by Eboo Patel
Zayd, remarkably, thought it sounded good. He wiped away a tear and nodded his head. I turned to Karthik, who was calmly eating his meal. He nodded, too. It was okay with him if he was included in Zayd’s prayers. My wife gave me a “Not bad” look.
It wasn’t until later that night—party over, kids in bed, small space to reflect on the day—that I realized I might have stumbled onto something very important. In a world of lots of different people and prayers, of religious narratives that intersect here, diverge there, oppose elsewhere, perhaps the most important and relevant lesson we teach our religious children is this: your religion is even more relevant in this cacophonous world because it marks your concern with and care for your friends from all religions.
“Mubaraki,” I said to Zayd on his fourth birthday. “Mubaraki,” I said again, this time with added fatherly emphasis. He smiled faintly at me, and then went back to eating pizza with his friends. I admit to feeling a little disappointment. The “Mazel tov” moment had been such a big insight for me, but maybe for Zayd it amounted to just one more interesting feature of an endlessly interesting world.
Later that afternoon, when we were opening presents, I saw Zayd gravitate toward the ones that looked like they might have remote-controlled cars inside. I snuck a package of what felt like books in front of him. Reluctantly, he opened it. One had an azure cover with the outline of a man riding a smiling horse flying through the night sky: Muhammad, by Demi.4 Shehnaz and I smiled at each other.
“Zayd, look,” I said. “It’s a book about the Prophet Muhammad.” But Zayd was already tearing into the next package, hoping for that remote-controlled car. I opened the book, started turning the pages, and was struck by the beauty of the illustrations transposed with verses from the Qur’an. I figured maybe one of Zayd’s grandmothers, or an aunt, had given it to him. I opened the card. It was from Karthik.
“Zayd, Karthik gave this to you,” I said.
Zayd turned back. “Karthik gave me that book?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said.
He took it and opened the pages. “Karthik knows about the Prophet Muhammad?” Zayd asked.
“He sure does,” I said.
All the mealtime prayers and bedtime stories about religion, all the hours spent in religious-education classes with his grandmother—nothing seemed to interest Zayd in his own faith as much as the idea that his friend from a different tradition respected it.
Sometimes you need to know a little about the sky to appreciate the ocean. Sometimes you need a bird to tell you that it’s cool to be a fish.
CONCLUSION
When the news reports started airing of a bomb in central Oslo, Pamela Geller did what Pamela Geller does: she posted pieces on her website blaming Muslims. “Jihad in Norway?” she asked. Then, “You cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring Jihad.” As the story about the attacks on the island of Utoya started taking shape, more and more media figures pointed their fingers in the same direction as Geller. Happy for the company but angry at their word choice, she snapped on her blog, “If I hear another television or radio reporter refer to Muhammad as ‘the Prophet [italics in original] Muhammad,’ I think I am going to puke. He’s not your prophet, assclowns.”1
It turns out that all those fingers should have been pointing the other way. The man who rented a farm in rural Norway to practice making bombs, who took a ferry to the island of Utoya, where, dressed in a police officer’s uniform, he shot several dozen teenagers at a youth camp, cited as his reason the hatred of Muslims and named as one of his inspirations Pamela Geller’s blog. Geller’s friend Robert Spencer, author of ten books with titles like Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, was referenced 162 times in perpetrator Anders Breivik’s manifesto.2 In the summer of 2010, the industry of Islamophobia in America had succeeded in drawing a straight line between Muslims who wanted to build an interfaith center near Ground Zero to the Muslims who attacked the World Trade Center. The following summer, they were accused of motivating a mass-murder spree an ocean away.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.”3 Contemporary analysts seemed to agree. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer, pointed out that just as al-Qaeda emerged out of the intellectual infrastructure of extremist Muslim ideology, so Anders Breivik drew from a similar poison in a different well. “This rhetoric,” Sageman told the New York Times’s Scott Shane, “is not cost-free.” Daryl Johnson, a former US Department of Homeland Security official and, during his tenure there, primary author of a report called “Right Wing Extremism,” said, “It could easily happen here.” The Hutaree, an extremist militia based in Michigan, had more weapons in its arsenal than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since 9/11 combined.4
I admit to jumping on the bandwagon for a few days, gleefully following the tweets and articles calling Breivik a Christian terrorist. In a piece comparing Breivik to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, former American Academy of Religion president Mark Jurgensmeyer wrote, “Both were good-looking young Caucasians, self-enlisted soldiers in an imagined cosmic war to save Christendom. Both thought their acts of mass destruction would trigger a battle to rescue society from the liberal forces of multiculturalism that allowed non-Christians and non-whites positions of acceptability . . . both were Christian terrorists.”5 Jurgensmeyer pointed out that the date Breivik had chosen for his murder spree, July 22, was the same date that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established during the First Crusade.
After being subject to a daily barrage about the evils in one’s own faith, I suppose it is only natural to happily highlight how another religion can motivate horror. But it’s not what interfaith leaders do. It was a lesson I learned at an interfaith conference in Australia.
