripture to do that,” Ashafa said. “In