Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  And then Bosnia. My father was glued to international news and would regale me with stories and images of the horror abroad every chance he got. “They are using rape as a tool of war, and the strongest military in the world is doing nothing,” he would shout. Eyes popping, he would turn to me and say, “What if the neighbors came over and tied you up and made you watch as they killed me and raped your mother, and there was a policeman on the corner doing nothing? That is exactly what is happening in Bosnia, and America is that idle policeman.”

  My father had always been knowledgeable about world affairs but never active in them. He is a profoundly decent man with a strong personal spirituality, but he was never a ritualistic Muslim, and certainly not one inclined to side with his coreligionists over the country he felt indebted to. But when my father felt that a part of his identity was under fire, however secondary it might have been in his overall makeup under normal circumstances, that part flared and rose to the surface and began dominating his personality. Bosnia was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My father had silently watched the powers that be wreak havoc in the Muslim world for decades: the U.S. support of Iran’s despotic shah during the 1970s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of that decade, Israel’s military response to the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s. If such events could anger my Reaganite father, whose religious belief was strong but private, I can understand how the fury of Muslims with deeper ties to the global ummah (Muslim community) and less success relating to the West spurred them to action.

  Looking back, I see flashes of the ingredients that prepared the ground for Hasib Hussain’s suicide mission in my own life: A gut-wrenching feeling of being excluded from mainstream society, in the form of a constant barrage of racist bullying. A vague sense of being Muslim from my mother without any real grounding in how that was relevant or useful to my life. A growing consciousness, through my father, that people with whom I shared an identity were being horribly treated elsewhere, often by people who looked like the ones who were bullying me here.

  Like Hasib, I took a step down the path of adolescent risk taking. Unable to find my place in junior high, I started hanging out with kids who pushed their way to the back of the bus, smoked cigarettes across the street from school, stole wine coolers from their parents’ refrigerators, and bragged loudly about touching their girlfriends’ breasts, while the girls in question giggled within earshot. My mother called them “the boys who ride dirt bikes.” My dad made it clear that he didn’t want them around. But my parents often didn’t get home until 7:00 p.m. or later on weekdays, and so I snuck around with this group as much as I could. Truth be told, I didn’t like them much. But as long as I laughed at their crass jokes and brought my collection of heavy metal cassettes to their homes, they seemed amenable to letting me hang around.

  Like Hasib, I needed a course correction. My grades were slipping. I was talking back to my parents and coming home with stories glorifying the fights I had seen my friends get into. Perhaps in another place and time, I would have followed a Mohammad Sidique Khan into the back room of an Iqra Learning Center and listened to a man with a regulation-size beard scold me for giving in to adolescent temptations when Muslims across the world were suffering. Maybe I would have sought his discipline and approval and discovered my identity in the imagined community of the global jihad.

  How does one ordinary young person’s commitment to a religion turn into a suicide mission and another ordinary young person’s commitment to that same faith become an organization devoted to pluralism? The answer, I believe, lies in the influences young people have, the programs and people who shape their religious identities.

  Religious totalitarians like Sheikh Omar are exceptionally perceptive about the crisis facing second-generation immigrant Muslims in the West. They know that our parents, whose identities were formed in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia half a century ago, have a dramatically different set of reference points than we do. They know that the identity we get from them feels irrelevant, that it is impossible to be a 1950s-era Pakistani or Egyptian or Moroccan Muslim in twenty-first-century Chicago or London or Madrid.

  In many cases, our parents built bubbles for themselves when they moved to the West—little worlds where they could eat familiar food, speak their own language, and follow the old ways. And because they re-created a little piece of Karachi in Manchester, England, or a part of Bombay in Boston, Massachusetts, they assumed that their children would remain within the cocoon. But we second- and third-generation Muslims cannot separate ourselves from the societies we live in. We watch MTV, go to public schools, cross borders that are invisible to our parents dozens of times a day, and quickly understand that the curves of our lives cannot adapt to the straight lines our parents live by. Raised in pious Muslim homes, occasionally participating in the permissive aspects of Western culture, many of us come to believe that our two worlds, the two sides of ourselves, are necessarily antagonistic. This experience of “two-ness” is exacerbated by the deep burn of racism. It is much worse for South Asian Muslims in Britain than it is here in the States. They listen to the prime minister say that they are British, cheer the local sports teams, but still find themselves virtually under siege by gangs of white youths, some wearing the trademark red shoelaces of the National Front, one of several well-organized white racist groups in Britain.

  As we grow older and seek a unified Muslim way of being, it is too often Muslim extremists who meet us at the crossroads of our identity crisis. They say, “Look how Muslims are being oppressed all over the world. You, who are living in the belly of the beast and indulging in its excesses, have only one way to purify yourself: to become death and kill.”

  Where are the Muslim leaders who understand this complex challenge, who are helping young people develop a coherent, relevant Muslim identity in the West? Most Muslim leaders are busy meeting other needs of the community—building mosques and Muslim councils, developing relationships with Western politicians and urban police departments. But most are not involved enough in the lives of young people.