It was a major event that took place in the Australian Houses of Parliament, in Canberra. There were major politicians and religious figures on the speakers’ list, and an audience full of leading citizens and media figures. Television cameras typically do not show up for interfaith conferences unless they are promised a cage fight, and for this particular session at least, the organizers delivered. The main event was a debate between a fiery Christian figure and an imam. And, no surprise, they’d gotten the scariest-looking Muslim they could find. Imposingly tall, sporting a regulation-size beard, wearing a dark, flowing robe, and carrying a staff, he looked like he’d walked out of a twelfth-century cave. “Oh, God,” I thought. “He’s the very picture of a medieval Muslim.”
The Christian evangelist, wearing a sharp suit and cool eyeglasses, went first. He spoke of the hatred and harassment he experienced growing up in a village in Pakistan: “I was beaten. My church was burned. My family was threatened. Never once did a Muslim stand up for me or offer to protect me.”
It sounded terrible. It also sounded rehearsed. This was probably how this guy made his living, going to conferences and telling stories about how the evil Muslims from over there were now flooding here. It seemed that the industry of Islamophobia was everywhere. But this guy was different in how far he was prepared to go. “I am only grateful that they did not follow their religion completely,” he added. “If they did, it would have been worse. Then they would have killed me, probably beheaded me. They would have taken my wife and had their way. That is what their terrorist religion would have made them do. It is what the greatest terrorist of all time, their leader and founder, the Prophet Muhammad, would have told them.”
I felt my throat getting tight and the hair on the back of my neck start to rise. I started scribbling down examples of Christian violence. You want Scripture? How about “Dash their children against the stones,” from Deuteronomy.6 You want historical examples? How about the Inquisition? Now I was glad the caveman Muslim was representing me. I was glad he was carrying a staff and looked medieval. I wanted him to turn directly to this guy, bare his big, scary, stained teeth, and let loose with a stream of example
s of Christian ugliness.
But my guy was not baring his teeth or shaking his staff. He was not trying to be intimidating at all. He was listening calmly. And when he spoke, his voice was soft and gentle:
I think perhaps you expect me to respond to your insults of my religion with insults to your religion. But I cannot do that, even if I want to. I respect too much your faith. I love too much your founder, the Prophet Jesus. I wish only that you knew the truth about the Prophet Muhammad. How, like Jesus, he revealed God’s message of mercy. I am sad that you did not know more Muslims in Pakistan who you could call friends, who protected your family from thugs and brutes. If I were in Pakistan, I would have stood up for you. My commitment to following the Prophet Muhammad requires me to.
There is a story that Sufi Muslims tell of Jesus—that when he was in the market in Jerusalem and people came up to insult him, he turned around and blessed them. When, later, his disciples asked how he could bless people who insulted him, Jesus responded, “I give only what I carry in my purse.”
“And we are put on Earth a little space,” poet William Blake wrote, “that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”7 Of all the wide knowledge there is to learn in interfaith literacy, of all the intricate skills necessary to be an interfaith organizer, by far the most important quality for an interfaith leader is an orientation toward love.
In the final days of the Montgomery bus boycott, after 380 days of walking to work and suffering arbitrary arrests, phantom death threats, and one very real house bombing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in Montgomery where he said, “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. . . . The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”8
People say that spirit is gone, but I know that’s not true. King was a twenty-year-old student when he learned of Gandhi, a twenty-six-year-old recent seminary graduate when he was selected to lead the bus boycott. Part of the joy of working on college and seminary campuses, training a critical mass of students and recent graduates to be interfaith leaders, is seeing the spirit of King and Gandhi resurrected in them.
Sometimes, even the most unlikely ones. Audrey was the quietest intern at Interfaith Youth Core in the summer of 2010. She had grown up in a small town in California and had read about IFYC when she was a student at Chico State University and had come to intern with us the summer after she graduated, not sure what was next for her. When I held my final session with the interns and asked how they planned to apply their interfaith-leadership skills on campus or back home, she was the one intern who said she didn’t really know. But when a chain e-mail titled “Can Muslims Be Good Americans” started making the rounds of her church, she knew she had to do something. The e-mail listed ten reasons, including the following:
Theologically—no . . . Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon god of Arabia.
Socially—no . . . Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.
Spiritually—no . . . Because when we declare “one nation under God,” The Christian’s God is loving and kind while Allah is NEVER referred to as Heavenly Father.
“Maybe this is why our American Muslims are so quiet and not speaking out about any atrocities,” a church leader had noted at the top of the e-mail.
Audrey and a friend wrote in response, “It saddens us to read such hateful, ignorant, and biased remarks. Our country was founded on freedom of religion. . . . Shouldn’t [Christians] be praying and setting an example?” They hit Reply All, thinking that was the end of it.
