Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  Second, and far more serious, she didn’t appreciate my telling her what her religion was. It was true, she felt a deep resonance with parts of the Ismaili tariqa, but there was also a disconnect. “I didn’t grow up with the notion of an Imam. My family believes in the message of the Qur’an and the life and teachings of the Prophet, and the way those became spiritually embedded in India. It’s actually not a small step to adopt the Ismaili position. It’s like a Protestant becoming a Catholic and adding to her belief in Jesus and the Bible the idea and authority of the pope.”

  I was supposedly the professional in matters of religious identity and diversity, but Shehnaz had clearly thought about this issue more intelligently than I had. It was important to both of us to be with a person who shared the same language of prayer. Shehnaz was reminding me that there were multiple dialects within a language, and those differences needed to be respected within the unity of the broader tradition. She pointed me to a saying of the Prophet: “Differences within my community are a mercy.”

  I wondered how my parents would react. My dad, typically, said he was thrilled I was getting married and, frankly, not a little surprised. My mother, also typically, got tears in her eyes, hugged me and Shehnaz, and said she loved us both.

  Finally, there was the issue of Mama, in Bombay. Since I was eight years old, she had made me promise to marry an Ismaili. Mama had guided me back to the faith. She was the last person I wanted to disappoint.

  I took Shehnaz to see her a few months before the wedding. I asked my father to tell her that Shehnaz was a Muslim, but not an Ismaili. I was too scared to break the news to her myself. My grandmother had always drawn from the broader Muslim tradition but insisted that we marry Ismailis. When we arrived on her doorstep in Bombay, Mama greeted us with smiles and kisses. She asked us to sit on her special sofa and put garlands of flowers around our necks. “I am so happy you two are getting married,” she said. “To my grandson, Eboo, Ya Ali Madad,” the Ismaili greeting meaning “May Ali help you.”

  “And to my new granddaughter, beautiful, precious Shehnaz, Assalamu Alaikum,” the more general Muslim greeting meaning “Peace be upon you.”

  “May Allah bless this union.”

  Farid Esack, a South African Muslim leader, officiated at our marriage ceremony, drawing in both Sunni and Ismaili elements. Kevin gave the best man’s speech. Jeff said the blessing over the food. I thought, “This is forever,” as I put on Shehnaz’s finger a ring inscribed with a line from Pablo Neruda: “Rest with your dream in my dream.”

  Conclusion:

  Saving Each Other, Saving Ourselves

  My heart has grown capable of taking on all forms

  It is a pasture for gazelles

  A table for the Torah

  A convent for Christians

  Ka’bah for the Pilgrim

  Whichever the way love’s caravan shall lead

  That shall be the way of my faith.

  IBN ARABI

  “My dear brothers and sisters, Assalamu Alaikum. I come to you in this beautiful house of worship with the Muslim greeting of peace.” It was February 2004, and I was listening to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf give the Sunday sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church. He talked about Islam as a tradition meant for all places and times, a faith that had sustained billions of followers for more than a thousand years and contributed enormous quantities of beauty to human civilization. Imam Feisal wore a traditional white robe from the Middle East, and his accent bore the traces of his past: the Arab world, Malaysia, England. But his message was about the here and now. In that church where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous speech against the Vietnam War, Imam Feisal talked about the emergence of a twenty-first-century American Islam.

  I approached Imam Feisal after his sermon and told him about the Interfaith Youth Core. He understood the vision immediately and suggested that I visit him and his wife, Daisy Khan, at their home the following evening. The living room of their apartment on the Upper West Side was set up like a mosque, with prayer rugs stretched from wall to wall. I arrived at dusk. We said the Maghrib prayer, then talked about how America, with its unique combination of religious devotion and religious diversity, was the ideal place for a renewal of Islam. “In the twentieth century, Catholicism and Judaism underwent profound transformations in America,” Imam Feisal observed. “I think this century, in America, Islam will do the same.” Imam Feisal said that it was young American Muslims, a generation both unabashedly American and unmistakably Muslim, who would shape American Islam. And he hoped that my generation in America could reach out to our peers across the Muslim world, approximately 70 percent of whom were under thirty years old, and we could renew Islam together.

  Islam is a religion that has always been revitalized by migration. The waters of the faith, says one scholar, are so clear that they pick up the colors of the rocks they flow over. Islam in India looks Indian; in China, Chinese. The cultural tradition of contemporary Islam owes enormous debts to Indian architecture, Persian cuisine, Turkish poetry, Arabic calligraphy, and Greek philosophy. What colors will America add to Islam?

  America is a nation that has been constantly rejuvenated by immigrants. For centuries, they have added new notes to the American song. There is now a critical mass of Muslims in America. About 75 percent are people who undertook a geographic migration, coming from South Asia, the Middle East, and various parts of Africa. Approximately 25 percent were born in the United States, mostly African Americans, who chose the spiritual migration of conversion. Most estimates put the total population of Muslims in America at six million, about the same as the number of Jews and almost triple the number of Episcopalians. What notes will Islam contribute to the American song?

