The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (27 page)

Hunter howled his approval. He, too, hated the attitude of those in Europe and the Middle East, be they Caucasian or Arab: it was the classic arrogance of those in the temperate zone couched in religious superiority. To me, this insulting of fellow believers
sounded sacrilegious.

“It’s not sacrilegious,” Ibnu Ahmad answered. “It’s in the Holy Quran. That’s why the Prophet was sent down among the Arabs: to save the wickedest people on earth.” Although it was unclear how he had arrived at this argument, Ibnu Ahmad said that the Quran’s ninth chapter, “Repentance,” supported his claim. In it, God instructs the Muslims on what to do with the Arab tribes
that have broken their treaties and returned to the worship of many gods: “They have sold God’s message for a trifling gain, and barred others from his path. How evil their actions are!” (9:9). According to Ibnu Ahmad, God was calling Arabs evil. Look at the Saudis, he said; they were the worst hypocrites. They tried to export Islamic law and practices to other places while letting their princes
do whatever nasty things they wanted behind the closed doors of their desert palaces. He seemed to have extrapolated these ideas about who was a good Muslim and who was not from Al Qaeda’s condemnation of the Saudi royal family. For
bin Laden and the Arab fighters along the Pakistani border, the Saudi princes were Islam’s worst enemies. Here in Indonesia, however, the battle lines were different:
it was Christians, not fellow Muslims, who were cruel.

“Muslims don’t have justice yet. If we don’t get it yet, we’ll rise up again,” he warned no one in particular. He had stopped making sense. Ibnu Ahmad’s febrile brain—that “broken computer,” as he called it—was loaded with glitches. Hunter shifted his gaze out to sea; he was either bored or discreetly trying not to notice his leader’s mounting
confusion. Hunter had changed out of his ceremonial outfit and into a T-shirt and shorts.

Both men knew that of the two of them, Hunter was lower on the pecking order. After the war, many of the most brutal fighters, like Ibnu Ahmad, stayed on, started schools, and got married. Some were still trying to impose their “purer” seventh-century observance on the townspeople, and to cleanse the people
of the syncretic taint of their mysticism and folk belief. When Ibnu Ahmad went downstairs to take a nap, Hunter confessed that no one admired Salafis like Ibnu Ahmad.

“They came and they stayed and they began to have an effect on our community,” he said, and locals resented the puritanical way of life being foisted upon them, as well as the haughty lectures about being good Muslims. The worst
part was that these conservatives were dividing Sulawesi’s Muslim community by whipping up fervent youth in their schools against their more tolerant parents, and this was beginning to affect local culture.

Burying the dead, for instance, had become a controversial practice. The locals bathed and buried their dead as quickly as possible, as Islam mandates, yet they held a service afterward, with
prayers and singing. This the Salafis abhorred, calling it
bidah
, or “innovation,” and as such, it was expressly forbidden. Hunter did not agree. “The Salafis treat their bodies like animals,” he said. The struggle over custom betrayed a deepening struggle over authenticity.

One day, the Salafi missionaries chided Hunter for wearing shorts to the mosque. “My house is less than one hundred feet
from the mosque. I had time to get in and out of my shorts. I wore them deliberately to annoy them,” he said. That day, he told them to mind their own business: true scholars should concern themselves with the Quran, not with clothing. “How many pages is the Quran? How many chapters? How many verses?” he asked them. These, he believed, were the basic truths any real Islamic
scholar should know.
When the missionaries could not answer him, he told them, “I’m already a Muslim. Go preach to nonbelievers.”

Now on the terrace, he added, “Honestly, I don’t know where they think they’ll find nonbelievers in Indonesia, because we all have religions.”