  People such as Dr. Umar Abd-Allah, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Imam Zaid Shakir, and Professors Sherman Jackson and Amina McCloud in the United States are the exceptions. They understand that the American project and the continuity of Muslim identity are symbiotic, not opposed to each other. They are some of the leading intellectuals in contemporary Islam, and they spend an enormous amount of time running seminars for Muslim college students and retreats for young Muslim leaders. One of their counterparts in Britain, Zaki Badawi (who died in January 2006), spent a lifetime trying to address the challenge of nurturing Muslim identity in the West but knew only too well that the type of leadership he exemplified was all too rare in Britain. When Tony Blair asked him and a group of other senior Muslim leaders why radicals such as Sheikh Omar were so effective with young people, Badawi said, “The young people who believe in him, we do not have access to them.” The truth is, not enough Muslim leaders are trying.

  A senior leader of the Leeds Muslim community made a similar confession to the New York Times: “Why this damage to their own streets, their own cities, their own communities? Maybe if we had paid attention then this wouldn’t have happened.”

  A young Muslim who worked at a corner shop in Leeds expressed the same frustration from his perspective: “The older generations and the younger ones just don’t talk like you think they should. Extremists don’t walk into mosques and say ‘Excuse me, would you like to join me in blowing up London?’ It just doesn’t work that way.” What he meant was that extremists take the time and energy to build strong relationships with young Muslims, while too many members of the established older generation don’t even try to connect.

  Reading this, I could not help but think of a funeral I had attended for the mother of a twenty-year-old Muslim friend. The death had come as a complete shock. Sohail was sleeping when a neighbor knocked on the door and said that his mother, an active woman in her
fifties, was lying on the front lawn. She had had a heart attack while shoveling snow off the driveway. The imam who performed the funeral looked uncomfortable around Sohail, his sister, and the group of grieving young people who had developed a deep affection for their mother. His sermon at the burial consisted of this statement: “This woman was a good Muslim and taught Qur’an and Hadith to her children. You must follow her example and teach Islam to your children.” Not a word of comfort about the spiritual meaning of death and the afterlife in Islam. No arm around Sohail’s shoulder. No lines of transcendence from Rumi about returning to our source. Only a short, cold command. During the most difficult time in Sohail’s life, his religious leader failed him. If Sohail ever had a question about faith, the absolute last person he would seek out is this man.

  I was lucky. My free fall was stopped by the YMCA. Since my mother had started working, I had been in afterschool care and summer camp at the B. R. Ryall YMCA in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where I was raised. Kids who wouldn’t talk to me in school befriended me at the Y. We played capture the flag and ultimate Frisbee and made up break dancing routines. One day, when my parents were especially late picking my brother and me up, I decided to walk home. I never stopped to think that I didn’t have a key. I was on the roof of my house removing my bedroom window when I heard frantic shouting from the driveway. It was my father and several of the Y staff. They had been driving around Glen Ellyn for the past hour looking for me. There were still people in the woods behind the Y searching to see if I had gotten lost there. My dad was furious. He explained that my impulsiveness had worried and inconvenienced a lot of people. I was a little scared going to camp the next day. But Sheila, one of the camp counselors, rubbed my head and said, “I tired my feet out looking for you, kiddo. Man, I’m glad we found you. You’re one of my favorites here, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.” I almost jumped into her arms.

  As I grew older, my camp counselors encouraged me to join the Leaders Club, a YMCA group for teenagers that focused on volunteering as a key to leadership development. There are Leaders Clubs at Ys across the country, and every summer one-week camps called Leaders Schools are held in different regions. If Y camp was where I first discovered I could be liked, the Central Region Leaders School is where I first recognized I could create and contribute. People were always asking me to take charge of something. I designed the Wednesday service project we did at a senior citizens center. I played the lead in the end-of-week skit. My name showed up on a regular basis in the daily newsletter. Staff members sought my advice on how to deal with troubled participants. I was asked to give nominating speeches for people running for president of Leaders School and was elected to the council one year myself.

  I felt physical pain when the week of Leaders School was over. The confident, creative, contributing somebody that had emerged would have to be folded back in so that I could make it through school without being noticed by the bullies. But the memory of the person I had been that week, the person I could be, remained. My grades rose; I stopped hanging out with the boys who rode dirt bikes.

  The YMCA’s secret is simple; it stems from a genuine love of young people. The conventional wisdom is that young people are scrambling for their place in the world. The YMCA knows that, deep down, young people need more than just a place. A place is too passive, and because the scheme of things is constantly shifting, it’s also too fleeting. It’s not a place young people need so much as a role, an opportunity to be powerful, a chance to shape their world. And so the YMCA nudges them in the direction of leadership—fourteen-year-olds in charge of ten-year-olds at camp, college students coaching high school basketball teams.

  At Leaders School, we sang a song called “Pass It On.” It uses the metaphor of fire to speak about the sharing of religious faith. I would sing it around the house for weeks after Leaders School was over. (I once slipped and sang a few lines in front of my high school friends, for which I was tortured mercilessly for months.) In one of the moments when my father was feeling especially righteous about his “Muslim-ness,” I overheard him expressing concern to my mother that the YMCA, which was after all the Young Men’s Christian Association, was teaching us Christian songs. “Do you think they are trying to teach Christianity to our kids?” he asked, the tone of his voice a kind of auditory chest thumping.

