Timely and Fascinating
Even though I am not all the way through this 2010 book about recent clashes between Christianity and Islam, I am eager to share my impressions thus far. The places where these clashes occur include Sudan and Somalia, which have been prominent in the news lately.
The author is someone we can respect up front. Eliza Griswold is the daughter of an Episcopal priest and has reported and written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker and more. The Tenth Parallel: dispatches from the fault line between Christianity and Islam is a series of adventure stories that surround interviews with key religious leaders in Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines, as well as the countries already mentioned. Griswold paints pictures that include strong-willed missionaries on both sides, intense local politics, backward tribes with poorly educated leaders, and steady pressure by global business interests, most of which are Western.
In Sudan she traveled with Rev. Franklin Graham and has stories that raise questions about the appropriateness of strategizing to use war situations to open doors for the evangelical message, in Sudan and elsewhere.
In the Philippines she traveled with a colonel who was commander of U.S. forces there, and who was directly involved in special-forces attempts to rescue the kidnapped evangelical missionaries, Gracia and Martin Burnham, and she came away with just awful stories.
In Indonesia she encountered Jihad Magazine, a cheap Islamist magazine, and the people who publish it and related web outlets. Readers of the magazine are encouraged to charge ahead and not fear killing a few of the wrong people in their holy cause. One interview took place in a large filthy prison.
In another story, she writes about a Pentecostal-style church rally she attended in Nigeria with some 300,000 others at an all-night church ground outside of Lagos. But her main story is about interviews in five cities along the center belt of the country that separates the Christian south from the Muslim north, where many on both sides have died in defense of their faith in recent years.
It is sad to be saying it, but it does appear that the heavy-handedness of wealthy Western business interests is stirring up great resentment and hatred in these impoverished regions, and that a great many Muslims there see murderous jihad as appropriate response.
Rudy Dyck, Librarian