"The Tenth Parallel" by Eliza Griswold - A Book Review

In December 2010, InTheFray Magazine published "Parallel Lives," my book review of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Click here to read my review.

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold

Hardcover, 336 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Price: $27.00
Published: 2010

Seven years ago, during a trip to Sudan, award-winning journalist and poet Eliza Griswold started investigating the complicated and longstanding conflict between Christianity and Islam that exists along the Earth's tenth parallel. 

Any understanding of this Muslim/Christian divide must begin with a look at the world's religious populations and where these adherents are to be found. As Griswold puts forth:

• 493 million Christians live south of the tenth parallel, which constitutes nearly one fourth of the world's Christian population of 2 billion.
• 367 million Muslims live north of the tenth parallel, which represents almost one fourth of the world's Muslim population of 1.6 billion.
• Four out of five Muslims live outside the Middle East.
• Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country. With a population of 240 million, eight out of ten Indonesians are Muslim.
• The Philippines claims a Catholic majority of 92 million believers and a Muslim minority of 5 million.
• Annual population growth in Asia is 1.4 percent and in Africa is 2.4 percent, as compared with global population expansion of 1.2 percent. 

Additionally, the problems of desertification and deforestation (which force mass migration), an ever-more fragile environment, territorial disputes over oil fields and revenues, corrupt governments, and failed states combine -- exacerbating the skirmishes between believer and infidel and prolonging religious persecution.


Griswold writes:

So much history and theology had been grafted onto the people of the tenth parallel over the centuries: the dramatic images of clashing civilizations and competing fundamentalisms; the demographics and big-picture analyses of the roles played by oil, weather, war, colonial interest, and clan conviction .... [And that] such people could accommodate conflicting worldly labels (evangelist, nomad, Muslim, and Christian) was a talent of post-colonial life, evidence of adaptation by people who have had different categories foisted on them by outsiders ....

Religious strife where Christian and Muslims meet is real, and grim, but the long history of everyday encounter, of believers of different kinds shouldering all things together, even as they follow different faiths, is no less real. It follows that their lives bear witness to the coexistence of the two religions -- and of the complicated bids for power inside them -- more than to the conflicts between them.