  “I hope so,” my mother responded. “I hope they teach the kids Jewish and Hindu songs, too. That’s the kind of Muslims we want our kids to be.”

  In that offhand reply, overheard when I was a teenager, my mother guessed the arc of my life.

  2

  Growing Up American, Growing Up Other

  Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe.

  ANNIE DILLARD

  I grew up with religious rituals. Morning and evening, my family would gather for prayer, hands cupped to receive blessings, forehead and nose touching the ground in sijda, prayer beads sliding through our fingers as we chanted, “Ya Allah, Ya Allah” (Oh God, Oh God).

  I was raised as an Ismaili Muslim. As soon as I learned how to talk, my mother started teaching me the six-part Du’a (prayer) that Ismailis recite once in the morning and twice at night. When my grandmother on my father’s side came to visit from Bombay, she made me sit with her and learn Ismaili ginans (devotional songs) line by line, note for note. I led the Chicago jamat (Ismaili congregation) in prayer before I knew how to ride a bike.

  “Say ‘Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad’ as you go to sleep. It will protect you,” my mother would tell my little brother and me as she tucked us in. It was my mother’s favorite Ismaili chant, calling on the blessing of both the first Shia Imam (Ali) and the Prophet of Islam (Muhammad).

  And then one day my father started leaving for work so early that he no longer joined us for morning prayers. Soon I grew accustomed to the phone ringing around 6:00 p.m., my father calling to tell my mother that he had to entertain clients later than expected, and we should go ahead with dinner and prayers without him. For a while we did. And then we didn’t. My mother had started her own upward climb in the professional world. Religious ritual did not so much fade into the background as it got elbowed aside by another faith, a force both glittering and suffocating: American achievement.

  One thing stayed. “Say ‘Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad’ as you go to sleep. It will protect you,” my mother still whispered as she tucked us in.

  My mother always emphasized that Islam is a diverse religion. Any religion with more than a billion adherents spread across eighty countries and a history going back over a thousand years has to be diverse. We Ismailis are a Muslim community that shares a great deal with our coreligionists, but we also are distinct in some ways. We affirm the basic Muslim shahada, the declaration of faith that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is His Prophet. As Shia Muslims, we believe that Muhammad appointed his cousin and son-in-law Ali to lead the community after his death. Ali was known as the first Imam. (This is not to be confused with the lowercase imam, as in the person who leads Muslim prayers.) He had the unique ability to interpret the true meaning and application of the Qur’an in changing times and therefore to guide the Muslim community. The Imam chooses his successor from among his family, ensuring that the Imamat (office of the Imam) remains within the Ahl al-Bayt, or the House of the Prophet. Over the course of history, disputes arose over the appointment of certain Imams, and the Shia split into different communities. The largest Shia community, the Ithna’asharis, believe that their Imam is in hiding. The Ismailis are the only Shia community with a living and present Imam.

  The past two Ismaili Imams have been important world figures. Sultan Muhammad Shah, the Imam from 1885 to 1957, was a well-respected Muslim statesman, serving as head of the League of Nations and earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. The current Imam, Karim al-Husseini, also known as the Aga Khan, has made his mark by building a highly innovative set of health, edu
cation, cultural, and poverty-alleviation institutions working across thirty countries, collectively known as the Aga Khan Development Network.

  The Ismaili Imam guides both the spiritual and material life of his followers in a manner similar to how a Sufi sheikh guides his followers. Regarding spirituality, Ismailis have been directed to follow a distinctive prayer practice. We recite a six-part prayer once in the morning and twice in the evening rather than the more common Muslim prayer, called the salat or namaz, performed five times a day. We have private houses of worship called jamatkhanas, days of fasting outside of Ramadan, and our own structures for alms giving. Materially, the Imam has encouraged a segment of Ismailis, traditionally a community of merchants, to seek higher education and settle in the West.

  My father was in that group. He moved from Bombay to the American Midwest in the mid-1970s to get his MBA at Notre Dame, acquiring a fanatic devotion to Fighting Irish football in the process. Truth be told, my father did not need the Imam to encourage him to leave India. Rock-and-roll music whetted his appetite, and the all-seeing eye of his mother started to feel suffocating. So he whisked his wife and two baby boys off to South Bend, Indiana, land of gray snow and white Catholics.

  After business school, my father landed a job in marketing at the Leo Burnett Company in Chicago, no small achievement for an Indian immigrant in the American Midwest in the late 1970s. We moved a few blocks from the only jamatkhana in Chicago, in the Rogers Park neighborhood, an area where Indians and Pakistanis wore their kurta “pajamas” and smoked their beedies on streets they shared with black-hatted Hasids. My parents enrolled my brother and me in a Montessori school. Every day, my father would leave for work at the crack of dawn, and my mother would drive my brother and me forty-five minutes to school. He would return exhausted, and she would come back with stories of how her children seemed unable to prevent themselves from biting the other students or screaming out loud during naptime.