Nothing could have prepared Audrey for the volley of hatred that followed. For the next several days, her in-box was filled with vitriol from people she had sat in the pews with since she was a little girl:
“Audrey, Where are you going to University? Mecca U?”
“Audrey, You are deceived. Have you been to your mosque lately? Got muslim lady costume?”
“Christians are supposed to be Faith Defenders. You instead are a Moslem lover. There is no such thing as a ‘Good Moslem.’ ”
She had to leave her church, my IFYC colleague Amber told me, the church she had been baptized in. I felt terrible. The last thing I wanted was for interfaith work to separate somebody from their religion.
I called her to ask how she was doing, and also to apologize. I was prepared to talk with her family, anything. These had been the most difficult days of her life, she told me. “My best friends were at that church. The adults that I respected the most in the world were at that church. I was literally texting with them casually until I sent that e-mail, and then they treated me like I was a monster.” I apologized again, but she interrupted:
I made friends with all these people from different faiths at Interfaith Youth Core. I couldn’t stand thinking that members of my church were insulting good people they’d never met because of these lies in a chain e-mail. I mean, every week at Interfaith Youth Core, I went and did a service project with Muslims, Jews, and humanists. It was a great experience. I just didn’t know how to take it back to my community or how it related to me being a Christian. Well, these last few days, I’ve been reading the Bible a lot, and here’s what I realized: Sending that e-mail and standing up for Muslims was the most Christian thing I have ever done.
She’d returned to California from her internship at Interfaith Youth Core unsure of her next steps. But they were clear now: She wanted to go to seminary. She wanted to learn more about the religions of the people she’d met at IFYC and more about what her Christian faith says about being in relationship with them. And wherever she wound up, as a pastor or a college chaplain or a professor of comparative religion, she wanted to create experiences where people from different faiths were meeting each other, learning from one another, building interfaith bridges high enough to rise over the barriers and strong enough to withstand the bombs.
One more interfaith leader committed to securing the blessings of pluralism on America’s sacred ground.
AFTERWORD
By Martin E. Marty
Seven Deadly Sins of the college campus—ignorance, intolerance, apathy, unawareness, prejudice, distraction, and exclusiveness—frequently appear in registers of “what’s wrong” with the young. Eboo Patel has seen them all, since he and his colleagues have been involved with scores of colleges, universities, and seminaries. I write “Seven Deadly Sins” rather than “the Seven Deadly Sins” because Patel and his coworkers could add many more to the list from what they have seen.
Patel can be disappointed, disturbed, and frankly terrified by some of what he has seen and what he knows other citizens have also experienced. Yet were he merely to report or, worse, whine over what he has seen, readers who have better things to do would soon toss his book aside. He does more than report about bad things, aware as he is that he can also find seven times seven virtues on campuses, at community gatherings, and in religious institutions. How to help turn the proverbial “sins” to “virtues” has been his goal, and he has worked impressively to achieve it, as this book attests, without boasting.
If I have made it seem as if educational institutions monopolize the attention of Patel and his readers, this is not the case. Patel has focused on them because they are efficient and decisive locales for encountering and engaging the young. He has sat in on and no doubt walked away from countless gatherings of attentive citizens who listened to lectures, watched PowerPoint presentations, and observed dramatizations designed to promote the common good. What most of these gatherings shared was the age of those present, which in most cases was “middle” through “senior.” Where were the young? He has nothing against citizens “post-youth,” knowing that if we are fortunate we may all get to that stage, and he is getting toward it himself.
But where were the young in the movements of the recent past? Why were they not there? Why did they turn out for athletics, entertainment, and celebrity appearances bu
t were turned off by or away from the “common good” events? As part of Patel’s answer he created Interfaith Youth Core, to help understand the old ways of the young and to assist them in finding new ways. This focus was and is worthwhile, as there are so many who belong to younger generations. Patel’s focus on the campus is doubly worthwhile because of the impact of higher education on the larger culture.
As I first read Sacred Ground, I kept noticing how seldom Patel used a good word that had once served well: tolerance. I thought that it should have been fitting still. But he knows how often “tolerance” and its synonyms turn out to be bland and ineffective as part of a strategy or a lure. Reading on, I also watched for alternatives to “tolerance,” and even searched the text in order to test what was so noticeable: Patel uses “interfaith” more often than “tolerance.” This is natural, a reader might say, because the word is in the very title of the organization, program, and commitment of this alternative, as in Interfaith Youth Core.
Why does this difference make a difference?” (And, along the way, let me hasten to say: Don’t throw away “tolerance” or “toleration.” They can come back to serve fresh purposes after our society does some reevaluating of what has gone wrong and what might help make it right.) Here is the theme that Patel has brought to the forefront of his discoveries: “Faith,” that grand and profound element in “the faiths,” “the religions,” and “the believing communities,” across the board was being corrupted in our time and used as an instrument of tribalism, exclusivism, xenophobia, hatred, and killing. Check the headlines and observe how often groups have been warring in the name of their God or their gods, denigrating those who are “other” to them.