The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
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Authors: Eliza Griswold
Tags: #Islam - Relations - Christianity, #Religion; Politics & State, #Relations, #Christianity, #Comparative Religion, #Religion, #Political Science, #General, #Christianity and Other Religions - Islam, #Christianity and Other Religions, #Islam
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THE TENTH PARALLEL
DISPATCHES FROM THE FAULT LINE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
ELIZA GRISWOLD
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2010 by Eliza Griswold
Map copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griswold, Eliza, 1973–
The tenth parallel : dispatches from
the fault line between Christianity and Islam / Eliza Griswold. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-374-27318-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Islam—Relations—Christianity. 2. Christianity and other religions—Islam. I. Title.
BP172.G758 2010
297.2'8309—dc22
2010001480
Designed by Abby Kagan
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
FOR PHOEBE AND FRANK GRISWOLD
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
—
JELALUDDIN RUMI
A self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I have gifts that you do not have, so consequently, I am unique—you have gifts that I do not have, so you are unique. God has made us so that we will need each other . . .
—
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU
I stopped asking such questions as
is he white
or black
an anarchist or monarchist
fashionable or outmoded
ours or theirs
and I began to ask
what in him is of human being
and is he
—
RYSZARD KAPU
CI
SKI
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
—
WILLIAM FAULKNER
18. “GATHER YE MEN OF TOMORROW”
20. NOVIANA AND THE FIRING SQUAD
26. THE RACE TO SAVE THE LAST LOST SOULS
29.
THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD
THE TENTH PARALLEL
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-and-yellow 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.
1
Thirty miles south (at a latitude of 9°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.