Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  We came out of that conference with the three pillars that still serve as the heart of the Interfaith Youth Core: intercultural encounter, social action, and interfaith reflection. In other words, the Interfaith Youth Core was about bringing young people from different backgrounds together to engage in social action and reflect on how their different traditions inspired that work. “Now we have to test the concept,” Anastasia told me at the close of the conference. “You will learn a lot more about the idea of the Interfaith Youth Core by running projects in the real world than by arguing over language at a conference. And I know the perfect place to start: South Africa.”

  The Parliament of the World’s Religions was being held in Cape Town in December 1999. It was the world’s largest interfaith event, with thousands of theologians, activists, and believers of different faiths coming together. The previous Parliament, held in Chicago in 1993, had had a small youth component, but the Parliament organizers were hoping for a higher-impact youth program this time around. They were planning to have more than five hundred young people from around the world attend. The Interfaith Youth Core offered to help them design and run the youth program.

  I arrived in Cape Town in late October 1999, nervous and excited. This was my first experience at organizing something outside the United States. I found a nation bursting with energy. It had been less than a decade since the fall of apartheid and barely five years since the African National Congress (ANC), the first black majority government, had taken power. The nation was creating itself anew.

  Apartheid in South Africa was a violation of the spiritual principle of human togetherness. South Africans had a term for this principle, ubuntu, which translates roughly as “people are people through other people.” It was because of ubuntu that South Africans had voted for the pluralist politics of Nelson Mandela’s ANC instead of the separatist “throw the whites into the sea” politics of the more radical parties. It was because of ubuntu that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had agreed to lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought healing, not punishment, for the sins of apartheid. It was because of ubuntu that Mandela invited his jailers from Robben Island to stand next to him when he was inaugurated as president.

  Ubuntu applied not only to racial and tribal harmony but also to religious pluralism. South Africa had significant Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and African Traditionalist populations, as well as a small Jewish population. Religion had a mixed history in South Africa. Apartheid was, after all, not simply a political program but also a theology. Its architects had PhDs from seminaries in Europe and had constructed apartheid from a warped reading of the Bible. But instead of rejecting religion because of its association with apartheid, South Africans had found a way of reinterpreting it as a holy path of liberation and equality. As Desmond Tutu famously said, when the white people came to South Africa, the black people had the land, and they had the Bible. The white people told us to close our eyes and pray. When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land. And now we are going to take this book seriously.

  South African leaders viewed the Parliament as a spark to increase the participation of the country’s diverse religious communities in the nation’s renewal. Imam Rashied Omar called it “an African opportunity.”

  I slept three hours a night during the month leading up to the Parliament, and not even that the week of the event. Registrations were coming in from young people in Japan, Brazil, India, Kenya, Iran—we could barely keep up. These young people had all kinds of suggestions for the youth program. Some wanted to do a project in the poor communities of Cape Town, called the townships. Others had heard that the Parliament was being held in District Six, where years ago the apartheid government had forcefully removed an entire neighborhood of people of color and claimed the land for white people. They wanted to do some kind of a service project and ceremony on that land commemorating its history.

  The common theme of the messages we received was that the young people wanted to do something, not just sit back and receive. They wanted to engage South Africa directly, establish real relationships, leave the country a little better for their having been there. We organized a trip to a community center in Mannenberg, a township in the poor Cape Flats area, so that young community organizers coming to the Parliament could connect with their peers in South Africa. We put together a cleanup of the vacant lots in District Six, then asked young people from different faiths to speak about the importance of stewarding creation from their religious traditions. Kevin, who had come from Chicago as part of the Interfaith Youth Core team, met a group of South African hip-hop artists and engaged them in drafting a piece for the youth plenary presentation. “Our generation has to tell the story of interdependence,” he said to me. A group of twenty-five young people were invited to make a presentation to the Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders who had gathered at the Parliament and included the Dalai Lama. Instead of standing up at the microphone and voicing platitudes about peace, we encircled the room and made commitments of concrete action: working for the rights of the poor in Britain, building a network of young religious leaders in India, moving forward with a program that destroyed guns in Brazil.

  The Interfaith Youth Core approach caught the attention of several people at the Parliament. A senior member of Sarvodaya Shramadana, a Sri Lankan–based movement meaning “the awakening of all through the sharing of labor,” invited me to make a presentation at one of its interfaith youth camps. I had admired Sarvodaya Shramadana and its Buddhist leader, A. T. Ariyaratne, for many years. The Interfaith Youth Core was partially based on its methodology of bringing people from different backgrounds together in a community development project, then encouraging them to use that initial space of gathering to form more sustainable networks that could engage with the root problems they were collectively facing. In this way, a project to clean up a river could lead to a group of farmers creating a regional organization that bargained for lower seed prices from suppliers. The Sarvodaya Shramadana member wanted his youth camp to know that young people all over world were coming together to do service projects, talk across religious traditions, and build organizations.

