MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, Verizon and the striking communications workers of America, does any of it matter to you?

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBut first, it's the distinction between a drought and a famine. Across the Horn of Africa, seasonal rains failed for the third straight year, a drought currently pushing the entire region to the brink of crisis. But the famine taking place in Somalia is largely a man-made tragedy responsible for the deaths of almost 30,000 children and threatening more than two million people.

MR. KOJO NNAMDISomalia lies in the corner of what Eliza Griswold calls a faith-based fault line, a line band of arid grasslands along the southern fringe of the Sahara, dividing the deserts of the Muslim north and the tropical forests of the Christian and Animist south. The countries that straddle this latitude are grappling with growing populations, shrinking resources and escalating tensions between religious communities.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBut Eliza Griswold says the most important battles are taking place within the faiths themselves. She joins us in studio. She is the author of "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam." She's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Eliza Griswold, thank you for joining us.

MS. ELIZA GRISWOLDThank you for having me.

NNAMDIAcross East Africa, seasonal rains have failed for the third straight year and contributed to a historic famine in Somalia. The U.N. says 640,000 kids are acutely malnourished, while between two and three million Somalis, almost half the population, is in need of immediate, life-saving assistance. I use the word contributed because famine is a really man-made catastrophe. Are they not, even though they're influenced by the weather?

GRISWOLDThat's absolutely right. They are man-made and Somalia's is no different. In fact, the U.S. played a role here in backing a rebellion, in backing actually an invasion in 2006 that overthrew the nascent government of Somalia and actually led to the very thing we were hoping to destroy, which is a popular militant rebellion and those are the guys, the very bad guys, al-Shabab, who are holding most of the country hostage.

NNAMDIAs a reporter and as an author, you traveled across this thin band of land along the 10th parallel of Africa often referred to as the Sahel. In many of these countries like Sudan, Nigeria, conflicts often pit Muslims versus Christians, but Somalia is different. How so?

GRISWOLDSomalia is different in that, first of all, it's 99.9 Muslim and the longstanding tension it has is with its neighbor to the west, Ethiopia, which is actually evenly split between Christianity and Islam, even though the Ethiopian government will say that since the 4th century they've been Christian. So there are many, many religious tensions in the Horn of Africa.

GRISWOLDBut the most prevalent today within Somalia itself is that between the longstanding Sufi traditional religious leaders and this new strain of Arabized Islam, which is what they would call it themselves, which tends to be more militant than their own religion. And there's a fight between the two, the Sufis and the Sunnis, there in Somalia over who should guide the future of the country and the religion.

NNAMDIYou spent years crisscrossing this region and you structured this book around individual stories. One of the people on the frontline of this current story is a doctor named Hawa Abdi. Who is she?

GRISWOLDShe is the most remarkable woman I've met in my life. She is a doctor. She's a gynecologist and a lawyer. She runs, under her own steam, a refugee camp for 90,000 -- that's 90 thousand people right...

NNAMDIThat used to be her family farm, didn't it?

GRISWOLDIt was once her family farm.

NNAMDIHow did it become a refugee camp for 90,000 people?

GRISWOLDAbout 20 years ago, she started a one-room hospital and that hospital in the civil war during the '90s became a safe haven for people fleeing from the war in Mogadishu. They came to her because they trusted her. They took residence up on her farm. And when I was last there, I watched them setting up new tents on what I thought was a hill, but in fact, it wasn't a hill. It was a mass grave for more than 10,000 people who she helped bury during the 1990s famine.

GRISWOLDOne of the most, I would say, the most exciting thing that's come out of this book is that people have taken up Dr. Hawa Abdi's cause. She's writing her own book. She is absolutely remarkable. We got to meet Hilary Clinton. She's getting the recognition she deserves and hopefully, because it doesn't always happen this way, but hopefully that recognition will translate into action on the ground.

NNAMDIHawa Abdi, as you said, is a medical doctor. She stays, why?

GRISWOLDShe stays. She's from a powerful, relatively affluent family. She sold her family gold to stay. Her story -- she is -- her story is very unique and I'm going to let her tell most of it in her own book, but she stays because she feels that she owes her people. She's set up this camp like nothing I've ever seen. It's like an innovation practice. She has a storeroom underneath the hospital and when I walked past it, I saw these bars in the storeroom. I said what's that? It's a jail. She puts men who are caught beating their wives in this jail.

