The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam » (First Edition)

Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, received a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine, among others. A 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she was awarded the first Robert I. Friedman Award for investigative reporting. A collection of her poems, Wideawake Field, was published by FSG in 2007.

A riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds

The tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world’s 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well.

An award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in The Tenth Parallel show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the people she writes about, one’s sense of God is shaped by one’s place on earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic.

An urgent examination of the relationship between faith and worldly power, The Tenth Parallel is an essential work about the conflicts over religion, nationhood and natural resources that will remake the world in the years to come.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Wherever she drops down -- Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, or Indonesia -- Griswold doesn't reduce, or attempt to proscribe answers for specific problems. But underneath, as a reader, it's hard not to feel an urge to create secular institutions that can help a different kind of prosperity flourish and help make tolerance possible. (I found myself wishing to redouble international health care and family planning efforts -- not in the name of God but of healthy women). Griswold wants to urge us out of thinking that these conflicts are either natural or divine, and to help us begin to imagine what on Earth we might do about them.

Map

Prologue 3

Part One: Africa 15

Nigeria

1 The Rock: One 17

2 The Rock: Two 27

3 The Flood 36

4 Drought 41

5 The Tribulation 45

6 Modern Saints And Martyrs 54

7 The God Of Prosperity 57

8 "Races And Tribes" 66

Sudan

9 In The Beginning 75

10 Faith And Foreign Policy 83

11 "Missionary Mayonnaise" 93

12 Justice 104

13 Choose 113

14 Spoiling The World 121

Somalia

15 "The Real Superpower" 125

16 "They'll Kill You" 135

17 Proxy 142

18 "Gather Ye Men Of Tomorrow" 151

Part Two: Asia 157

Indonesia

19 Beyond Jihad 159

20 Noviana And The Firing Squad 171

21 Beginning On The Wind 178

22 "No More Happy Sundays" 185

23 A World Made New 192

24 The Clash Within 201

25 "Allahcracy" 204

Malaysia

26 The Race To Save The Last Lost Souls 215

27 The Wedding 229

28 The River 233

29 The Greatest Story Ever Told 236

Philippines

30 A Kidnapping 243

31 From Two Thousand Feet 250

32 Reversion 258

33 Victory Or Martyrdom 263

34 To Witness 268

Epilogue 277

Notes 285

Bibliography 295

Acknowledgments 301

Index 303