The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
by Eliza Griswold
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp.

n an era of shrunken foreign news budgets and dial-it-in journalism, Eliza Griswold has made a career out of going against the flow. Just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks she left a comfortable job as a Vanity Fair editorial assistant and planted herself in Baghdad, then established herself as a freelance correspondent reporting from some of the world’s edgiest places. She has written lengthy magazine pieces about cannibalism in the Congo, Somali piracy, and civil war in Sudan, all while pursuing a second career as a poet. Griswold’s background is also intriguing: her father is the former presiding archbishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Her new book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, seems the logical outgrowth of both her unusual pedigree and her intrepid, footloose journalism: it traces a journey, over six years, along the latitudinal line that runs approximately 300 miles south of the equator—the zone where Christianity and Islam collide.

Griswold has crafted a vivid book that is part history, part travelogue, and part inquiry into faith as a cohesive, as well as fragmenting, force in Third World societies. The main focus of Griswold’s reporting is Africa, where an “explosion of Christianity” over the last fifty years, she writes, has raised the stakes for the many adherents of both faiths who equate numerical superiority with survival. There are now 417 million Christians living south of the tenth parallel—one-fifth of the world’s total Christian population—and roughly the same number of Muslims living north of it. The two faiths meet in the so-called Middle Belt, a 200-mile-wide strip of grassland that runs across most of the continent, and that includes the suud—the notorious tsetse fly–infested swamp that stopped Islam in its tracks during the colonial era. “In this fragile zone,” Griswold writes, “the pressures wrought by growing numbers of people … are sharpening tensions.” Adherents of the two faiths are fighting, she writes, not only about religion, but “over land, food, oil, and water.”

Nowhere is that conflict more acute than in the Sudan, Griswold finds, where a decades-long civil war between the Christian north and the Muslim south was finally quelled, thanks in part to American diplomacy—one of the few policy successes of the George W. Bush administration. In advance of the 2011 referendum on Southern Sudan’s independence, Griswold visited the area around Abeyei, an oil-rich town that straddles the border of two Sudans, where bloody clashes presage an imminent renewal of the conflict. She describes a memorable encounter with Franklin Graham, the charismatic, pistol-packing preacher and founder of the aid group Samaritan’s Purse (and son of the televangelist Billy Graham), whose determination to win Christian converts in the Muslim heartland has stirred up suspicions and animosities. Joining him on a missionary trip to Khartoum in 2003, Griswold describes a bizarre meeting between Graham and Sudan’s president, Omar Bashir—a hardline Islamist who would later be indicted for war crimes in Darfur—who jokes with the evangelist about sending Sudanese warplanes to bomb his hospital in the Christian south.

The battle for souls—and resources—is also at the heart of the struggle in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Griswold visits Canaanland, the 565-acre headquarters of the Living Faith Church, one of the most aggressive proselytizers in Nigeria’s Pentecostal movement. She then finds its Islamic counterpart, Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fatih (“There is no help except from Allah”), whose ventures include a soft-drink company, a prison outreach program, even a matchmaking service. “Success, triumph, and glory are from the Creator,” says a member of the Islamic group’s youth division, sounding remarkably like some of his industrious Christian counterparts. Nigeria’s Islamic and Christian entrepreneurs may find common ground, but the country also has the continent’s most religion-fueled clashes, which routinely leave hundreds dead. Ironically, it was the collapse of one of the world’s most brutal military dictatorships, in 1999, Griswold writes, that unleashed the worst of the bloodletting: democratic elections in this zone of destitution and shrinking resources has become a zero-sum game in which neither side can countenance a victory by the other.

Crossing the Indian Ocean to Asia, Griswold finds that the same themes are playing out in remote archipelagos and island “paradises.” She tracks down adulterers awaiting flogging in a jail in Banda Aceh, Sumatra—where Islamic fundamentalists have taken advantage of the chaos that followed the 2004 tsunami to push through Indonesia’s only sharia laws. She chronicles the tragic ordeal of an American husband-and-wife missionary team kidnapped by Islamic radicals from an island resort in the Philippines. (It is hard to say whether the couple were targeted specifically because of their beliefs or because they were handy Westerners; but in the aftermath of the husband’s death, he was embraced as a martyr to the Christian cause.) She visits the remote Indonesian island of Sulawesi, in the company of a supposedly reformed radical Islamist heading back to his home village. Here, she finds an area riven by horrific clashes between Christian and Islamic gangs, each group determined to drive the other off the island. In the Christian highlands of Sulawesi she meets Noviana Malewa, the only survivor of an attack on Christian schoolgirls by Taliban-style militants in which three close friends were beheaded. “A deep, shiny scar cut across her right cheek,” Griswold writes. “She was wearing a pink rubber bracelet that read ‘HE IS RISEN!’ A policeman carrying an AK-47 trailed behind her sending text messages.” Though the author traces much of the tensions along the tenth parallel to the explosion of radical Islam in recent years, she makes it clear that neither side has the monopoly on cruelty: the Christian gangs she encounters in Sulawesi, the Philippines, and Nigeria turn out to be as nasty and vengeful as their Islamic counterparts.

The amount of shoe leather that Griswold expended on this project is extraordinary, and reason enough to read her book. Still, she veers away from her main focus at times: a lengthy section on Somalia, for example, touches on Christian Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of the anarchic country, then being run by Islamic fundamentalists, but otherwise it’s just a nicely done piece of hellhole reportage. The book can lack narrative drive, coming off more like a series of well-crafted magazine pieces. And while it is crammed with rich characters, scenes, and anecdotes, there’s something unsurprising about this intractable conflict. Griswold has traveled thousands of miles to document what is, ultimately, predictable: Islamic radicalism, Christian evangelism, and the competition for shrinking resources have ratcheted up a conflict that’s been going on for centuries.

Griswold ends her book on a note of optimism. After meeting an imam and a minister in a small town in Nigeria’s Middle Belt who are working side by side to foster religious harmony in their violence-wracked region, she is inspired by the possibility of reconciliation. “Religious strife where Christians and Muslims meet is real, and grim,” she writes. “But the long history of everyday encounters, of believers of different faiths shouldering all things together, even as they follow different faiths, is no less real.” Sadly, however, most of the everyday encounters that Griswold documents in her marathon journey give little hope that the reconciliators will prevail.