Author Talk With Eliza Griswold
In her new book—The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam—Eliza Griswold explores the relationship between faith and power.
Griswold talks with Anna Louie Sussman about religion, democracy and rights.
Anna Louie Sussman: At the start of your book, you make it clear how very little “the state” means in places like Nigeria and Somalia; here and in many other countries where you travelled, the state offers citizens, as you say, “almost nothing in the way of services or political rights.” Religious movements: what do they offer in the way of political rights?
Eliza Griswold: Wait. Back up. First, let’s ask what does “the state” mean? In many countries, particularly in Africa, national borders are largely arbitrary, were imposed by colonial powers, and divide ethnic groups and families in random, unsustainable ways. A state that grows out of borders like this is, by definition, very weak.
And, many of the resulting post-colonial governments are corrupt and perceived as such. People take different positions against the state, and explain its corruption and inauthenticity in terms of their own experience. Religion, more than any other experience, has become the measuring stick by which the state has failed, and the source of a new authenticity that is based on what is usually an imagined past—this idealized, imagined past when people were better taken care of. Life was easier and perfect and religion guaranteed that. It’s an imagined utopia: “Oh, we’re going to return to this time when everyone was happy and everyone had enough to eat.”
ALS: You describe something that sounds far from utopian. In terms of actual political rights, what does religion offer?
EG: Let’s start with very practical rights like water or land. The state does not guarantee people the right to go to school or to have clean water, so religious groups come in and guarantee these rights, as the largest form of collective identity, both local and global. People turn to religious entities to guarantee those rights that the state cannot give.
ALS: What does that mean in terms of democracy?
EG: One of the paradoxes that I found in many places on The Tenth Parallel is that democracy actually intensifies religious conflict, certainly in its nascent stages, because you have political power up for grabs, and people looking to grab it by any means possible. Religion becomes a means by which to grab political power. People take different positions and say, “that’s not going to last," that "it’s just a stage of early democracy.” I’m not so sure.
ALS: You describe America’s faith-based foreign policy. To what extent should religion be a factor or consideration in America’s foreign policy?
EG: Religion has to be a factor. In most of the world, it is the fabric of people’s lives. For a lot of the world, the understanding of secularism—or of America’s effort at secularism—is allied with immorality, rapacious use of resources and YouTube. Every negative we can throw in—television, pornography—goes hand in hand with secularism.
We’ve tried under the International Religious Freedom Act to safeguard religious freedom around the world, not just for Christians, but for others too. But it’s impossible to police religion globally; the very act of global policing looks to many people, a lot like a neocolonial effort.
In many places I travelled, religious leaders are likely to outlast political leaders. In forming long-term relationships in foreign countries, we need to address those religious leaders far more seriously. There’s a great book called A Mosque in Munich in which Ian Johnson points out that we’re not very good at understanding who’s who: if someone wears a suit and is very eloquent, we’re much more likely to talk to him, no matter what his linkages really are. It’s not as if America makes easy-to-fix blunders when it comes to diplomacy with religious leaders. It’s really, really hard.
ALS: Do you have any country-specific or general advice for the American foreign policy establishment? Any examples of constructive engagement you’ve seen that you’d like to highlight?
EG: In Indonesia after the tsunami, our response improved our international profile exponentially. People are looking for help, and for the US to supply that without strings attached, which we are lucky enough to be able to do, goes a long way.
ALS: Anywhere else you saw examples like this while reporting your book?
EG: I spent time in Africom, in Djibouti, and was really consistently impressed by the attitude of the American soldiers stationed there. They saw themselves as part of an armed Peace Corps. They could talk to me about whatever they wanted, since I was basically hanging out on the base. They told stories about working with the Afar people—who are Muslims and a notoriously closed society in eastern Ethiopia—their stories about digging wells, and helping people with mobile veterinary clinics, and things like this. They weren’t trying to sell me anything. (They weren’t even aware that they could!) But their own individual experiences, people to people, were huge for them, and, I imagine, for the communities they served.
ALS: Interesting. I was suspect when I first heard about Africom. It sounded like such a wrong move, PR-wise.
EG: Me too. Africom functions as a way to launch airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, so it’s not an easy sell, but the soldiers are doing a lot of good work over there, whether that’s the intention of the thing or not.
ALS: There are certain resource-scarce situations in which Christianity and Islam coexist peacefully. What best promotes coexistence?
EG: What I’ve seen work most effectively is when community organizations are able to get buy-ins from both sides. In Nigeria, there was a green stove that a pastor and an imam were trying to figure out how to distribute to people. When people need to rely on one another to survive, when that’s their daily experience, then that’s the answer.
ALS: And how do they reach the conclusion that they need—rather than need to eliminate one another?
EG: Usually with some help. And, unfortunately, often in post-conflict situations. A guy burns his neighbor’s house; his neighbor slaughters his cows; now everyone is destitute; their children can’t marry. In order to ensure mutual survival, they have to stop fighting.
ALS: Again and again throughout your book, people—in Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the mega-churches in Nigeria—say, essentially, “I joined so I could get a job.”
EG: Usually it’s not that the church or the Brothers are giving out the jobs themselves. It’s social networking, and it is effective. “I joined so I could get a job,” yeah. But I joined not so I could get a job from the Brothers, but so I could get a job from the rich businessman who joined the Brothers last week but now needs to give back. It’s social networking without Facebook.
ALS: What can secular, non-religious or even anti-religious readers take away from The Tenth Parallel?
EG: Hopefully they’ll take away an understanding that religion is not voodoo. And a sense that the “developing world” isn’t developing towards secularism. That belief isn’t a naïve moment in geopolitical evolution.
ALS: In situations in which there are human rights abuses in the name of religion, I wonder if the people at the top actually understand themselves to be spiritual, and, if so, how do they understand what they are doing?
EG: Look at the Bush administration. Bush made it perfectly clear he believed he was divinely ordained to engage in various wars, and, part of what came out of this was Abu Ghraib. How does American torture fit into that narrative of his faith? This is difficult to imagine. The danger of acting out of righteousness, for any religious regime, is that it justifies behavior, including abusive behavior. The people at the top usually don’t know. I don’t think Bush knew what was going on at Abu Ghraib.
ALS: What about those who ordered killings and massacres you report on in your book? They knew what was going on.
EG: Everybody regretted what they’d done. This was universally true. Even Farihin Ibnu Ahmad [a member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the group linked to the 2002 bombings in Bali]. He didn’t articulate it as such, but there was a lot of regret there. The Nigerian pastor and imam understand, and were very eloquent about the fact that they were manipulating religion. Others just believe they made a mistake.
ALS: You write about growing up a bishop’s daughter. Can you talk a bit about your own relationship to faith?
EG: I am definitely a seeker. I’ve always been interested in matters of the spirit, but I take other people’s beliefs more seriously now. I don’t believe that I can explain them away, or intellectualize them. My own relationship to faith? I grew up in a Christian household, where questions of faith and intellect were linked. How could smart people believe in God? That question has definitely driven a lot of my life. In terms of what I believe, I think I’m just at the beginning of figuring that out, and I’m not sure I ever will, but I know that my curiosity is a form of seeking. I’m not just intellectually curious, but also spiritually curious.
Anna Louie Sussman is a writer in New York.