Rwandans Turning to Islam as Faith Shaken by Genocide
by Laurie Goering for Chicago Tribune [August 2002]

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Long before the call to prayer begins each Friday at noon, Rwanda's Muslim faithful jam the main mosque in Kigali's Nyamirambo neighborhood, the overflow crowd spreading their prayer rugs on the mosque steps, over the red-earth parking lot and out the front gate.

Almost a decade after a horrific genocide left 800,000 Rwandans dead and shook the faith of this predominantly Christian nation of 8 million people, Islam, once seen as a fringe religion, has surged in popularity.

Today "we see Muslims as very kind people," said Salamah Ingabire, 20, who converted to Islam in 1995 after losing two brothers in the killing spree. "What we saw in the genocide changed our minds."

Women in bright tangerine, scarlet and blue headscarves stroll the bustling streets of the capital, beside men in long, white tunics and embroidered caps. Mosques and Islamic schools are overflowing with students. Today about 14 percent of Rwandans consider themselves Muslim, up from about 7 percent before the genocide.

"We're everywhere," says Sheik Saleh Habimana, the leader of Rwanda's burgeoning Muslim community, which has mosques in nearly all of the country's cities and towns.

Islam is no rarity in Africa, and countries around Rwanda -- Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda -- have large Muslim communities. But the religion was never particularly popular in Rwanda until the 1994 genocide, which spurred a rush of conversions.

From April to June 1994, militias and mobs from the country's ethnic Hutu majority hunted and killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis at the government's urging. Within a few months, three of four Tutsis in the country had been hacked to death, often with machetes or hoes. More than 100,000 suspected killers eventually were jailed and many others fled to Congo, where they joined that nation's bloody war.

The genocide stunned Rwanda's Christian community. While clergy in many communities struggled to protect their congregations and died with them, a number of prominent Christian leaders joined in the killing spree and are facing prosecution.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the head of Rwanda's Seventh-day Adventist Church, is on trial, charged with luring Tutsi parishioners to his church in western Kibuye province then turning them over to Hutu militias who slaughtered 2,000 to 6,000 in a single day.

The day before the massacre, Tutsi Adventist clergymen inside the church sent Ntakirutimana a now-famous letter, informing him that "tomorrow we will be killed with our families" and seeking his help. Survivors report that he replied: "You must be eliminated. God doesn't want you anymore."

At the same time, Rwanda's Muslims -- many of them intermarried Tutsi-Hutu couples -- were opening their homes to thousands of desperate Tutsis. Many Muslim families successfully hid Tutsis from the Hutu mobs, who feared to enter the country's insular Muslim communities.

Yahya Kayiranga, a young Tutsi who fled Kigali with his mother at the start of the genocide, was taken into the home of a Muslim family in the central city of Gitarama, where he hid until the killing was over. His father and uncle who stayed behind in Kigali were slain.

"We were helped by people we didn't even know," the 27-year-old remembers. Unable to return to what he considered a sullied Catholic church, he converted to Islam in 1996. Today he wears a white tunic and gold-embroidered cap and no longer drinks Rwanda's traditional banana beer. He is studying Arabic and the Quran at a local madrassa and most mornings awakens for the dawn prayer, the first of five each day.

His job as a money-changer in downtown Kigali conflicts with Islam's prohibitions on profiting from financial transactions, but he thinks he has mostly adapted well to his new faith.

"I thought at first Islam would be hard, but that fear went away," he said. "It's not easy at the beginning, but as you practice it becomes better, normal."

Rwanda's Muslim leaders have struggled to impart the importance of unity and tolerance to their converts, who number as many Hutus as Tutsis. Sheik Habimana is one of the leaders of the country's new interfaith commission, created to promote unity and tolerance, and in a country still seething with anger and fear after the mass killings, Rwanda's mosques are one of the few places where reconciliation appears to have genuinely taken hold.

"In the Islamic faith, Hutu and Tutsi are the same," Kayiranga said. "Islam teaches us about brotherhood."

While Rwanda's ethnic Tutsis, for the most part, have come to Islam seeking protection from purges and to honor and emulate the people who saved them, Hutus also have come, seeking to leave behind their violent past. "They all felt the blood on their hands, and they embraced Islam to purify themselves," Habimana said.

Becoming Muslim has not been an easy process for many Rwandans, who chafe at the religion's dress and lifestyle restrictions. Despite Islam's new post-genocide status, Rwandan Muslims traditionally have been second-class citizens, working as taxi drivers and traders in a society that reveres farmers. "Because we were Muslim we weren't considered Rwandanese," Habimana said. Now, as the religion's popularity grows, that is changing.