After I heard Eboo Patel speak at the Civic Engagements lecture at ISNA (ok, ok, I was only in there for the last 10 minutes but he closed the lecture with style with his final comments), I wanted to check out his book Acts of Faith in which he describes his trying to find his identity as American Muslim.
Patel’s search for an identity eventually leads to the creation of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), which “Builds mutual respect and pluralism among young people from different religious traditions by empowering them to work together to serve others.”
Patel writes about how childhood and authority figures in one’s life affects the idealogical framework of a person. He cites examples of cases of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic extremism that dealt with people who’s minds were shaped into hate by their mentors. The problem for Muslims, Patel states, is that in the Muslim community, most Muslim leaders are not involved with the Muslim youth. The author goes into his own experiences as a youth and how the right influences, beginning with the YMCA, deterred him from a potentially unsavory path.
Patel realized the need of the something like IFYC. This organization creates an environment in which youth from different religions can come together and gain acceptance of others while being proud of one’s own religion. As Patel explains it to a member of the Archdiocese of Chicago to convince him of IFYC’s mission: “The middle path, the only route to collective survival really, is to identify what is common between religions but to create the space where each can articulate its distinctive path to that place. I think of it as affirming particularity and achieving pluralism.”
Patel’s journey towards IFYC, which includes giving lectures on the subject while in college, meeting the Dalai Lama, and shaping his doctorate at Oxford to study religion and interfaith cooperation, is worth reading. “Important” is a word that many use when describing Patel’s book, and it is. He shows that Muslims in America cannot just think of themselves and the need to be involved with those of other faiths. I recommend it.
By the way, a definition of “pluralism,” a word Eboo Patel uses quite a bit to discuss the goals of interfaith movements: What is Pluralism?
{ 1 trackback }