by Eboo Patel
What surprises my seminary students most of all is the place where King began to take Gandhi’s work seriously, the site where a theology of interfaith cooperation that shaped the second half of the twentieth century first began: in seminary. As a student at the Crozer Theological Seminary, King came under the spell of Professor George Davis, the son of a union activist, a committed pacifist, and a deep admirer of Gandhi. King took a third of his Crozer courses with Davis, and it was Davis’s copy of Frederick Bonn Fisher’s That Strange Little Brown Man of India, Gandhi that King borrowed and pored over in the library. The message was reinforced by a lecture that King attended in the spring of 1950 at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House, where the president of Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, spoke on Gandhi as an embodiment of Christian love. It moved King to buy a stack of books on the Mahatma and his movement.14 I imagine King marveling at what Gandhi accomplished in the Great Salt March, his mind swirling with Bible verses and Walter Raushenbush quotes, wondering what it meant to admire the inspiration that Gandhi got from Hinduism while staying committed to his own Christian tradition. It occurs to me that the conversations that King must have had at Crozer sixty-five years ago about faith having both roots and wings is very similar to the ones that seminary students are having today.
One of my favorite lines from King is about the origins of his faith commitment: “I am many things to many people, but in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. That is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.” I thought about those lines when I visited the home where King grew up, in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district. For all that King learned about faith and leadership at Morehouse College and at Crozer, it’s that home where the first and most important formation took place. It is the home where the pressures and wonders of religious diversity are first felt, and these days, felt more intensely than ever before. As the founder of an interfaith organization, I thought I knew something about this. And then I had children—and that, as they say, changes everything.
AMERICAN MUSLIM CHILD
The late writer David Foster Wallace opened his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College with the story of two young fish on a morning swim. They pass by an older fish, who stops and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The young fish swim on for a bit, and after a while one turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”1
Wallace uses the story as a meditation on the importance of awareness, but I can’t help see it as a metaphor for the consequences of being immersed in a monoculture. The problem with knowing only a single culture or ecology is not only that you don’t know others, it’s also that you don’t really know your own. Not, at least, in the way we moderns understand what it means to know something. Those fish were perfectly comfortable in the water—they could swim, they could breathe, they could eat. But when they were asked to explain, they couldn’t do it. They lacked the language, even for a fellow fish, even for themselves. And when the young fish realized this, they couldn’t help but be angry.
Imagine these young fish swimming back to the older fish that posed the question and saying, “Since you know so much, Jack, tell us about this thing called water.” The older fish begins with the chemical equation—water is H2o. No traction with that. He tries describing the key properties of water. “It’s, well, wet,” he tells them. No response. They’ve never known anything but wet. So he begins to explain by way of comparison. He tells tales of the sky and the land, the fabulous creatures that fill both. He speaks of legs for running, wings for flying, points out the fins the young fish have and says that is their version of legs and wings.
He continues, but the young fish are elsewhere now, in their own heads. They have gone from “What the hell is water?” to “What does running feel like? Or flying?” and then to “Why was I cursed with fins instead of blessed with wings?” and “What the hell will I do if I ever meet one of them?” Finally, one turns to the other and says, “Have those other places, those other creatures, always existed? Why did it take the old fish so long to tell us about them? What were the old fish scared of?”
The more I thought about this story, the more I connected it to the challenges and wonders of being a parent trying to raise religious children in a religiously diverse world.
One afternoon, when my son Zayd was three and my wife had come home early from work to be with him, she called to deliver some news: Zayd was racing his toy cars up and down the hallway of our third-floor condo and chanting, loudly and repeatedly—and in Spanish—the Lord’s Prayer.
“Must be Luz,” I said.
Luz is our nanny. She is from Colombia, where she had been a judge, and she brought both her high regard for education and her deep Catholic roots with her when she immigrated. She had helped Zayd learn how to write the alphabet and count to a hundred, taught him how to kick a soccer ball, and gotten him out of diapers at a remarkably early age. The love she had for our children was more like that of a grandmother than that of a nanny. I had come home from work more than once and seen them dancing vigorously in the living room to the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Zayd’s favorite band). I just shook my head and smiled, thinking, “After eleven hours of playing soccer, chasing him around the park, taking him to the library, making his lunch and his many, many snacks, you have the energy to dance with him? That’s love.”
Luz recognized the importance of teaching kids calm as well as encouraging crazy, which is probably where the lesson on the Lord’s Prayer came from. She knew Shehnaz and I are Muslim. We talked about it every Ramadan, when I had to explain why I wasn’t eating breakfast. She had seen the Arabic calligraphy around our house, the biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, the copies of the Qur’an. After her brother died, I told Luz the prayer Muslims say when we hear of a death—“Inna Lilahi wa Inna iIahi Rajiun” (“We are for God, and we return to Him without doubt”). “Very beautiful,” she said, repeating the Arabic slowly in her South American accent and giving me a big, teary hug. Still, she didn’t see a problem in teaching Zayd a prayer from her Catholic faith. I had to decide if I did.
