by Eboo Patel
In the sphere of religion, the totalitarians have spent decades investing in their institutions and focusing like a laser on young people. Consider the institutions of Hindu extremism, led by an organization known as the National Volunteer Corps, or RSS. The RSS was formed in 1925 with the express goal of marginalizing India’s Christian, Muslim, and other minorities in the pursuit of a “pure” Hindu nation. One of the RSS’s early leaders, M. S. Golwalkar, openly expressed admiration for Nazi Germany. He wrote, “National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
This ideology is spread through a sophisticated institutional structure. The core unit of the RSS is known as a shakha (cell), where swayamsevaks (volunteers) gather to be steeped in Hindu totalitarian ideology and engage in activities that spread it. The model was borrowed from Mussolini’s Fascist Party in Italy. The cells multiply when seasoned swayamsevaks move to a different area to start a new shakha. A friend of mine doing a graduate degree in Bombay estimated that more than half of her classmates were either actively involved in a shakha or had been raised in the shakha system.
Swayamsevaks also move into positions of influence within the RSS’s many different wings. These include a youth wing called the Bajrang Dal, which doubles as a paramilitary group; a political party called the BJP (which held national office from 1998 to 2004); a so-called service wing known as the Sewa Vibhag; and a culturalpolitical mobilization wing called the VHP. These different segments work together in the most nefarious ways. For example, in the 2002 murder spree that left approximately two thousand Muslims dead in the state of Gujarat, BJP government officials used instruments of the state, including the police force, to encourage the killing; the Bajrang Dal and Sewa Vibhag sent truckloads of young militants into Muslim areas to carry out the murders; and the VHP provided the political and organizational mobilization, its international working president going so far as to call the carnage a “successful experiment” that would be repeated in other parts of India.
Of course, totalitarians have always recognized the importance of building institutions that attract young people. The Nazis are a prime example. After gaining power in 1933, Hitler began to systematically indoctrinate the next generation. He took over schools, firing teachers suspected of being opposed to the regime and forcing the remaining educators to join the National Socialist Teachers League, which monitored teachers throughout Germany and organized camps where teachers were trained in how to most effectively teach Nazi ideology to German students. Families were required to enroll their ten- to eighteen-year-old children in the Hitler Youth, which grew from just over a hundred thousand in 1933 to nearly nine million by 1939, organized around the motto, “Führer, command—we follow!”
Religious totalitarians have put enormous effort into two institutions where young people spend a great deal of time: schools and websites. The Christian Identity movement is particularly adept on the web. Their sites feature electronic coloring books with white supremacist symbols, crossword puzzles with racist clues, and twenty-four-hour webcasts. Interested in reading Eric Rudolph’s most recent musings or writing to him in jail? You can find that information, plus several flattering photographs of him, at the Army of God website.
Online Bible studies that masquerade as mainstream endeavors slowly take unsuspecting students deeper and deeper into the theology of white supremacy. The purpose statement at the Kingdom Identity Ministries website reads:
What does the A.I.T. Bible Course do for Christian Education? It brings understanding, it reveals facts. It separates man-made doctrine from the original Holy Scriptures. It creates a sound basis for a person’s Christian Faith … One sure way to a non-denominational Christian Education is via the American Institute of Theology Bible Course.
A few clicks later, and students are reading about how white people are God’s chosen race and Asians, Jews, and blacks are worthy only of subjugation, slavery, and destruction.
Schools are a major area of focus for religious totalitarians. In the mid-1990s, about six thousand schools, employing forty thousand teachers and educating more than one million students, were associated with the RSS in India. A National Council of Educational Research and Training report concluded that the curriculum used by many of these schools was “designed to promote bigotry and religious fanaticism in the name of inculcating knowledge of culture in the younger generation.” Textbooks contain a map of India that includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, and parts of Burma. The alphabet is taught using Hindu symbols—A is for Arjuna, B is for the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. Letters that do not correspond to any Hindu symbol do not get taught.
Institutions require money, and religious extremists make the most serious investments. A financial network committed to an aggressive version of Salafi Islam has dramatically changed the Muslim world over the past quarter century. These Salafis insist that the only true Muslims are the ones who follow a purist practice of Islam based on an imagined notion of the early Muslim community. Salafis actively seek to destroy any diversity within the ummah and consider relations between Muslims and other communities anathema. How has this interpretation become dominant? Private foundations and wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf have funded educational institutions that create textbooks, produce videos, and train Muslim preachers. Muslim communities around the world receive money to build lavish mosques, and Salafi imams are sent to staff them and make sure their educational materials are widely available at low cost. One expert calls this process the single most effective use of philanthropic money in the past two decades: “They [the Salafis] have managed to shift the meaning of Islam in the global marketplace of ideas because there is no meaningful competition of any kind.”
