equator, and i spent the past sevena years traveling between the equator i always remember. platitude. so traveling within this bandwidth, 9,000 miles from west africa through southeast asia licking and what happens, christianity and islam actually meet. this single fact that i really began with. four out of five of the world's over 1 billion moslems do not live in the middle east. they are africans and asians. they live within the state. this is where basically the southern edge of the world's muslims be nearly half of the world's 2 billion christians who live in africa and southeast asia. some people refer to this area as the global pelt. a new moniker. and so here most of the people

of faith in the world live and meet each other. i wanted to see what actually happens on the ground when christianity and islam practically meet. >> seven years. >> seven years. >> y? >> i can't think of a more important question. certainly as a reporter, so much about this overblown and oversimplified narrative. i wanted to see what actually happened in floods, droughts, fights over land, oil, water, and even in indonesia, crops of chocolate. and the global price of chocolate spiked the principal ingredient in chocolate is grown in eastern indonesia. christians and muslims began to fight over that very valuable land. so i wanted to see what actually happens when resource conflicts are mixed. it isn't that religion can be explained away by a political economy. it isn't always a question of have and have not.

so essentially i wanted to look, try to restore the reality of this beyond this monolithic oversimplified clash which is simply not the truth on the ground. >> why is the price of a religious issue? >> that is a good question. the price of kick out is a dividing issue. so because -- essentially what has happened in eastern indonesia which is really interesting in terms. dates back hundreds of years. some of these confrontations and the history of coexistence are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. what happened in eastern indonesia primarily, the spice trade, the trade was brought. christian and muslim traders and missionaries to the same beaches and island's imports. this is where the trade went brought them. so in the eastern part of the archipelago islam arrived first

drought indonesia more than 24,000 islands. and so the muslims were traitors. there were sailors. is on really rang the coast, especially in the eastern part of the archipelago. when the portuguese and dutch arrived what happened really in the 16th century is that the dutch targeted and led populations where islam had not reached yet. all of these islands. as the people who live inland that a port. pork is forbidden by muslims. and so the dutch used the five dutch missionaries used to then naturally pre-existing trends and practices of the people to graft christiane the on to local conditions. so how does it come to bear on this? the muslims in the eastern part of indonesia tend to be

wealthier. they have these global trade links. they are on the coast. the christians to live and learn to do not have these. the airport. and so what's happened is the muslims have bought up all lot of the island. the christians live inland and upon these ridges. muslims about a lot of the land. the christians are in essentially sharecroppers. like any sharecropper that process can make people absolutely outraged, especially when they see the plates of roof. christiansen been forced to sell off their land in that area over the past decade. that has made people super angry. >> eliza griswald. are there any generalizations that you can make a bet your travels and the people you've met? >> well, probably the largest surprise for me is that we talk a lot about the clashes between religion. the most important religious confrontations of our time are

not between christianity and islam. they are inside of christianity and islam. they are the confrontations between christians and christians to muslims and muslims over who is a true believer and he's not. you has the right to speak for god and he doesn't. we certainly see that here in america when people will take -- for example, we see that between liberals and conservatives. people like rev. frank and graeme, a half billion dollar evangelical empire him. bois whether it barack obama is a true christian are not. that is about this confrontation inside of christianity. within islam it's even more important to understand that there is no such thing as islam. there are thousands of the sectarian division between sounion shiites. it's also a question between liberals and conservatives over is going to control what is law

means and the 21st century in practical terms whether it's bailing or practices for women's rights or economic policies. these are complications within their religion. they are the most important confrontations of our time. >> what is your relationship? >> i'm glad to say it's a very friendly one. i have a great deal of respect for him. he is also good fun. we traveled together in 2003 had to saddam. when he was going for the first time in history to me with a man he had called just as evil as saddam hussein. when that is still sudan's president today. one he stands indicted by the international criminal court for crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity for what happened in our four. in 2003 door for was just really a whisper. at that time think lee gramm was very much in the public eye because he had called islam a

wicked and evil religion. the north of sudan is primarily muslim. so there was a lot of outcry against his arrival. what i found out, he was going to me with this one enemy. asked if i could go a long pit of his working for vanity fair. he said yes. the technique. we went and sat in the marble palace, it was like watching. it was fascinating. these men he's tried to convert the other. that wasn't terribly successful. then graeme made reference to a hospital that he ran until very recently that the south sudan's largest hospital. and president bush years government and army has twice bombed this hospital. that is how the 40 years of civil war has played out.

