The Middle Belt Describes The

Erase for a moment the images of Nigeria that may come up to your mind—of burning garbage dumps in sprawling Lagos or unemployed young men brandishing jerry cans in the Niger Delta. Picture instead 100,000 white-clad believers flowing out of a mosque on any given Sunday, or a megachurch filled with 300,000 worshipers at an almanac Pentecostal convocation. As Eliza Griswold reports in her March Atlantic commodity, "God's Country," Nigeria is a state suffused with faith—a forcefulness that has become a powerful and divisive grade of identity.

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Photos and narration by Seamus Murphy. Produced in conjunction with PBS'due south Frontline/Globe.

Audio: The Contest for Africa
Hear Eliza Griswold speaking with Lisa Mullins of Public Radio International's "The Earth" most the clash between Islam and Christianity forth Nigeria's Middle Chugalug.

Slideshow: Nigeria—A Struggle for Souls and Survival

Griswold has written about conflict and human rights for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New Republic, amidst other publications. In 2006 she visited Nigeria, hoping to learn more than virtually how the forces of globalization are influencing the formation of local identities—particularly religious identities—in a country that is well-nigh evenly carve up betwixt Muslims and Christians.

Neither Islam nor Christianity is new to Nigeria. Islam was introduced to West Africa as early as the eighth century past traders and jihadis equally they traversed the Sahara. Islam's spread in Nigeria culminated in the establishment of a 19th-century caliphate that ruled several states in the north. Every bit for Christianity, by the fourth dimension the British managed to unify and colonize the country in the beginning of the 20th century, Christian missionaries had already begun making inroads in the countryside. Since and so, evangelization and the spread of Pentecostalism and African Initiated Churches have increased the number of Christians in Nigeria from one percent of the population a century ago to some 40 percent now.

In recent years, violence between Muslims and Christians has erupted in an expanse of central Nigeria known as the Eye Belt, where the north's majority Muslim population meets the s's majority Christian population. The metropolis of Kaduna has witnessed some of the most devastating of the minor-scale conflicts that have killed thousands. Residents of the city guess that clashes betwixt Christians and Muslims in the bound of 2000 took the lives of well-nigh 5,000 people and displaced many others. And in 2002, Christians-Muslim violence in the town of Yelwa, described by Griswold in her slice, left hundreds dead, and dozens of churches and mosques ruined.

Griswold makes clear that the underlying causes of this conflict are complex. The flames of Nigerian violence, she emphasizes, are fanned by a number of secular factors: climate change has brought the two faiths into closer physical proximity, while high birthrates take intensified their competition over scarce resources. At the same fourth dimension, the rampant abuse plaguing the Nigerian government has left members of both religions grasping for order and accountability. "Outbreaks of violence," she writes, "result not simply from a clash betwixt two powerful religious monoliths, only from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet—zones of agony and official neglect where organized religion becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work."

Simply Griswold warns confronting attributing Nigeria's struggles merely to secular causes and thereby whitewashing the religious issues at hand. In a region that is divided near evenly betwixt the cross and the crescent, religious discord is not simply a manifestation of unrest but is truly a part of the problem. As i church building leader in Yelwa put it, "Our God is different than the Muslim God … If he were the aforementioned God, we wouldn't fight." And as a young Muslim woman who was abducted and raped by Christian militants observed, "The Christians don't desire u.s.a. hither [in Yelwa] considering they don't like our organized religion."

Fortunately, Nigeria's intensely religious character can sometimes be a source of harmony likewise as disharmonize. In the form of her reporting, Griswold encountered religious leaders on both sides of the divide who have dedicated themselves to fostering peace in the proper noun of their respective religions. As Pastor James Movel Wuye, a former Christian militia leader who now works jointly with a Muslim imam toward fostering peace, told her, "We take to discover a space for coexistence."

I interviewed Eliza Griswold by phone and e-mail in January.

—Justine Isola

Yous've reported from all over the world, particularly on issues of security and human rights. What drew you to Nigeria and to this story?