Well-run youth programs have a profound impact on the behavior of young people. This is strikingly illustrated in a summer camp experiment organized by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. Attempting to sow hostility between the boys at the camp, Sherif’s researchers divided them into two groups, called the Rattlers and the Eagles, and organized a series of athletic competitions designed to build intragroup solidarity and intergroup antagonism. The researchers intensified this polarization by giving preferential treatment to one group. The Eagles were invited early to a camp party and ate all the choice refreshments before the Rattlers showed up. The Rattlers were furious, name-calling ensued, and soon punches were being thrown.
The researchers then sought to reverse the hostility. The most effective approach they found was putting the kids in situations where they had to work together. They organized a camping trip where the truck broke down. Every boy had to help, either pushing or pulling the vehicle, to get it back to camp. After participating in a series of similar cooperative projects, the hostile feelings dissipated, and the boys reported strong feelings of solidarity.
I recently read an Indian journalist’s account of the RSS. I was surprised at the intimacy of the article, the detailed description of life inside the organization. I wondered how he knew so much about it. Toward the end, he confessed that he had been a member during the 1940s, when he was a teenager. It was the twilight of the colonial era, and he wanted to be part of something larger than himself. He joined the RSS because it seemed like the only option for a teenager with a growing political consciousness. He ended the article with a final detail: the more moderate Congress Party did not have an active youth wing in his area.
This same dynamic defines our world today. The totalitarians have put their resources into building youth programs. The pluralists haven’t.
I remember a conversation with a well-meaning Protestant in a wealthy suburb just north of Chicago. He approached me after a talk I gave on the importance of youth programs in religious communities and made a sheepish confession: “My wife and I really enjoy the church we go to, but my da
ughter, she hates it. She thinks the services are boring, and she complains that there’s no real youth program. The pastor keeps talking about starting one, but I guess he has other priorities.” He kind of shrugged as if to say, “At least we’re thinking about it.” Then he asked me offhandedly, “What do you suggest we do?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Change churches,” I said.
He looked a bit taken aback. “Either that or make sure that the church starts a youth program that interests your daughter,” I continued. In my mind, it was a question of priorities: was he more interested in his daughter liking church or himself liking it?
Most people choose themselves over their kids. It is an entirely understandable choice, but we should not be blind to the consequences. It means that we will continue to fail our religious youth. I cannot help but think of the number of teenagers I know who say that they are bored in their congregations, that their church or synagogue or mosque or temple has little going on for them. The youth minister they liked was let go because of budget cuts. The Habitat for Humanity trip they were planning got canceled because the adult supervisor couldn’t make it at the last minute. The pastor or imam or rabbi can never remember their names.
Too many adults secretly consider the absence of young people in mainstream religious communities the natural course of events, viewing the kids as too self-absorbed, materialistic, and anti-authoritarian to be interested in religion. The result is that adults pay lip service to the importance of involving youths in faith communities but let themselves off the hook when it comes to actually building strong, long-lasting youth programs. Youth activities are typically the top item in a congregation’s newsletter but the last line in the budget. Youth programs are the most likely to be funded by short-term grants, and youth ministers are the first to be fired when a religious community has financial problems.
Recent research by sociologist Christian Smith shows how wrong-headed this view is. In his book Soul Searching, Smith concludes that many young Americans want religion to play an important role in their lives, but their faith communities do a poor job of involving them. The problem, Smith observes, is that religious communities seriously fail to adequately support youth programs. He writes, “Very many religious congregations and communities of faith in the United States are failing rather badly in religiously engaging and educating their youth.”
Were Yigal Amir, Hasib Hussain, and Benjamin Smith meant to be murderers? How about Osama bin Laden? They, too, were born with the breath of God within them. They, too, were made to be servants and representatives of God on earth, to steward His creation with a sense of compassion and mercy. What happened?
Every time we read about a young person who kills in the name of God, we should recognize that an institution painstakingly recruited and trained that young person. And that institution is doing the same for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of others like him. In other words, those religious extremists have invested in their youth programs.
If we had invested in our youth programs, could we have gotten to those young people first?
8
Building the Interfaith Youth Core
How are we, in the United States, to embrace difference and maintain a common life?
MICHAEL WALZER
I arrived at her doorstep soaking wet. It was pouring rain, and the windshield wipers on my car had suddenly stopped working. I couldn’t see a thing driving south on Lake Shore Drive to her condo in Streeterville. I had to lean out the driver’s side window, grab one of the wipers, and move it up and down with my hand to clear a space on the windshield.
Kevin had been telling me about this woman for years. Her name was Shehnaz, and she had gone to law school with Kevin’s friend Nikki. Every time Kevin would talk about her, I would shrug it off. “You’re being an idiot,” he would say. “She’s a civil rights attorney, she’s beautiful, she’s Indian, she’s a Muslim, she owns her own condo, and she will probably agree to see you on my recommendation. You, on the other hand, don’t have a job and don’t own anything except some books on anthropology. Don’t you think that you should try to improve your lot in this world and ask her out?” Finally, I took his advice, and here I was, all wet.
