New Perspective: Religious Life in the Tenth Parallel

Soldiers stand guard after December 2008 post-election riots in central Nigeria leave hundreds dead.Updated: Sept. 21, 2010

At least 10,000 Nigerians have died during Christian-Muslim violence during the past decade. The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria is evenly divided between Christians and Muslims.

Eliza Griswold, who has spent the last five years traveling to Nigeria to examine the causes of religious violence, explores the fact the Muslims and Christians in Africa are involved in a numbers game, in her book “The Tenth Parallel”.

The tenth parallel north, the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator, is the defining metaphor of our time, according to Griswold.

An ideological front line stretching across two continents and nineteen countries, this is where Christianity and Islam collide—a profound encounter that shapes the lives of more than a billion people. It’s not just geographic; it’s demographic.

Hear Griswold explain the fundamentals of her views in this Blogging Heads interview withNell Freudenberger.

The Tenth Parallel

Griswold offers thinking people a new context for understanding what’s going on in our world, at a time when big words like poverty, religious conflict or global development are ambiguous, overwhelming concepts.

While CNN focuses on Nigeria — the most visible paradigm of a self-destructive country breeding terrorists like Uman Farouk AbdulMutallab — Griswold directs our attention to the tenth parallel north. She also puts religion front and center as the major influence in this zone.

The center of global faith lies in the jungles and buzzing megacities of Africa and Asia. Of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, more than half live along the tenth parallel, as do roughly 60 percent of the world’s 2 billion Christians. Here, as elsewhere, Christianity and Islam are growing faster than the world’s population.

Increasingly, we are seeing a global numbers game that threatens us all.

I speak for myself now, and not Griswold, who I’m researching. We must ask ourselves — and answer honestly — how democratic institutions take root in deeply divided countries, where both religions believe they are “born to rule”.

Our primary concern at Anne of Carversville is the world’s women, who have always been the pawns of men and history.

On the first day of 2010, reading and researching this concept of the tenth parallel — north and south — I have a geographical lens perspective that has eluded me until now. I’m sure that if I study malaria, it’s concentrated in the tenth parallel. Presumably, a wide variety of global health challenges thrive in the tenth parralel.

It’s also clear to me that this religious battle is a numbers game in the tenth parallel. Knowing that Scandinavian women are the most institutionally liberated in the world — but that we also have a woman president in Argentina — I’m asking myself if women are more liberated closer to the North and South poles.

Understanding the top-level decision-making processes, institutions, ideologies and players in the tenth parallel will be a key Cultural Creative goal of Anne of Carversville in 2010. This biggest evolution in my own mindset in 2009 is a rejection of colonialism as being the explanation for all that’s wrong in Africa today.

I now understand that modern-day colonial rule is part of a historical battle of conquest that has existed for thousands of years. Reading the list of countries in the tenth parallel, north and south, most have been colonized, right along with Canada, Australia and America.

Were the indiginous peoples of these lands less populous and more easily brought under control? I don’t know. Design and not global history is my bckground. We will learn the answers to these questions in 2010.

Two major forces are front and center in human existence: religion and patriarchy, which reinforce and feed off of each other. In 2009 I brought this 1970s “old school feminism” front and center in my mind.

via Flickr’s Social_GeographicAs a young New York woman, my thinking was sidetracked away from feminism and onto political ideology and a preoccupation with colonialism and racism. My adoration of a liberal guy and his beliefs was sufficient for me to accept the idea that women’s lives would improve, if only we created nonracist instiutions around the world. I also embraced a lifetime of guilt for the atrocities colonialism perpetuated onto native populations.

Looking at life in the tenth parallel, I belive my friend was wrong in his arguments that economics was the primary problem, not patriarchy and religion. Patriarchy embraces conquest and colonialism and also argues that under all but a few rare ideologies and small religions, women will always be subordinated to men.

I wasted precious years of my life, following his line of reasoning. No more. The rest of my “thinking time” on our planet is devoted to the world’s women and the forces that are united against improving their self-development and human right to think for themselves.

With about 40% of our readers are men, and the vast majority embrace this thinking,

I know that my ideas are not as divisive as they might appear. In reality, it’s men who say “go for it, Anne” on this philosophical approach, with women being more reluctant to call a spade a spade on human rights being disproportionately a women’s issue.

There are good guys everywhere in the world. We have a disproportionate share here at Anne of Carversville.

My hope in 2010 is that enlightened men will help the world’s good girls get out of line, especially in countries where they have nothing to fear. 

Where religion and government oppose women in every respect, we will do our best to help, while acknowledging the danger that surrounds any attempt to change the status quo.

Happy New Year to all of our readers — and to the world’s women. Thanks, guys. Anne