Dr. Eboo Patel is a man of peace in a time of violence. At a time when a Muslim name is automatically equated with terrorism and Islam itself is misunderstood, this young Muslim Indian-American shows the power of interfaith dialogue. This month he was honoured in New York with the 2012 Guru Nanak Interfaith Prize, established by Hofstra University. Although young, Dr. Patel has a formidable resume. He holds a doctorate in the Sociology of Religion from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the founder and president of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core and is also on President Obama's Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He was named one of “America's Best Leaders” by the US News & World Report in 2009.
Source of inspiration
Patel has been successful in propagating the commonsense yet outrageous idea that, given a choice, young people of different religions would prefer love to hate, peace to violence. “I grew up as somebody whose heritage is Indian and whose faith is Muslim and whose citizenship is America,” he recalls of his youth in Chicago. “I have friends from different religions. Every time I turned on the television there were stories about religion as a source of violence but, in my own personal life, religion was a source of an inspiration to serve; that was the case in the lives of my friends as well.”
It became clear to me that what I wanted to do was to help the present generation of young people follow in that tradition of interfaith bridge building.” He was influenced by an incident in his youth when he stood by and did not stand up for a Jewish friend who encountered anti-Semitism. When he told his father, he said, “Not only did you fail your friend but you failed your religion; Islam calls you to stand up for people who are suffering, especially those who are different.”
The 1990s were a decade of racial and religious turmoil with the bombing of the World Trade Center, the war in the Balkans, the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the nuclear tests first by India, then Pakistan all foreshadowing a world low on tolerance. Religion, the source of so much violence, could also be a source of redemption, thought Patel.
As part of President Obama's advisory council on faith-based initiatives, Patel helped shape the President's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. Patel's contribution has been helping make interfaith co-operation on campuses a higher profile issue in the White House, and shape that initiative.
Patel's urge to connect people of diverse religions and work for their common humanity goes back to his youth, when he visited his grandmother in Mumbai while studying at Oxford. He woke up one morning to find a strange woman in their apartment in Colaba, someone whom he did not recognise as family. His grandmother told him she was a young girl who had been abused by her uncle and her father. So she had taken her in, and warned him not to open the door as her abusers might he out looking for her.
“I kind of scolded my grandmother, telling her she should not be taking in refugees in her home; it was dangerous, she was getting on in years. She said she had been doing it for 50 years and showed me photos of all the women she had helped over the years.” The women came from all religious backgrounds and diverse regions.
When Patel asked her why she did this, her simple, heartfelt answer convinced him of the path he must follow: “I thought for myself it is my responsibility to take the core values of Islam, of mercy, of cooperation, of pluralism, of tolerance and to carry them out in a concrete way.”
Change in attitudes
His belief in religion as a bridge of co-operation rather than a barrier led him to author Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation . He has also edited Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action and also writes a blog on religion for The Washington Post .
Does he see a change in the attitudes on college campuses from the time he was a student? He says, “Absolutely. When I was in college in the early 1990s there was almost no discussion about religious diversity in the campus culture but now I would say a positive and proactive engagement of religious diversity is becoming a higher priority across campuses.”
As a father of young children, he is very aware of the future we are building for the next generation and that it is in our hands to lay the foundation with the young people of today. Asked to share how Indian youth are making a difference, he points out, that India has a great tradition of interfaith cooperation from the time of Emperor Ashoka through the Mughal Emperor Akbar to the work of Gandhi and Nehru.
“George Washington wrote a letter to the leader of a synagogue while he was president saying ‘This government would give bigotry no sanction and prosecution no assistance'. I think young Indian Americans should view themselves as writing the next chapters in both of those narratives, both in the Indian narrative of interfaith cooperation and in the American narrative.”
What gets him through good times and bad? He says, “You know, I think the heart of my philosophy is that we are created with the breath of God and we should do everything we can with the gift of God's breath to be that mercy that he intended us to be.”
More information about Interfaith Youth Core: >http://www.ifyc.org/