Hunter led me to the railing of the new veranda, which smelled of sawdust and salt. Before us, swells scudded across the cove. Turning his back
to the sea, he pointed inland to where the dun-colored sand ended and a series of red switchbacks running up the drowsy green ridge began. The sandy edge marked the end of the Muslim fisherman’s domain and the beginning of the inland Christian farmer’s carnelian highland. “It’s like the Berlin wall,” Hunter said; the border between two ideologies. The shift from sand to loam reminded me of Africa’s
fault line. In Africa, however, the pale sand marked the beginning of the desert, where two kinds of land underlie divisions between peoples and religions. Here it marked the edge of the sea. Both sea and desert signified Islam, a religion spread by travel and trade over the Sahara, and over the Indian Ocean. Geography was religious destiny; like gangland turf, the changes in terrain told stories,
spoke of divisions that outsiders could not see. To us, they were barely worth noticing, since we could cross and recross them at will. Yet for the locals, these boundaries were indelible, marking out matters of life and death. In Poso, Christians and Muslims used to intermarry. “I used to be married to a Christian,” Hunter confessed. During the fighting, she had had a heart attack and died.
Now he was on his own.

Late one spring afternoon in 2006 we took the road behind Hunter’s veranda. It twitched back and forth up the green ridge for forty-three long and lurching miles until, after dusk, we reached Tentena, a Christian town in the highlands. Main Street looked deserted: an ominous, unfriendly place trying to bar its doors against any more
suffering. At three thousand feet above the Molucca Sea, the jungle grew eerily cold and dank; brackish clouds of rain and sea mist swung low through town like a crowd of salty, ill-tempered ghosts. The Land Cruiser’s high beams caught a dog sleeping on the concrete doorstep of a shuttered mosque. Awakened by the glare, he flashed his amber eyes in the dark and disappeared. If there was ever a
sign that there were no Muslims left in a once-integrated town, it was this dog sleeping on the mosque doorstep. (Dogs are considered unclean in Islam.) From other small details, it was clear even at night that the Muslims were gone. By day, the market’s butchers slaughtered pigs (also considered unclean). (When Dutch Protestant missionaries from the Netherlands Missionary Society arrived in Celebes—today’s
Sulawesi—in 1892, they found that Islam had already “won” the coastal kingdoms. They bushwhacked inland to convert the indigenous people, and to halt Islam’s spread. Discovering that the landlocked highlanders already ate wild boar as their staple protein, the missionaries were able to graft their theology onto local conditions.) Weird, disembodied choral music rang through the empty market
stalls. I thought there must be a celebration going on nearby, maybe a wedding. Listening closer, however, I heard William Blake. It was the hymn “Jerusalem”: “Bring me my bow of burning gold, / Bring me my arrows of desire, / Bring me my spear—O clouds, unfold!” The hymn was blasting from a pair of tinny loudspeakers attached to Tentena’s mobile-phone office, and this happened on most ordinary
nights. The speakers were so loud, I wondered if perhaps they
had once competed with the muezzin’s call to prayer from the nearby mosque. The muezzin had moved down the mountain to the safety of his people along the Muslim coast.

Somewhere nearby, in Tentena, Noviana Malewa—the teenage girl who had survived the beheading of three of her friends months earlier—lived under police protection at
her sister’s home. Zamira Loebis and I had come to find her. Ibnu Ahmad stayed down the hill; as a Muslim militant, he was not welcome here in the Christian highlands. To ask about Noviana, we went from the market to the home of the local minister, the Reverend Rinaldy Damanik, who was also the president of the Christian Church of Central Sulawesi, a mainline, Dutch Reformed Protestant church that
claims 188,000 members today.
¹
The minister’s two guitars were sitting on the couch, but he was not at home, and his wife directed us down a hill to a house with a pig tethered outside. After the attack, Noviana had moved from Poso’s minority Christian community up to the segregated safety of the highlands to stay with her sister. The clouds broke on our way to the house, a rough-hewn shack. Rain
blew in through the splintered walls, and there seemed to be no door, just a cloth snippet tacked to the lintel, billowing against the storm. Shivering, we waited for Noviana to return to her sister’s house for the night.

