August 17, 2010
The most impressive thing about “The Tenth Parallel” is that Eliza Griswold lived to write it.
Traveling the latitude that describes the borderland of Islam and Christianity in much of Asia and Africa, where warlords, missionaries, aid workers and profiteers battle for oil as well as for souls, Ms. Griswold dodges attack dogs in Nigeria, leaves an office building in Somalia hours before it is hit by a suicide bomber and departs the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java, the morning before an earthquake that killed 5,000 people.
As a literary device, an invisible line 700 miles north of the equator is rather meaningless, no matter how many times Ms. Griswold insists that it unites her book. Even writing so assured and efficient — this intrepid journalist is also an accomplished poet - cannot make us forget how different Indonesia is from Sudan, or Malaysia from Somalia.
But given the danger at which Ms. Griswold scoffs, and the disorienting violence she describes, it would be surprising if there were a smooth, narrative coherence to her dispatches. It is enough that the 10th parallel is, very generally, where the southward advance of Islam’s armies, from the seventh century onward, was arrested, either by human resistance or by wet weather and vegetation. In places as disparate as the Philippines and East Africa, it was somewhere just north of the equator that Muslims encountered Christians, who had either preceded them or arrived soon thereafter.
In these regions the Muslims and Christians also encountered native traditions and competing imports, like Chinese Confucianism in Malaysia. And today the 10th parallel is the site of internecine religious strife, too. In Africa, for example, Pentecostal Christians now push aside Anglicans, while some children of moderate Sufi Muslims adopt a more radical, intolerant faith, one they believe is purer and links them to a global struggle.
Ms. Griswold never states her arguments as clearly as I would wish, but several emerge nonetheless.
First, she believes that Muslim versus Christian fights in Africa and Asia have been amplified, even caused, by the West. Sometimes the legacy of colonialism is the culprit, as in Sudan, where the British governor-general of Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, first played the Arab Muslim northerners against the darker Africans in the south. In 1905, she writes, he “declared it illegal for Christian missionaries to evangelize among Muslims to the north of the 10th parallel, and eventually Muslim traders could not travel to the south of it.” This division won the British the favor of their Muslim puppet leaders in the north, but of course its legacy can be read in the spilled blood of Darfur.
In other cases what seemed like an unremarkable bit of butterfly wing-flapping in the West set off a tsunami in distant lands. Using hawala, the Muslim good-faith money-transfer system, the Somali company Al-Barakat once helped expatriates send home about $790 million annually. Believing — wrongly, it turned out — that Al Qaeda had used hawala to finance the 9/11 attacks, “the United States shut down the company, destroying Somalia’s economy in the process,” Ms. Griswold writes. Where a formal economy cannot exist, black markets and corruption thrive: thus did the United States empower Somali warlords.
Ms. Griswold further argues that leaders along the 10th parallel use Islam cynically, to bolster their power and win recruits. In the 1990s President Suharto of Indonesia “needed religion to bolster his waning authority,” she writes, so he “built mosques and prayer halls in villages and schools, went on the hajj, promoted Islamic education and scholars, and placed Muslims, instead of Christians, in high military positions.”
And for penny-ante warlords, the collapse of Western sponsorship has driven them to religion. “Without the funding from the Soviet Union and the United States,” Ms. Griswold writes, of Somalia, “would-be leaders were searching for new claims to power.”
In that quest “Islamic authority was de rigueur,” she says. In anarchic, failed states, it is easier to raise an army by declaring jihad than by advertising for teenagers to extort roadside bribes near the strongman’s compound.
Everywhere Ms. Griswold travels, Christianity and Islam are debased by their own practitioners. In Khartoum she sees the evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) visit a 4-month-old girl in the hospital who is dying of a congenital heart defect; he gives her mother a gift box that contains a pamphlet encouraging her to repent and come to Jesus. In Malaysia the government pays isolated villagers who cling to their indigenous beliefs the equivalent of several dollars to convert to Islam.
Ms. Griswold’s outlook is fairly hopeless. Climate change exacerbates competition for resources, and thus religious conflict; Christian missionaries are naïve, often willfully; Islamic leadership proves as corrupt as whatever it replaces. She is all too persuasive, which leaves the reader grateful for moments of whimsy and absurdity: the demographer trying to catalog how every Christian martyr in history died (“roasted alive, sawed in two, thrown from airplane”); the Indonesian terrorist whose Facebook page proclaims him a fan of Ashton Kutcher.
A number of recent books have enlarged our sympathy by focusing on memorable victims of global conflict: Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What,” for example, and Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.” “The Tenth Parallel” is not a page-turner like those. But Ms. Griswold’s fearless wandering has given her a broad view of religious and ethnic conflict, one that reminds us just how many victims Mr. Eggers and Mr. Kidder had to choose from, and how many millions more continue to be with us
The most impressive thing about “The Tenth Parallel” is that Eliza Griswold lived to write it.
