・The same book has been reviewed several times so far. Please see my previous postings dated 22 August 2010, 8 September 2010, 2 October 2010, 16 October 2010, 29 October 2010, and 28 November 2010 respectively. (Lily)
Guardian.co.uk（http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/23/tenth-parallel-eliza-griswold-review/）
The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold – review
An examination of the nature of religious conflict in Africa, 23 April 2011
by David Shariatmadari
Imagine the world divided into neat parcels of culture and civilisation and you will also imagine faultlines: sharp delineations between Islam and Christianity, east and west, developed and developing, that carry with them all the unpleasant connotations of real-life seismic rupture. It's a poetic idea, full of drama and simplicity. Eliza Griswold, who is a poet as well as a journalist, applies it to the parts of Africa where Islam and Christianity meet. But her own investigations, of which The Tenth Parallel is a kind of portfolio, show that it's an inadequate metaphor, and one that has the potential to create all sorts of misunderstandings.
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline Between Christianity and Islam
by Eliza Griswold
Roughly 10 degrees north of the equator is where Griswold locates these borderlands. Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia are the countries whose misfortune is, apparently, to straddle them. And it's true that in some places, fissures appear to have developed along religious lines – the bustling street in Jos, scene of some of Nigeria's worst sectarian violence, where signs for "Every Night is a Miracle" ministries and the Christ Pilgrims Welfare Board abut those advertising the revivalist Muslim Nasrul-Lahi il-Fathi society; or the village of Todaj, Sudan, which sits nervously on the frontline between the territories held by Arab nomads and southern, mainly Christian, Dinka people.
Religion, however, is only one prism through which to view the strife that occasionally erupts to ruin lives in this region. As Griswold points out, the lands along the tenth parallel are among "the most ecologically precarious in the world", menaced by drought and desertification. Politically, they are laid low by corruption, unemployment and the legacy of colonial-era manipulation of local power structures (much of the worst of it done by missionaries). There has been coexistence – intermingling, even – for centuries along parts of the "faultline": living proof comes in the form of a Muslim herder with a Coptic cross tattooed on his cheek Griswold meets in Plateau State, Nigeria. So if violence is now committed in the name of religion it's at least partly because religion has been blamed by those who are blind to more complex causes.
This self-fulfilling prophecy plays out in interesting ways. Islam and Christianity have come to resemble one another. In Nigeria, members of the Nasrul-Lahi il-Fathi movement meet on a Sunday, a day with no religious significance for Muslims. Driven by the success of the "prosperity gospel" churches, which promise material success in exchange for spiritual devotion (and cash on the collection plate), it runs an entrepreneurship programme and proclaims "success, triumph and glory are from the creator". Elsewhere, loudspeakers broadcast tinny versions of the hymn "Jerusalem" in imitation of the muezzin's call.
There are other, stranger sides to what begins to seem like a religious version of the "great game". It is both amusing and dismaying to learn, for example, that the CIA wanted to sponsor a "Muslim Billy Graham" to counter Soviet influence in Egypt and Sudan. Like the Afghan mujahideen, radical Islamists in Africa enjoyed US support during the cold war. Now that Islamism is the enemy, it is Graham's son, Franklin, who leads the struggle for souls in this part of Africa. His evangelical hospital in southern Sudan was bombed by government forces in 2000. And Griswold herself is part of the same geopolitical swirl. Her father, Frank, was head of the liberal Episcopal church, though, for her part, she says she spent years "wondering how it was that smart people could believe in God".
Across the Indian ocean, Griswold corrals the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia into her schema. Here the fit isn't so neat: the tenth parallel falls entirely outside the latter two countries, and, with a population that is nearly 90% Muslim, Indonesia seems more like heartland than borderland. Though her dispatches are never dull (in one she attends the wedding of an indigenous Malaysian woman and a Muslim man, where bargaining over the dowry is a very public and very awkward ritual), it becomes more difficult to see what wider point she is trying to make.
For a book which is presented as selling a big idea – one of "clash of civilisations" proportions – The Tenth Parallel is, in the end, a little aimless. Had she chosen to, Griswold could have used tales of political interference and missionary meddling to make an overwhelming case against outsiders' attempts to control populations they do not understand or respect. As it is, any messages she sends are implicit. She takes great risks to bring us stories from places only a handful of western reporters dare go. Her writing, though it veers at times into the self-consciously poetic (clouds of sea-mist are like "salty, ill-tempered ghosts"), is immediate and affecting. This is good journalism, of a kind particularly admired in America: it shows without telling. But it is what Griswold already does in her many magazine and newspaper columns. Given her talents, an attempt to step outside the role of witness for a moment might have yielded some especially compelling arguments about the nature of "religious" conflicts and what not to do about them.
・guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
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