especially bashir, he has really bombed hospitals. gramm has seen that up front which is what really shaped his opinions about as long. so he said, mr. president, i have a hospital in the south. he said the one and only sentence he added in english during the whole time. he turned to his aid. isn't that the hospital we bond? and graeme leaned forward and said twice come into mist. with that most of us were ushered out into the driveway. what happened next was even more fascinating. gramm told me later that he remembered that in the pocket of his blue blazer he had a george he leaned forward and took the pen from his pocket and give it to him and said, mr. president, i understand you'll be speaking to my president later today, why don't you tell him.

so what does that mean? is sincerely that means that watch out. i've got to hear the president. i found that particularly interesting at the time because of the relationship between faith and foreign policy which goes so unexplored. we don't really know. .. history books, life. our guest. this is her first nonfiction book. the tenth parallel. 202 is the area could you would like to call. fight 8538 fifer those in the east and central time zones. 585-3886 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zone. first call-up comes from portland, oregon. please go ahead, portland.

>> caller: hello, everybody. i really appreciate your authorr for reaching so many dimensions o talk especially about the world image.a co i have a coupleu of questions t regard to what kind of of econoc hold she sees in the book or she exposes in the book. not only in regards to petroleum, but i think it's very acute she points out a lot of the economy comes down from the hemisphere. it's related to others. my question, i guess, is do you know of any companies that are doing business currently that profit from that economy? that is it. thank you. >> a lot of the local businesses in indonesia do have local

elements and they have international elements. cocoa was just one of the smaller resources and the crops that i was looking at in the course of seven years. much more relevant on the world today would oil. sedan, today, is a huge oil supplier. not to the united states. one thing i was seeing quite a bit of in africa was chinese oil development. you know what, i was also seeing malaysian oil development in an oil feel called haglet, which we are going to be hearing more about. southern sudan, which has had a world with northern sudan, southern sudan on january 9, 2011, very soon, is going to be

voting for it's right to it's own independence. now 80% of sudan's oil is in the south of the country. there's only one way that oil leaves the country, through the north. through a pipeline, the pipeline is heavily protected by chinese oil interest. it used to be a u.s. company which has divested because of so much political power. i had the very curious conversation with some of the former farmers, sudanese farmers solved off of their land by oil interest; right? they are now essentially fisherman, they fish in puddles. i had a group of men say to me, why can't you bring back chevron. we much perform chevron and western oil interest to chinese ones. at least they try to get to know us. that is to say in what looks

like economic policies, we need to say out of particular areas is frequently on the ground much more complicated than it looks at a distance. >> host: good morning, you are on with eliza griswold. >> caller: hi, i wanted to thank the lady between the statement and the christians and muslims, is really between their own kind, muslims against muslims and christians against christians. that's a profound insight that's not recognized. i'd also like to ask her if she knows of any third party that's interested in conflicts between christians and muslims and if she could expound on that. i'd appreciate it. thank you. >> guest: like a third party, like a political party or? >> host: i think he meant generically. anything that you recognize as a third party, corporation, or whatever. >> guest: sure. i will be totally frank. i'm the daughter of a priest.

so i grew up watching a lot of interface dialogue that frankly put me to sleep. piscapalian priest. they can have children. i grew up where questions of faith were barely questions. what does it mean with christians, muslims, jews, buddhist, hindus sit down and try to find common ground. there was a lot of hot air. there are so many places where i've seen substantive interface work. really being done by people themselves. they don't need a third party. in fact, sometimes they are better served without one. so in nigeria, for example, there's a pastor and hamad. they both believe the other one is going to hell. >> host: james and ashofa.

