Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  He got his chance a few months later, when a group approached him and asked if he and his church might do in Afghanistan what they had done in Vietnam. Bob agreed. He grew his beard out long, flew to Pakistan, and traveled with a group of Christians and a guide across into Afghanistan. Bob was pretty proud of himself; he felt both intrepid and enlightened, going into the heart of dangerous territory to love people that most Americans felt were enemies. No one else he knew had done anything even close to this. There was something that gave him pause, however: the schools and hospitals he saw in northern Pakistan were built and run by Catholics. “Holy cow,” Bob thought to himself, “these people are everywhere.”

  When I visited Bob in Dallas in 2009, he brought me to a dinner and told me, “There’s this Muslim guy you’ve got to meet. He’s young, smart, politically active, a good Republican. You guys are a lot alike.” And then he stopped and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You are a Republican, right? Don’t forget, this is Texas.”

  “Let’s go meet your guy,” I told him. It turns out that the guy he was talking about was Suhail Khan, one of the first American Muslims Bob had come to know. After working on Capitol Hill for Congressman Tom Campbell, Suhail had worked in the Bush White House, where he had become friends with a lot of Evangelicals. After that, he had moved to Dallas. Figuring that after their experience with Vietnamese Communists Evangelicals there would be open to Indian Muslims, Bob asked Suhail to come speak at his church. It was such a positive experience that Bob began planning an international interfaith conference at his Southern Baptist church in Keller, Texas, in November 2010. I had the honor of speaking there.

  Bob is convinced that building bridges between Evangelicals and Muslims is a priority similar to the Catholic–Evangelical understanding that took place in the late twentieth century. During the Cordoba House furor, Bob would tweet top-ten lists about Islam and Muslims: “What I Love about Muslims” and “What I’ve Learned from Islam.”

  But his highest hopes are in younger Evangelicals. Just as his generation viewed Catholics differently than their parents did, he hopes the next generation will view Muslims differently than the current one does. He addresses the issue directly in his speeches to younger pastors. One of those pastors came to see me in the fall of 2010, right around the time the anti-sharia referendum passed in Oklahoma. “I just got back from a conference,” he told me, “and the keynote speaker, Bob Roberts, said one of the most Christian things a pastor could do is build relationships with Muslims in our city. He said that just as Christianity values compassion, so does Islam. That is an alien idea to my congregation. But if we’re going to build relationships with Muslims, we will have to know things we admire about Islam. Will you come do a guest presentation at my church?”

  Listening to this pastor in my office, I realized that Bob Roberts wasn’t traveling the path of interfaith cooperation alone. He was bringing others with him. As he changed personally, he implemented changes in his church, and he spread the gospel to his fellow pastors, knowing that each of them had the power to impact large churches as well. Moreover, Bob seemed to intuit that there were two key levers to changing people’s attitudes about other religions—the knowledge they had about a particular religion, and the people they knew from that community. I met Bob in 2009, after I’d been doing interfaith work for more than a decade, and silently marveled at how much somebody outside the formal circles of the movement had figured out in such a short period of time. “Hmmm,” I thought to myself, “maybe we should be implementing some of Bob’s strategies at Interfaith Youth Core.” I only wish I’d met him earlier and learned from his approach faster. It would have saved me a lot of headaches, especially during the summer of 2010.

  PART II

  THE SCIENCE OF INTERFAITH COOPERATION

  When the call came from Christiane Amanpour’s producer in September 2010, a cheer went up at Interfaith Youth Core. Here was a journalist who knew what she was talking about when it came to religion and global affairs. She had reported from all over the world—Bosnia, Afghanistan, Gaza. She had seen religious conflict tear societies apart but had also seen faith-inspired people and organizations do heroic work. She had gotten up close and personal with real Muslim militants, and therefore knew it was laughable that people like Imam Feisal and Daisy Khan were being called radicals. And, especially from her experience in the Balkans, she was acutely aware that Muslims could well be the victims rather than the perpetrators of religiously motivated violence.

  Christiane and I had met several times before. In fact, she had interviewed me for a CNN special called Generation Islam, encouraging me to speak of the hope I saw in the growing Muslim youth population around the world. Usually, when journalists asked me about Muslim youth, it was with an air of foreboding. I was struck that Christiane wanted my perspective on the promise rather than the threat of this rising generation.

  I’d grown up watching This Week—it was part of the Sunday-morning ritual I had with my dad—so seeing George Will stroll into the green room, bowtie neatly in place, was a bit surreal for me. I caught up with the Reverend Rich Cizik and Irshad Manji, my copanelists for the segment on Islam in America, eavesdropping from time to time on the grilling Arianna Huffington was giving a White House economic adviser in the corner. Broadly speaking, Rich, Irshad, and I had the same view of the Cordoba House situation. Rich had recently made a statement at the National Press Club that Jesus would condemn a Florida pastor’s plan to burn copies of the Qur’an. Irshad had written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal stating that the opposition to Imam Feisal’s interfaith center was misguided and then pivoting to emphasize that Muslims should use the media limelight as an opportunity to make Cordoba House the most progressive Muslim project the world had ever known. I had been opening my speeches with the line “Are we entering a new era of American prejudice?” and following it up with statistics and stories of how scared Muslims felt of their fellow US citizens. The typical format of a Sunday-morning talk show is for hosts to quote earlier statements of panelists and then ask them to expound. I was ready with more stories of Muslims as victims.

