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

arrive, and every person on earth would adopt the one true faith. “According to our
ulamas
[teachers], there is no way that the whole world will not be Muslim.”
    Later, I looked up Matthew 24, the verses that Pastor Wuyep hadcited, in a soft-bound black leather copy of the KingJames Bible—a gift to me from the American evangelist Franklin Graham, after I traveled with him to Sudan in December 2003. Down the rice-paper page, where Jesus’s words were printed in red to show that they were absolute and unerring, one verse caught my eye: “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!” (Matthew 24:19). I thought of Hamamatu Danladi. Afterher rape, she told me, she didn’t give birth for four more months, which meant she had carried her child for more than a year.

    A year later, in August 2007, I returned to Yelwa to be sure I’d understood her story. This time, I carried along a digital recorder. It must have switched on in my pocket, because later that night, as I went through the audio files after the interview, I heard the sound of my flip-flops approaching her house, then her at the door gleeful, shouting in an unknown tongue. I treasure this recording:she sounds so joyful, in spite of the horror I had asked her to recall.
    When we sat down to talk, I asked her to tell me again how long she had carried the baby in her womb. She repeated the story: she had carried him for more than a year. And even though he had spent more than a year inside her, he was born healthy. Maybe, she thought, he simply refused to come into this world during such tribulation.

    At the time of the Yelwa massacre of Muslims in May 2004, Archbishop Peter Akinola was president of the Christian Association of Nigeria. He has since lost his bid for another term, but as head of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of eighteen million Anglicans. He was also a colleague of my father’s, Frank Griswold, when, from 1997 to 2006, he was the presiding bishop of theEpiscopal Church, which has about two million members and is part of a larger network of churches called the Anglican Communion. Three years before I met Akinola, the diocese of New Hampshire had consecrated an open homosexual, the Right Reverend Gene V. Robinson, as bishop, an act without precedent in the Anglican Communion. This raised a hue and cry among Americans and Africans alike. Robinson’selection was so contentious that my father—whose job it was, as presiding bishop, to consecrate new bishops—had to wear a bulletproof vest under his cassock at the service. The election also antagonized Archbishop Akinola, who saw in it more evidence that the profligateWest was willing to abandon its biblical faith and leave African Christians, already in peril among Muslims, to defend themselvesagainst the sins of the West. Denouncing Gene Robinson’s election as “satanic,” 3 Akinola suddenly stood at a distance from my father.
    When I arrived in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the buzzing stopped and I could hear a man behind the doorrise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a powder blue pantsuit and a darker blue crushed velvet hat, opened the door.
    “My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say,” he said, eyeing me. I imagine what he saw was an American bishop’s daughter. But he did have more to say. The fact is, I was asking about the threat Islam posed to Christianity, and this was the great questionof his life. Once he began to answer, he grew expansive, even voluble, as he tried to pull the scales off the eyes of a Western reporter. Archbishop Akinola, who is sixty-six, is Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But his understanding of Islam was forged by his experience