>> guest: yes. james has one arm. the other arm was lopped off in fighting. these guys have done the most successful interface work that i've seen. it's essentially community and organizing 101. they don't deal with garbage collection, but it's like that. one the things they fight about in northern nigeria is firewood. so they get -- essentially they get a buy in from christian and muslim women, because the women are much more likely to be amendable. they say, hey, you guys, it cost $360 to get enough wood to burn, you know, to make your food in a single year. this stove cost $100. we can't buy it for you. how are you going to figure out to buy it? it's bringing in a secular element. really a third element, rather than a third party is maybe the

best way to say it. i think in most situations, people are better off building peace on their own. >> host: dispatching on the fault line between christianity and islam. next call comes from maine. >> caller: yes, good morning. i'm curious whether the author has an idea of -- from the places that she's traveled how the two different religions discussed, how they might or might not be reacting to the controversy of the islamic center proposed for manhattan? >> host: thank you, caller. >> guest: that gets to a super important point. global realities can lead to death in many, many places that i traveled along the 10th

parallel. in particular, the danish cartoon riot left more people dead in nigeria than in any other country. >> host: why? >> guest: for one, we are looking at weak states, really failed states that are weak at best. so local identities tend to be based not around -- if you ask someone who are you, the answer is i'm a nigerian. i'm a christian. i'm a muslim. why? because being a christian or muslim is what guarantees that you get electricity, fresh water, a good road. whether there is no functioning government, people turn to other factors in order to safeguard those most basic human rights. along the 10th parallel, people turn to religions quite a lot. actually, what happens, is i have to say i forget the question -- >> host: it was about the muslim center in new york. it was a good answer. >> guest: essentially what happens is pastor james said

something to me which i repeat all the time. when the west needs us, africa and asia catch the cold. so when something, again, the u.s. invasion of afghanistan, the lunatic holding up the koran and saying he was going to burn it. you know, these images rocket around the world. people do die. people die in kabul. they die in nigeria. so in terms of the ground zero question, because it has not turned explicitly violent here, i have not seen that leading to a lot of violence elsewhere along the 10th parallel. that said, these two sides shape each other. radicals on one side mouth off and they create an equal and opposite reaction on the other side. and that is what is so enably polarizing. this is a true believer.

i'm a true exclusive believer. that creates piss yours on the same side. >> host: how much fall the law? >> guest: the northern third follows islamic law. that has proven very little. essentially the call to return to islamic law is so frequently in this area of the world about rejecting corruption. rejecting what's seen as a failed democracy which is failed by the west. we don't think of that. well, it's about the voodoo, the criminal code that says lop off lands, stone people to death. in fact, not. the first religious edict that we have about stoning nonbelievers comes from the book

of dude onmy, yeah, it comes from one of the older scriptures. not from islam. and curiously enough, one the most interesting places i've seen it practices and in the book is what happened in indonesia after the tsunami. where in the providence, the people decided to adopt sharia. they tell about going out with the virtue squad. it was like taliban meets cops essentially. >> host: next call for eliza griswold comes from orlando. go ahead, orlando. >> caller: yes, thank you for your work. my question is do you belief the differences in religion are really a cover for -- ground for

political power? thank you. >> guest: you know, the answer to that is a complicated one. a lot of the work that i have done and that is essential, we understand, i never found myself in a place where i could explain away somebody's belief in god. really the job of the book was to bring back people's stories. there was no objective truth to saying this is just about politics. or this is -- there were certainly situations in which you could see people's political interests and what was playing out on the ground and how they used religion. i would say that would be one time out of ten. nine times out of ten, there was a faith factor, there was a fault line there that had to be with people's beliefs about god. a lot of the book is restoring just as people told me themselves. >> host: eliza, how did you start the book called "the 10th parallel." >> guest: with difficulty.

