“No theory of religious politics or religious violence in our time can possibly be complete,” Eliza Griswold writes near the beginning of “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam,’’ “without accounting for the four-fifths of Muslims who live outside the Middle East or for the swelling populations of evangelical Christians whose faith is bound up with their struggle for resources and survival. I wanted to go where such lives are actually led, where wars in the name of the religion are not Internet media campaigns to ‘control a global narrative’ but actual wars fought from village to village and street corner to street corner.”
What are we fighting for?
Is the global battle between Christians and Muslims exclusively about faith? Eliza Griswold thinks not
Griswold, an award-winning journalist and poet, spent seven years in pursuit of this desire, years spent exploring the countries that lie along the “tenth parallel” of the title — Nigeria, the Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines — where more than half of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world live alongside 60 percent of its 2 billion Christians. Her goal was to meet the religious believers who populate these areas and to see how the adherents of the world’s two largest faiths get along, or fail to, in this part of the world.
Griswold’s travels are sometimes arduous, occasionally bizarre, and not infrequently hazardous. In Nigeria children cry out in horror on seeing her, believing that she is a devil who will turn them white. Near Mogadishu the convoy she is traveling in is shot at by bored soldiers armed with automatic weapons. “My driver stopped the car, which I thought seemed suicidal after these men had just shot at us. He yelled at the shooters, who, to my baffled relief, looked sheepish and apologized. They had fired at us simply because we were moving, the driver told me when he returned to the car. No other reason.”
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