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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Aug 25 2010 - 15:45:00 EDT
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129407295
The 10th Parallel: Where Christianity And Islam Meet
August 25, 2010
In the winter of 2003, writer Eliza Griswold traveled to the northern
capital of Sudan with Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader and son
of Billy Graham, to meet with Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan.
There were several reasons for making the trip. Graham wanted to ask
Bashir for the right to preach to Muslims in Khartoum and in northern
Sudan. (Bashir denied his request.) Griswold, meanwhile, wanted to see
how Christian evangelicals had come to play such a large role in U.S.
foreign policy, a topic she was researching for her book The Tenth
Parallel, about the collisions between Islam and Christianity in
certain parts of the world.
She says that when someone like Graham travels to Sudan to meet with
an official, he is seen as representative of what all Americans
believe.
"That is one of the more dangerous realities of how conservative
evangelicals abroad can shape the perception of the West," she says.
"This is especially sensitive in the Muslim world. ... [And then we
see] this kind of defensive posturing of Islam — that Islam is under
threat by the West. Unfortunately, a handful of evangelicals can
misrepresent what the West is about and make Muslims feel very much
under threat."
Ideological conflicts like these are not limited to Sudan, but many of
them take place along the 10th parallel, the line of latitude 700
miles north of the equator. More than 60 percent of the world's 2
billion Christians live along the 10th parallel — along with half the
world's 1.3 billion Muslim population. Griswold spent the past seven
years traveling along the latitude line and researching the places —
like Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines — where
Christianity and Islam collide.
She recounts her journey and shares several stories about her time
speaking to religious leaders in Africa and Asia with Terry Gross on
Fresh Air. She also explains how her travels along the 10th parallel
have helped her see how Islamic leaders may view the controversy in
New York City over plans for an Islamic center and mosque near Ground
Zero.
"I think it's sending a message that the West is at war with Islam,"
she says. "I know that's not what most people engaged in that fight
would see as the case, but unfortunately, there are plenty of people
out there — al-Qaida included — who are willing to work as spin
doctors, who are willing to get that message — that Islam is a danger
at the hands of the West — across.' "
Eliza Griswold is the author of The Tenth Parallel and Wideawake
Field, a collection of poems. She is currently a fellow at the New
America Foundation and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enlarge
Antonin Kratochvil
Eliza Griswold is a fellow at the New America Foundation, where she
reports on religion, conflict and human rights.
Antonin Kratochvil Eliza Griswold is a fellow at the New America
Foundation, where she reports on religion, conflict and human rights.
Interview Highlights
On the meeting between Omar al-Bashir and Franklin Graham
"What President Bashir did was try to convince Graham to convert to
Islam. The two men engaged in this faith-based one-upmanship where
each tried to convert the other to his respective faith. ... [Then]
Franklin remembered that in his pocket he had a 2004 election pin for
the re-election of George W. Bush. So he reached into his pocket and
he wanted to give it to Bashir and he said, 'Mr. President, you'll be
speaking to my president later on today and I think you should tell
him you're his first voter here in the Sudan.' In one way, to read
what that situation really meant, was Graham showing Bashir that he
had the ear of the administration — that here's where faith and
foreign policy were really intermingled. Graham was not an emissary of
the U.S. government in any way, yet the pin, which he'd taken from the
desk of Karl Rove's secretary, indicated that he had access to the
uppermost echelons of power — and that's what he was trying to tell
Bashir. Bashir only met with Graham because he feared his country
would be the next country, after Iraq and Afghanistan, to face U.S.
invasion."
On Peter Akinola, the former Anglican Primate of the Church of
Nigeria, seeing religion as a numbers game
"That notion that democracy — that Islam will use democracy against
the West because democracy, like religion, is a numbers game, and it
matters how many believers you have, whether those believers are
Christian or Muslim or Democrats or Republicans — I have heard that as
much in Franklin, Tenn., as I have in Abuja, Nigeria. That is pretty
prominent thinking — [things like] 'these guys are going to take over,
and you liberal apologists are going to pay for your blindness at the
ballot box.' "
Excerpt: 'The Tenth Parallel'
by Eliza Griswold
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between
Christianity and Islam
By Eliza Griswold
Hardcover, 336 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List price: $27Prologue
The chief was spending Easter Sunday in his hut, which smelled of
stale smoke from a cooking fire and of something more glandular:
panic. When the visitor from Washington ducked inside, the chief, a
man in his mid-fifties named Nyol Paduot, rose stiff-kneed from a
white plastic lawn chair. He had spent several days keeping watch
against an approaching dust cloud kicked up by horsemen and Jeeps. It
would mean his village of Todaj, teetering on the fraught and murky
border between northern and southern Sudan, was under attack again. He
was grouchy and unkempt: his eyes pouched, his salt-and-pepper beard
scruffy, his waxy green-andyellow shirt stained with the tide lines
of dried sweat. He glowered at the American visitor, Roger Winter,
whose bare legs poked out from khaki shorts. One leg bore the scar of
a snakebite he had gotten not far away while helping to broker a peace
on behalf of the United States. The 2005 deal was supposed to end
nearly forty years of intermittent civil war between northern and
southern Sudan, which had left two million people dead. In some
places, the peace agreement had stanched the bloodshed, allowing the
south to form a nascent government that described itself as
"Christianled." Under the terms of the deal, the north was supposed
to make it attractive for the south to remain part of a unified Sudan
by giving it a voice in the national government, and a fair share of
oil revenues. But the north ignored most of the terms. The peace deal
proved to mean nothing here on the boundary between the two Sudans,
which jigs and jags like an EKG reading along the straight, flat
latitude of the tenth parallel.
