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

a term he’d coined: the Total Man concept. “The problem with the African man is that he sees himself as poor, and others see him as poor,” the bishopsaid. He walked over to his desk and handed me a stack of his books—he’s written sixty—including one of the bestsellers:
UnderstandingFinancial Prosperity
. The cover features Nigerian banknotes, naira. The back cover reads, “I am not a preacher of prosperity, I am a Prophet. God spoke specifically to me while I was away in America for a meeting, ‘Get down home and make My people rich!’ ”
    When I returned to Canaanland in September 2007, the vice-provost arranged for me to meet the student council. Two dozen young men and womengathered behind U-shaped desks to answer questions about their faith and their school. They were so quiet and respectful it was more like facing a corporate board than a group of college kids. (In Pentecostal parlance, they called themselves kings and queens.) For a large number—and this was the student council—prosperity didn’t mean just future success, it meant any future at all. Many had leftother schools due to the scourge of gangs—called cults in Nigeria—which, as they told me in horrifying detail, frequently involved initiation rights of rape, theft, and murder. One student council member, who asked not to be named, claimed that he had broken into his math professor’s home and watched in horror as a fellow cult member raped the professor’s wife. Here, they were as safe from harmas they were from harming others.
    The Christian gospel of prosperity is so powerful it has spawned a unique Nigerian phenomenon: an Islamic organization called Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi (NASFAT). The name comes from a verse in the eighth chapter of the Quran, “The Spoils of War,” or al-Anfal, and it reads, “There is no help except from Allah.” The kind of help NASFAT offers begins very much with thisworld. The organization is based on economic empowerment and prosperity, with an Islamic spin. Started with about a dozen members in the 1990s, NASFAT now has 1.2 million members in Nigeria and branches in twenty-five other countries. The organization has an entrepreneurship program, a clinic, a prison-outreach program, a task force to address HIV/AIDS, a travel agency, and a soft drink companycalled Nasmalt, whose profits go to the poor. It even offers a matchmaking service. NASFAT is not modeled after Islamic charities such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which provides Islamic-based social services to its clients and propagates a conservative form of Islam. It is the opposite: a way for Islam to engage with the West on its own terms. As splits within Christianity areshaping the futureof the faith, so is splintering within Islam. Most conservatives loathe NASFAT and believe that this engagement with the secular world is
haram
, “forbidden,” and distinctly un-Islamic. Yet faced with the encroachment of Christianity, NASFAT argues that the only way to survive in the religious marketplace is by playing the same game.
    “We are competing for faithfuls,” said NASFAT’s executive secretary,Zikrullah Kunle Hassan, one blistering Sunday in September 2007. “Many people now want God. This is happening especially among the youth, that they feel they need to be committed to faith.” Gesturing to the streets choked with more than a hundred thousand men and women in white as they came from a prayer service at the Lagos Secretariat Mosque, he explained that NASFAT meets on Sundays sothat Muslims have something to do while Christians attend church. “The space on Sunday is usually not dominated by Islam, but other faiths and other values. But when our people come here, they come and drink from the fountain of Islam.”
    The prayer ground looked like a fairground—just like the Pentecostal churches did. Everyone among the throngs of thousands was clad in white, and except for thewomen’s eyelet head scarves and the men’s small white hats, there