Journalist Eliza Grizwold traverses the jagged borders where two global faiths meet and finds both bloody conflict and surprising reconciliation.
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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Eliza Griswold
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2010)
In The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, acclaimed investigative journalist and poet Eliza Griswold treads the geographical and ideological middle ground where the world's largest faiths meet. But as Griswold reports, many places along the latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator are less a middle ground than a battlefield, where global political forces and trends are pushing Muslims and Christians towards increasingly extreme versions of their faiths.
But this is not another Clash of Civilizations. Griswold describes in grim detail the perils of life in this contested zone--from the Muslim-Christian massacres days before September 11, 2001 in Jos, Nigeria to Jemaah Islamiyah's deadly brand of Islamist terrorism in Indonesia. But she renders these stories compassionately through personal anecdotes and the stories of believers "whose religious convictions were emphatic and elusive," whose relationship to their faith "slipped out of [her] easy distinctions." In doing so, Griswold delves into the gray areas of both faiths and explores not only the conflicts between Islam and Christianity but the ways and places in which they coexist. She quotes a Nigerian pastor who has chosen to join forces with an imam--"his former mortal enemy" from the city of Kaduna, a frequent site of religiously motivated bloodshed in recent decades: "We have to find the space for coexistence."
Citing esteemed scholars, local journalists, religious leaders, and members of militant religious organizations in six countries lying astride the tenth parallel, Griswold grapples with the local and global politics of the collision of Christianity and Islam. But she also explores the many factors that continue to raise the stakes of the collision higher and higher--the war on terror and American foreign policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world, climate change and resource conflicts, to name a couple of these elements.
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