GRISWOLDIt's the first time there's been accountability for Somali men in history. She has these elder councils in which women and men equally have a role in what happens in the camp and most importantly, she forbids discussion of clan, which is the single most divisive issue in Somalia. She's unreal.

NNAMDIIn a lot of ways, that's clearly true. We'd like -- if you'd like to join this conversation, have you traveled across the 10th parallel in Nigeria or Sudan or Ethiopia? Why do you think these regions are racked by conflict? Call us at 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org, and join the conversation there. Ever since the failed American intervention in Somalia in the 1990s, the U.S. and the international community have been wary of getting directly involved in that country, but we continue to influence events indirectly, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, don't we?

GRISWOLDAbsolutely. Well, not only have we supported drone strikes in Somalia, which are highly unpopular on the ground as one might imagine, but we did back this Ethiopian invasion that became an unpopular occupation. And now, you know, we spend double. In 2009, our military aid to Somalia was $250 million, give or take. That's more than double what we gave in food aid.

GRISWOLDAnd since then, because of licensing with the U.S. Treasury Department, we stopped giving any aid at all. Happily, really with the leadership of Secretary of State Clinton, we've now made it possible for aid groups to get U.S. aid once again to use in Southern Somalia.

NNAMDILet me go to the telephones. Here is Sumine in Arlington, Va. Sumine, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

SUMINEGood afternoon.

NNAMDIGood afternoon.

GRISWOLDGood afternoon.

SUMINEOne of the reasons why people starve is there are two rivers in Southwestern Somalia, which flows from Ethiopian highland. Those rivers did not dry up. They are still flowing. The amount might have been reduced, but they are still there. Some of my Somali friends tell me one of the reasons why people starve and have to leave the area is al-Shabab is recruiting all young and able-bodied men into its army and it's not allowing women to farm and that's why people have to leave. Southwestern Somalia has been, for years and years, the source of crops and vegetables to Somalis.

SUMINEBut al-Shabab was helped by (word?) soldiers, which invaded Somalia and blew up all houses and buildings if one al-Shabab...

NNAMDILet me get the response to the first part of your question first, Sumine, before we get deluged with Ethiopia.

GRISWOLDSo Sumine, absolutely. I mean, there are many ways in which al-Shabab is controlling people, not letting people leave their lands because they want to keep power over them even if they're starving to death. Recruiting boys has been going on for a very long time, not letting women work. In fact, they invaded Dr. Hawa Abdi's camp in May of 2010 saying a woman couldn't do the work she was doing. She told them to get out. It was actually at that point, it was Hisbah Islam, another group, but now linked to al-Shabab.

GRISWOLDAnd she stood up to them and two-thirds of those 90,000 people in her camp are women and children because, of course, the men are dead. They were fighting or they've left the country to make money so it's very, very much an issue of women are forbidden from working.

NNAMDIOur guest is Eliza Griswold, author of "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam." She's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Sumine, thank you very much for your call. These are conflicts that are taking place thousands of miles from Washington, D.C. but they end up affecting us in profound and subtle ways. Sumine reminds me or his call reminds me that we have a large Somalian and Ethiopian community right here in the Washington area that is really interested in what's going on there and are in many ways active in it.

GRISWOLDAbsolutely, when I get into a taxi, because so many Somalis are taxi drivers in D.C., I always ask where people are from. And I'm careful not to make a guess because, at this point, you don't want to be calling an Ethiopian -- or an Ethiopian an Eritrean or an Ethiopian without being very careful.

NNAMDIExactly right, Sumine, thank you very much for your call. The other way they affect us in profound and subtle ways, the truly horrific suffering we have seen has forced Washington to re-think its anti-terror policies. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control had previously prevented aid groups from operating in areas controlled by al-Shabab, but the Obama administration recently agreed to waive those limitations.

GRISWOLDThis has been one of the more exciting, at least from a policy perspective, development in the past few weeks. For more than two years, aid groups have been lobbying to be able to work in Somalia, which means in order to do that, in order to work in any country where there's terrorism, you have to get the special license called an OFAC license, as you mentioned, from the Treasury Department. We do, we issue them in Sudan for blanket country. We issue them in Gaza, but we weren't issuing them in Somalia.