One of the most frequent questions I receive when I give speeches on interfaith cooperation is whether young people should know their own faith before they engage in interfaith work. My standard response is to tell the story of how babies are delivered in a typical American hospital. I imagine it as an institution founded by Jewish philanthropists (think of Chicago’s Mount Sinai Medical Center or Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), with a Muslim doctor presiding over the delivery, a Hindu anesthesiologist administering the epidural, and a Catholic nurse helping the mother push and shooting warning glances at the hyperventilating father-to-be. My point is this: We are literally born into a condition of interfaith interaction. For most of us, the world of religious homogeneity simply doesn’t exist anymore. The challenge, then, is to nurture our children into our faith tradition in the world that is—the world of religious diversity.
The answer felt sufficient to me. In fact, I took some pride in it. But some of the questioners gave me looks that suggested they were unconvinced. As the Muslim leader of an interfaith organization, I wasn’t sure why they were skeptical. As the Muslim parent of two boys, I get it. These questioners weren’t asking about the abstract social dynamics of raising religious children in the modern world, they were asking about the present and particular challenges of raising their religious children.
Luz was far from Zayd’s only religious influence from a tradition outside of Islam. Zayd attends a Catholic school that has services every Friday, prayer before every meal, and morning readings on Catholic saints. He listens well and learns quickly. On our annual family holiday to Florida, we drove past a statue store, and Zayd pointed out the window and shouted, “Look, Mommy, it’s Mary!” He’s got the Easter story down pat: The bad people made Jesus go on a cross. They hurt Jesus wit
h nails, but Jesus was still nice to them. Jesus went to the Father for a day, and then he came back. Jesus always makes good choices.
After I told Zayd that his mother’s name—Shehnaz—means “pride of the king,” I asked him, “Who’s the king, love?” The answer I was hoping for couldn’t have been more obvious. Zayd didn’t catch the hint. His answer came swift and strong. “The king, daddy, is Jesus.”
Should I tell Zayd that Jesus is not the king? Should I expect him to pray in Arabic before meals at school while the other kids are all chanting “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”? We tell his teachers not to give him any pork—no pepperoni on pizza day, no ham on Green Eggs and Ham Day. Do we tell them Zayd needs to go somewhere else during the Easter lesson? Do I just let Zayd sit through that and then tell him at home that we don’t believe Jesus died on the cross and we don’t believe that God has a son, but we do believe that Jesus forgave the many people that were not nice to him, that he always made good choices, and that he is definitely part of God’s royalty? As clear as I felt giving sociological answers on the interfaith moment from the stage, I felt confused in nurturing my child’s Muslim identity on the multifaith playground.
Not just confused, actually—afraid. Would he say Catholic prayers so many times that they felt more natural to him than Muslim prayers? Would he simply ignore me when I told him the Muslim story of Jesus?
Around the time I was worrying about Catholic teaching, we got invited to the birthday party of Zayd’s Jewish friend Ariel. It was at a petting zoo, and there was plenty of Zayd’s favorite cake, but the thing that stuck with Zayd was all the people saying, “Mazel tov.”
“Daddy, why do they keep saying that?” he asked. “What does it mean?”
“It means ‘Congratulations,’ ” I told him. “People say that when something good happens to someone. Today is Ariel’s birthday, so everyone is congratulating him.”
“Why don’t they just say ‘Congratulations,’ then?” he asked me.
“Well, they’re Jewish,” I said. “When something is a very special occasion, they want to say congratulations in their language.”
“Hmmm,” Zayd said. “What will you say to me on my birthday?”
I was about to say the obvious—“Happy birthday”—but something made me stop in my tracks. Zayd had heard “Happy birthday” plenty before. That’s not the answer he was looking for. And he hadn’t asked me to say, “Mazel tov” to him. He wanted to know if we had something like “Mazel tov,” something distinct that we said to mark special occasions. He wanted the version of “Mazel tov” that was his.
“Mubaraki,” I told him. “I will say, ‘Mubaraki’ to you on your birthday!” I happily launched into a lecture on the term mubaraki—how it is from our holy language and it is our way of saying, “Very special congratulations.” (Actually, mubaraki is the South Asian Hindi/Urdu derivation of the Arabic term mabrook, but I decided on the shortcut explanation with Zayd.)
This was a novel insight. My son’s encounters with other people’s religious language and stories actually made his own faith more relevant. Religion was not just something he did for a few moments before bed and meals, or for a few hours a week at religious education lessons, it was something all around him—at school, at Saturday-morning birthday parties. The more he was around other people’s religions, the more he wanted to know about his own.
Every time Zayd came home with a Jesus story or a Christian prayer, I sat down and taught him a Muhammad story and a Muslim prayer. Zayd’s encounters with other religions gave me a reason to talk with him about his own. I tried to do it in a way that highlighted the shared values across both traditions. In the Christian story of Jesus, he forgives the people who put him on the cross, returning kindness for hate. There is a similar story about the Prophet Muhammad. Every day, he walks under a balcony in Mecca, where a woman throws trash on him. The Prophet never gets angry with the woman or even scolds her. One day, the Prophet realizes that there is no trash coming from the balcony. He looks up and doesn’t see the woman. Instead of rejoicing over her absence, or even considering it an act of God that she didn’t show up, the Prophet becomes concerned about the woman’s health. After being told that she has indeed taken very ill, the Prophet brings her water and prays for her recovery. “Like Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad always makes good choices,” I emphasized.
