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

Author:Eliza Griswold [Griswold, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Islam - Relations - Christianity, Religion; Politics & State, Relations, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Religion, Political Science, General, Christianity and Other Religions - Islam, Christianity and Other Religions, Islam
ISBN: 0374273189
Google: Xqa9U42GP2cC
Amazon: B003R0L6TE
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-17T07:00:00+00:00

6

MODERN SAINTS AND MARTYRS

Standing in his pajamas at the foot of the living room stairs, the seven-year-old boy struggled to remember his father’s cell phone number. When he tipped his head up to me politely, I noticed that his mouth was scarred with white lines that looked like someone had sewn stitches through his lips. I was looking for his father, the Middle Belt’s Anglican archbishop. Benjamin Kwashi came up repeatedly as both a victim of religious violence and, like his boss, Peter Akinola, as an outspoken critic of the liberal West. Apparently Kwashi had forgotten our appointment on this Saturday morning in July 2006. When I arrived at the locked gate, two ferocious dogs speckled with mange bared their yellow teeth and barked. I yelled for someone to call off the dogs, but there was no answer, so I darted past them, sprinted down the driveway, and pushed open the front door. It seemed at first that no one was home, until I heard a pair of small feet thump down the stairs.

The sound reminded me of my own feet on the back steps of a Philadelphia rectory twenty years earlier, in the days before people locked their doors in the suburbs. On Saturday mornings, with my parents out somewhere on church business, people would wander into the rectory looking for help. I was left, like this boy, to solve grown-up crises. I stood there, sorry I’d come, until the boy eventually remembered his father’s number, his scarred mouth twisted into a lopsided smile.

“As a result of persecution, we have become more evangelistic,” Archbishop Kwashi said. I found him at the church office, in shorts and a T-shirt, catching up on e-mail. “If you die in Christ, you go to heaven.” On the bookshelf behind him: The Purpose-Driven Life and Body by God: The Owner’s Manual for Maximized Living, a diet book created by missionary chiropractors planting churches around the world. Also Modern Saints and Martyrs, in which Baroness Caroline Cox, a seventy-three-year-old conservative British parliamentarian, writes about Kwashi. (Cox started Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, or HART, which works on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide. A baroness since the early eighties, when she was appointed to the House of Lords, Cox is a compelling and controversial figure who melds a hard-line Christian worldview with the language of human rights. She has spoken at Laura and George W. Bush’s church in Midland, Texas, and has been criticized for perpetuating a misunderstanding of Sudan’s war as a crusade against Christians. She has bought the freedom of an alleged 2,281 Sudanese slaves since the 1990s.)1 All of these books on the archbishop’s shelf were practical manuals for living according to a twenty-first-century life: from weight loss to career advancement to the necessary role of martyr.

About five months earlier, on February 13, 2006, while Bishop Kwashi was away in London, a group of Muslim men broke into his house, knocked his nineteen-year-old son unconscious, and blinded his wife. “They also broke my seven-year-old’s mouth,” he said, explaining the scars I had seen on the boy.

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