The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (24 page)

In the ancient capital of Axum, farmers uncovered a seven-foot-high roadside stone in 1981. It chronicles one King Ezana, who ruled the kingdom from 330 to 356. The stone is inscribed with Ezana’s declaration of his Christian faith, and his demand for tribute from all who pass along the stretch of the now-forgotten road that once linked Africa to the faraway kingdoms of Arabia and Jerusalem.

While King Ezana’s conversion is a matter of historical record, the union between King Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and the birth of their son, remains the stuff of legend. Still, Ethiopia’s modern emperor, Haile Selassie, and today’s Orthodox Christian leaders have relied on this legend to legitimize their authority. Its most powerful symbol still rests in Axum. Unseen by human eyes save those
of its keeper, a guardian monk, lies an ancient relic that Ethiopians believe to be the Ark of the Covenant, carried by their Jewish forebears from Jerusalem thousands of years ago.

From Judaism to Christianity to Islam—the most important bond forged between Christians and Muslims in East Africa dates as far back as the Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime. In 615, when Mohammed had to flee his hometown
of Mecca, he sent his family to the Christian king of the Ethiopian empire, then called Abyssinia (yet another name for Land of the Blacks), for safekeeping. In thanks, he warned his followers not to attack the East African Christians, according to the following Hadith: “Leave the Abyssinians alone, so long as they do not take the offensive!”
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And for more than a thousand years, as Muslim traders
from Egypt, Yemen, and Oman, among other places, arrived along the east coast of Africa, they coexisted peacefully with Christians out of respect for the fact that an African Christian king had once saved the Prophet’s family from death at the hands of fellow Arabs.

Somali Muslims have waged jihad against their Christian neighbors only twice. First in the sixteenth century, then from 1899 to
1920, under the banner of a Sufi reformer and persuasive poet, Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, known as “the Mad Mullah.” Alarmed by the Christian influence in Somalia under the British, Hassan founded an army of dervishes who aimed to drive the infidels into the sea. Hassan was the third and last of Africa’s Sufi teachers—like Uthman dan Fodio in Nigeria, and Sudan’s Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad Abdullah before
him—to wage a major African jihad, until today.

A familiar Somali hero, or antihero, depending on whom you asked, was emerging in 2008. His name is Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, and when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006, he fled to the coast with his fighters, dodged American air strikes, and disappeared, only to resurface in Asmara a year later. After months in hiding, he was the guest of the Eritrean
government—much to the dismay of the United States. Aweys led a homegrown Islamist movement that had begun in the seventies, when a group of influential sheikhs opposed Siad Barre as un-Islamic because his “Family Law” gave equal rights to women. When Barre executed the sheikhs for being “religiously backward,” many young Somalis came to believe that their religion was the only solution to
Barre’s godless “scientific socialism.” University students traveled to Cairo, Karachi, and Riyadh on secret Islamic scholarships; others went to Afghanistan to fight in the anti-Soviet jihad. Aweys became their icon, in part because of his historic relationship with Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda’s first-ever attempted attack on Americans occurred in 1992, when bin Laden blew up a hotel in Yemen where U.S.
soldiers were billeted on the way to Somalia. (Fortune had it that the Americans had already left.) The group’s direct relationship with Somalia—and with Aweys—began when a dozen or so of Osama bin Laden’s operatives, called the Africa Corps, arrived in Somalia from Sudan in late January 1993. Al Qaeda agreed to fund Aweys’s now-defunct organization al-Ittihad al-Islami
(AIAI), which promoted
Islamic law in Somalia. In return, Aweys’s group helped the Africa Corps start terrorist training camps in southern Somalia, where Al Qaeda struggled from the start. The salaries it offered didn’t compare with what Somalis could earn as freelance gunmen working for warlords. And the “spiritual benefits package”—the millennial brand of faith that guaranteed heaven to those willing to fight and die
for the faith—meant nothing to Somalis who did not buy into the movement’s violent Islamist ideology. In letters seized by U.S. intelligence and analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the Africa Corps’s operatives, who traveled from neighboring Sudan to Somalia, couldn’t get cells up and running, and complained about the cheap and lazy Somalis who were willing to let their wives
starve to death rather than kill their cattle. Al Qaeda and the Africa Corps never found a foothold in Somalia. Costs outweighed benefits. A handful of Al Qaeda members still used Somalia as a base, including the Comorian Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2002 attack on the Paradise Hotel. Most such
fighters, however, decamped for Kenya. Weak states, not failed ones, serve terrorists best.

