E-mail a friendEboo Patel
original airdate July 23, 2007
Eboo Patel is founder-executive director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that gets young people of different faith backgrounds talking with one another. Patel has worked as an organizer, teacher and artist on four continents and, in '02, was named one of 'thirty social visionaries under thirty changing the world.'" He completed his Ph.D. at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Patel is a frequent contributor to numerous Op-Ed pages and author of Acts of Faith.
Eboo Patel
Tavis: Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and author of the new book "Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation." He joins us tonight from Chicago. Eboo Patel, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Eboo Patel: Great to be with you, Tavis, thanks for having me.
Tavis: Let me go right to that subtitle, because it got my attention. "The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation." Enlighten me about the subtitle.
Patel: Sure. Well, I'm an American Muslim, deeply proud to be an American, deeply proud to be a Muslim. And I think that right now, America is struggling with how do we be the most religiously diverse society in human history, and the most religiously devout society in the west? And Muslims are a huge part of that diversity.
There are several million of us in America, and we want to contribute to this country. And we think America is the best place to make the Qur'anic hope, that God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another, a reality. And I think that that hope, which I call pluralism, which is the hope that people from different backgrounds can live together in mutual trust and loyalty, that's either going to be enacted by young people or destroyed by young people.
And right now, the people who are against us - the religious totalitarians of all stripes - they know how to get to young people. So the question I ask in this book is, “Do those of us who believe in religious pluralism, can we make young people leaders for our cause?”
Tavis: Let me come back to that question in a moment. Before we get to that, let me ask where the reality is concerned that you would like to see us live in, in America; this reality that you're speaking of - pluralism. What's the challenge for Muslims to making that happen, and what's the challenge for the rest of us to making that happen?
Patel: That's a great question, Tavis. I think that I would prefer to look to this as an opportunity, and I think that we share this opportunity, which is to make, as I said, this Qur'anic hope, that God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know each other, a reality. And I think that that was best articulated in the 20th century by an American - a man who is my hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that we can be like a beloved community.
And he talked about how Hindus and Muslims and Jews and Christians and Buddhists, they have one beating heart of love. That's the common element within all those faiths. And King envisioned America as that beloved community. I think the opportunity is for us to live up to that principle. And what strikes me about King is not just his vision, but the fact that he was so young when he began enacting it.
We forget that in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, King was only 26 years old. So this African American who had grown up in this powerful Baptist tradition and learned from an Indian Hindu about how to enact love in real life in a social movement, he was the one that showed America what it could be in the 20th century. And I want us to be living up to that vision. Muslims and Christians and Jews and all of us.
Tavis: I accept your formulation that it is, in fact, an opportunity. But what I want to press a little further, though, is what the challenge is from those of your faith to realizing that reality, and what is the challenge for the rest of us who happen not to be Muslim to make that beloved community a reality?
Patel: Right. I think the challenge comes in what I call religious totalitarianism, which is the opposite - the enemy of religious pluralism. And religious totalitarianism is the idea that only one way of being, believing, and belonging is legitimate on Earth, and that way must dominate - it must suffocate others. And right now it's no secret that we are experiencing a moment where Muslim totalitarians are particularly loud and particularly vicious, and they're using the particularly heinous tool of terrorism to make that a reality.
I think the vast majority of Muslims - I know the vast majority of Muslims absolutely condemn terrorism and in fact have absolutely nothing to do with it. So when people say to me, "Eboo, why are your people on the other side of the world shouting these horrible things about Jews or these horrible things about America," I think to myself, what do I have to do with Hizbullah? What do I have to do with Muslim terrorists?
I have no more to do with Muslim terrorists than the average Chinese person has to do with Chinese criminals, or the average Brazilian person has to do with the Brazilian mob. And I think that the challenge right now for Muslims is to make it loud and clear we have nothing to do with those people. And the challenge for Americans or other people in America is to live up to that best in our own country, which is to understand that you do not disenfranchise an entire religion, an entire community of people, because of the actions of a few.
We don't look at Catholics and say, well - we don't look at the IRA and think that it represents all Catholics. We don't look at the horrible things that the Christian identity movement and think it represents all pluralists. So let's not look at al Qaeda and think it represents all Muslims.
Tavis: Let me take you back, then, to the beginning of this conversation to the faith that you expressed in youth people to engage in these acts of faith, which would allow us to live, to King's words, in this beloved community. I'm curious as to why you think that the hope for this reality rests with young people. You've done more research in this, obviously, than I have.
Is there some number that we can look to, some research that suggests to us, first of all, that young people today are particularly more spiritual, more religious, believe more in faith so that we aren't displacing that hope in them?
Patel: Well, I think the quantitative part of it is very simple, and that is that we live on a very young planet, and particularly the most religiously volatile parts of this planet are very young. So the median age in Iraq, for example, is 19.5, and 70 percent of Iran is under 30 years old. And the big question is what type of religiosity are those people going to have?
How are they going to interact with people from different parts of the world and from different religions? Are they going to be on what I call the religious pluralism side of the faith line, or are they going to be on what I call the religious totalitarian side of the faith line? So that's the kind of quantitative dimension. But I think that there's a strong poetic and anecdotal dimension to this also, Tavis.
