by Eboo Patel
At this point, my friend and mentor Jim Wallis of Sojourners, one of the other members of the Faith Council, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “It sounds like the president has read the mission statement of the Interfaith Youth Core.” It sure did, and I couldn’t believe my ears.
As the meeting was winding down, the president asked if there were any final questions or comments. I decided it was now or never. “Mr. President, what you were saying earlier about faith and service, diversity and common ground, young people showing leadership in social action and interfaith cooperation—my organization, the Interfaith Youth Core, is trying to build a global movement out of that very energy. Thank you for sharing our vision.”
Obama smiled that megawatt smile—it looked even better in person than it did on TV—and said: “We’ll be following up with you on that.” And follow up he did, from dedicating a week of the United We Serve campaign to interfaith service efforts to making interfaith cooperation a theme of his historic Cairo address. The grassroots interfaith youth movement had gotten a global stage.
I wrote Acts of Faith when the Interfaith Youth Core was just getting off the ground. I can’t help but smile as I reread the book now and think back to those early days of the organization. Our first leadership program involved eight young people meeting weekly in the basement of a Catholic church in Rogers Park, Illinois. Our early university-based training programs engaged a few dozen students’ total—from Penn, Illinois, Northwestern, and DePaul. Our first national conference drew forty people. I spent a lot of weekends driving long distances to speak to gatherings of twenty-five or thirty people. We were overjoyed when a local media outlet did a short feature on IFYC, thinking it was our one shot at getting the message out to a larger audience. Funding was so precarious that I talked to my wife more than once about the possibility of having to forego a few paychecks. In short, the IFYC was a fledgling organization dreaming of a grassroots movement.
We’ve come a long way. Our most recent conference drew 650 people, including delegations from a dozen countries. The Chicago Youth Council has morphed into a national Fellows Alliance program for exceptional college students who are transforming their campuses into models of interfaith cooperation. We’ve added an international fellowship called FaithsAct, a partnership with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which involves thirty recent college graduates dedicating a year to building interfaith alliances focused on ending deaths related to malaria. The IFYC now has a team of speakers and trainers; we’re more likely to be in front of an audience of 250 than 25, and we occasionally find ourselves addressing upwards of 2,500 people. We are regular contributors to national and global media, including the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN, and have been featured on several high-profile programs, including Good Morning America. Over the last few years, major philanthropists have made significant investments in the IFYC, and we’ve also managed to build a fee-for-service dimension into our work, allowing us to grow our staff to over thirty full-time professionals at the time of this writing.
What’s even more impressive than the growth of the Interfaith Youth Core is the emergence of a genuine grassroots interfaith youth movement. Cities like St. Paul, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Sharon, Massachusetts, have interfaith youth programs, and I hear of several more communities every month that are in the process of launching their own. Campuses from Berea College in Kentucky and Luther College in Iowa to Stanford, Princeton, and Yale have all made interfaith cooperation a high priority. Graduates of Interfaith Youth Core programs are making their mark as well, winning prestigious scholarships like the Mitchell and the Truman, launching academic journals with a focus on interfaith cooperation, starting their own interfaith nonprofit organizations, and using their interfaith leadership skills to advance issues related to food justice and public health.
So how does an emerging movement best utilize the opportunity of the global stage? I think we start by articulating a big, bold vision—the kind of vision that a lot of folks may think is out of reach. And then we put forth a strategy that makes believers out of skeptics and leaders out of believers. So here’s the big, bold vision: interfaith cooperation should be a social norm, the same way that environmentalism, human rights, multiculturalism, and volunteerism are social norms. We’ll know that interfaith cooperation is getting there when we simply expect houses of worship to be involved in regular interfaith service projects, just like they do regular Habitat for Humanity projects now; when it’s just the status quo for cities to host a Day of Interfaith Youth Service program and thousands of people come, including the mayor; when college campuses make a commitment to being models of interfaith cooperation; and when religious prejudice is challenged with the same frequency and intensity that racial bigotry is called out.
And here’s the Interfaith Youth Core strategy. First, be aggressive about spreading the vision of interfaith cooperation. Religious extremists and religious bigots are not shy about shouting their ideas from the mountaintops, and we need to compete with and ultimately defeat their message machines. We are building a top-notch communications department at IFYC with the goal of using every channel available to us—from college newspapers to CNN, from websites to the White House bully pulpit—to advance the idea that this century needs to be characterized by bridges between different faith communities, not bombs. Second, help higher education become a model of interfaith cooperation. Campuses already have a religiously diverse student body, a commitment to civic engagement and student leadership, and a desire to be at the vanguard of important social change. Just as college campuses have become models of multiculturalism and environmentalism, with concrete goals they commit to achieving, they can also become models of interfaith cooperation. The IFYC wants to work with five hundred campuses over the next several years to help them advance toward this goal. Third, we want to inspire, train, and mobilize a critical mass of young people as interfaith leaders. This was the animating vision of the IFYC from the beginning, and it remains a cornerstone today. Interfaith leaders have the vision, the knowledge base, and the skill set to change negative conversations about religious diversity into positive ones, to launch sustainable interfaith cooperation projects, and to transform environments (their home, their college campus, their city) into models of interfaith cooperation.
