Please see my previous postings dated 22 August 2010, 8 September 2010, 2 October 2010, 16 October 2010, and 29 October 2010 respectively. (Lily)
Winnipeg Free Press (http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/entertainment/books/fault-line-between-faiths-a-place-of-conflict-violence-110900609.html)
'Fault line' between faiths a place of conflict, violence , 27 November 2010
by Graeme Voyer
The Tenth Parallel Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
By Eliza Griswold
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 317 pages, $31
THE 10th parallel, the line of latitude 1,100 kilometres north of the equator, has more than geographic significance.
A confluence of factors -- environmental and historical -- has made it the "fault line" between two faiths.
In Africa and Southeast Asia, in the space between the equator and 10th parallel, adherents of Christianity and Islam come together en masse, and the result is often conflict and violence.
Youthful American journalist Eliza Griswold spent much of the last decade travelling along this fault line. She visited Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, observing the encounter between Christians and Muslims.
Her intriguing book is an account of what she saw.
Griswold, it must be said, is an absolutely fearless investigative reporter. She is also a talented writer. However, her narrative is not entirely satisfying.
Loosely structured, it goes back and forth in time. It is a succession of anecdotes about people that she met; this kind of writing may work for a magazine article, but one expects more from a book.
It is difficult to discern exactly what Griswold is trying to communicate; one gets lost in the forest of her anecdotes and loses any sense of an overarching interpretation that she may be developing.
If this book has a theme, it is that the tensions between Christians and Muslims along the 10th parallel are as much about land, oil and other resources as they are about religion.
Griswold does not quite say that religion is merely a secondary sympton of a clash over resources, although she comes close.
In several places, she stresses that the conflict between religions is rooted in economics and a struggle for political power. Elsewhere, however, she says that the conflicts are both spiritual and material, and that the two are inextricably related.
Griswold points out an interesting misperception held by radical Islamists. They conflate Christianity and the West. They think that globalization is a stalking horse for Christianity; they do not seem to grasp that the West, for good or ill, is largely secular.
While she has written a book about religious discord, Griswold, a liberal Christian, is not critical of religion per se. Rather, she sees it as a positive force in the lives of millions of people.
"Even in the midst of war and catastrophe," she writes, "I had watched time and again how people were able to undertake the extraordinary tasks of daily life -- to keep going -- based on their absolute belief in God's Divine Plan."
Griswold has written a vivid work of reportage, but it would have been even better if she had thought more clearly about the overall significance of what she is reporting.
・Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.
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