GRISWOLDSo with some -- you know, many journalists took up this cause, many activists pointed out this and so we have been able to push toward the lifting of this ban and, again, with Secretary Clinton's help and the State Department. They said, do you know what? We have to waive this policy because it's actually costing people's lives in Somalia.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. Does the U.S. play a constructive role in these conflicts in your view? What role should the government -- and we'll talk later about missionaries. What role should the government and missionaries be playing? 800-433-8850. You can send an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org or you can send us a tweet at kojoshow. Somalia lies in the upper eastern corner of Africa straddling this invisible line, the ten degrees north of the equator. Why is the 10th parallel so significant?

GRISWOLDWell, this space really, the 700 mile and we could even say up to a 1,000 mile-wide band between the equator and the 10th parallel because Mogadishu is quite farther south, is a curious geological and geographic fault line. It's here that two kinds of weather actually meet, dry warm air dropping from the north and wet, warm air rising from the south collide around the equator. It's called the inner tropical convergent zone and it causes extreme droughts and extreme flooding, both actually crazily enough.

GRISWOLDAnd the weather created here, actually, spins off the West Coast of Africa and strikes Americas East Coast as Hurricanes. So it's just one more -- one more example of the way in which weather, like religion, links us to one another. Whether we like it or not. So essentially what happens, because of that weather, on the ground in Africa is, here is the Southern edge of the Sahara, the Southern edge of the dry North and the beginning, as you said in the beginning of the show, of the grasslands and then the wetter South.

GRISWOLDThis is pretty predominate within inside Africa, along the coast, the patterns are a bit different do to sailors. But inside Africa, this is exactly how it works and it's become quite a sharp fault line.

NNAMDIIf you stand in front of a world map and trace the path of the 10th parallel, your finger will run over some of Africa's longest running conflicts, Somalia, Sudan, Chad. You also hit on countries that are, well, technically at peace but grappling with combustible feuds over religion. Places like Nigeria, Ethiopian, feuds over resources, all along the 10th parallel.

GRISWOLDAbsolutely. I mean, a lot of the reality here is that we're looking at the fallout from arbitrary colonial boundaries, which never made any sense in the first place. And so during the scramble of Africa, late 1800s, people carved up those maps according to greed, essentially to colonial appetites and divided people from one another and created these false coherencies. And where those governments are weak, at best, rapacious at worst, we see people turn to other kinds of identities. And that's mostly religion. More than ethnicity, more than race, people turn to religion as an identifier.

NNAMDIIn many of these countries, you have a similar pattern, nomadic herders, mostly Muslim, overlapping with sedentary farmers, mostly Christian and animist. In some places, you have a racial component with lighter skin Muslims and black Christians. This pattern is the product of a history that unfolded over hundreds of years, going back to the original spread of Islam. Please explain.

GRISWOLDThese are the most thoughtful questions I've ever been asked about this book, I have to say. And I'm very grateful for them.

NNAMDIYou're welcome.

GRISWOLDSo this unfolded, it depends who you talk to, if -- so many African Christians, especially in Sudan today, will say -- will trace their roots back to the book of Acts, 37 A.D. to be precise, a few years after Jesus was killed, to the conversion of the first Sudanese eunuch by a roadside river in Jerusalem. And so many African Christians will say that that eunuch came back to, what was then, Ethiopia and was the first missionary among his own people.

GRISWOLDAnd so that African Christianity predates any kind of Western -- predates the West. It's a very important idea. On the flipside, when you look at Islam here, in Africa, Islam was not spread by the sword, not at all. Totally peacefully, trade and inter-marriage. One of my favorite stories that I learned in the course of reporting this book was what happened in Ethiopia.

GRISWOLDDuring the Prophet Muhammad's lifetime, before, actually, Islam was a religion, when he was under siege by his own people in Mecca, he fled and sent about a dozen of his followers to Africa to the court of a Christian king, the King of Abyssinia. And these dozen followers, including his daughter, were seeking safe haven. And to do so, to get a little plot of land where they could not die, they told the king a story. And the story they told the king was the story of the birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary under a date tree, a story that's in the Koran.

GRISWOLDAnd those followers were granted safe haven and their descendents still live in Ethiopia. So Ethiopia is riven by religious tensions, even though they bubble beneath the surface a lot and play out in their foreign policy, as in their invasion of Somalia. And, yet, there's peaceful coexistence and had been for more than 1,000 years.

NNAMDIOne of the key distinctions for understanding how and why conflicts continue to simmer in this band, however, is battles within religions. We'll talk about that when we come back. You can still call us, 800-433-8850, or send e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Do you think Islam and Christianity are destined to clash? How important are divisions within religion? What role do you think religion should play in international politics? 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation with Eliza Griswold. She is the author of "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam." She's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. One of the reasons these groups that we were talking about before the break, co-exist is that the spread of Islam,, essentially, stopped at the 10th parallel, did it not?