  At the commercial break, we were hustled from the green room to the set. Christiane shot us a quick smile and then went right back to reading her notes. “Which one of us are you going to start with?” I gingerly asked. She lifted her head and raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, “We don’t tell you those kinds of things ahead of time.”

  The first question went to Rich, the second to Irshad, each basically following the expected script. And then Christiane turned to me: “Eboo, you have done a lot in interfaith dialogue, trying to rebuild bridges here since the disaster of 9/11. What does this say to you, this fervor that’s being whipped up, this rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in this country?” She ticked off the statistics I was going to use—one-third of Americans say Islam encourages violence; over half say they don’t have a good understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam. Waving her hands and raising her voice, she asked point blank, “So, what has all your work done?”1

  Thank God I’d gotten media training. The expert who put me through the drills emphasized three rules: Rule number one, don’t listen to the question. If you make the mistake of hearing the question, don’t let it bother you. Rule number two, have a positive message, know it cold, and be prepared to deliver it in twenty seconds or less. Rule number three, SMILE. Many people won’t remember what you say, he told me, but they will remember your smile. If you get interrupted, repeat the cycle. When they ask you another question, repeat the cycle.

  And that’s exactly what I did. I beamed broadly for the cameras, talked about how in America the forces of inclusion always defeat the forces of intolerance, and told a story of a sixth-grade girl who donated her allowance to Interfaith Youth Core because she was bothered that too many people were being mean to Muslims. Christiane wasn’t having it. “Well, that’s wonderful,” she said dismissively and went on to cite a recent New York Times article on
how scared Muslims were feeling that summer, even more scared than they felt after 9/11.2 And then she gave me a “What are you doing about that?” look. I dutifully put my smile back on and launched into another positive story. I would have kept smiling and pushing sunshine if Irshad had not interrupted.

  It wasn’t until I was on the flight back home that I really thought about Christiane’s first question: “What has all your work done?” She wasn’t asking me about how I felt as a Muslim living in America; she was asking about the impact of my work as president of Interfaith Youth Core. She was treating me as an agent, not a victim, effectively saying, ‘Your job is not just to complain about religious prejudice; your job is to do something about it. The task of the organization you started, the claim of the movement you are part of, is to reduce prejudice and increase pluralism. How can you say you are doing your job if we keep seeing prejudice rise?” It was a perfectly reasonable question—an extremely important one, in fact—and I’m kind of glad that I successfully ignored it when she posed it to me on camera in front of 2 million viewers, because the truth is, it did bother me.

  I’d gotten quite good at talking about religious prejudice, actually. I always had recent survey numbers on the tip my tongue in order to show just how pervasive the problem is in our society. I’d somberly tick off the percentages of Americans who said that Hinduism and Buddhism are “strange,” who wanted Muslims to go through extra security at airports or don’t believe they should serve on the Supreme Court, who, on account of a Mormon or secular-humanist presidential candidate’s faith or their lack of one, would not vote for them. I’d make comparisons to the multicultural and feminist movements. Progress might not have come fast or gone far enough, but at least these issues were on people’s radar screens. Take the election of 2008 as an illustration. For the most part, mainstream America was proud that we had African American and female candidates running for high office. It was certainly central to the media narrative about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. When racism and sexism reared their ugly heads, the media cried foul. But the digs against the candidates’ religions—the suggestion that because he is Mormon, Mitt Romney can’t be president, that Sarah Palin is kooky because she attends an Evangelical church, that Barack Obama is a radical because his grandfather was Muslim—these were commonly stated and rarely called out. Part of the work of Interfaith Youth Core is to convince people that religious prejudice is a serious problem, and that it ought to be considered just as un-American as racism or sexism.

  I’d also become expert at talking about how fast the interfaith movement is growing. A half-century ago, few cities had any organized interfaith activity. Today, dozens have some sort of initiative, everything from interfaith councils to festivals of faith. Religious denominations have invited leaders from other religions to give keynote addresses at their national gatherings, and local congregations have started interfaith exchange programs. Think tanks have commissioned task forces and issued reports. The United Nations launched a major interfaith initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations. Muslim and Christian theologians unveiled a document called “A Common Word Between Us and You.”3 Scores of scholarly books have been published, including one by Jonathan Sacks, the spiritual leader of the United Kingdom’s largest Jewish synagogue organization.4 Celebrated world-religions author Karen Armstrong used her TED Prize in 2008 to issue a “Charter of Compassion” calling all religions to redefine themselves by the shared, core value of loving others. Princes, prime ministers, and presidents have all, in various ways, lent their support to the interfaith cause. I remember standing in the Oval Office with President Obama at the first meeting of his inaugural Faith Council, when he spoke of the importance of interfaith cooperation as a way to strengthen America’s civic fabric and to show the world that conflict between faiths is far from inevitable. “It’s a rare opportunity,” I would tell audiences at my public lectures, “when a grassroots movement becomes a global priority.”