i became a freelance journalist in 2000. my first story was about not -- was about crime, woman who are killed against their honor. usually around sex, raped, adultery, this was right before 9/11. i ended up in new york on 9/11 like so many young reporters. two weeks later i was in pakistan with the dust from the world trade centers on my shoes. i was wearing -- i was one of them who had the same experience. most of us really haven't looked back. and so i came of age at a particular time where religion was -- trying to understand religion was very much, there was a market for it, essentially. and so i to be honest as my wonderful editor and paul eli who really decided they could

take on the project and allow me a very long leash that make take several years longer than anticipated, which, in fact, it did. >> host: next call from the guest comes from east hampton, new york. good afternoon, to you. >> caller: hi. i have a book fair question. i've been following her for years. it's extraordinary work. it's very deep, highly symbolic, conceptual, intellectual, moving, and you don't expect that sort of things from journalist. i'm wondering maybe part of the question is the answered in her own biography, whether being the daughter of a priest sort of predisposed her from literary life. moving from literature to journalism provided an opportunity to get into prose. the great poetry book that has

come out as the return to origin. that's sort of the first part of the question. if there's a distinctly literary background that might be related to religious life and poetry. secondly, people who see what you see around the world, tremendous pain and injustice, depravity, most of them, i think, need some sort of vent for that. does your poetry operate as a vent or therapeutic for you? i wonder whether human beings can absorb the kind of things you that see and seem to come back and have a tremendous balance and so on and so forth. >> host: thank you, caller. eliza? >> guest: thank you very much. mostly i write poetry about what i don't understand. that's really it. if that is while i'm reporting a story and i see something or

meet somebody and i can't figure it out on the page in prose, that stuff goes to poetry. for me there is something. that is to be honest, that's my -- that's my religion in a certain way. there's a theologian who writes about something called the safe word, the horizontal, and the vertical world, the sacred and the sector meet. when i can feel that heat, that usually becomes a poem. and i do have a new book of poems that will be out no time soon, but i'm working on it right now. >> host: so he obviously bought "wild awake field." >> guest: that was. and i do hope he bought it. some of the answers, i hope, biographically, "10th parallel"

is not a first person narrative. it's a story about africans and asians. one thing i've learned, in this kind of work there's no such thing as objectivity. the best i could do is continue to own by own subjecttivity. poetry allows somebody ton honest about the lens they are looking through. >> host: where did you go to college? >> guest: i went to princeton university. >> host: why? >> guest: at the time, the writing department was strong and i grew up in philadelphia. which isn't so far. weirdly enough, i missed the light. there's a kind of light in delaware, new jersey, philadelphia, that is not anywhere else. yes, we will leave it there. >> host: next call. who's book is "the 10th parallel: dispatches from the fault line christianity and islam." good afternoon. >> caller: hello. i'm on the air? >> host: you are, sir.

>> caller: hello, i didn't hear you mention, ms. griswold, the fault line within the islamic world on the ethnic basis. you mentioned the majority of muslims are not arabs, in sudan, the fault line between the darfur muslims and the central government which is arab. and the fact that the nonmuslims of the south have for many years emphasized the darfur issues, like the newba, and the other smaller muslim northerners together form a majority of black africans. which together muslim nonarabs with nonmuslim southerners form a huge 2/3 of the majority. and that the darfur issue is essentially racial because the muslim nonarabs of the darfur are being marginalized much like

the southerners which is what a man who just died was kind of like the hero of the whole black majority movement. they considered it a partide, and it was very similar in the whole killing of the blacks -- >> host: caller, we got the point. let's get an answer from miss griswold. >> guest: okay. great point. the larger thing to understand, again, we're talking about sudan, africa's largest country, this is how all of the sudan's wars relate. whether it's darfur, south, east, even the northerners, the newbeians. the central small political, very powerful regime fights against it's own peripheries whether they are against any terms they maybe. in the south traditionally, they have used islam.

sudan waged the bloodiest world between christians and muslims alike. you are right, darfur is muslim/muslim. these are the kind of nuances which are essential to understand to try to decode some of this. christian/muslim all the time. no, it's not the. it's the fault lines within that are truly the most important to watch. >> host: we haven't talked about ethiopia. >> guest: ethiopia, okay. i didn't go to ethiopia until very late in the reporting. and before i went the prophet muhammad was preaching to his own people in mecca, they kicked him out. they didn't want to hear the message of one single god. he fled with most of his followers 210