A hundred years ago the terms “environmentalist” or “human rights activist” were not broadly recognized in our culture; they were social roles that evolved as societies grew more concerned with our effects on the earth and came to accept the idea that there are basic rights that any human being should be afforded. As we increasingly come to understand the importance of interfaith understanding and cooperation, the Interfaith Youth Core hopes to make the term “interfaith leader” a new identity category in our culture, something that idealistic young people aspire to become. Ultimately, it is going to be a generation of interfaith leaders who make interfaith cooperation a social norm. Our job at the Interfaith Youth Core is to catalyze, resource, and network this generation of interfaith leaders, and watch them change the world.
Acknowledgments
This is a book painfully penned by one set of hands and proudly carrying the fingerprints of many, many others. Thank you to Bill Ayers for suggesting that there may be a story worth telling floating around in my head, and for introducing me to the fantastic people at Beacon Press. A special thanks to my Beacon editor, Amy Caldwell, who may have spent more time on repairs for this manuscript than on any other book she has edited. The support provided by Swanee Hunt, James Jensen, Aaron Olver, and Ron Kinnamon made this book both easier and more fun to write. Thank you to Cecelia Weiss, Nick Price, and Erin Williams for helping me with the research for this book. Thanks to Hussein Rashid, Jane Rechtman, Jeff Pinzino, Jennifer Zlotow, Roy Bahat, and Reza Aslan for reviewing the manuscript with care and providing valuable insights. This book is very much the product of conversations with the staff, the board, and all the young people of the Interfaith Yo
uth Core, as well as my colleagues in the broader interfaith movement. It is a tribute to their vision, energy, and friendship.
My mom, dad, and brother have always provided the right balance of challenge and support for all of my crazy endeavors. I thank them for bringing the same love to this book. And finally, thanks to my wife, Shehnaz Mansuri, who embodies in human form so many of the central values of the Muslim tradition—compassion, mercy, patience, and constancy—and who read draft after draft, corrected the major errors, allowed the minor ones, and stayed my best friend and key coconspirator throughout.
Bibliographic Essay
This is a book, like so many of the characters within it, that lives at the intersection of many fields, movements, and archetypes: terrorists and faith heroes, religious totalitarianism and religious pluralism, social entrepreneurship and academic theory, current events and ancient traditions, the Harlem of life and the Heavens of thought. Its sources are equally diverse. Many of them are embedded in the text. The purpose of this essay is to give the reader a sense of where some of the more specific material I cite comes from and to suggest avenues for additional reading.
For current events, I generally relied on well-regarded newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic Monthly. For information on the London Tube bombings, I also used several British sources, including the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC, and the British government’s official report on the bombings. My information on Eric Rudolph came largely from the New York Times reports of his capture and his trials and from a book called Hunting Eric Rudolph by Henry Schuster with Charles Stone.
I tell some specific stories about religious violence in this book. My main source on Hindu nationalism in India is an excellent report titled The Foreign Exchange of Hate. My source on Yossi Klein Halevi’s story of becoming a Jewish extremist at the hands of Meir Kahane is his autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. The quotes in chapter 7 come from this book.
There are several excellent books on the causes of religious violence. For information on the roots of Muslim violence, Al Qaeda, and September 11, I found The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, Landscapes of the Jihad by Faisal Devji, and Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden by Bruce Lawrence particularly useful. For books on the more general issue of religious violence, I like Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God, Mark Jurgensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God, Martin Marty’s When Faiths Collide, and Martin Marty and Scott Appleby’s The Glory and the Power, an accessible book based on their multivolume Fundamentalism Project.
