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Ten Years After Horror, Rwandans Turn to Islam
April 7, 2004
By MARC LACEY
KIGALI, Rwanda, April 6 - When 800,000 of their countrymen
were killed in massacres that began 10 years ago this week,
many Rwandans lost faith not only in their government but
in their religion as well. Today, in what is still a
predominantly Catholic country, Islam is the fastest
growing religion.
Roman Catholicism has been the dominant faith in Rwanda for
more than a century. But many people, disgusted by the role
that some priests and nuns played in the killing frenzy,
have shunned organized religion altogether, and many more
have turned to Islam.
"People died in my old church, and the pastor helped the
killers," said Yakobo Djuma Nzeyimana, 21, who became a
Muslim in 1996. "I couldn't go back and pray there. I had
to find something else."
Wearing a black prayer cap, Mr. Nzeyimana was one of nearly
2,000 worshipers at the Masdjid Al Fat'h last Friday. The
crowd was so large that some Muslims set their prayer mats
on the dirt outside the mosque and prayed in the midday
heat.
The Muslim community now boasts so many converts that it
has had to embark on a crash campaign to build new mosques
to accommodate all of the faithful. About 500 mosques are
scattered throughout Rwanda, about double the number that
existed a decade ago.
Although no accurate census has been done, Muslims leaders
in Rwanda estimate that they have about a million
followers, or about 15 percent of the population. That,
too, would represent a doubling of their numbers in the
past 10 years.
Muslim leaders credit the gains to their ability during the
1994 massacres to shield most Muslims, and many other
Rwandans, from certain death. "The Muslims handled
themselves well in '94, and I wanted to be like them," said
Alex Rutiririza, explaining why he converted to Islam last
year.
With killing all around, he said, the safest place to be
back then was in a Muslim neighborhood. Then as now, many
of Rwanda's Muslims lived crowded together in the Biryogo
neighborhood of Kigali.
During the mass killing of Tutsi, militias had the place
surrounded, but Hutu Muslims did not cooperate with the
Hutu killers. They said they felt far more connected
through religion than through ethnicity, and Muslim Tutsi
were spared.
"Nobody died in a mosque," said Ramadhani Rugema, executive
secretary of the Muslim Association of Rwanda. "No Muslim
wanted any other Muslim to die. We stood up to the
militias. And we helped many non-Muslims get away."
Mr. Rugema, a Tutsi, said he owed his life to a Muslim
stranger who hid him in his home when members of the
Interahamwe militia were pursuing him.
Mr. Rugema said two imams had been arrested outside Kigali
on charges of taking part in the massacre. But both were
released within about two years for lack of evidence. "We
are proud of how Islam emerged from the genocide," he said.
For all the gains Islam has made, no one is suggesting that
it is about to supplant Christianity as the country's
leading religion. Catholicism, which arrived in the late
19th century with the White Fathers order of the Roman
Catholic Church, remains deeply embedded in the culture.
On Palm Sunday, worshipers on their way home from Mass
lined the roadways throughout Rwanda with fronds in their
hands. They included people like Mediatrice Mukarutabana,
who survived a massacre in her church that she says has
made her even more observant now.
"God saved me," she said after the morning Mass at St.
Francis Xavier Church in eastern Rwanda. "He was testing my
faith. Since the genocide I've been transformed. I can
endure more now. I have more of a connection with God."
Ms. Mukarutabana's church has a new pastor as well. The one
who was there during 1994, a Spanish priest, tried to
persuade the attacking militias to spare his congregation.
He even offered them money if they would go away. But the
militias would not relent.
After a standoff, the attackers offered the priest the
opportunity to leave safely on his own, and he fled.
Ms. Mukarutabana said she had felt let down by the priest's
decision to leave the congregation behind but understood
his fear. "We thank him because he made every effort to
save us," she said. "But when it came to the 11th hour, he
blessed us and left us to die."
Church leaders acknowledge that attendance at many parishes
dropped after the killing rampage. They have taken pains
since 1994 to teach a message of healing and to distance
the church from clergy members who were implicated in the
killings.
They say that after a period of decline, they are now
slowly rebuilding attendance, and that Christianity
continues to play an important role in the recovery from
1994.
The pain of 1994 lingers, though, and since the turmoil in
Rwanda subsided in the late 1990's many, like Mr.
Rutiririza, have been looking for an alternative to
Christianity. But in a country where Christians account for
about three-quarters of the population, Mr. Rutiririza
found, as others have, that conversion can be a difficult
and complex process.
He said he was ostracized by his Methodist congregation
after he decided last year to become a Muslim. His wife
remained with the Methodists, he said, while his children
joined him at the mosque. Neighbors steer clear of him, he
said, now that he has left Christianity.
The community that Mr. Rutiririza joined is a largely
self-sufficient group, receiving relatively small amounts
of aid from the larger Muslim world. Libya built a grand
cultural center for Muslims in Rwanda more than 20 years
ago, and Saudi Arabia provides financing for some of the
mosques.
It is also largely an inward-looking group, and not a
likely candidate for harboring cells of Al Qaeda. While
Rwanda's Muslims say they follow the travails of Islamic
adherents in other parts of the world - the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, and the conflict in the
Middle East - their primary focus is on their own struggle
to put their lives back together.
"Our first priority is our country," Mr. Rugema said.
"Muslims in other countries face many problems, too, but we
focus here more than on Afghanistan or Iraq. In Rwanda
there is no Al Qaeda. We have too many problems to deal
with. Mixing killing and religion - we don't believe in
this."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/international/africa/07RWAN.html?ex=1082384424&ei=1&en=e9a23845cc9561da
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