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

This is a fascinating book about the tensions between Christians and Muslims. As I have gone through World History this year with Ethan, I have become better versed in the background of world religion--how it spread, what helped, what made change happen. this book takes that several steps further, while still offering enough of the back story to be able to follow the modern drama.
Seven hundred miles north of the equator, the tenth parallel marks a geographical and ideological front line where Islam and Christianity collide, with more than half the world’s Muslims and 60 percent of the world’s Christians living in the region. Award–winning investigative reporter and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling on both sides of the faith–based fault line from Nigeria and Somalia to Indonesia and Malaysia.

The author combines academic research and her poetic sensibilities with a reporter’s discriminating eye to uncover the causes of various conflicts between Christians and Muslims, the specifically religious character of which she often reveals to be a somewhat belated addition to the equation. For example, in Nigeria, which is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, changing global weather patterns such as increased drought and flooding are forcing Muslim herders from the north to drift south and encroach on farmland owned by sedentary Christians, thereby sparking clashes that sometimes spiral into religious mini-wars.
Griswold does not shy away from identifying religious zealotry (often in tandem with ethnic and racial chauvinism) as an important factor in some of the bloodiest conflicts. In Sudan, it isn’t simply the fact that the south is oil-rich that has spurred successive regimes to unleash murder and mayhem on southern Sudanese seeking increased freedoms, but the established practice of Arab Muslims oppressing the non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples of the country.
There is much to be learned her, and much to worry about--beautifully written and terrifying in many ways, but also illuminating.