The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (7 page)

Before satellite dishes and Skype, weather connected one continent to another. The intertropical convergence zone binds the northern
and southern hemispheres by driving both of their high-pressure air currents toward the equator, where atmospheric pressure is lower. This system not only creates the trade winds but also carries carbon dioxide and other pollutants
produced by the northern hemisphere toward the south. As these compounds travel south, they warm oceans and land, contributing to patterns of flooding and drought.

These equatorial patterns directly affect North America, too. Atlantic hurricanes, such as Katrina, are born in this zone. When the two collide, they form vortexes known as Hadley cells, which move clockwise until they sweep off Cape Verde. Most of these storms dissipate while passing through the doldrums, or “horse latitudes”—named for the practice of sailors in becalmed ships tossing their horses
overboard to save precious drinking water. But some do not dissipate, and these eventually strike America’s East Coast. This is the pattern Ernest Zebrowski, Jr., in
Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters
, calls the butterfly effect, borrowing the term from chaos theory. The tiniest change to the air currents in Nigeria—caused by a movement as minute as the beat
of a butterfly’s wings—may create chaos seven thousand miles away in North America.
⁴
A terrible flood season in the catastrophe zone can mean that the United States and Caribbean will face a horrific hurricane season.

The twin plagues of advancing desert (desertification) and flash flooding mean that for the first time in history there may be as many people fleeing from the weather as from war.
By 2050, by one estimate, as many as one billion people will be displaced from their homes by environmental factors.
⁵
Every year, an average of ten million people are forced from their homes in the Sahel, according to Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University.
⁶
These numbers are speculative, and critics point out that it is difficult to determine why people move, and harder still to document
such migrations. And no one knows for sure if the changing weather will lead to more or fewer insect-borne illnesses—malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and sleeping sickness. Scientists also disagree as to whether the rising temperature of the ocean, or of the land, will determine the weather’s future, and whether floods or deserts will prevail.
⁷

From deluge to desert, there was
no balance. In August 2007, I met Dr. Amin al-Amin, an ecologist in his forties and a member of a royal Muslim family from the north. He had started a nongovernmental organization called Nature Trust International, to address the perils of desertification in Nigeria and eight other West African countries. However, al-Amin (which means “the trusted one” in Arabic, one of Mohammed’s nicknames) was
not simply interested in the environmental aspects of the desert’s southern spread; he was concerned with the ensuing social crisis as well.

“The line of latitude ten degrees to the north of the equator across Africa marks the beginning of a fragile ecosystem in terms of climate change, in terms of population growth, in terms of religious conflict,” al-Amin told me. He thinks and speaks in terms
of latitude, and referred to the tenth parallel as “latitude ten.” As the Sahara Desert advances south and leaves former farms and grazing lands consumed by dunes, the northern Muslims must move south with their livestock to survive. Pushing south, the nomads enter settled areas and collide with farming communities, many of which are Christian. Such was the case in Sudan, and also in Nigeria,
where for more than a decade al-Amin, along with other scientists, has studied the geographic coordinates of desertification, and the social problems between the two groups, which are fomented by a drastic lack of education and services.

Although the Middle Belt’s high plateau is temperate, most of Nigeria is overwhelmingly hot, and even the late summer rainy season offers little relief. The
air is just as warm as before, only wetter. On one smothering August afternoon, a few days after I had left the flood-devastated Wase, al-Amin picked me up in his green Mercedes SUV at a hotel in the Nigerian
capital of Abuja—a boring, ordered city architecturally akin to Washington, D.C.—to show me firsthand how the dynamics of environmental migration were interwoven with religion. We were going
to drive north of Abuja to visit a community of several hundred children who had migrated south about three hundred miles, from latitude fourteen. Their village to the north could no longer support their farms or grazing for their cows, so everyone was moving south, beginning with the children, al-Amin explained. He shouted over the air conditioner’s full-tilt roar. The vehicle was a curious choice
for an environmentalist, but not perhaps for the scion of one of Nigeria’s Muslim royal families. “My great-grandfather was very close with Uthman dan Fodio,” he said, invoking the name of the famous Sufi reformer and Nigerian hero. Al-Amin was wearing a fine-gauge white linen suit, through which he was sweating despite the air-conditioning. Driving made him nervous, he confessed, but he had
given his chauffeur the day off so he could lead this tour himself.

