Eliza Griswold examines Sudan in ‘Tenth Parallel’

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Sudan is of special interest to Eliza Griswold. She’s just written a book called “The Tenth Parallel – Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam” and the book runs right through Sudan. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Griswold, who travelled to Sudan for her research. Download MP3

• ‘The Tenth Parallel’ book info

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ELIZA GRISWOLD: Abiye is so important because a river of an estimated 2 billion barrels of oil runs underneath it. And here is where north and south meet along the tenth parallel.

LISA MULLINS:  That’s Eliza Griswold, who has just written a book called The Tenth Parallel – Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Eliza, the “tenth parallel” runs through Africa, as you mention through Sudan. First help us draw a map of where this is.

GRISWOLD:  Okay, so I myself need to begin with lat is flat. Latitude is horizontal and so if you think about the equator and then you want to cast you eye 700 miles to the north of it, and it’s really within this van that I spent 7 years travelling. So from West Africa through Southeast Asia, you’re thinking of 9,000 miles, a square rectangle 700 miles [INDISCERNIBLE] and 9,000 miles wide. Here, if you think imagining Africa, imagining this rumpled upside-down sock, you think of the northernmost third of Africa being dry. This is where dry and wet meet in Africa and this is where the two religions meet.

MULLINS: So this is where the two religions meet. This is where they also divide. What is behind the division in Sudan? Is it over oil? Is it over geography, land? Or over religion?

GRISWOLD: In Sudan, oil is the primary factor and the way that that works is that oil lies underneath the land and then land comes into it because particularly the northern government, this cartoon-based regime, uses religion and uses land to push south into other people’s land. But what they’re really interested in is the oil underneath.

MULLINS: And so how is that likely to play out in the elections that Jeb just told us about?

GRISWOLD: Well, if we go to Abiye, for example, here two kinds of people meet, the [PH] Unof Dinka, which is the largest ethnic group in the south, and an Arab tribe called the Misseriya in the north. As the land dries up, the Arabs need to go farther and farther south into [INDISCERNIBLE] to make sure their cattle have enough to eat. When they push into settled land, what is a land dispute takes on the colors of the religious because the Arabs are northerners and they’re Muslim. And the Christians in [PH] Todage, the village that lies right on this front line where I was in 2008, the villagers actually have put crosses on their roofs.

MULLINS: This is very interesting because you say that they have been attacked so many time, I mean brutally three times in about 20 years, that even those who are born Muslim feel as though Islam now stands for their government and they reject Muslim wear. I mean they wear Western style clothes.

GRISWOLD: That’s exactly right. They reject Muslim names that they were given in order to go to government schools and that was a policy that Christian missionaries began long before the Muslims did. But if you wanted to go to school, you had to adopt a name that reflected the faith.

MULLINS: Now this is important in the whole context of your book because you say one of the really inflammatory areas that you’re looking at right now is disagreements, conflicts within one particular faith.

GRISWOLD:  That’s exactly right. I would say what I’ve seen after 7 years of travelling along this fault line, and here in America, is that the most important religious struggles that we’re not paying attention to, are not between religions, they’re inside them. They’re between liberals and conservatives, Sufis, Sunnis, Shias, over who has the right to speak for God.

MULLINS: That’s in Islam, but you say it also happens in Christianity.

GRISWOLD: Absolutely. It’s actually eerie to see it happening back here in terms of ground zero or on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. What we’re really seeing is conservatives saying, we speak for God and no one else does.

MULLINS: Alright, can you bring in, since you’re talking about America right now, can you bring in American evangelicals who have been so deeply involved in Sudan?

GRISWOLD: In 2003, when I began reporting this book, I went to Sudan with Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son.

MULLINS: The American evangelist?

GRISWOLD: Exactly. He was going for the first time to meet with Bashir, Sudan’s current president, to ask for the right to evangelize among Muslims in the north. That has been illegal for the last 100 years, since the Brits split Sudan between north and south on the tenth parallel. And, you know, south of that line, the Brits did not build any infrastructure whatsoever. They left it to missionaries to do. And that’s why Christianity has such a long relationship with the south. And many of the Christians who live along the tenth parallel have traditionally been enslaved by their Islamic northern neighbors. They see Islam as rapacious and really out to destroy them. And so Christians, Western Christians, who’ve worked with them, carry back that same message. And that’s become a primary driver in American understandings of Islam.

MULLINS: Thank you very much for coming in. Author Eliza Griswold, speaking to us about Sudan and the division’s there. Her latest book is called. The Tenth Parallel – Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Thanks again.

GRISWOLD:  Thank you.

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