This story is part of a larger volume projection I'k working on, which is an test of the edge—roughly between the equator and the line of breadth nigh 700 miles to the north of it—called the 10th parallel. In Africa and Asia, this is the zone where the explosive growth of Christianity in what's called the Global South meets the southern border of the Muslim globe. In Africa, this coming together signal is particularly dramatic because of geography: information technology's the border between dry country to the north and Sub-Saharan Africa to the south. For the past 4 years, I've been traveling inside this zone on two continents in six countries, examining up close what happens when Christianity and Islam meet, and what role religion plays in relationships between people. The book, which will exist published adjacent yr, is mostly a book of ideas explored through the characters who alive and die in this zone. The voices are particular to individuals, but they also speak to the larger questions of globalized religious identity.

Tin you elaborate on what you mean by "globalized religious identity?"

Sure. It'southward actually a way of saying that globalization has a massive impact on people's personal and shared worldviews, or organized religion. The reality is that the current religious renewal in both Christianity and Islam today is a direct effect of globalization. Every bit Peter Berger, the manager of the Institute for the Written report of Economic Culture at Boston University, recently wrote, well-nigh of our smartest thinkers, à la Nietzche, idea modernity would kill God, but exactly the reverse is happening. And then how do we account for this? Well, in many dissimilar ways. I'll but talk nigh a couple of them specially prevalent in Africa.

Today equally nations become increasingly irrelevant, religious identity becomes ane of the next-greatest ways past which people stake their claim as to who they are equally an individual and equally function of a group. This is especially true in places where national borders, which were superimposed by the colonialists scrambling for resource, have never actually worked in the first identify. When national identity breaks downward under the pressure of globalization, other collectives become more important. In many cases, this is organized religion.

This is also happening here in the Usa, with megachurches. But it's especially pronounced in the developing earth. Those of us who report exterior of America, are seeing more and more religious awakenings patterning people'south daily lives in ways that are hard for many of usa at home to empathise. Perceived slurs and slights, or massive conflagrations—similar the war in Republic of iraq, or the situation in Israel and Palestine—take a profound impact on how people hold onto their religious and cultural identity. One example: during the state of war in Lebanon several summers agone, I was in Kano, a town in northern Nigeria. If y'all wanted to watch the news, you watched either blonde Hala Gorani on CNN or marching music videos on Hezbollah Tv. While we in the W may see the difference between those 2 options equally a cultural or political divide, that'southward non how information technology appears to a swell deal of the earth. It appears as a religious split.

Does that mean we've stumbled into on overly simplified notion of the "great clash"? No. It just means that on an individual level, faith is becoming more intimate and essential, and on a community level, religious identity plays a significant role in worldview and social identity. This is on the increase without question.

The Center Belt has been the site of some of the most fierce religious clashes in Nigeria. Why has faith—as opposed to ethnicity, for example—get such a powerful class of identity there?

The roots of religion's supremacy over ethnic identity in the Middle Chugalug, among Christians in particular, are actually historic. You had a bunch of disenfranchised smaller ethnic groups, the hill people—many of whom fled from the dominant ability of the Hausa Muslim majority in the due north to this plateau in the Middle Chugalug to protect themselves from slave raiders. And they were very isolated. They used the plateau equally a form of fortification, and they surrounded themselves with thorn bushes to keep people out. Christianity gave them a sense of collective identity, which too provided vital educational activity nearly health and hygiene. And the association between Christianity and Western education and bureaucracy gave people purchase into a organisation that they'd never had before. One Christian leader in the Middle Chugalug told me that his grandfather was able to get from living in one of these isolated communities to condign a businessman only by reading the Bible. And to him the Bible was word-for-word truthful. He said, "At present you in the West are telling united states that the Bible is a metaphor, that we're non to accept information technology equally literally true? What organisation of development is adjacent? What syllabus are yous offer in commutation for taking the Bible'southward literal truth away from us?"

And then Christianity became a unifying identity for some of the Nigerians living in the Eye Belt. Has Nigerian Christianity taken on any distinctive characteristics?

John Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown, has observed that talking virtually encounters between Christianity and Islam in Africa is off base of operations. Nosotros're really talking near encounters between the two faiths with Africa. Nosotros have to ask continually, "Which Christianity. Which Islam?" These faiths are non but global monoliths that be in i place every bit they do in the other. "Syncretic" is the word people would apply to draw a religion that borrows from local traditions also every bit global traditions.