There are two industries working overtime to produce bad books about Islam: Muslim extremists and Islamophobes. What a better world it would be if these groups all went into one room and read one another’s books. (If they stayed away from their guns long enough, they might even realize how similar their visions actually are.) Thankfully, there are also many excellent books on Islam. My personal favorites include Major Themes of the Qur’an by Fazlur Rahman; No god but God by Reza Aslan; What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf; Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism by Farid Esack; and Muhammad by Karen Armstrong. As I stated in chapter 1, the United States is blessed to have a number of exceptional Muslim scholars who are steeped in the Muslim tradition and are committed to the project of pluralism in America and beyond. The most senior of this group is Dr. Umar Abd-Allah, the scholar in residence of the Nawawi Foundation in Chicago. The importance of his essays cannot be overstated. Not only have they awakened many a young Muslim to the beauty of his faith, but they also provide the intellectual architecture for a twenty-first-century Islam that remains true to the roots of the tradition and seeks not only to acculturate America but also to contribute to it. These essays include “Islam and the Cultural Imperative,” “Mercy, the Stamp of Creation,” and “Innovation and Creativity in Islam.” They can be found at the Nawawi Foundation website. For more on the Aga Khan, the Aga Khan Development Network, and the Ismaili community, see the websites of the Institute of Ismaili Studies and the Aga Khan Development Network.
Underlying this book are both theories of religion and theories of pluralism. My favorite theories of religion can be found in two short books. Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Faith of Other Men was written in the early 1960s, at a time when America was finally accepting the presence of Jews and Catholics, and many years before it would become aware of growing Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist communities. As if looking into a crystal ball, Smith stated, “The religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism.” He was cautiously optimistic about this prospect, but warned that it would require a massive shift in religious understanding, particularly from his fellow Christians, who would have to learn to see the faith of other people as just as deeply rooted and genuine as their own. Smith called for a field of inquiry that focuses not so much on religious systems as religious people—in other words, more concerned with understanding how Buddhists and Christians will live together than with whether Buddhism and Christianity have theological points in common. My other favorite book in the theory of religion is Aziz Esmail’s The Poetics of Religious Experience, which uses examples from Islam to illustrate that religions are best understood as traditions with a core essence that communities of believers interpret and give expression to in a range of ways across time and place. The essential vision of Islam can be stated simply as submission to the will of God—a core idea shared by Muslims from tenth-century North Africa to twenty-first-century North America, but understood and put into practice differently.
The literature of pluralism, especially religious pluralism, is growing. My favorite books on pluralism in America include What It Means to Be an American by Michael Walzer and The One and the Many by Martin Marty. Other important writers in this area include Anthony Appiah, Will Kymlicka, John Berry, Amy Gutmann, and Charles Taylor. In the specific area of religious pluralism, I find myself constantly referring to Diana Eck’s two excellent books on the topic, Encountering God and A New Religious America. More and more books on the history of religious cooperation are being written. I particularly like Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, a set of lyrical vignettes about medieval Andalusia, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in a spirit of mutual enrichment. There is also a growing literature on the interfaith movement. An excellent history of the movement can be found in Marcus Braybrooke’s Pilgrimage of Hope. I coedited a volume with Patrice Brodeur, who has played a key role in many interfaith endeavors, called Building the Interfaith Youth Movement. The journal CrossCurrents has focused on interfaith cooperation for many years, and the journal Interreligious Insight also is good.
The social entrepreneurship movement is one of the most exciting new forces of our time. I am honored that the Interfaith Youth Core is considered part of it. David Bornstein’s How to Change the World is an excellent history of social entrepreneurship and does a particularly good job of articulating its distinctiveness and profiling its founder, Bill Drayton of the organization Ashoka. There are several excellent memoirs by social entrepreneurs on how they started their organizations. Two good recent ones are Wendy Kopp’s One Day, All Children …, on the beginnings of Teach for America, and the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’s Banker to the Poor, on the founding of the Grameen Bank and the field of microfinance. For examples of older social entrepreneurs, see Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, on community organizing, and Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House, on the beginnings of the settlement house movement. There is an excellent biography of Alinsky called Let Them Call Me Rebel and several good ones of Jane Addams, including one by the theologian Jean Bethke Elshtain.
My greatest inspiration for this book came from the faith heroes who emerged as leaders in their teens and twenties and built movem
ents with profound interfaith character. Chief among these are Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. Each of them has written a revealing and highly recommended autobiography. In addition, I love Taylor Branch’s three-volume set on the civil rights movement, America in the King Years, as well as King’s collected writings and speeches, A Testament of Hope, edited by James Washington. I remember staying up all night in India, aided in my insomnia by a colony of ravenous bedbugs, to finish Louis Fisher’s excellent biography of Gandhi. The best-known biography of Mandela is by Anthony Sampson. I also suggest biographies on Abdul Ghaffar Khan (also known as Badshah Khan), a Pashtun Muslim who worked closely with Gandhi to liberate India.
If there is one guiding intellectual behind this book, in both style and vision, it is James Baldwin. The Library of America has compiled a comprehensive collection of his nonfiction into a beautiful volume edited by Toni Morrison. It includes his three most important books—The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and Nobody Knows My Name—as well as a number of essays and talks. If I was banished to a desert island and allowed one book in addition to my English translation of the Qur’an, it would be Baldwin’s collected nonfiction.