GRISWOLDIt did, thanks to the tsetse fly. So where dry lands ends in Africa, so begins this wetter land and where the wet land begins, so do tsetse flies. And tsetse flies carry sleeping sickness and that sleeping sickness killed off the camels and the horses who the Islamic traders and missionaries -- because again, Islam was spread peacefully and through trade in Africa. These guys rode South and when they hit the 10th parallel, they had to stop because their horses died. And that's where Islam largely stopped, even today.

NNAMDII mentioned, going into the break, the key distinction for understanding how and why these conflicts continue to simmer along the 10th parallel is battles within religions. And all the places you visited, you found that ideas of religious identity are much more fluid then you think. Sudanese Christians practice a hybrid version of Christianity and Animism faith, moderate Muslims worry about the influence of new radical strains in the faith in Nigeria and Somalia. Talk about that.

GRISWOLDWell, my favorite group, that we might call syncretic, right, of these kind of mixed faiths, is a group based in Nigeria called Nasfat. And they are, essentially, and I bet we get calls for this, but they are Muslim Pentecostals. And they practice on Sunday and they use drums and music and they sell a very popular form of a kind of cola called Nasmalt. They run a travel agency. They run a dating agency.

GRISWOLDAnd they will say to you, look, we're in competition here with Christians and why should we meet when it's not popular, when it's boring. We need adherence to the faith and we're out there making sure that our followers, too, can practice the gospel of prosperity. That they, too, can find -- basically, make money through their belief in God, which is kind of a Max Vabor (sp?) , you know, Protestant work ethic for the 21st century.

NNAMDIBut in Nigeria, which we're talking about right now, the expansion of the Pentecostal churches, apparently, when Muslims see the expansion of these churches, they see a faith that venerates the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit and that's smacks of polytheism. You're worshipping three gods...

GRISWOLDExactly.

NNAMDI...as opposed to one so that we have a problem with that.

GRISWOLDAbsolutely. And, so essentially, the patterns are different depending where you are in the country. So the Muslim Pentecostals, Nasfat, operate mostly in the South. They're mostly Urabá. So Urabá being both Christians and Muslims among them, where this idea of Pentecostalism becoming more threatening, happens much more along the 10th parallel in the middle belt where these two religions actually, practically, meet on the ground. The idea of the trinity does actually fit spirit-based religions in many ways.

GRISWOLDAnd it also -- these guys will -- I mean, I've been in actual live debates between Christians and Muslims in a Kenyan slum where these guys have loud speakers set up and they'll say, you know, you say it's monotheism, but you've got three gods. And they'll say oh, really. Well, you say that -- you know, it just goes back and forth. So -- but, yes, this idea of the trinity is very troubling to many Muslims who think it doesn't -- how do you have one God? How does God have a son? Who's this Holy Spirit figure? Yeah.

NNAMDIIn Southern Sudan, decades of war have pitted the Muslim dominated government in the North against a group of Christian tribes in the South. But away from politics, pastoralist Muslims and Christian farmers have had to share the grasslands and the swamps of the border for generations. Today, that whole area is in a very fragile peace. How does history influence what is happening on the ground?

GRISWOLDHistory influences what's happening in Sudan in so many different ways. And the conflict there has roots in ethnicity, race, religion, colonial history. One thing that happen is, as we know, the Brits who were the colonial power in Sudan faced the largest Islamic rebellion they'd seen in history in the late 1800s, the Mahdi rebellion. They won after being shamed, pretty significantly.

GRISWOLDAnd what they did is, when they got control of these million square miles, they said to the Christian missionaries, we're not going to deal -- you're not preaching to Muslims. We're not having another rebellion. You're headed to the South -- explicitly, you're headed South of the 10th parallel where the people are, what they called Pagans, indigenous believers, as the majority of people still are in the South.

GRISWOLDSo, essentially, the North got developed, the South did not. The only colonial power in the South, only roads, schools, hospitals were missionary hospitals. And that's lead to a lot of uneven development that created this four decades of Civil War.

NNAMDIYou begin this book with the story of a Southern Sudanese Chief named Nyol Paduot whose village lies in the disputed region of Abia. His story reveals a lot about religion and the role of outsiders in Southern Sudan, how come?