If you look at the religious heroes of the 20th century, all of whom stood for pluralism - whether it was Mandela or Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or King - they were all, to a person, young when they started. As I said, King was 26 in Montgomery in 1955. Gandhi was even younger when he started his movement against the racist pass laws in South Africa.
Mandela's first public move was to start the ANC's Youth League. And it's no surprise and no secret that today's religious extremists are very young. The vast majority of the September 11th terrorists were in their twenties, for example. The murderer of Yitzhak Rabin was a young Jew who was in his mid-twenties. And so I think we're looking at two stories here.
One is a story of religious heroes who stand for pluralism. The other is a story of religious extremists who stand for totalitarianism. Both groups are young. Which direction is my generation going to go? That's the question I ask in this book, and that's the question that I hope my organization, the Interfaith Youth Core, is a part of a positive answer to.
Tavis: Part of the answer to that question rests with who is mentoring, who the peers are for these young people. Let's talk about mentors and peers where these young folk are concerned.
Patel: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I think that if you look in the lives of religious heroes, what you find is that when they came to what I call the crossroads of their identity crisis, they were met by profound souls. People who nurtured them in the direction of pluralism. And so you have King at Morehouse College, or you have King at Crozer Seminary, hearing lectures on Gandhi.
And who gets to Osama Bin Laden when he's 14, or who gets to Zawhiri when he's 14, or who gets to Benjamin Smith, who's a Christian identity extremist, when he's young? Well, it's leaders of that cause. So I think one of the things that those of us who believe in religious pluralism have to be doing, Tavis, is building a movement that has young people at the center as the architects of pluralism.
We need to be telling young people, it's your work that's going to make the difference in whether the 21st century is defined by religious pluralism or religious totalitarianism. And that's precisely what the Interfaith Youth Core is about. It's about empowering young people to be the architects of pluralism. And I believe that if young people are building the cathedrals of pluralism wherever they are - on their campuses, in their communities, on their street corners - there will not be enough terrorist bombs to destroy all those cathedrals.
Tavis: Part of accepting this notion of pluralism, it seems to me, Eboo, starts with knowing what you believe. It's very difficult - strange though it may sound - to accept others' faith, others' beliefs, if you're not certain and sure of where you stand. What's your sense of how certain young people are? King was certain, Gandhi was certain, Mandela was certain.
You throw these names out; they're very clear about where they stood on these issues, which is what allowed them to be able to have the courage to reexamine their own assumptions and to engage in a gospel, if you will, of pluralism. What suggests to you that young people have a good sense of where they stand on this issue, or these issues?
Patel: Well, I think that's a profound question, Tavis, and this is, in a lot of ways, the question that my book seeks to unpack and to answer. And I basically start with this framework of pluralism versus totalitarianism, and then I ask myself the question well, how did I wind up on one side of the faith line instead of the other side of the faith line?
And the truth is, none of us are born knowing exactly who we are, particularly in the confusing world that we live in right now. We discover who we are, we create who we are, and a lot of that creation and discovery comes in the encounter of people who are different. And I think what's unique about a King and a Gandhi is not that they were born at eight years old knowing who they were, but it was when Gandhi read the Sermon on the Mount as a Hindu reading and appreciating Christianity that it strengthened his own Hinduism and said to him, I can learn and love my Christian brothers.
And when King studied Gandhi, he didn't want to become a Hindu, but he said I can appreciate my Hindu brothers. I can appreciate their spirituality. I can learn from them, and I can love them. And I think that that has everything to do with who mentored them through that process of identity confusion. And right now, frankly, in too much of the Muslim world, we don't have those exceptional mentors.
In the United States, that's actually different. We are very blessed to have a set of profound Muslim scholars - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Imam Zaid Shakir, Dr. Omar Abdullah, Professor Ingrid Madsen, Professor Sherman Jackson - many of these people are African American converts to Islam who have studied the Arabic and Islamic traditions in depth, and they spent a lot of time with young people, which is precisely why I have such hope for American Muslims at this point in our history, and in what we can contribute to this great country.
Tavis: I got a quick 30 seconds here. You've been very clear in your admiration for Dr. King and my viewers know that I think - as I've said many times - that King is the greatest American we've ever produced. That said, your writings, I'm told, your work also influenced by another great American named James Baldwin. Tell me right quick about Baldwin's influence on your work.
Patel: Baldwin is the man who gave me an insight into what is best in America and what is possible in America, and he did it in his book "The Fire Next Time," which I quote extensively in my own book and in my identity journey. And I'll end with this: Baldwin, after a period of profound anger at America, has an insight where he said "And if we in America, those who are conscious, the Black and the White, all of us can insist like lovers, we may be able to achieve our country and change the history of the world." And I believe that as true at this point in history, and I want to be a part of it.
Tavis: Can't do much better than King and Baldwin. His new book is "Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation." His name is Eboo Patel. Eboo Patel, nice to have you on the program. All the best to you.
Patel: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure.
Back to July 23, 2007