A riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds
The
tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the
equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity
and Islam collide. More than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims
live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world’s 2
billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles
of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is
shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well.
An
award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has
spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth
parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia,
Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in
The Tenth Parallel show
us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil,
and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often
shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the
people she writes about, one’s sense of God is shaped by one’s place on
earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic.
An urgent examination of the relationship between faith and worldly power,
The Tenth Parallel is
an essential work about the conflicts over religion, nationhood and
natural resources that will remake the world in the years to come.
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