Traveling the latitude that describes the borderland of Islam and Christianity in much of Asia and Africa, where warlords, missionaries, aid workers and profiteers battle for oil as well as for souls, Ms. Griswold dodges attack dogs in Nigeria, leaves an office building in Somalia hours before it is hit by a suicide bomber and departs the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java, the morning before an earthquake that killed 5,000 people.
As a literary device, an invisible line 700 miles north of the equator is rather meaningless, no matter how many times Ms. Griswold insists that it unites her book. Even writing so assured and efficient — this intrepid journalist is also an accomplished poet - cannot make us forget how different Indonesia is from Sudan, or Malaysia from Somalia.
But given the danger at which Ms. Griswold scoffs, and the disorienting violence she describes, it would be surprising if there were a smooth, narrative coherence to her dispatches. It is enough that the 10th parallel is, very generally, where the southward advance of Islam’s armies, from the seventh century onward, was arrested, either by human resistance or by wet weather and vegetation. In places as disparate as the Philippines and East Africa, it was somewhere just north of the equator that Muslims encountered Christians, who had either preceded them or arrived soon thereafter.
In these regions the Muslims and Christians also encountered native traditions and competing imports, like Chinese Confucianism in Malaysia. And today the 10th parallel is the site of internecine religious strife, too. In Africa, for example, Pentecostal Christians now push aside Anglicans, while some children of moderate Sufi Muslims adopt a more radical, intolerant faith, one they believe is purer and links them to a global struggle.
Ms. Griswold never states her arguments as clearly as I would wish, but several emerge nonetheless.
First, she believes that Muslim versus Christian fights in Africa and Asia have been amplified, even caused, by the West. Sometimes the legacy of colonialism is the culprit, as in Sudan, where the British governor-general of Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, first played the Arab Muslim northerners against the darker Africans in the south. In 1905, she writes, he “declared it illegal for Christian missionaries to evangelize among Muslims to the north of the 10th parallel, and eventually Muslim traders could not travel to the south of it.” This division won the British the favor of their Muslim puppet leaders in the north, but of course its legacy can be read in the spilled blood of Darfur.
In other cases what seemed like an unremarkable bit of butterfly wing-flapping in the West set off a tsunami in distant lands. Using hawala, the Muslim good-faith money-transfer system, the Somali company Al-Barakat once helped expatriates send home about $790 million annually. Believing — wrongly, it turned out — that Al Qaeda had used hawala to finance the 9/11 attacks, “the United States shut down the company, destroying Somalia’s economy in the process,” Ms. Griswold writes. Where a formal economy cannot exist, black markets and corruption thrive: thus did the United States empower Somali warlords.
Ms. Griswold further argues that leaders along the 10th parallel use Islam cynically, to bolster their power and win recruits. In the 1990s President Suharto of Indonesia “needed religion to bolster his waning authority,” she writes, so he “built mosques and prayer halls in villages and schools, went on the hajj, promoted Islamic education and scholars, and placed Muslims, instead of Christians, in high military positions.”
And for penny-ante warlords, the collapse of Western sponsorship has driven them to religion. “Without the funding from the Soviet Union and the United States,” Ms. Griswold writes, of Somalia, “would-be leaders were searching for new claims to power.”
In that quest “Islamic authority was de rigueur,” she says. In anarchic, failed states, it is easier to raise an army by declaring jihad than by advertising for teenagers to extort roadside bribes near the strongman’s compound.
Everywhere Ms. Griswold travels, Christianity and Islam are debased by their own practitioners. In Khartoum she sees the evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) visit a 4-month-old girl in the hospital who is dying of a congenital heart defect; he gives her mother a gift box that contains a pamphlet encouraging her to repent and come to Jesus. In Malaysia the government pays isolated villagers who cling to their indigenous beliefs the equivalent of several dollars to convert to Islam.
Ms. Griswold’s outlook is fairly hopeless. Climate change exacerbates competition for resources, and thus religious conflict; Christian missionaries are naïve, often willfully; Islamic leadership proves as corrupt as whatever it replaces. She is all too persuasive, which leaves the reader grateful for moments of whimsy and absurdity: the demographer trying to catalog how every Christian martyr in history died (“roasted alive, sawed in two, thrown from airplane”); the Indonesian terrorist whose Facebook page proclaims him a fan of Ashton Kutcher.
A number of recent books have enlarged our sympathy by focusing on memorable victims of global conflict: Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What,” for example, and Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.” “The Tenth Parallel” is not a page-turner like those. But Ms. Griswold’s fearless wandering has given her a broad view of religious and ethnic conflict, one that reminds us just how many victims Mr. Eggers and Mr. Kidder had to choose from, and how many millions more continue to be with us
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