The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (13 page)

Egypt, then a province in the eastern
Roman Empire, was predominantly Christian at the time. The province fell quickly to the Muslim armies, since an internal fight had splintered Jesus’s followers. Egypt’s Christians, now known as Copts, were isolated from the rest of the Christian world. They had lost a theological debate against the larger Christian world of dyophysites who believed that Jesus had two different natures: both
human and divine. The Egyptians were monophysites: they believed that Jesus had a single nature, which was both divine and human at once. This seemingly arcane division grew so heated that it came to define one of the most important early splits inside Christianity. Egypt’s Christians, having lost this battle, were now vulnerable to persecution by fellow believers. By accepting Muslim rule, they were
granted a measure of safety. Egypt, at the time, also was substantially weakened by war against the Persians, and could not hold off the invading Muslims. As
dhimmi
, or non-Muslims, all of Egypt’s Christians gained the status of protected people living under Islamic rule.
¹³
Like Jews, also fellow people of the Book (in Arabic,
ahl-al-kitab
) who believed in one God, they were not full and equal
citizens. Dhimmi were socially subservient to Muslims and had to pay the
jizya
, or protection tax, in lieu of military service. For decades, Muslims did
not even enter the cities; they built their forts outside of Christian settlements, and it took more than fifty years for them to build a large mosque in Egypt. Conquest did not mean conversion, and the two religions, while stratified, lived side
by side.

By the middle of the seventh century, the conquering Muslim armies drove farther south along the Nile River until they reached Nubia, the ancient Christian kingdoms in Sudan where the fabled royal eunuch had lived. The women and men of Nubia were expert archers, able to put out 150 Arab eyes in one day.
¹⁴
With bow and arrow, they protected their land—called Ta Sety, or “the Land of the
Bow”—from the advance of the Muslim armies until 652, when Christian and Muslim rulers agreed to the terms of the first lasting peace treaty in Sudan.

No written versions of the treaty—called the
baqt
—have survived, and most accounts of it were passed down orally through the Arab chieftains who negotiated it alongside the Coptic kings of Nubia. And yet the ensuing peace lasted for more than six
hundred years, making the
baqt
one of the most effective treaties in history. It proved to be a peace between equals. Each year, the Coptic Christians—who had traded in slaves long before Islam arrived—sent 360 slaves to the Muslims, along with ostrich eggs and feathers used for decoration. The Muslims, in turn, delivered 1,300
kanyr
of wine (about two liters each, four bottles per slave) to the
Christians of Nubia. As Richard Lobban, who teaches Sudanese history at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, points out, this exchange foreshadows the Atlantic slave trade: liquor from the north traveled south, in return for raw goods and slaves.

It was also worldly competition—over territory, trade routes, and spices—that brought the peace between Christianity and Islam to an end.
From the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, the Christian West led a series of crusades against Islam. In truth, Muslims were more concerned with the threats from other Muslims, including those from the Mongol kingdom to the east. Although the crusades did not reach into Nubia, existing letters show that European crusaders did try to win Nubian support for their campaigns.
¹⁵
The Muslims feared
that the Nubians would take up arms against them, and easily defeated the last of the weakened Nubian kingdoms in 1504.

Except for a few telling symbols—crucifix tattoos, crosses carved into lintels
¹⁶
—Christianity was all but effaced from Sudan for the next three hundred years. Instead, Islam spread over the northern part of the continent
as trading posts served as hubs in a network of Islamic
conversion. Most North Africans became Sufis and belonged to different brotherhoods—
tariqas
, meaning “the way”—each having a slightly different way to pray. By the thirteenth century, their trade routes ran across the Sahara Desert from Mecca to Timbuktu as traders traveled to and from Arabia on the hajj. Through the lingua franca of Arabic, Islam wove together disparate cultures and kingdoms
across North Africa.

With Islam firmly planted in the northern third of Africa (stretching as far south inland as the tenth parallel), Christianity returned to the continent largely during the nineteenth century, after a three-hundred-year absence. Its unfolding encounter with Islam—largely along this fault line—has come to define, over time, a larger struggle between Christian and Muslim revivals,
modern movements that cast back to the past for their authenticity and power. The convergence of these movements, both religious and political, defines our historical moment, and it begins in Sudan.