Both Loebis and I were chilled, and I felt as if my soul had caught cold and was lying like a lifeless slab of liver under my ribs. It had been a long several days of listening
to litany upon litany of bloodshed. On this island, there was no denying the dead. A few days earlier, the exhumation of two mass graves had begun on the road between the two towns. The police had cordoned off a section of the jungle. Inside the muddy clay pits lay what was left of the Muslim men massacred on May 28, 2000, at an Islamic school called Walisongo. Already, the police had unearthed
seventeen bodies in one pit and eleven in the other, including the corpse of an eight-year-old boy. Before leaving Poso to drive up to Tentena, we had visited a hotel abandoned by its Christian owner, where Muslim widows who’d survived the Walisongo massacre were now squatting. In May 2006, each family was allowed to send a member with the police to search the mass graves. The police had waited
so long for the exhumation because
they were cautious that digging up the past would breed new violence. Most family members were still waiting to hear if their fathers, brothers, and sons could be identified by anything: a scrap of shirt cuff, a rubber shoe sole. One Muslim widow, Suwarni Hariani, thirty-five, had lost nine male members of her family during the massacre. The women had been captured,
stripped of their clothes, frightened, and humiliated. “I believe they held us hostage until they had killed all the men,” she told me. Hariani had recognized one of her attackers, a local Catholic man named Dominggus da Silva, who had greeted her by name that day as she stood before him in her bra and underpants.

Three Catholic men, da Silva, Fabianus Tibo, and Marinus Riwu, had been convicted
of orchestrating the Walisongo massacre, killing the men, then herding the women into the school, ordering them to take off their head scarves, and checking their vaginas for magic amulets. Many were raped. Now the three convicts were awaiting execution by firing squad in a prison in the Central Sulawesi capital city of Palu, where, several days earlier, I had gone to visit them. Tibo, the ringleader,
had dyed his gray hair shoe-polish black. His two sidekicks were brawny, wore crocodile smiles, and denied everything. “The Protestants got more lenient sentences than we did, because we Catholics have become barter between the Muslims and the Protestants,” Tibo said. He argued that all Christians should stick together. Because I was a Westerner, the men assumed that I, too, was a fellow Christian
who had come to see them in solidarity, out of our shared belief in fighting for Christ. They hoped I could carry their message to fellow believers in the United States.

“The pope wrote to us,” Tibo said. He claimed they had received a papal pardon. While it was true that Pope Benedict XVI had recently sent a letter to the three men in prison, a local Catholic priest explained that it was certainly
not a pardon, simply “a message of union.” Still, the convicts believed they were protected by outside powers, and this belief gave them a shared identity larger than the prison. Also, they were quick to explain, they had changed their ways. Tibo, who had admitted previously to killing 40 people, was now a prayer healer, laying his hands on those who came to be saved by a condemned man. He
claimed to have healed 537 people.

“It’s not me. It’s God,” he said, simpering. “I want the world to know that this case shows injustice. As a Christian, I gave my left cheek and my right.” This was the same revisionist call I had heard in Nigeria, the one
that the one-armed pastor, James Wuye, used to make before he renounced religious violence: that Christians had a right to defend themselves.
He had left that call behind, but Tibo hadn’t.

Four months and eleven days later, the three men were executed by firing squad. Federico Lombardi, S.J., a spokesman for Pope Benedict XVI, called their death “a defeat for humanity.” He was careful, however, to make clear that this was not a statement about the men’s innocence. It was a defeat for humanity in the sense that all capital punishment
is a defeat for humanity.
²

At last, Noviana Malewa, her dark hair tucked behind her small ears, appeared in the shack’s doorway. A deep, shiny scar cut across her right cheek. Although she was a teenager, she could have been ten years old, and her tiny, well-muscled form looked like a gymnast’s. Noviana was dripping with rain. She was wearing a pink rubber bracelet that read, “HE IS RISEN!” A
policeman carrying an AK-47 trailed behind her, sending text messages.

Once I saw Noviana, still gasping from the steep climb up the wet, oily hill, I did not want to ask any questions, and I could see by Zamira Loebis’s face that she did not want to translate them. This was all too raw; this girl had suffered too much, and her frailty was palpable. “He cut through to my teeth,” she began, speaking
below a whisper—just a breath, really. Her small jet eyes squeezed shut involuntarily when she talked, as if she had a tic. While walking to school, as they did every morning, she and three friends had taken their usual shortcut from home down a narrow path through plantations and jungle. They were laughing, talking about their boyfriends, when a group of men attacked them. Noviana had no idea
how many, and she had survived only because she was the last of the four filing down the narrow path. “I only found out my three friends had died three days later. They were my best friends at school, at home, and at church.” The other three had been beheaded, but she—Loebis and I realized as Noviana spoke—did not know this. Either she had seen nothing, or her conscious mind had refused to entertain
the images.