GRISWOLDSo, Chief Paduot lives right smack on the 10th parallel and since I've written about him, he's been driven from his land with his people. And when I went to visit him, you know, I always was careful about whether I was putting this idea of the 10th parallel in place. You know, was this my metaphor and -- so I was skeptical. And when I got there, I noticed that they had what I thought were scarecrows on the top of their hot -- in fact, they were crosses, and Chief Paduot believed that this was the beginning of the Christian liberated South against the Muslim North.

GRISWOLDHe had been -- of course, he was born neither Christian or Muslim, he was born as an indigenous believer. He was forced to join Islam in order to go to school, had to choose a new name. Where did that policy come from? Christian missionaries before the Islamic regime. So chooses his Muslim name, he's an nominally a Muslim, he wants to leave Islam, he goes to the Catholic priest and says "Make me a Christian." The Catholic priest is threatened by the Islamic security forces. You can't convert the Chief.

GRISWOLDThe Chief gets pissed off that he can't get converted, he goes back to his indigenous religions and marries and Episcopal wife. So religion is as fluid as any other kind of identity that we have here.

NNAMDIYou say the decision to embrace Christianity in Southern Sudan isn't just a religious decision, it's also a political act for, example, after centuries of being forced into indentured servitude, many people consider Islam to be a religion of slavery.

GRISWOLDAbsolutely. And the current regime in Khartoum has, of course, created that perception by waging the modern worlds bloodiest jihad against Christians and Muslims alike in the South of the country. And so Christianity has been a watch word, a moral backbone, a form of identity to stand up against that perceived Islamic (word?) .

NNAMDIEven though the actual experience of these people has little to do with a religion, it has to do with the people who are espousing that religion, who they feel have oppressed them.

GRISWOLDA 1,000 percent. Even, you know, even in Imam, in that same town of Abia, the Chief had a cousin who is an Imam, who embraced Islam from his heart and was forced to fight against his fellow people and refused and he was tortured for that.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Eliza Griswold. She is author of "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam." Eliza Griswold is a senior fellow at the New American Foundation. Here is Joe in Washington, D.C. Joe, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOEHello, can you hear me?

NNAMDIYes, we can, Joe.

JOEGood, okay. This is a great conversation. You're both doing a great job and kind of unveiling what's going on in that confusing area. I just wanted to, on one point, move the discussion forward a little bit. Earlier, Ms. Griswold did mention the conflict between Sufis and Sunnis in Somalia. And a lot of Americans are very confused about Sufis and often they think, oh, it's like Shi'a versus Sunni, but a lot of Sufis are Sunni, a lot of Sufis are Shi'a. One of the reasons they resist this kind of thing is that they're very non-sectarian.

JOEAnd the way they conduct themselves, normally, is what Americans might perceive in Buddhists, for example. And my understanding, in Somalia -- I have not been there. I've been in the Middle East and in the Maghreb. My understanding is that after 10 years of patience, they held councils and decided they would have to engage in resistance. But in their resistance, they put loud speakers on their vehicles as they drove into battle and played music very, very loud, which is anathema to the fundamentalists.

JOESo they had not only weapons, but loud music, which you could use in all kinds of villages expressions and artistic expressions. But we had also a bit of confusion in New York, for example, the ground zero Mosque was sponsored by Sufis who wanted to join -- and more moderate Muslims, and it's the confusion of Americans around this issue. This trend (unintelligible) ...

NNAMDIWell, you should know that Eliza Griswold's next project is writing about American Muslims. So she's the person to whom you want to address this. But we're talking, in his case, in Somalia, about what we talked about earlier, which was an intra-religion feud.

GRISWOLDSo here's the thing. Sufism, like, any other religion -- we love to -- and this is not going to be popular, but it's going to be true. We love to classify Sufis as the Buddhists of Islam because then we think oh, they -- no, they don't fight. The truth is, throughout history, Sufis have been as militant as any other group because there's everything within every group. So you are absolutely right that the Sufis took up arms and got very tired of this Sunni Arabi-Islam among them in Somalia.

GRISWOLDIs Sufism some overwhelmingly peaceful trend? Not necessarily so. It's certainly dynamic, it's certainly mixed with music and all sorts of prayer. And you know what, it mostly resembles evangelical Christianity. Why? Because the way you encounter God is through the human heart. It's a personal and direct relationship with God. And it's pretty beautiful to witness that, what you were talking about vicar, some of the beautiful singing and dancing that goes on within Sufism.