During the nineteenth century, Christianity served as the spiritual engine of the European colonial enterprise’s three
C
s: “Christianity, commerce and civilization,” the words carved on David Livingstone’s
tombstone. As evangelical missionaries targeted the border pagans who lived along the tenth parallel, secular industrialists also took note of the line, because the tenth parallel marked the geographic beginning of the scourge of sleeping sickness. One civil engineer, M. W. Wiseman, proposed building a grand transcontinental railroad across the continent of Africa here. “The limit of a camel’s
usefulness is passed at the tenth parallel,”
The New York Times
reported in a story (August 23, 1891) about Wiseman’s proposed project, and “south of that line the camel dies.”
¹⁷
But the project faltered; Wiseman’s critics pointed out that the labor his railroad would require was exactly the kind imperialists and missionaries were trying to stamp out: slavery.

Abolishing slavery served as the
clarion call of the nineteenth-century evangelical movement, with its roots in social justice, including workers’ and women’s rights. When evangelical Christian missionaries arrived in Khartoum during the 1870s, the slave trade was booming. At the time, Sudan fell within the Ottoman Empire, and Turks and their Egyptian proxies governed Sudan. Like their predecessors, the Turks and Egyptians raided
the south—the Land of the Blacks—for the familiar booty of gold, ivory,
and slaves. They made no secret of setting Sudan’s territorial boundaries according to these appetites. Maintaining empires cost money. The Egyptian khedive Mohammad Ali Pasha bankrupted Egypt and settled his debts by handing the British control of the Suez Canal in 1873. He wrote to his sons on a slave-raiding mission to
the south: “Show me your zeal . . . have no fears, go everywhere, attack, strike, grab.”
¹⁸
The majority of Sudanese blacks were enslaved by a small group of Arabs, and each year, slavers shipped eighty thousand to one hundred thousand human beings north, where they were pressed into service as soldiers,
jihadiqeen
, in the Ottoman armies. Appalled by the teeming human markets, the newly arrived
missionaries pressed the colonial authorities to end the slave trade. Although the British did officially ban slavery in 1877, Egyptian slaveholders effectively ignored this prohibition, freeing their slaves only to reconscript them into the Ottoman army. By 1884, the competition for Africa among rival European powers had grown so fierce that at Portugal’s urging, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck
invited representatives of Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway (governed as one until 1905), and the United Kingdom to Berlin to carve up the continent peaceably, lest a full-on war for Africa break out. At this, the Berlin Conference of 1885—the “Scramble for Africa”—evangelists were key figures in the bargaining. Although the colonial officers
and industrial scions were enthralled by Africa’s vast untapped resources, the missionaries had the scramble for souls in mind, and were granted, like explorers and scientists, “especial protection”
¹⁹
to traverse new territories under the sheltering flags of their respective empires.

Many American and British evangelicals headed for the English-speaking territories of the British protectorates
in Nigeria and Sudan. The tenth parallel, and its division between Islam and the border pagans—most of whom belong today to Africa’s swelling ranks of Christians—ran across both territories. Soon, the British would draw a line across one million square miles along the tenth parallel, and deepen the natural divide that already separated two worlds.

The casualty
ward of Khartoum’s Ahmed Gasim Children’s Hospital was strung with fake red flowers for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It steamed with the press of bodies and the glare of TV lights. The Reverend Franklin Graham murmured a prayer over four-month-old Shirain, who was dying of a congenital heart defect. The child was smaller than his outstretched hand, and she lay swaddled and inert on a pus-stained
cot. Her gray eyelids, like moth wings, stayed closed and still as flashbulbs flooded the cot she shared with her mother, Nada, a woman of twenty-eight. Graham, in a blue wool blazer and cowboy boots, was sweating.