Aideed and I climbed into a tiny taxi to meet Sheikh Aweys in the once-swank diplomatic section of Asmara called Tripolo. We were early. From behind the gate of the compound came a boy’s voice; then a man in wire-rimmed glasses and a blue tracksuit opened the door. Aweys grinned hello. It was the same
rictus that stared out from his wanted photo on the U.S. terrorist watch list, his hair and beard the same Halloween hue of pumpkin henna.

He welcomed us inside the empty government villa, and then excused himself. I heard voices and wandered down the hall. Behind a half-opened door, four women sat on beds, minding small children. The youngest of these mothers was one of the sheikh’s wives. She
hated Asmara and missed Mogadishu, she explained, while rocking a newborn baby. The conversation—a little English spattered with Arabic punctuated by gestures—was a bit like bilingual charades. She worked to communicate to me that there was something about the altitude that was making her sick; the baby had been born too early. A boy of four or five chased a smaller girl around the
room, pretending
he was a lion. “Halas, Osama,” his mother said half-heartedly.
Osama, enough!

Aweys appeared at the bedroom door—he had changed from the blue tracksuit into a white robe—and led me back to the parlor, where he served popcorn and tea. He also set up his laptop computer and a microphone to record our conversation, showing me how my voice leaped across the screen. It was a gesture of accountability,
and an attempt at intimidation. I nodded earnestly and crunched popcorn into the microphone to make the electronic needle spike. Inevitably, talk turned to Al Qaeda.

“Let’s assume I met with Al Qaeda. Is there a sin in it?” he asked. I held my tongue as Aideed translated for his cousin. “Al Qaeda was a small baby. My commitment was much bigger,” he said.

The sheikh’s infamy was local, not global,
he strained to tell me, as he recounted the heroic story of his own life, including a near execution in 1986, when Siad Barre sentenced Aweys to death by firing squad. (He was saved when other international Muslim leaders intervened.) The question of Christianity in a Muslim land was a tricky one, he said, recounting an incident during the early nineties when he was working at the Mogadishu
port and found a shipping container full of Bibles delivered as relief supplies. He took the Bibles—Bibles!—to Hussein Aideed’s father to prove what the Westerners were secretly up to. Hussein grinned and nodded in agreement. I tried to catch his eye, but he gazed back at me unseeing, as if he had slipped into a role of devotion, or maybe favorite son, for the ease of it. He told me later that Aweys
was one of his father’s closest allies, and a respectable sheikh, who, like his father, had been misunderstood by history.

Aweys protested that he did not belong on the U.S. terrorist watch list just because he had met with Al Qaeda and was in charge of a few militant groups. Okay, so perhaps his followers launched several attacks on Ethiopian soil over the years, but he had never taken action
against America. Still, he refused to denounce Al Qaeda—a demand he says the West uses to divide Muslims. “The hammer and big stick coming from the West affects all Muslims,” he said. The more the West attacked Somalia, the more Muslims around the world would unify against America.

He led me to the door of the villa. His son Osama was playing on the stairs outside. “Osama?” I asked, pointing
to his son. His eyes widened in alarm: oh no, he explained, his son was not named for Osama bin Laden,
but for Osama bin Zayd, one of the Prophet Mohammed’s adopted sons, who, by the age of twenty-seven, became a famous general.

Returning to Somalia’s battlefield in April 2009, a year after our meeting, Sheikh Aweys took command of a new militant group called Hizbul Islam, “the Islamic Party.”
He turned his self-proclaimed jihad against the five thousand African Union peacekeeping troops from Uganda and Burundi stationed in Somalia. Calling the peacekeepers “bacteria,” Aweys fought alongside al-Shabab to destroy the African Union troops and defeat his former friend and the Islamic Courts Union political chief, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. With UN and U.S. support, Sheikh Ahmed had become
Somalia’s latest transitional president in January 2009. (On August 6, 2009, as a gesture of U.S. support, Sheikh Ahmed met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) Disgruntled, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys claimed that his former ally had become an American patsy, and in late February 2009, he joined forces with al-Shabab in a vicious battle against the African Union troops, killing nearly fifty
peacekeepers and wounding three hundred more. Inevitably, as the new fissures between Sufis and Sunnis continued to branch, the militant groups splintered and began to fight one another, too.