Shehnaz laughed when I explained my car situation. She handed me a towel and motioned for me to sit on the couch across the room. I settled in, looked up, and found myself thinking about poems that praised deep beauty.
We talked about her job as a civil rights lawyer. Her clients were mostly poor minorities with lengthy rap sheets who had been beaten up by Chicago police officers. “Everybody has rights in this country,” Shehnaz said flatly. “That’s what makes it great. If we let the rights of one group erode, we endanger the very existence of those rights for everybody.”
She was working on a new case: a mosque foundation was being harassed by a suburban council, and she was preparing a First Amendment/religious discrimination suit. “When it’s your people being discriminated against because of their religion, you realize how important the Constitution is to everybody,” she said.
We went for dosas at Mysore Woodlands on Devon Avenue, ate with our hands, laughed about what it was like growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago with Indian Muslim parents. She had gone to high school in Naperville, fifteen minutes from where I grew up. We had probably passed each other at the Ogden Six movie theater. We had graduated high school one year apart and overlapped at the University of Illinois. “You never read my column in the Daily Illini?” I asked her over milk shakes at the Zephyr café. “You never came to any Indian Student Association meetings?” she shot back. I decided it was better that she hadn’t known me in college.
It was a work night, and I thought maybe I should drop her back home. But I didn’t want to leave her. I decided to push my luck. “Kurt Elling sings at the Green Mill tonight,” I said. “Wanna go?”
“All right,” she said softly.
That was Wednesday. Thursday we ate chow foon at Hong Min in Chinatown and went to see Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited at the HotHouse. Friday we watched the film Girlfight. Saturday we ate Thai fish cakes at Rosded in Lincoln Square and caught the band Funkadesi. I ran into some people I knew from college at the show. “Is she with you?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said, just loud enough for Shehnaz to hear. She didn’t turn around, but I thought I saw her smile.
We walked outside. She saw the moon, slowly took her hand out of mine, ran her palm down her face, and whispered the shahada: “La Ilaha il Allah, Muhammadu Rassoolillah.”
The first thing I did when I got back to Oxford was tell my landlord that I needed to break my lease. I called Kevin and said, “I’ll be home before New Year’s.”
“But you just left.”
“I met the one,” I told him. “I’m coming back to Chicago.”
Chicago, a somber city? What was Saul Bellow talking about? I returned to an exuberant city—a blue-collar metropolis getting an artists’ makeover; an American city taking its place in the world; a town unafraid to decorate cow statues and call it public art; a city that was one part Indiana and one part Manhattan.
It was a rich time to be back in Chicago. The Cubs, Sox, Bulls, and Bears each got a new coach—two of them black, one Latino. Millennium Park was emerging from the big mud pit on Michigan Avenue, an urban playground that felt both a part of downtown and a world away. In a basement on the South Side, Kanye West was producing beats, practicing rhymes, dreaming of new layers in hip-hop. In another basement not far from there, a Senate campaign was under way, and a local politician named Barack Obama was about to become a national icon.
I loved the thousands of trees and flowers that the mayor had planted. I loved the way the sun played off the lake on a cold winter day. I loved the Russian Jews and Pakistani Muslims who spent their Thursday afternoons on the park benches on Devon Avenue. I loved the women who filled the corridor between O—Hare Airport and the Blue Line back to the city with gospel songs.
> I thought about Louis Armstrong stopping to listen to a group of jazz musicians who were playing “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue.” “Man, you’re playing that too slow,” he told them.
“How would you know?” one asked scornfully.
“I’m Louis Armstrong. That’s my chorus you’re playing,” he said.
The next day he walked by the same corner, and the musicians had hung up a sign: PUPILS OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG.
Jazz got educated in this town. The blues went electric here. And one of the originals, Buddy Guy, still played a show almost every night of the week during the month of January at his club, Legends.
I went back to my old barber, an Iraqi who had been forced to fight in Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War and was given asylum in the United States. His son came bounding up as he threw the smock around my shoulders. The boy wanted to show his father some new trick on his Game Boy. “My God,” I told Amir, “is that Dexter?” He was three the last time I saw him—shy, still a toddler. Now he had a head of thick, wavy hair and eyes set off by long Arab eyelashes. I asked Dexter about school, about his grandparents; next thing I knew, my hair was done.
“Hey, Eboo,” I heard. It was a black girl’s voice, soft but not shy. I was munching on a falafel sandwich made by the Palestinian grocer near El Cuarto Año, where I had my first teaching job. “You don’t remember me?” she asked, her voice playful. “It’s Roxanne. You were my teacher second semester, right here,” she said, gesturing toward the school building. “I got my GED. I got a job now, and my son’s doing real good—he’s in preschool.” She smiled.
I woke up one morning and took my Chicago Tribune out of its blue wrapper, and there was a story that brought me to tears. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an Argentine Israeli maestro, had shown up at a student assembly at a school in the Palestinian territories and played the piano. Simply brought his gift to a group of students who are given too little, communicating that they, too, are worthy of beauty.