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GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia - In the hours after a devastating earthquake shook Nias Island, Farid Mushaf risked his life pulling a dead Christian neighbor from the rubble of his shop.
The 56-year-old Muslim then loaded the corpse onto the back of his truck and took it to the Santa Maria Cathedral, which is being used as a morgue by Christians.
Unlike other places in Indonesia, islanders on mostly Roman Catholic Nias have always lived in peace, an example of religious tolerance in a nation better known for interfaith clashes than harmony.
Elsewhere on this sprawling archipelago - the world's most populous Muslim nation - religious violence, mainly between a fringe of Islamic extremists and pockets of Christians, has left thousands dead in recent years.
But Monday's devastating earthquake has deepened the ties on Nias and forced members of different religions to help each other in ways they could never have imagined.
"On this island, we are humans first," said Mushaf, sitting outside a green-domed mosque that was flattened by the quake. "There are no differences."
Victims of the quake, which is estimated to have killed some 1,000 people on the island, are being sorted according to their faith.
The main mosque, the Santa Maria Cathedral and a Buddhist temple are all being used as makeshift morgues for victims from their respective congregations.
Two days after the disaster, and with no refrigeration, the smell of death wafted from the buildings.
Outside the cathedral, bodies were laid out wrapped in white sheets. Some relatives have held vigils, lighting candles next to the heads of their loved ones.
Nias' 450,000 people are almost 90 percent Christian, but Christians remain a tiny minority in Indonesia, which has a population of more than 238-million.
The island, where European missionaries first set foot 500 years ago, lies just off Sumatra, the country's most staunchly Islamic region.
The Nias islanders, particularly the well-organized southern villages, initially put up strong resistance when the Dutch colonizers tried to take control. But the Dutch finally conquered the island in 1909, and then Nias slowly started to convert to Christianity.
Muslims make up almost a third of the people in Nias' main town, Gunung Sitoli, which bore the brunt of the earthquake. Mostly traders and restaurant owners originally from elsewhere in Indonesia, they live close to the harbor where they first arrived.
The island has never seen the violence that has plagued regions in eastern Indonesia in recent years. Ambon, the capital of the Maluku Islands, 2,300 miles to the east, is now a divided city after five years of sporadic Muslim-Christian clashes.
Large-scale Muslim-Christian battles in Ambon killed 9,000 people between 1999 and 2001. Much of the violence has been blamed on radical Islamic organizations that sent in fighters from other parts of Indonesia. Islamic militants belonging to the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group have targeted churches around the country. The same group is blamed for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings and other attacks on Western targets.
Monday's 8.7-magnitude earthquake damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings in Gunung Sitoli, including dozens of whitewashed churches. Mosques and temples were not spared either.
"Before the disaster, we used to bring food to Islamic orphanages," said Tan Swi Beng, who was helping organize the makeshift morgue at a Buddhist temple. "Now they are bringing dead people here."