The tenth parallel is the horizontal band that rings the earth seven
hundred miles north of the equator. If Africa is shaped like a rumpled
sock, with South Africa at the toe and Somalia at the heel, then the
tenth parallel runs across the ankle. Along the tenth parallel, in
Sudan, and in most of inland Africa, two worlds collide: the mostly
Muslim, Arab-influenced north meets a black African south inhabited by
Christians and those who follow indigenous religions — which include
those who venerate ancestors and the spirits of animals, land, and
sky. Thirty miles south (at a latitude of 9 degrees 43'59"), the
village of Todaj marked the divide where these two rival worldviews,
their dysfunctional governments and well-armed militaries, vied inch
by inch for land. The village belonged to the south's largest ethnic
group, the Ngok Dinka. But in 2008, when Roger Winter paid Nyol Paduot
a visit, the north was threatening to send its soldiers and Arab
militias to attack the village and lay claim to the underground river
of light, sweet crude oil running beneath the chief's feet.
Oil was discovered in southern Sudan during the 1970s, and the
struggle to control it is one of the long-running war's more recent
causes. The fight in Sudan threatened to split Africa's largest
country in two, and still does. In 2011, the south is scheduled to
vote on whether it wants to remain part of the north or become its own
country, made up of ten states that lie to the south of the tenth
parallel and border Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic
of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Chad. This looming split —
which, if it happens, would likely occur largely along the tenth
parallel — meant that Todaj and the nearby oil boomtown of Abyei,
about ten miles south, were vitally important. Whichever side
controlled them would control an estimated two billion barrels of oil.
Other than Paduot, and six elders gathered in his hut, the village
appeared deserted. Prompted by gunfire and rumors of war, the five
hundred families who lived there had fled south, terrified that Todaj
was about to be wiped off the face of the earth. Their fear was well
founded: three times in the previous twenty years, soldiers from the
north had laid siege to Todaj, raping women and children, killing and
carrying off young men, and burning to the ground the villagers'
thatched huts and the Episcopal church made of hay.
It was the end of the dry season, and a breeze stirred the air over
this colorless plot of parched earth, bare but for these empty
dwellings and a few gaunt cows trawling for loose hay. The cows
wandering hungrily around the village didn't belong to the people of
Todaj, but to northern Arab nomads, the Misseriya, who, because of
seasonal drought up north, came south at this time of year to graze
their cattle. Paduot was afraid that when the rains began a few weeks
later, and the nomads could return home to their own greener pastures,
there would be nothing to keep the northern soldiers (cousins and sons
of the nomads) from attacking Todaj.
"We know when they burn our village, they want the land," said the
chief, a Ngok Dinka translator rendering his words into English. These
patterns sounded like the ones unfolding less than fifty miles
northwest, in the region of Darfur, because they were the same. Three
decades ago, while Sudan's current president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir,
was a military general stationed on this border, the Khartoum-based
northern government perfected the methods of attack, using the
paramilitary horsemen called the Janjawiid, whom it was now deploying
in Darfur. Todaj faced this same threat, but other than Roger Winter,
very few knew anything about the impending disaster. On BBC radio,
Paduot heard much talk about Darfur. Although the same thing was
happening here along the border, it rarely made international news.
The two fronts had much in common, since all of Sudan's wars boil down
to a central Khartoum-based cabal battling the people at the
peripheries. The only differences between Darfur and Abyei, the chief
explained, were religion and oil. In Darfur, there was no oil and both
sides were Muslim, a confrontation he did not understand. "Why would
Muslims fight against Muslims?" he asked aloud.
Here, the north had mounted its assaults in the name of jihad, or holy
war, claiming that Islam and Arab culture should reign supreme in
Sudan. Chief Paduot, who had survived several such conflagrations, had
come to see Islam as a tool of oppression, one the northerners were
using to erase his culture and undo his people's claim to the land and
its oil.
"People hate Islam now," he said. Having stepped into the hut behind
Winter, I glanced around to see if any of the elders was startled by
the chief's remark. If they were, no sign of it crossed their faces,
which showed only dread and exhaustion.
To defy the north, most of the villagers had been baptized as
Episcopalians — they prayed daily, attended church on Sunday, and had
cast off loose, long-sleeved Islamic dress in favor of short-sleeved
Western-style button-down shirts, or brilliant batiks. For them, Islam
was now simply a catchall term for the government, people, and
policies of the north.
Race, like religion, was a rallying cry in this complicated war. The
paler-skinned Arab northerners looked down on the darker-skinned
people of the south, Paduot explained slowly. He seemed tired of
giving tutorials to outsiders. What good were earnest, well-meaning
people like us, who came with our water bottles and notebooks to
record the details of a situation but could do nothing to stop it?
Excerpted from The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line
Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold. Published in August
2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2010 by Eliza
Griswold. All rights reserved.
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