  A representative from Habitat for Humanity in India invited the Interfaith Youth Core to partner with it in a project the group was doing in Hyderabad. Historically a Christian organization based in the American South, Habitat was now a truly international entity and was thinking more seriously about how to deal with the diverse religious communities it was encountering in places such as South Asia and the Middle East. Rima, the Habitat representative, wanted the Interfaith Youth Core to run interfaith reflection sessions with a group of religiously diverse young people who would be building homes in the slums of Hyderabad in January 2001.

  Anastasia had been right. When the Interfaith Youth Core presented itself as a mobile idea that could be applied in many places, other people jumped at the opportunity to have us involved in their work. Forgetting about my doctorate for a moment, I put both trips on my calendar and thanked my lucky stars for the opportunity to travel the world and do interfaith service projects.

  Anastasia invited me to spend New Year’s with her family at the Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre, a Christian community and retreat center located outside Johannesburg. Like the Catholic Worker, Wilgespruit tried to provide a model for the “Kingdom on Earth,” a place where people could be better. Anastasia’s father, Dale White, was an Anglican priest who believed, in the spirit of Christianity and South Africa, that humanity was meant to be diverse and in relationship. During the height of the apartheid era, Dale (who is white) met with Steven Biko to nurture the black consciousness movement, because he felt it was crucial to rebuild the historical memory and pride of black South Africans. As apartheid was ending and violence between South Africa’s various tribes began brewing, Wilgespruit started to train peace mediators. Now, as South Africa was moving into the twenty-first century, Dale was intent on Wilgespruit becoming an interfaith community. To him,
South African renewal was not simply about government housing and equal employment laws. It was a spiritual goal that required the unique wisdom of diverse religious communities working together.

  It was Ramadan, and I started to settle into fasting. Anastasia fasted with me. We made it a spiritual retreat, sleeping in the small chapel at Wilgespruit, waking up at dawn to say our respective prayers, and then joining with Dale to pray together. “God bless Africa, its children, and its leaders,” Dale would say, his voice still slightly weak from the stroke he had suffered recently. “God bless humanity, its various races and religions.” I could not help but think that in this country ten years earlier, it would have been illegal for me to stand in the same room as these people because of the color of my skin. And had it not been for the people in this room, and for so many other people in so many rooms like this, it might still be illegal for us to stand here together.

  I observed Laylatul Qadr, the night in Ramadan when the Qur’an was first revealed, on New Year’s Eve, the turn of the millennium. That night, in prayer, I had a moment of stark clarity: I was part of the story of Islam. I was part of the story of pluralism. I was part of the story of ubuntu.

  Every time I announced to my thesis adviser, Geoffrey, that I was leaving for a month or two to run an interfaith youth project somewhere in the world, he would mutter that being a doctoral student was meant to be a full-time occupation and then tell me to have a safe trip and return ready to write. He understood that much of my mental energy was going toward building the Interfaith Youth Core. He also understood that I felt like a stranger in Oxford.

  Oxford, someone once told me, is a city of ten thousand students, all studying alone in their rooms. One day you wake up and realize you are among them. The university is organized around its residential colleges, self-contained little worlds dominated by the adventures, idiosyncrasies, and hormones of British undergraduates. Between November and March, the parks close in the late afternoon, and the sun seems permanently hidden behind a thick sheet of immobile clouds. Most of the people I knew preferred the shelter of their rooms to the constant drizzle of Oxford. But I went crazy if I was cooped up for more than a couple of hours a day. That meant, mostly, I flew solo. After a morning of reading and writing at home, I would make my way to Ricardo’s sandwich store in the covered market, then hole up at the Grand Café on High Street, drinking French press coffee and catching up on American politics in the International Herald Tribune. Evenings, I would go to a play at the Oxford Playhouse or one of the smaller theaters in town, or to an art film at the Phoenix cinema. Occasionally, I would meet with a group of Rhodes scholars for dinner at the Wig and Pen pub or a late-night ice cream at G & D’s, but it was not uncommon for me to go days without talking to a friend. It was a stark change from living at Stone Soup, where I was surrounded by eighteen other hippie activists and artists, each constantly insisting that I had to read his new poem or hear her new folk song.

  And then I met Nivita. She was Indian, had grown up in Botswana, had attended Amherst College, and had won a Rhodes scholarship from the Southern Africa region. At Oxford, she was studying development with a focus on reducing the devastation of AIDS in Africa. She was quiet and dark and beautiful. She made me feel immediately shy.

  After a day of research in London, I would walk back from the Gloucester Green bus station and take the long way past Nivita’s dorm room at St. Antony’s College. If the light was on, I would call her name until she came to the window, and we would talk for a few minutes before I continued on home, the night suddenly feeling warmer. Once, when I returned especially late and the light was out, I threw small stones at her window until she lifted it and stared out groggily. “I just wanted to see you before I went to sleep,” I said. She smiled, and the edge suddenly left the Oxford chill.

  For our first date, I took Nivita to Chez Gaston, a bright French café with funky yellow walls and fresh food on the north side of Oxford. She ordered the spinach crepe, and I ordered the chicken. I noticed Nivita fidgeting in her chair a little, but I kept plowing through the story I was telling and the chicken I was eating. Halfway through, I remembered my manners and asked if she wanted to try some. She couldn’t mask her disgust. “I don’t eat meat,” she said sharply.