The Peace Hotel, where I stayed in Mogadishu in 2007 and 2008, flew eight white flags as a symbol of its neutrality. Its manager, Bashir Yusef Osman, thirty-three and
unmarried, had fended for himself in the midst of a civil war for the past seventeen years. His family, like many of Somalia’s wealthy families, had gone to America and Canada during the fighting, but he had stayed on to oversee their interests. Wearing Timberland boots and a caterpillar mustache, Osman could have been a Brooklyn hipster—a savvy everyman in any culture.

“Most of the ones who
have left, they think they are going to make it big in the States,” he said. “But they end up cleaning toilets.” In an inversion of Mogadishu’s wartime remittance economy, Osman sent money abroad to keep the family afloat. His cousin Jamma, who was about the same age, had recently returned from Canada to help Osman run the hotel for a few months. Although he was terrified, Jamma could not refuse to
lend Osman a hand. Jamma owed him.

Jamma was slight and as big-eared as a field mouse. He anxiously twirled his cufflinks, which were custom-made in Canada and embossed with the Somali flag: a white five-pointed star against a pale blue background. The color was United Nations blue. The familiar hue was a reminder of its lack of national identity inherent in the patchwork of colonial borders.
Now that the borders no longer applied, religion was filling the space they’d left behind. The points on the star reminded Somalis of their cousins living beyond the nation’s five borders—especially those in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, where that country was starving its own Muslim population.

Convinced that he was going to be shot at any moment, Jamma kept repeating, “It’s all good, it’s
all good.” An obvious outsider, he was hoping that his cufflinks would keep him safe if he were caught in a tight spot;
they were both a mark of his allegiance to Somalia and easy lucre for a bribe.

Jamma hated guns and the culture of guns. “These insurgents would just as soon shoot me. I am much more like you,” he said one May afternoon in 2008, as we sat in the back of Osman’s Corolla waiting
for our armed security guards to lead the way into the colonial patch of town by the sea.

That afternoon, like most, Osman drove. We were headed to meet the prime minister, and to visit a Catholic cathedral I had seen on a postcard near his office. Osman was the only one cool enough to handle the ever-changing checkpoints, all of which seemed to be manned by armed teenagers, surly boys too small
to fill whatever piece of camouflage “uniform” they had managed to cadge. The gunmen belonged to the clan of Prime Minister Gedi, a former veterinarian who has since been ousted from power. Gedi was, to put it bluntly, an Ethiopian stooge, and his transitional government had retriggered old tribal animosities. We were stopped every block until we reached the ex–Italian colony, which a Somali friend
of mine dubbed the Lime Zone (to Baghdad’s Green Zone). The failing government had hunkered down here in a last-ditch effort to protect itself. Curious boys peered into the car as we drove past. Seeing a foreigner—and a woman—they puffed out their child-size chests. I fixed my gaze beyond them to the sullen sea, and the fishmongers in a Romanesque piazza.

We passed the post office where the U.S.
Army Rangers had barricaded themselves and were killed in 1993. We passed the U.S. embassy where the two childless widows were squatting. We passed the old sea wall along which Osman and Jamma’s family had once kept a bar. And we passed mounds and mounds of rubble of every kind: stone, garbage, and indistinguishable waste. Trash hung in the trees like bleached prayer flags, or a doll’s laundry.

“Friday night, this place was packed,” Jamma said, recalling the boozy fun of more than twenty years ago. We had stopped briefly to look through a hole blasted in an old stone wall. Through it we could see a square of dance floor, and beyond that, a beach, where music used to spill into the surf at night. (I had seen a postcard of this same beach with Italians in shorts and bare chests strolling
across the white sand.) “Look at what God gave to us and people are missing,” he said.

A little farther down the road, the cathedral we had come to see had
been blasted into stone toothpicks; its spires looked like bleached bone shards splashed with cerulean paint, it seemed, to indicate heaven.