In December 2003, Franklin Graham was already one of America’s most powerful evangelical leaders. At fifty-seven, he was also the eldest son of Billy Graham. Known as the personal
pastor to George W. Bush, Graham was poised to inherit his father’s $200-million-a-year organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
¹
and he already ran one of his own, Samaritan’s Purse, a $175-million-a-year worldwide evangelical Christian relief and development organization founded in 1970.
²
For more than two decades, Franklin Graham had provided relief and medical aid in southern
Sudan, but this was his first trip to the northern capital of Khartoum. Graham, a bush pilot who had flown his own Gulfstream to Sudan, was going to meet his enemy, President Bashir, a man he had called “just as evil as Saddam Hussein.”
³
In the late fall of 2003, that simile had particular weight, since America was soon to invade Hussein’s Iraq, and had already deposed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a former general who had seized power in a 1989 military coup and then declared a jihad against the south, had already begun to wage attacks against the Fur people to the west, in the formerly independent kingdom of Darfur, but in Khartoum, word of the unfolding genocide was little more than whispered.
⁴

Yet Graham had come to Khartoum at Bashir’s invitation; the
Sudanese regime was trying to curry favor with Washington and thus avoid being the next Muslim country America attacked. Bashir was also hoping to persuade the United States to lift the economic sanctions that had been put in place in 1998, after Al Qaeda operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on orders from Osama bin Laden, whom Sudan had been sheltering since 1991.

Graham
had own his reasons to come to Khartoum, and some of them lay in the ward of this hospital. With its coppery sting of blood and bleach, the air made Graham’s eyes water. “There is an opening in her heart,” Nada said, peering wearily at her daughter. The strain of staying alive had wizened the baby’s features. Although the operation that could save her life was a simple one, it was not available
in Sudan. Shirain would live for one more month, maybe two, the hospital’s director, Dr. Muzackir A. Monim, told us. He followed Graham’s entourage around the ward as they placed taped-up Nike and Payless ShoeSource boxes on each of the fifteen cots. The boxes were part of Operation Christmas Child, one of Graham’s efforts at worldwide evangelization. People in America and Britain pack the boxes
with toothbrushes, socks, toys, and sometimes Bibles, and place handwritten letters inside. I read one from a ten-year-old in Brooklyn:
I hope you like your gifts in the shoebox. You can think of the gifts as a blessing from Jesus Christ. Do you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? I hope we are both similar in many ways.
In 2003, Operation Christmas Child delivered six million gift-packed
shoe boxes around the world, sixty-six thousand of which arrived in Khartoum.

Graham placed a box on Nada and Shirain’s cot, along with a pamphlet called “The Greatest Gift of All.” He moved on to another patient—a three-month-old boy named Osama—as Nada rifled through her box, pulling out a roll of pink chewing gum called Bubble Tape, a stuffed rabbit, and a book of Bible stories. She stroked
the bunny distractedly and opened the pamphlet, which began:
Dear God, I know I’m a sinner. I made the wrong choices and did bad things. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I know your Son, Jesus, died for my sins and I believe you raised him from the dead. I want Jesus to be my Lord.

Squatting next to the bed, I asked Nada what the book was about. “Jesus,” she said. “This book talks about Jesus and
what your soul is.” The patients and parents in the hospital were Muslims, and for Graham,
reaching them with the Gospel’s good news was imperative. Whether they chose to accept the invitation was up to them.

Graham formed his controversial views of Islam here in Sudan. In November 2001—two months after the September 11 attacks—during a chapel dedication in North Carolina, Graham had famously
declared, “We’re not attacking Islam, but Islam has attacked us. The god of Islam is not the same God. It’s a different god, and I believe it is a very wicked and evil religion.”
⁵
Although these comments had led Graham to be vilified by Muslims worldwide, President George W. Bush had invited him to lead the 2003 Good Friday service at the Pentagon anyway. Graham had asked to be photographed with
the Pentagon’s Muslim employees following the service, but they refused. Now he had arrived in Khartoum to ask for permission to evangelize among Sudan’s northern Muslims; and I, traveling with him, had come along to ask how evangelicals had come to play such a large role in American foreign policy.