  Imam Feisal introduced me to a community answering both questions at once. At the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference that he and Daisy convened in the spring of 2004, I met the best of my generation of Muslims: artists and bankers, African American converts and Middle Eastern immigrants, Sunnis and Shias, women who wore headscarves and women who didn’t. We woke up early to do Sufi chants with Imam Feisal, had heated debates over how best to participate in American politics, and rolled off our chairs laughing at the act of the Muslim comedian Azhar Usman. Three themes emerged in the discussion: Islam had to be a big tent for all believers, not a small room for only the purists; Muslims needed to contribute to all aspects of human civilization, not obsess exclusively over a handful of causes; and American Muslims needed to be just as concerned with the future of the country we lived in as we were about the places of Islam’s glorious past.

  I had grown up comfortable with diversity but unclear about my identity. Finally, I had found a community I could call my own.

  Jen had the opposite experience. Her parents wanted her to have a strong Jewish identity, so they raised her entirely within a Jewish bubble. She grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, attended a Jewish school, and went to Jewish summer camps. One day, at a restaurant, Jen grew visibly upset around a dark-skinned employee. Her mother realized that Jen’s discomfort was based on her limited contact with non-Jews, and that if Jen was going to make her way in a diverse world, she needed to come out of the Jewish cocoon. How to do that while maintaining a strong Jewish identity? Jen’s parents hoped the Interfaith Youth Core’s Chicago Youth Council would help.

  Sayyeda, a young woman from a traditional Muslim family, joined the CYC at about the same time Jen did. I watched them, a devout Jew and a devout Muslim, each raised in the bubble of her own community, slowly come to know each other. They built their relationship by volunteering together—tutoring children, spending time with senior citizens, painting the walls of community centers. After a particularly challenging afternoon with refugee children on the North Side of Chicago, I saw Sayyeda recite to Jen Sura Asr from the Qur’an, about the importance of staying patient while doing good work. During an interfaith discussion on the importance of teachers in different religions, Jen talked about a famous Jewish scholar name
d Rashi and how he gave his daughters the same duties as his sons. I could see Sayyeda’s mind working on that idea. She had spent the past several years thinking about gender issues within Islam, and hearing Jen point to Rashi had made her curious about whether Islam had a similar teacher. They also had several lighter moments together. Before leading a discussion on shared values between religious communities at the Catholic Theological Union, they slipped away to the restroom together, then came out laughing hysterically. “What’s so funny?” I asked. They had been trading the prayers that Jews and Muslims say while using the bathroom.

  “Honestly, it’s like talking to another Muslim,” Sayyeda said of their friendship. “I have the same relationship with Jen as I do with some of my Muslim friends. I find that kind of ironic.”

  Jen nodded. “Anyone spiritual goes through very similar struggles in their lives. Would I go to Sayyeda to talk about how to practice modesty? Absolutely, because she’s exemplary in her modesty. Even if we have different traditions, we still grapple with the same ideas.”

  One of the ideas that Jen and Sayyeda both grappled with was being committed to your own tradition while empathizing with another person’s perspective. During one CYC meeting, Sayyeda confessed, “It seems like most of my life I’ve only been looking at one side. I’m struggling with this idea of seeing both sides. I’ve been opened up to these new cultures, these new faiths, new people. I guess it’s better to open up the lid in a box than to just close it.” She explained that she had not gone to a protest on behalf of Palestine because she didn’t feel as if concrete solutions were offered and she didn’t feel right about just denouncing something.

  Jen’s eyes flipped wide open as she listened to Sayyeda. “I was invited to go to the anti-protest to that Palestinian rally. And as much as I support Israel, never would I go and protest someone else, and it’s probably out of a direct relationship with you,” she said, gesturing to Sayyeda.

  “See, yeah, that’s it,” Sayyeda said. “I used to look at a newspaper and see a heading that says, ‘Palestinian Terrorist Blows Himself Up.’ And as sad as this sounds, I could understand why. But now, it seems like there are much better alternatives than to turn to violence.”

  “We had a really pro-Israeli event at my Jewish youth group, and somebody told the story of an Islamic leader being assassinated and people started clapping,” Jen said. “I was about to stand up and say, ‘What are you doing? That’s a human life. You can’t clap when somebody dies.’” She choked back tears, then continued. “I find myself in every situation arguing the opposite side, because now I know you and I see both sides.”

  “Same here,” said Sayyeda.

  We talked about the Muslim concept of being a mercy upon all the world. Jen brought up the saying of the first-century Palestinian rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” Understanding the other person’s point of view, we determined, was a core value in both Islam and Judaism.