We passed a seemingly endless procession of young boys trudging along the roadside carrying gnarled branches on their heads. “Look around. Do you see any trees?” al-Amin asked. For miles, the earth was crimson and treeless. (The boys must have walked for dozens of miles to find those few brittle branches.) Through the smeared
window, it looked like a grainy image sent back to earth from a Mars probe. The ground had been stripped of most of its minerals. Thanks to the heat, the equatorial glare, and the punishing rainstorms, all that remained was the iron-rich laterite that reddened the tropical soil.

As we drove, al-Amin recounted a bloody confrontation he had recently had with a group of conservative Muslim scholars
over the issue of desertification. According to the Maliki school of Islam—one of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence and the one that most Nigerian Muslims follow—sin, not science, causes the desert’s spread. Believing that it is his duty to dispel such misconceptions, al-Amin visits conservative schools, using his royal lineage to gain entry. He lectures scholars on the environmental
causes of desertification, and explains that alcohol and fornication do not cause drought. As he puts it, the earth is growing warmer because of man, not God. Not long ago, during one such lecture, a conservative scholar leaped to his feet and told al-Amin to “quit talking nonsense.” When al-Amin refused to back down, the audience began to pelt him with stones. With his left ear bleeding, he
raced to his car. By the time he was locked safely inside, the crowd had shattered the SUV’s
windshield. Undaunted, al-Amin kept returning to the school, and finally convinced the students to take part in a reforestation pilot program.

“I like a bit of thrill,” he said. He pulled off the capital’s highway and into a warren of shanties slouching against a brick-colored boulder the size of a house.
The street was almost empty except for a handful of teenage boys, none older than sixteen. The social problem that most concerned al-Amin involved the millions of itinerant Islamic students—boys between the ages of six and eighteen—whose families sent them to boarding schools for religious education.
¹
Historically, these wandering students, called
al majiri
after the name of their schools, worked
on their teachers’ farms to pay for their educations. Al-Amin had attended one of these Islamic schools, once renowned for Quranic study. (By fifteen, students are supposed to be
hafez
, meaning they know the Quran by heart; “These days, instead, they are full-blown miscreants,” al-Amin said.) Now they were changing—in part because of the weather. Due to desertification, the teachers, like everyone
else, were forced to move south and leave their farms behind. The schools now clung to the edge of cities, like the capital, Abuja. With no more farms to feed the boys, the teachers sent them out to beg instead.

“It is a form of slavery,” al-Amin said. “They need somewhere to stay and their teacher becomes their only protector. The children are victims because a natural disaster is taking place
and it should be up to our government to solve it.” But the government did nothing, and, instead, the teachers functioned like Fagins in a modern-day version of
Oliver Twist
. To educate fellow Muslims about this problem, Nature Trust International had staged a play about a religious teacher whom desertification forced off his farm and into corruption. It caused so much anger in northern Nigeria
that the play was banned.

We searched for the community’s leaders among the shanties, and found them sitting together in a lean-to (the only one with furniture and a thin carpet). After a few words of introduction in Hausa—I heard al-Amin drop Dan Fodio’s name—we were ushered into the school. One hundred children under the age of eight were crammed into a single room. Teenage boys hung around
outside. 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, pimply
teenage 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 pulled
over 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 had
beaten 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.

Nigeria’s troubles between Christians and Muslims began
in 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 religious
violence. 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 in
2001, 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 Nigeria
to 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 act
many 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 hundred
more died in Jos during 2009. Farther northeast, in the town of Maiduguri, a splinter group of
al majari
youth who called themselves
Boko 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 candidates stood on opposite sides of the barren soccer field as the people of Yelwa, a town
of 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. Most
belonged 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 ears
in 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. Chaos
ensued, 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.