My mind started adapting my graduate school comparative-religions charts for a toddler. They say, “Mazel tov”; we say, “Mubaraki.” They have a name for and a description of God (the Lord, our Father); we have a name for and a description of God (Allah the Creator). They have a Jesus story (the son who died on the cross); we have a Jesus story (the Prophet who brought and embodied God’s message of love and forgiveness). They have Catholic saints; we have Shia imams. They have hymns; we have Ismaili ginans.
There’s the category of things every religion shares: thanking God before meals and bedtime is important. There’s the category of things we share with Jews: we don’t eat pork, we pray in a language other than English. There’s the category of things we share with Christians: Jesus always makes good choices. There’s the category we share specifically with Christians who are Catholics: incense means something holy is about to happen.
The twentieth-century African American writer James Baldwin tells the story about when he was living in a Swiss village while finishing work on a book.2 Walking through the town square one afternoon, answering the questions of little Swiss children who were touching his hair, asking him what he eats, if he sleeps at night, he has a sudden realization: he is not simply the only black person in this village, he is also the only black person these people have ever seen. He ends the essay with this observation: the world, once white, is white no more, and will never be white again.
Those villagers were going to have to come to an understanding of who they were in a world where at least one person in their presence was not like them. British scholar Anthony Giddens says it’s this dynamic that makes the modern world so challenging to negotiate. When you encounter a person with a pattern of life different than your own—someone who doesn’t go to church on Sunday in a town of Christians, someone who doesn’t pray in Arabic in a village of Muslims—you start to ask yourself a series of questions that most human beings through most of human history, raised as they were in monocultures, never had to deal with: If they don’t go to church on Sunday, why do I? If I have been taught that my way is the best way, what do I think of their way? When I pass them on the street, what do I say?
It is precisely the situation in which the two rabbis in writer Chaim Potok’s Book of Lights find themselves. On a trip to Japan, while observing the rituals of a Shinto priest, one rabbi looks at the other and says, “Is God listening to this? If not, why not? If so, what are we about?”3
For Zayd, for most of us, there is no pre-Baldwin Swiss village—no island, no retreat, no bubble—to protect us from the jazz and war of the world’s diversity. The question is, How do parents and religious communities make this an asset in faith formation rather than an obstacle? When do we realize that it is the jazz and war of the world that our faiths are meant for?
It’s not just Catholics and Jews that Zayd interacts with. Our neighbors next door are secular Hindus, and their five-year-old son, Karthik, is Zayd’s best friend. Zayd was uncharacteristically quiet for most of the Diwali party Karthik’s parents hosted in 2010. But when the food came, he looked over at his friend and said, “Karthik, you need to say, ‘Shukrun lillah’ before you eat.”
I was one proud papa witnessing that moment. “He remembers a Muslim prayer,” I thought to myself. “And he’s willing to say it, even though it’s outside of our house and his Muslim religious-education lessons.”
My flush of pride was interrupted by Zayd’s rising voice. He was insisting, at the top of his lungs, that Karthik say, “Shukrun lillah.”
Karthik knew how to play this game. He smiled sweetly, a young child inten
t on getting under his friend’s skin, and shook his head no as if denying Zayd a toy that he wanted to play with.
This, of course, just made Zayd fill his lungs with a new whoosh of air and level the command out at an even higher volume: “YOU HAVE TO SAY ‘SHUKRUN LILLAH’ BEFORE YOU EAT!”
I swear that Karthik’s parents shot Shehnaz and me a look that said, “We thought you weren’t those kinds of Muslims.” Shehnaz shot me a look that very clearly said, “You’re the religion guy—you take care of this. I made the cupcakes.”
Zayd was crying now, alternately asking aloud, “Why won’t Karthik say ‘Shukrun lillah?’ ” and whimpering softly, “Karthik, you have to say ‘Shukrun lillah.’ ” He got up and started toward Karthik, who was still smiling sweetly, keeping his toy away. “Uh-oh—this is not good,” I thought to myself. Zayd was going through a hitting phase. His friend at school had recently gotten whacked with a marker on the forehead. “Why’d you hit Jose?” I asked him. “Because he was running faster than me in the race,” Zayd told me, his eyes growing dark. That was the look I was seeing now.
I put my food down and took off, intercepting Zayd a few steps from Karthik. I picked him up in my arms and blurted out the first thing that came to my mind: “Karthik doesn’t have to say, ‘Shukrun lillah,’ love. We say, ‘Shukrun lillah’ for Karthik. I want you to go back to your plate and close your eyes and think of your food and Karthik and everything and everybody you love and say, ‘Shukrun lillah’—you’re thanking God for all of it. How does that sound?”