THE TENTH PARALLEL
Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
By Eliza Griswold
317 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27
August 19, 2010
The influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington theorized about the “clash of civilizations.” The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold takes on the same topic in a much more visceral way: she traveled through the “torrid zone” to see, smell, taste and write about it. Her book “The Tenth Parallel” is a fascinating journey along the latitude line in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam often meet and clash. Since Americans commonly equate Islam with the Arab Middle East, this book is a useful reminder that four-fifths of Muslims live elsewhere. It’s also an intimate introduction to some of those who live in places like Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
“The Tenth Parallel” is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions. Because of both population growth and the explosion of Christianity in Africa in the last half-century, nearly a fourth of the world’s Christians now live south of the 10th parallel, alongside Muslims who are migrating from the north to escape creeping desertification. All along this fault line, struggles over valuable resources like oil, lumber and minerals add to the volatile mix.
Africa is a logical place for Griswold to begin her story, since Muhammad sent followers and family to find refuge in Christian-ruled Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) in 615. Traders have plied the route from Mecca to Timbuktu in western Africa ever since. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and its 140 million people are evenly divided between the Muslim north and the Christian south. It is also America’s fifth-largest supplier of oil. Chronic conflict springs from both these sources. Griswold visited a local Muslim king, the emir of Wase, in his hilltop castle in 2006 to hear him bemoan the worsening outbreaks of religious violence — which had taken tens of thousands of lives — that neither his clout as a traditional leader nor his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh could halt.
Griswold’s journey is made all the more interesting because of her personal motivations. The daughter of a leading liberal Episcopal bishop, she recalls being spooked by the consecration ceremony in which he lay facedown on the floor of the cathedral in Chicago with his legs and arms stretched out in the shape of a cross. As a young girl she saw the Bible “as a book of spells, one whose extravagant metaphors, whose terrible and powerful parables were ways to call God down to earth.” And as a teenager she feared that God would ask her to be a nun. “I spent those years wondering how it was that smart people could believe in God,” she writes.
In 2003 Griswold traveled to Sudan with Billy Graham’s son Franklin, who attempted to convert her by inviting her to pray with him. She could not find a logical reason to decline, since, as a good ecumenical Episcopalian, she had prayed with Sunnis and Sufi Muslims. She returned to Sudan five years later, after its leader was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. The war-torn country’s Christian south is preparing for a 2011 vote on whether to split from the Muslim north, which would break Africa’s largest country in half. Griswold also reports from Somalia at great personal risk, vividly describing in 30 pages the religious violence and ill-informed policies that America has pursued since its failed attempts to corral the murderous Aidid clan (members of which she meets with). More recently, Washington has been trying to weaken the Qaeda-linked Shabab gang and shore up a hapless Islamist government.
In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, the religious ferment mostly occurs between conservative and moderate Islam. Bouts of violence shocked the quiescent majority into defending a traditionally tranquil version of its faith and, happily, the moderates may now have the upper hand. Griswold trekked from Jakarta to the province of Aceh, meeting all sorts of Indonesians, from a terrorist leader to a bride-to-be worried she would be found not to be a virgin. Those unfamiliar with Asia may be surprised to learn that a much more draconian legal system defends and promotes Islam in tiny, prosperous Malaysia, whose oil wealth and skyscrapers coexist with measures that ban usury and ensure compliance with Shariah or Islamic law; make it illegal for a Muslim to leave the faith and forbid proselytizing by other religions — all to preserve the Malay culture and Muslim religion in this melting pot of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and aboriginal tribes like the Orang Asli, who practice animism.
“The Tenth Parallel” ends in the Philippines, the only Christian country in Asia. Nine of 10 Filipinos practice the religion Ferdinand Magellan brought to the archipelago in 1521. But the Moros, as Magellan termed the Muslims he found there, still populate the southern islands, which Griswold visited to see the local points of conflict. These date back to the start of the 20th century, when Christian Filipinos moved south and fought the rebellious locals. They were encouraged by the neocolonial power, the United States, whose president, William McKinley, was an evangelizing Methodist.
The Abu Sayyaf of the southern Philippines, like the extremist Jemaah Islamiyah movement in Indonesia, was first radicalized by conflicts in the Balkans and Afghanistan, where militants went to earn their battle stripes. Among the loose global federation of radical Islamists, Abu Sayyaf earned a reputation for thievery, kidnapping and other common crimes. It was during one such crime spree that the group kidnapped the missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham. Their yearlong ordeal as hostages wasting away in the jungle ended in tragedy when Gracia was rescued but Martin was killed; it was the Philippine Army’s 17th attempt to free them. Gracia, whom Griswold interviewed, was remarkably generous toward her captors, understanding the role that poverty has played in their lives. “Jihad was a ‘career move,’ she said. The only other job besides kidnapping was fishing. And fishing required a boat.” Gracia, who had lived among the impoverished people of the developing world for most of her adult life, felt more at home in places like the Philippines than the Kansas heartland where she settled after Martin’s death.