  “Oops,” I said, suddenly feeling stupid. Of course, Nivita was a Hindu, a Brahmin no less. She had never eaten meat; it had never entered the house she had grown up in. Even eating in a restaurant that served meat was a possible compromise, because the meat could have touched the food that Nivita ordered. Kevin, Sarah, and several other people I knew were vegetarians, but they had no moral qualms about what I ate. Nivita was much more sensitive about the matter. Sometimes when we sat down to dinner, she would give me a look, half-accusing and half-forlorn, and say, “You ate chicken for lunch, didn’t you?”

  “How did you know?” I would protest. It was just a bite. I had brushed my teeth afterward. She would shake her head and hand me a piece of lime to squeeze in my vegetable curry.

  What you ate, for Nivita, was a question of faith, and faith was primarily about deepening your spirituality. She and her family had been among the earliest devotees of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, an Indian guru who had memorized the Bhagavad Gita by the time he was four and invented a breathing technique that his followers swore imbued their lives with a powerful spiritual energy. Nivita performed the twenty-minute ritual early every morning.

  I found myself admiring Nivita’s spiritual discipline. She poured her heart into prayer. I started trying not to rush through mine, doing my best to pronounce each Arabic term of the Du’a fully before moving on to the next one. When she sang Hindu devotional songs, she swayed back and forth, eyes closed, totally absorbed in their beauty. I stopped treating the ghazals of the Pakistani Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as background music. Now I listened to them with full concentration, with my prayer beads in hand, hearing the music for what it really was: worship.

  Nivita and I would take turns praying before dinner. “Your turn,” I would say, and we would bow our heads and close our eyes, and I could hear the soothing chanting of Sanskrit lift into the air. We would open our eyes, squeeze hands, and begin eating.

  And when it was my turn to pray, I would say Sura al-Fatiha. Once, after I said “Amin” and opened my eyes, I noticed that Nivita’s were still closed and that she was whispering something. I realized it was Sanskrit.

  At first I wanted to say, “Hey, what’s the deal? My prayer doesn’t count for you?” But I bit my tongue. Nivita didn’t mean to offend me. She was not suggesting that Muslim prayer fell short of heaven. She was not making an objective claim about the worth of one religion over another. She was only indicating that her preference was to connect to God in her holy language.

  I remembered my time at the Catholic Worker, how I had felt uplifted by the prayer life but also slightly apart from it. I thought about “Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad” coming into my Buddhist meditation and how praying in Arabic felt like the completion of a long journey home.

  I realized that I loved Sanskrit prayer, that I considered it beautiful, even holy. But it wasn’t my holy language, not my way of connecting with God. And I understood somewhere in my soul that, ultimately, I needed to be with someone who shared the same language of prayer.

  The discussions in our book group turned toward life after Oxford. Half of the people were going to law school, most at Yale, some at Georgetown or the University of Virginia. Others had taken jobs as consultants and investment bankers. The word “career” was frequently invoked. Everybody seemed to have a plan. I had a mostly complete doctorate and a string of experience running interfaith youth projects in India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. “Well, it was fun while it lasted,” I said to myself.

  I went to see Azim Nanji at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. I was wondering if he had any suggestions for tenure-track jobs I should apply for and whether he would be willing to write me a letter of reference. It was Azim’s job to develop young Ismaili scho
lars. The only time I had ever detected pride in his voice was when he told me about Ismailis who had gotten jobs at major universities in North America and Europe, and he mused about the impact they would have when their work started to be published. I thought perhaps he would be excited about my new career focus. But he knew me too well.

  “What about the Interfaith Youth Core?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if starting an interfaith youth movement is a career,” I told him. “I’ve put all this work into doing this doctorate, and I think maybe I should just do what people who get doctorates do—get a job at a university.”

  “Listen,” Azim said, “there are a lot of people in the world with good careers. But you have a big idea about one of the most important issues of our time. You’ve spent the past three years building that idea. That’s more than a career. That’s a calling. And when you have a calling, you have to follow it.”

  7

  The Youth Programs of Religious Totalitarians (or Tribal Religion, Transcendent Religion)

  He drew a circle that shut me out—

  Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,

  But love and I had the wit to win:

  We drew a circle that took him in!

  EDWIN MARKHAM

  The first person I called on September 11, 2001, was my friend Roy. “Everyone we know is okay, and everyone they know is okay,” he said, his voice a mixture of fury and fear, relief and resolve. Roy was a member of my Rhodes scholar class at Oxford and somehow always managed to be the life of the party and the smartest guy in the room at the same time. He was just the kind of person I could see making a deal over breakfast at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. Roy was a devoted Jew whose best friends at Oxford were a Muslim and a Hindu. He believed that pluralism was at the heart of America’s greatness, and nowhere was it on more brilliant display than in the masala of cultures that is New York City. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Roy had been the head of the Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard’s student-run community service organization. He was a big believer in the power of service to bring people together, and we had spent many hours talking about strategy for the Interfaith Youth Core. “You realize that what you’re doing is more important than ever,” he told me on the phone. I heard sirens behind him.