An American Muslim

Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, speaks at school meeting

04/21/2009
Andre Li '11

Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, spoke at school meeting in April. He shared a message of interfaith cooperation ad pluralism.

"What's happening to you now that might shape what you do in 20 years," he asked. Patel has found that most people he meets choose their paths based on something that happens to them in their youth.  For him, growing up in Chicago, it was the example of his grandmother who spent much of her life helping abused women of all faiths, despite the dangers. He asked why she took that risk. "Because I'm a Muslim," she answered. "That's what Muslims do."

"I had always known I was a Muslim, but I had never known the power of that, what that could mean in my life," he says. "She was that example." He began to ask himself how he could live up to the name of one who submits to God.

He learns through the creation story in the Qu'ran that "God tells us we are at one time united and diverse; we are one and we are many." But he wondered why every time he saw religious diversity in the media it was always about violence. He began to think his purpose might be to make sure "that religious identity is not a barrier that divides people, but a bridge that brings folks together."

"What if this generation," he asked, "committed itself to bringing people from different religious backgrounds together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty?"

He founded the Interfaith Youth Corps for the purpose, to find common ground and shared values.

"Being an interfaith leader is a way of seeing the world," he explains. He does not believe there's a clash between Christians and Jews or believers and nonbelievers; it's a clash between pluralists and extremists. "Pluralism is a belief in a society where people from different backgrounds respect each others' identities and serve the common good. Extremists want only their group to dominate and others to suffocate."

Being an interfaith leader is also a way of acting, he adds. Learn about diversity; tell stories about what brings people together.

Patel is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based institution building the global interfaith youth movement.  He was recently appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, where he is working to realize the president’s priority of interfaith cooperation.   He is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. He holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio and writes "The Faith Divide," for The Washington Post. He was chosen by Harvard’s Kennedy School Review as one of five future policy leaders to watch; and was most recently selected to join the Young Global Leaders network of the World Economic Forum.

 

 
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