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.
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.
It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example, has been a “failed state” since 1991; this is a place where the presence of the state and accompanying service provision is virtually nonexistent. Griswold shows how the story of the rise of al-Shabaab—an Islamist militia currently wreaking havoc with horrific efficacy across Somalia and now outside its borders (the group claimed responsibility for last month’s bombings in Kampala, Uganda)—is both local and global in nature. Proxy wars of various scopes and varieties are no doubt a trend in the countries Griswold profiles, but her in-depth examination of each context avoids generalization and oversimplification.
Perhaps the phenomenon of seeking “direct experience of God” is one way people transcend their everyday circumstances in place where life is not merely difficult, but is instead a daily struggle for survival. It would be inaccurate to generalize, but Griswold shows this to be the case in Mogadishu, and I’ve seen it for myself in Sudan. I currently live south of the country’s “front line,” contested area, Abyei which Griswold profiles through the story a local southern Sudanese chief who knew the fate that awaited him and his people when she was interviewing him in the spring of 2008. In May of that year, chief Nyol Paduot and his people were forced to flee for their lives when northern Sudanese troops razed the nearby town of Abyei.
The part of Sudan I am in right now is the site of yet another proxy war, different from the one in Somalia, but with reminiscent undertones. In Somalia, the Shabaab do the bidding of the broader Al Qaeda network and are supported by this global movement. In Abyei, Sudan, the on again, off again local warring parties—Arab, nomadic cattleherders and sedentary black Christians and atheists—are, as Griswold writes, “pawns of their respective governments,” former warring parties themselves who are uneasy partners in an internationally-brokered peace agreement signed in 2005.
While it would be easy to draw negative conclusions from this book about the ways in which Islam and Christianity are currently interacting around the globe, it would be impossible not to have faith about the future of the world’s interlocking religions after Griswold’s profiles of individuals of different faiths who are “shouldering all things together,” “bear[ing] witness to the coexistence” of religions, as believers have done for centuries.
Maggie Fick is a freelance journalist based in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan. She reports on southern Sudan for the Associated Press, among other news organizations. Prior to working on and in Sudan, Maggie lived in Niger as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar studying gender roles in Tuareg society.