  To see the other side, to defend another people, not despite your tradition but because of it, is the heart of pluralism. It is this same ethic that I see exemplified in the Indian art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. It is about a young Muslim photographer and a young Hindu housewife who come from very different backgrounds and have very different temperaments but find themselves on the same cross-country bus. The bus stalls in a part of the country where riots are raging. Muslim and Hindu mobs are roaming the area and murdering people of the other religion. A group of extremist Hindus climb aboard the bus and start checking IDs. They murder the ones with Muslim names. When they approach the young Muslim photographer, the Hindu woman stops them and says that he is her husband. The two finally escape the Hindu extremists on the bus and make it to a nearby village, only to find themselves in the midst of a group of Muslim extremists. The photographer risks his life to protect the woman and the baby, claiming that they are his own.

  I saw the film in a theater in Bombay. I thought about the times when my family there had to lock themselves in their home for fear of the raging Hindu and Muslim mobs on the streets of their city. I thought about my own failure to protect my Jewish friend in high school when people had targeted his religion for ridicule. I thought about what the young religious extremists we read about in the news every day could have been if different influences had gotten to them first. I thought about the meaning of pluralism in a world where the forces that seek to divide us are strong. I came to one conclusion: We have to save each other. It’s the only way to save ourselves.

  Postscript

  Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend.

  NORMAN CORWIN

  Movements re-create the world.

  A movement is a growing group of people who believe so deeply in a new possibility that they participate in making it a reality. They won’t all meet. They won’t even know everybody else’s names. But somehow, they all have the feeling that people on the other side of the city or the country or the world believe in the same idea, burn with the same passion, and are taking risks for the same dream.

  This book is the story of how I came to participate in the movement of religious pluralism. Everywhere I go—from villages outside Kandy, Sri Lanka, to community centers in Amman, Jordan, to offices at the State Department in Washington, D.C.—I find people with a similar story. When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else’s story, they have the chance to write a new story together.

  The purpose of the Interfaith Youth Core is to catalyze, provide resources for, and network with the growing international interfaith youth movement. If you have been doing interfaith projects for years, we want to learn from your model. If you believe deeply in the vision of religious pluralism but do not know where to start, we want to provide you with resources to get going. If you teach at a school or in a religious education program and need answers to questions about how Islam (or any other religion) calls on its followers to cooperate with others to serve the world, we have materials that might help. The Interfaith Youth Core has produced activity guides on how to run interfaith service projects and academic papers on how to think about some of the thorniest issues in interfaith work. We hold annual conferences in Chicago and send speakers and trainers to campuses and communities around the world. Come visit us on our website, and let’s see how we can work together.

  “I’m not really religious,” a high school junior in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, told me, “but I want to be a part of this.”

  “We need you,” I said.

  The question of the faith line cannot be answered by drawing a line between the religious and the nonreligious. Pluralism—even religious pluralism—is everybody’s business, for both the obvious pragmatic reasons and the more poetic ones. After all, there are many places where people hear the music of transcendence. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, some folks find the beyond in the church of their choice, some folks find it in a Woody Guthrie song.

  We need all of those people—the hymn singers and the sun saluters, the Qur’an reciters and the mandala makers, the speakers of Hebrew and the readers of Sanskrit, the hip-hop heads and the folk music fans—and more. We need a language that allows us to emphasize our unique inspirations and affirm our universal values. We need spaces where we can each state that we are proud of where we came from and all point to the place we are going to.

  I fear the road is long. I rejoice that we travel together.

  Afterword

  we are each other’s

  harvest:

  we are each other’s

  business:

  we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

  GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  When the first black president of the United States spoke of identity in his inaugural address, he used these words:

  For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers…. We c
annot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

  I was there that day, standing on the National Mall with over one million of my favorite citizens, astonished by Obama’s language. It was the urgency with which he spoke of religious diversity that got me. During the campaign Obama had been exalted for shattering racial barriers and hounded for the Muslim faith of his grandfather. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had avoided the topic of religion in his inaugural address altogether. Instead, he put the issue center stage, making it crystal clear that bridging the faith divide was going to be one of the priorities of his presidency.

  A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the White House. Joshua Dubois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, started the conversation with the word “congratulations.” Obama had appointed me to the twenty-five-member Faith Council, and the president wanted to meet with us later that week. When the Faith Council gathered in the Oval Office that Thursday morning, the president wasted little time getting down to business.

  Our formal task, he said, was to deliver at the end of one year a set of recommendations about how the federal government could better partner with faith and community-based organizations in several areas, including reducing poverty, strengthening families, improving the environment, and advancing interfaith cooperation.

  I was thrilled that interfaith cooperation was an explicit priority area, but I got an even better sense of how the president viewed this issue when he grew reflective and started talking about his broader vision for the role of diverse faith communities in our society. He said he hoped that religious communities would expand their service and community-building programs at this time of economic crisis, and repeated a sentence from his National Prayer Breakfast address: “The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us.” Such social-action efforts, he noted, could illustrate the shared values between diverse religious communities and thus provide common ground for interfaith dialogue and understanding. Finally, the president spoke of the idealism and energy of young people, and said that we should be especially mindful of engaging the leadership of the next generation in faith-based social action and interfaith cooperation.