NNAMDIJoe, thank you very much for your call. I'm glad you mentioned evangelical Christianity because in the case of Sudan, the U.S. Congress and a unique lobbying campaign out of Washington, have profoundly influenced the way we see the conflict in that country. Here in the U.S., a parallel set of arguments is taking place about Christian identity. You've interviewed evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham, son of Bill Graham -- Billy Graham, who are aggressively inserting themselves into U.S. foreign policy.

NNAMDIThese groups have mobilized around the premise that Christians are being oppressed in corners of the Muslim world. You followed Franklin Graham during his trips to Sudan, including a meeting he had with Sudanese president, Umar al-Bashir. Tell us about what that meeting looked and felt like.

GRISWOLDThat was a pretty curious encounter. That was the first time Franklin Graham had met with President Bashir who has since been indicted by the international criminal court for crimes against humanity, for his actions in Darfur. But those charges could include what he's done in the South of his own country, what he's doing now in South Kordofan. But the two men sat down to meet in the marble palace of President Bashir.

GRISWOLDEach tried to convert the other to his respective faith, that didn't go over terribly well. Franklin Graham drew Bashir's attention to the fact that he had twice bombed his -- Graham's hospital. Graham ran, at that time, the largest hospital in Southern Sudan, again, as we've been talking about, this legacy of Christian missionaries in the South. So what he'd seen, he'd seen firsthand and he laid into Bashir about it.

GRISWOLDBashir shot back at him and then the rest of us had to leave the room, and I learned later that Graham handed President Bashir a George W. Bush 2004 re-election pin and said, Mr. President, I understand you'll be talking to my president later in the day. Why don't you tell him you're his first voter here in the Sudan?

NNAMDILeaders like Graham are interested both in helping and in proselytizing, and indeed, you say the two cannot be separated in their world view.

GRISWOLDThe two cannot be separated, and on this point I want to be extremely clear, because both while reporting this book, and even before being in eastern Congo and places where there was no -- even Doctors Without Borders wasn't. Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse, was doing some of the most cutting edge medical and relief work I've ever seen. So that work has been extremely important.

GRISWOLDDoes it always draw proselytization into it? No. Does it -- on occasion, are there places where proselytization is part of the aim? Yes. Because according to the world view, it's a Christian's duty to not necessarily convert people, it's a Christian's duty to preach the message and let other people decide whether or not they want to join the faith.

NNAMDIYou, too, are the child of a religious background, so to speak. Your father is a former presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. How did that influence your experience and the way you viewed these issues on the ground?

GRISWOLDFirst, I'm sure that growing up around, you know, the chock-a-block table eating dinner from the Crockpot and listening to questions about faith and intellect patterned what it was like when I was little. I mean, how did smart people believe in God? And I think it made me, to be honest, a lot less afraid of figures on either the extreme Christian or extreme Muslim end of things, because I grew up around a -- much more liberal figures, but at the same time, people who believed as strongly in their faith.

GRISWOLDSo I wasn't afraid to ask questions. And after 9/11, you know, as a reporter in the Muslim world, I realized we were missing, A, the fact that four out of five of the world's Muslims don't live in the Middle East, they live in Africa and Southeast Asia, and B, that religion did play a role here. It wasn't just oh, those are poor people and they're fighting. They pretend it's about God. God patterned everybody's life and that was an important thing to understand firsthand.

NNAMDIThis year marks the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. This was an event that prompted a lot of questions about religion and global politics. But within the United States, it also prompted soul searching within faiths. We've talked about Franklin Graham for whom the attacks were seen as proof of an existential threat. But you've done a lot of reporting within the many Muslim communities in this country, and that's what you're gonna be writing about next.

GRISWOLDI've done some, and I'm working on a magazine piece around this now and then the next book that I'm working about is about poverty in America. But within the American Muslim question after 9/11, I think what I've heard mostly -- because I'm not a Muslim so most of the Muslims who I've spoken to say it was a wake-up call to identifying what it meant to be Muslim. How you could be a patriot and a Muslim? And that was not -- there was not conflict inherent there and Muslims really had to confront the rise of militant Islam and what that meant within their faith.

NNAMDIEliza Griswold is author of "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam." She's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Thank you so much for joining us.

GRISWOLDThank you so much for having me.

NNAMDIWe're gonna take a short break. When we come back, Verizon and the striking Communication Workers of America. Does any it matter to you? I'm Kojo Nnamdi.