About 60 per centum of the earth's Christians live in the developing earth, which means that for virtually Africans, Christianity doesn't experience like something that came from the Due west. And it didn't. Accept Sudan, for example. The showtime Christian in what is today Sudan was a imperial eunuch who converted on a business trip to Jerusalem in 37 A.D., so the Bible story goes. 1 of the disciples hopped into his chariot and—wham!—he converted. So where is the W in that? Nowhere. Oft, people say to me, "The West may have brought the Bible here to us, just then they abandoned it. Now it's our plough to accept faith back to them."  And so, many African Christians experience their faith stands outside the tradition of colonialism. In fact, faith allows them to decline the cultural imperialism of the morally lax West. This is essential to agreement how organized religion can work as a kind of conservative liberation theology. In detail, expect at Pentecostalism'due south power to include spirit-based worship. In Pentecostal traditions, demons and demon possession are existent. So is possession by the Holy Spirit. That's one reason why Pentecostalism has had such explosive growth in Africa: it's very much in keeping with notions virtually spirit, which already exist.

Has Islam also taken on traditional African characteristics?Does this create tensions with the global Islamic community?

Showtime, it's important to remember that 80 percent of the earth'southward Muslims live outside the Arab globe. So Islam in Africa takes many, many forms, especially along the edge of the Muslim world. Many Africans are Sufis, a broad and sometimes syncretic form of the organized religion patterned past relationships between brotherhoods, or tariqa. Since the late '80s, the reawakening of the organized religion has led some hardliners to oppose Sufi practices. For case, many kids who get to Islamic schools write on boards called allos to memorize the Koran. The ink they apply becomes sacred. Some Sufi teachers—both to make coin and because it'due south tradition—will sell that ink to people who drink it for sure cures. They are purified by drinking—taking in—the world of God. Now for many reformist Sunnis, that's haram—forbidden by Islam considering it's not in the stricter traditions. They see the practise as something that needs to exist rooted out of social club. Sometimes that leads to violence between the reformists and the Sufis who oppose them. Similarly at that place'southward been violence between those who call themselves Shia—some even hang posters of Moqtada al Sadr on their walls—and Sunnis. All of these divisions undermine the arguments that we're watching a disharmonism but between global monoliths.

As you write in your slice, these nuances and divisions within Christianity and Islam are every bit important as the opposition betwixt the two faiths.

We sometimes see a global clash—what Samuel Huntington calls the "bloody" borders of religion—where these two monoliths come across each other. Only the truth behind the occasions of violence is that information technology's the weakness and insecurities of those who live at the edge that pb to fighting—not two overarching ideologies battling it out.  Religious identity isn't fixed. Information technology's changing all the time, and is affected by many other power struggles—over land, resources, and politics.

In Nigeria, the consequence of  "indigeneship" seems to be a primal source of tension betwixt Christians and Muslims. Tin yous say more about the meaning and history of this concept in Nigeria and elaborate on its implications?

The Nigerian constitution simply poorly defines information technology, merely in short, indigeneship is designed to mean that you have the most rights in the place you call home, wherever that may be. It doesn't actually work though. Instead, whoever holds political power controls the correct to indigeneship because they tin make the rules. Abdullahi Abdullahi, a Muslim human rights lawyer, has brought a case in front of the Nigerian Supreme Court to challenge the constitutionality of the whole system.

I've read that part of the problem is that some groups cannot trace their roots to any 1 expanse. Is this role of the issue in Yelwa?

Absolutely. In fact, as Abdullahi would say, nosotros're all refugees from somewhere. Yelwa is a predominantly Muslim pocket inside what's at present a larger Christian area. Both sides claim that they were there showtime.

And that's exactly where religion enters into it. "There are no Christians on this map," Abdullahi said once, showing me a map. And true, there were all those small pockets of Tarok and Goemai, minor subsets of ethnicities. In isolated pockets, those ethnicities had no power over anybody, but when they came together and used Christianity as their shared identity, they were able to establish dominance over the Islamic groups that were there. And the Christians say, "We're all Christians. Nosotros don't know where you came from, but we've been hither forever." So that's a perfect instance of how a grouping uses faith to gain power over another grouping.

