By Ned Martel

Add Africa to the list of dangerous arenas where Christianity and Islam are clashing. Anyone charting global hot spots may know as much, but viewers of "Battle for Souls," on the Discovery Times Channel tonight, can get a lesson in compounded pain. The continent is already gasping through pandemics of poverty and AIDS, so bloodshed among true believers seems to inflict new lacerations on broken limbs.

"Battle for Souls" leads viewers into the riotous troubles with a focus on unrest in Nigeria. Christians dominate that nation's southern region; Muslims have large communities in the north. In the overlapping central strip, missionaries and evangelical Christians can count conversion successes, aided by Western methods of population mapping and televised Gospel messages.

Some Muslims in the area have shored up their resolve with stricter adherence to the Qur'an. Interpretations include sentences like death by stoning for adulterers and amputations for thieves.

Intensity on each side has led to unrest in the streets, including church burnings. Victimization and retaliation have begun a violent interplay, and the program shows how blame can be assigned to aggressors in both faiths. The Muslim and the Christian avenues to salvation might be seen as peacefully parallel in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but the African paths have dangerous bends. "Islam and Christianity do seem set on a collision course," says Philip Jenkins, a Penn State professor of history and religion.

You can read the entire article at:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E5DC113AF931A35751C1A9659C8B 63

how do two foreign faiths battle for Africa? two children of colonizers using their master's faiths to bat one another over the head? sounds like the willie lynch syndrome. somebody revize that post!

From: African and Traditional Religions: A Thousand-Year Cohabitation and the Resulting Compromises

By Josef Stamer

"Islam was brought to sub-Saharan Africa via the trade routes from the Arab countries and North Africa. African Muslims have always maintained quite close links with the Arab world, from which a number of reformers came. But Islamization was essentially carried out by Africans themselves, who shared the same life, spoke the same language, lived in the same cultural world entirely. There is no doubt that, for African Muslims, 'Africanicity' and Islam are in no way opposed. For them Islam is not an imported religion. For many, abandoning the Muslim religion is equivalent to the rejection of all their family and tribal traditions, so intermingled are the two socio-religious universes. One must conclude that Islam, in its traditional African form, is entirely a part of the African cultural heritage, and thus an African reality..."

(Excerpt from "Islam in Sub-Saharan African," Estella, Spain, 1995, pp. 121-125)

http://www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/islam-afritradition.htm