A Conversation with Eboo Patel
When Eboo Patel speaks to young audiences, he often shares one of his favorite verses from the Qu’ran: “God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another.” Still a young man himself, he has accomplished a good deal toward his vision of making interfaith dialogue a large part of campus life.
Patel seems to be everywhere these days. A former Rhodes scholar, currently an advisor to President Obama, he appears frequently on NPR and writes “The Faith Divide” column for the Washington Post. US News and World Report recently called him one of America’s 22 best leaders. He has been named an Ashoka Fellow, part of a group of social entrepreneurs whose ideas are changing the world.
As he recounts in his memoir Acts of Faith , the prejudice he met growing up in Chicago could have made him bitter. But his heroes – Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Aga Khan – suggested that faith could unite rather than divide. In 1998, he founded the Interfaith Youth Core (spelled “core” because it is at the heart of a larger movement), which now has a presence on 140 college campuses. Patel credits his highly-regarded staff for making good use of new media and building a social network. Recently we spoke with the peripatetic Patel by telephone.
Where are you today?
I am in Chicago. It’s the only day this week.
How many miles do you log in a year?
Not that many. Most of my travel is domestic. But I’m gone a lot.
You have a son?
He’s two-and-a-half. And a wife. And she reminds me that I actually signed on to be a husband and a father.
What led to the idea of an interfaith youth movement?
It was a reasonably obvious idea. Look – religious traditions inspire service. Young people want to do service. The world needs that, and it certainly needs cooperation among different religious traditions. So why not use service as a way to bring young people of different faith backgrounds together? What’s distinctive about IFYC is that we’ve focused on developing leadership. We train young people to be conversation changers in the world of religion, moving the conversation away from violence and conflict towards cooperation and service. We train young people to launch their own interfaith projects; we network with them for maximum impact. We challenge them to go beyond launching projects to changing their environments, in the same way that the service learning movement went from sponsoring one-time projects to now pervading the culture of high schools.
You’re getting pretty well-established on college campuses.
We hope that college campuses around the country will consider becoming sponsors of interfaith cooperation and create models in which they would nurture young people into interfaith leaders. Many young people have their first interfaith experiences at college, then graduate and become leaders in the culture.
What is it about young adulthood that lends itself to interfaith dialogue?
People are asking deep questions about their identity and how that identity directs them, and we have a message that is extremely exciting for young people—that your religious identity is relevant to the world around you, if you view that religion as a bridge to cooperate with others.
Has interfaith work changed your own religious beliefs?
Well, one of the things it’s helped me to understand is how Islam is relevant to my life in the world. Growing up, Islam was what I did in the local prayer hall and in the privacy of my own home. Once I discovered dimensions of Islam that were calls to service and cooperation, I recognized that my faith had purchase for all aspects of life.
Were you religious as a boy? Did you consider a religious vocation?
I write about this a lot in my memoir, Acts of Faith . Islam was in the air in my home. We said Bismillah before meals or a trip. But the real religion of my house was the religion of American achievement.
Apart from your roots in the city, why have you chosen Chicago as headquarters?
There are many reasons. Chicago has a great history of religious diversity – the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, for example. It’s where Dr. King met Rabbi Heschel, where the National Council of Christians and Jews was founded. It’s also where a lot of social movements were founded – the community organizing movement, Jane Addams’ settlement house. So we see ourselves as part of a Chicago tradition.
Okay, so in a nutshell, what are you after?
It’s the theology of positive human interaction. I think it should be preached in the pulpit and taught in Sunday school, and it’s the same for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and humanists. What is it in our beliefs that requires us to cooperate with people who hold different beliefs? I frequently ask high school and college students that question, and it’s hard for them to answer.
What about people of no faith?
Absolutely. At our national conference, Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard, shared the dais with an orthodox Muslim, an evangelical Christian, and an observant Jew. They all felt very strongly about their own beliefs, and they were also comfortable with diversity.
I mean, Greg had just written this book called Good without God. The most important Muslim prayer is “There is no God but God.” So an orthodox Muslim who disagreed with Greg’s entire ontology handed the microphone over to him without hesitation. She was comfortable with giving him the mike because she knows that humanists exist. That’s the theology of human interaction. It does not pretend that certain other people do not exist, but asks: “How do I relate to and cooperate with people who actually believe very differently than I do?”
Are you reaching out to atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?
No. We are working with folks who have very different beliefs but have chosen pluralism. I view those people as somewhat intolerant.
Did you give President Obama any advice for his address in Cairo?
We wrote a memo and had several conference calls about raising the importance of interfaith cooperation, and of course that was included in the Cairo address. We were told that we had an impact.
IFYC has experienced tremendous growth in the first ten years. What have been your biggest frustrations?
We should be as big as the environmental movement, as big as the service learning movement. We are nowhere near to that yet. We should see more stories about interfaith cooperation on the evening news than stories about religious extremism. My staff probably wishes that I would spend a little more time celebrating what we’ve accomplished.
You once said that it might take 40 or 50 years to build the student interfaith movement to reach the point where it could make a big impact. How big is big?
Environmentalism has become a social norm—people doing everything from recycling to buying clean cars. Service learning has also become a social norm—every college campus in America has a great percentage of students engaged in volunteer efforts. Civil rights is a social norm.
We’d like interfaith cooperation also to be a social norm. That means that mosques, synagogues, temples, churches and humanist societies should have interfaith exchanges and service projects just as a matter of course—just like having an Easter service or a Thanksgiving service. It’s just becomes part of what your mosque, synagogue or church does. We think that every Sunday school or mosque school or Hebrew school should be teaching about how its tradition inspires positive human interaction. We think that everyone should stand up against religious prejudice in the way that people stand up against racial prejudice.
Cubs or White Sox?
Cubs, all the way.
