God's geography dispatches from the sweltering, malarial no-man's land between Islam and Christianity.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: 'The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam' - Book review

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

by Eliza Griswold

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp.

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In an era of shrunken foreign news budgets and dial-it-in journalism, Eliza Griswold has made a career out of going against the flow. dust after the 9/11 terrorist attacks she left a comfortable job as a Vanity Fair editorial assistant and planted herself in Baghdad, then established herself as a freelance correspondent reporting from some of the world's edgiest places. She has written lengthy magazine pieces about cannibalism in the Congo, Somali piracy, and civil war in Sudan, all while pursuing a second career as a poet. Griswold's background is also intriguing: her father is the former presiding archbishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Her new book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, seems the logical outgrowth of both her unusual pedigree and her intrepid, footloose journalism: it traces a journey, over six years, along the latitudinal line that runs approximately 300 miles south of the equator--the zone where Christianity and Islam collide.

Griswold has crafted a vivid book that is part history, part travelogue, and part inquiry into faith as a cohesive, as well as fragmenting, force in Third World societies. The main focus of Griswold's reporting is Africa, where an "explosion of Christianity" over the last fifty years, she writes, has raised the stakes for the many adherents of both faiths who equate numerical superiority with survival. There are now 417 million Christians living south of the tenth parallel--one-fifth of the world's total Christian population--and roughly the same number of Muslims living north of it. The two faiths meet in the so-ca]led Middle Belt, a 200-mile-wide strip of grassland that runs across most of the continent, and that includes the suud--the notorious tsetse fly-infested swamp that stopped Islam in its tracks during the colonial era. "In this fragile zone," Griswold writes, "the pressures wrought by growing numbers of people ... are sharpening tensions." Adherents of the two faiths are fighting, she writes, not only about religion, but "over land, food, oil, and water."

Nowhere is that conflict more acute than in the Sudan, Griswold finds, where a decades-long civil war between the Christian north and the Muslim south was finally quelled, thanks in part to American diplomacy--one of...