The same might be said of the itinerant and intrepid author, who candidly admits that she has discovered no neat theory to explain why people fight over religion or why someone like the self-proclaimed Reverend Abdu, a former Muslim Fulani nomad, lives his life as an unpaid proselytizer or why a missionary couple in the Sudan persist although they have not converted a single soul. Sitting in Abdu’s sweltering hut one day Griswold experienced the paradoxically cooling effect of the hot tea he serves her and realizes that some mysteries cannot be solved
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/excerpt-the-tenth-parallel.pdf
Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
By Eliza Griswold
317 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27
August 19, 2010
The influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington theorized about the “clash of civilizations.” The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold takes on the same topic in a much more visceral way: she traveled through the “torrid zone” to see, smell, taste and write about it. Her book “The Tenth Parallel” is a fascinating journey along the latitude line in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam often meet and clash. Since Americans commonly equate Islam with the Arab Middle East, this book is a useful reminder that four-fifths of Muslims live elsewhere. It’s also an intimate introduction to some of those who live in places like Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
“The Tenth Parallel” is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions. Because of both population growth and the explosion of Christianity in Africa in the last half-century, nearly a fourth of the world’s Christians now live south of the 10th parallel, alongside Muslims who are migrating from the north to escape creeping desertification. All along this fault line, struggles over valuable resources like oil, lumber and minerals add to the volatile mix.
Africa is a logical place for Griswold to begin her story, since Muhammad sent followers and family to find refuge in Christian-ruled Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) in 615. Traders have plied the route from Mecca to Timbuktu in western Africa ever since. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and its 140 million people are evenly divided between the Muslim north and the Christian south. It is also America’s fifth-largest supplier of oil. Chronic conflict springs from both these sources. Griswold visited a local Muslim king, the emir of Wase, in his hilltop castle in 2006 to hear him bemoan the worsening outbreaks of religious violence — which had taken tens of thousands of lives — that neither his clout as a traditional leader nor his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh could halt.
Griswold’s journey is made all the more interesting because of her personal motivations. The daughter of a leading liberal Episcopal bishop, she recalls being spooked by the consecration ceremony in which he lay facedown on the floor of the cathedral in Chicago with his legs and arms stretched out in the shape of a cross. As a young girl she saw the Bible “as a book of spells, one whose extravagant metaphors, whose terrible and powerful parables were ways to call God down to earth.” And as a teenager she feared that God would ask her to be a nun. “I spent those years wondering how it was that smart people could believe in God,” she writes.
In 2003 Griswold traveled to Sudan with Billy Graham’s son Franklin, who attempted to convert her by inviting her to pray with him. She could not find a logical reason to decline, since, as a good ecumenical Episcopalian, she had prayed with Sunnis and Sufi Muslims. She returned to Sudan five years later, after its leader was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. The war-torn country’s Christian south is preparing for a 2011 vote on whether to split from the Muslim north, which would break Africa’s largest country in half. Griswold also reports from Somalia at great personal risk, vividly describing in 30 pages the religious violence and ill-informed policies that America has pursued since its failed attempts to corral the murderous Aidid clan (members of which she meets with). More recently, Washington has been trying to weaken the Qaeda-linked Shabab gang and shore up a hapless Islamist government.
In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, the religious ferment mostly occurs between conservative and moderate Islam. Bouts of violence shocked the quiescent majority into defending a traditionally tranquil version of its faith and, happily, the moderates may now have the upper hand. Griswold trekked from Jakarta to the province of Aceh, meeting all sorts of Indonesians, from a terrorist leader to a bride-to-be worried she would be found not to be a virgin. Those unfamiliar with Asia may be surprised to learn that a much more draconian legal system defends and promotes Islam in tiny, prosperous Malaysia, whose oil wealth and skyscrapers coexist with measures that ban usury and ensure compliance with Shariah or Islamic law; make it illegal for a Muslim to leave the faith and forbid proselytizing by other religions — all to preserve the Malay culture and Muslim religion in this melting pot of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and aboriginal tribes like the Orang Asli, who practice animism.
“The Tenth Parallel” ends in the Philippines, the only Christian country in Asia. Nine of 10 Filipinos practice the religion Ferdinand Magellan brought to the archipelago in 1521. But the Moros, as Magellan termed the Muslims he found there, still populate the southern islands, which Griswold visited to see the local points of conflict. These date back to the start of the 20th century, when Christian Filipinos moved south and fought the rebellious locals. They were encouraged by the neocolonial power, the United States, whose president, William McKinley, was an evangelizing Methodist.
The Abu Sayyaf of the southern Philippines, like the extremist Jemaah Islamiyah movement in Indonesia, was first radicalized by conflicts in the Balkans and Afghanistan, where militants went to earn their battle stripes. Among the loose global federation of radical Islamists, Abu Sayyaf earned a reputation for thievery, kidnapping and other common crimes. It was during one such crime spree that the group kidnapped the missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham. Their yearlong ordeal as hostages wasting away in the jungle ended in tragedy when Gracia was rescued but Martin was killed; it was the Philippine Army’s 17th attempt to free them. Gracia, whom Griswold interviewed, was remarkably generous toward her captors, understanding the role that poverty has played in their lives. “Jihad was a ‘career move,’ she said. The only other job besides kidnapping was fishing. And fishing required a boat.” Gracia, who had lived among the impoverished people of the developing world for most of her adult life, felt more at home in places like the Philippines than the Kansas heartland where she settled after Martin’s death.
The same might be said of the itinerant and intrepid author, who candidly admits that she has discovered no neat theory to explain why people fight over religion or why someone like the self-proclaimed Reverend Abdu, a former Muslim Fulani nomad, lives his life as an unpaid proselytizer or why a missionary couple in the Sudan persist although they have not converted a single soul. Sitting in Abdu’s sweltering hut one day Griswold experienced the paradoxically cooling effect of the hot tea he serves her and realizes that some mysteries cannot be solved
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/excerpt-the-tenth-parallel.pdf
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