Do you lot come across the implementation of sharia as a glace slope when it comes to merging religion and politics?

There's no such thing equally one simple code of sharia. Information technology has inside it a very strict criminal lawmaking that nosotros call back of as sharia, but is really called hudud, which involves harsher punishments like stoning and beheading. Merely sharia is as well about protecting the rights of those under it, like widows and orphans, and protecting holding rights.

The question of sharia has, from the beginning, been misunderstood both by those who wanted to implement it and a West that fears it. In Nigeria, it largely was used equally an electoral bid: "You guys are going to get sharia, no more corruption." Well, there'southward still just as much corruption. And as such, the popular support of sharia has dropped off. That's not interpreted as a failure of sharia just as a failure of those who wanted to implement it in the first place. It turns out that the very same government officials who were pushing it and then difficult are among the well-nigh corrupt.

When I read the more dogmatic comments made in your piece, I'm even more than impressed past the work Pastor James and Imam Ashafa of the Interfaith Mediation Centre are doing to "deprogram" Christians and Muslims who take adopted the view that their faiths are irreconcilably opposed. What challenges do they face, and what have they accomplished?

They confront many challenges. The Imam'south two wives talk most how people approach them now and tell them that their hubby sold out to the Christians and he'south not a true Muslim, so why should they believe him? Pastor James has to face people who say, "Hey, man, what are you doing? You're selling out our people." And so at that place'due south yet very much the idea that in working together each is risking the power of his own group. People are agape that peace or an end to competition will price them. And that's something James and Ashafa have to work against all the time.

One successful example of deprogramming that I've seen myself involves a group that the Interfaith Arbitration Center calls its Youth Paramilitary Organization. The Christians and Muslims in the group were formerly on the streets fighting. Today, they don't accept any weapons, simply they share a commitment to bailiwick and coming together. Sometimes they become to parades and march together. This effort may seem to us somewhat small-scale at a altitude, simply these are the boys who picked upwards jerry cans for a picayune bit of money from local politicians and went after each other. Past having grassroots connections their violence is diffused.

Most of the individuals whose voices y'all capture in the slice identify as either Christian or Muslim. Did you lot worry about subjectivity or bias when reconstructing specific events or framing general trends based on their accounts?

This story, substantially, is about subjectivity—you could phone call that "perspective" or "worldview" or "bias," even—and how that informs what actually happens between human beings. One of the reasons I'm writing virtually the tenth parallel is that I don't think we in the largely secular West really empathise how present God is in the daily lives of people in the rest of the world.  I think we really need to get that, because this isn't just happening "out there somewhere." We're learning that we're all connected, and this means in our worldviews, too. As Barbara Cooper, the author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel said, faith matters. It doesn't all boil downwards to political economic system. Faith, or worldview, equally I write in the piece, is an X cistron. Peter Berger also writes nigh a secular bias—about how those who don't count themselves every bit religious are always looking for "root causes" nether religious disharmonize. Well, sometimes religion, or worldview and its symbols, are the root causes, as uncomfortable as that might make us experience.

Did your sources always enquire you about your ain behavior?

Every unmarried time I sit with someone to talk well-nigh his or her beliefs, that person asks about mine, and I answer whatsoever questions they might have. An interview is an exchange, actually, and perspective and subjectivity doesn't become one way. Someone recently called me a translator—and I think that rings truthful. My job is to translate 1 side to another—conservative to liberal, religious to secular and dorsum once more. This is what all reporters do in different ways, whether they're writing nearly Google or God.

Practise you take any predictions for the future? Will flashpoints go along to emerge or practise yous see signs that requite you hope that an end to violence is in sight?

You know, I'm no cracking speculator. Like most of us, I'm more than comfortable looking back than looking frontwards. Just I do have to say, in some places I'm hopeful. And because I'grand more often than not a carper, I take this promise pretty seriously. I don't think we're headed for global religious meltdown—in role because I've watched many of these minor-scale conflicts burn themselves out where the two faiths meet. They simply cost too much.

The Middle Belt Describes The,

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/one-nation-under-gods/306689/

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