Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves on a couple of dollars a day — that’s to say nothing of the millions of unemployed vagrants. The government oscillates between inertia and rapacity, so competing religious organisations have emerged in its place. But while religious communities provide legal services and schools, they can also incite sectarian violence as Nigerians contest their country’s dwindling resources. An estimated 50,000 Nigerians, both Christian and Muslim, have been murdered in the last decade. Western governments have remained largely indifferent to the slaughter.
Griswold is an American journalist who spent nearly a decade reporting from the 10th Parallel, the faultline between Christianity and Islam that runs through Nigeria, Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Her book, The 10th Parallel, is an account of tensions between faiths, and the relationship between the conservative societies along the parallel and liberal democracies in the West. Despite the grim prospectus, it is a hopeful book.
Griswold is too unassuming to say that she has demolished received opinions about that strip of the globe, but her motives were self-consciously iconoclastic. “I set out to criticise people imposing an otherness,” she says. “All my editors thought that religion had nothing to do with 9/11. That it was all about poverty; that God was dead. And I knew that it wasn’t true.” She says that the media, particularly in America, felt no need to report from the frontline. “I don’t think we pay a lot of attention to stories that don’t endanger us personally. And since the death of 50,000 in Nigeria doesn’t really endanger us, we don’t pay the attention we might to what’s going on.”
Criticism of a complacent media grows into an assault on the assumptions of western foreign policy. Perceptions of Islam are crucial. Governments have, Griswold says, a “huge” tendency to see Islam solely through the prism of the Middle East — with its craven sheikhs, despotic soldiers and crazed Salafists. This has prompted the conclusion that, in Griswold’s words, “Islam and democracy are opposed”, which explains why western governments, particularly America, have supported Mubarak et al as the lesser of two evils. The Arab Spring shook those convictions, but the emergence of various shades of Islamist in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria is restoring the faith that Islam is compatible with democracy.
Griswold has seen a different world. “Look to the fact that nearly 4 out of 5 of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims don’t live in the Middle East. Look to the border lands in Asia and Africa, where they do live. Indonesia, for example, is the world’s largest Muslim country and a functioning democracy. Now, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Salafist movement in Indonesia — and the other countries, too. But there is variety in the voices that is a hopeful sign on the future of Islam.”
The premise of Griswold’s book is that although there is frequent and bloody tension between Christians and Muslims along the 10th Parallel, especially where resources are scarce, there is no ‘clash of civilizations’. Rather, there is a competition for souls that is strongest among faiths, as Christians fight for Christians and Muslims fight for Muslims. “There is a proliferation of vibrant forms of religious practice. They look pretty kooky from a distance, but as any good Nigerian will tell you, religion is a market place. And it’s up to everybody to get as many people as possible to fill their Churches and Mosques.”
Enlightened religious organisations of both faiths in southern Nigeria are confronting reactionary groups in the north, groups which believe that vaccinations are poisons and that natural disasters are punishments from God. Meanwhile, Anglicanism and Catholicism are being supplanted along the 10th Parallel by flashy Pentecostals, who preach that God is the surest route to material wealth.
The strength of public religion may confound the increasingly secular West. But, Griswold says, that is another example of our partial view of abroad, and indeed how we perceive modernity. Globalisation is obviously an economic phenomenon, but it is also a religious phenomenon. The internet, for example, is spreading religious identities around the developing world, connecting believers.
Many religious conservatives of both faiths along the parallel see the internet and globalisation as vehicles of unwanted westernisation. Western governments have Panglossian faith in the power of information; blind trust epitomised by Jared Cohen, the US State Department’s former internet guru, who insists that Facebook is “one of the most organic tools for democracy the world has ever seen”. But Griswold knows that access to information can reinforce stereotypes about the dissolute West.
“There’s certainly a conservative backlash against [some internet] culture. It’s opposition to Britney Spears. It feeds conservative religious agendas because it gives them more information and images of a perceived enemy.”
The propagation of universal human rights may also alienate the West. Islamic opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is well known — Muslim countries have signed 2 alternative documents that promote the collective rights of the faithful above individual rights and subordinate all law beneath the ultimate jurisdiction of Sharia. But what of the conservative Christian communities along the 10th Parallel? Griswold says that is “fair” to say that they would sympathise with many of the social tenets laid out in the Islamic declarations on human rights. When one considers the treatment of homosexuals and women in those societies — and the deleterious effect those debates are having on the Anglican Communion — this does seem fair.
Griswold’s book is defined by its honesty, but it omits to mention that the West is not the only incursive force along the 10th Parallel. China’s scramble for Africa is now so advanced that there are political movements opposing it. Zambia’s new president, Michael Sata, won an election at the end of last year on an anti-Chinese ticket (the Spectator interviewed deputy president, Dr Gut Scott, recently). What do the people Griswold met make of the Chinese?
“They make different things of China. First of all, the South Sudanese prefer to have American oil companies than Chinese ones. When the Chinese are on the ground, they are very isolated. Even with prostitutes. Where normal oil workers will have local prostitutes, not the Chinese: they bring their own. They don’t share a language. They don’t attempt to integrate in anyway. There is a lot of distrust of them that way. But it depends who you talk to. If a government is getting a lot of support from China, then everyone loves China because their money comes freely.”
Despite the Zambian election and pervasive grumbling against Chinese presence, Griswold feels that there is little resentment of Chinese foreign policy as yet. Liberal democracies remain the most obvious enemy. Western policy is clear and often counterproductive, whereas China’s is “nebulous”. In Griswold’s view, the West’s decision to isolate President Bashir, the dictator of Sudan, and indict him for war crimes has bolstered his power. “He’s got a second wind over the past few years by taking up this banner of ‘I speak out against the West’. He’s actually become more popular for that.” A lesson of Griswold’s book is that the clash of civilizations cuts both ways, and that the modern world is much too interconnected for a policy of us and them.
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the faultline between Islam and Christianity, by Eliza Griswold, is published by Penguin £9.99
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