  Every movement has its moment, and, at Interfaith Youth Core, we believed this was ours. We had grown rapidly from our first Ford Foundation grant of $35,000 and a handful of Chicago projects in 2002. Our activities now spanned the globe; our partners included everyone from Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan to the US State Department; our work was getting covered by major newspapers and cited by world leaders. If you opened a book or think tank report about interfaith cooperation written after 2005, there was a pretty good chance you would find a reference to Interfaith Youth Core. If there was an interfaith conference happening anywhere from Louisville to London, an IFYC staff member was very likely on the speakers’ list. We had started the organization with two big ideas: that young people should be a priority, not an afterthought, in interfaith cooperation, and that social action should be central to interfaith efforts—enough already with the documents and ceremonies. Our rationale was simple: if religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action, and interfaith cooperation continues to be defined by senior theologians talking, we lose. In some quarters of the interfaith movement, those ideas were greeted with outward enthusiasm and backroom skepticism. Everybody knew, the whispers went, that young people aren’t interested in religion—or anything else useful, for that matter. And what older people liked doing was having dinners, drafting declarations, and organizing panel discussions.

  We had proved the skeptics wrong. A few years after that first Ford Foundation grant, our two basic ideas had become common practice within the interfaith movement and had received attention far beyond. In that Oval Office meeting with President Obama, he had mentioned both the importance of interfaith social action and the leadership of young people. On a visit to Chicago soon after Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Blair invited me to his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to discuss plans for his new Faith Foundation. That conversation helped catalyze the foundation’s Faiths Act Fellows program, in which thirty recent college graduates work in interfaith and international teams on social-action projects that have an impact on the United Nations initiative known as the Millennium Development Goals.

  What would happen as more and more young people got involved in interfaith social-action projects? We believed this surge of interest would shape a society characterized by religious pluralism. In her work on interfaith cooperation, Harvard University scholar Diana Eck had made a crucial distinction between diversity and pluralism: diversity is simply the fact of people from different backgrounds living in close quarters.5 Baghdad is diverse; Belfast is diverse; Bosnia is diverse. Each of those places, in recent memory, had also experienced serious interreligious violence. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad had effectively become the site of a civil war fought between various groups of Iraqi Muslims wielding weapons and different interpretations of Islam. Where diversity is a fact, pluralism is an achievement—it means deliberate and positive engagement of diversity; it means building strong bonds between people from different backgrounds. IFYC’s definition actually went one step further and laid out a three-part framework for pluralism: a society characterized by respect for people’s religious (and other) identities, positive relationships between people of different religious backgrounds, and common action for the common good.

  We set a grand goal for ourselves at IFYC: to make religious pluralism a social norm within the course of a generation. Just as environmentalism, volunteerism, and multiculturalism had permeated our society, altering the notion of what it means to be a good citizen, shifting the images we see in magazines and movies, changing patterns in schools and workplaces, so would the idea that people from different religious backgrounds should come together in ways that built respect, relationships, and common action. Every city would have a Day of Interfaith Youth Service, with thousands of religiously diverse young people cleaning rivers and building houses side by side, all inspired by a keynote address given by their mayor. Congregations that did not participate in interfaith exchanges would be considered
out of the mainstream. Ordinary citizens would speak with pride of America’s history of interfaith cooperation, in the same way as they talked about freedom, equality, and justice. Religious prejudice in political races would be considered as beyond the pale as blatant racism had become.

  A big dream meant raising big money. I actually enjoyed this part of my job, in no small part because IFYC had experienced great success in fund-raising. My pitch basically revolved around interfaith cooperation being important. It was important because of the pervasiveness of religious prejudice and the destructiveness of religious violence. It was important because it had played an important part in history, from the civil rights movement in the United States to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It was important because lots of important people were talking about it. And IFYC was important because when important people talked about the importance of interfaith cooperation, they frequently talked about us. The State Department was sending our staff on speaking tours, cable news kept calling us for interviews, we ran cool projects all over the world. It was an inspiring narrative, and a remarkable number of the foundation program offices and individual philanthropists I met with found it compelling enough to help IFYC grow from that $35,000 Ford grant into a $4 million entity by 2009. That made us probably the largest interfaith organization in the United States, an impressive achievement for an outfit that opened its first office less than a decade ago and whose founder was neither a bishop nor a billionaire.

  There was a certain New York City–based philanthropist I had been trying to get in front of for a year. “He loves programs that develop young people as leaders, especially through social action, and he has been talking more and more about the importance of religious diversity,” IFYC board member Ron Kinnamon told me. “If you can energize him about our work, he’s got the kind of money and clout to take us to the next level.” Finally, I got my chance, a thirty-minute spot on his schedule. This was the big one.