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By Deb Aronson
Photos courtesy of Interfaith Youth
Core
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| Eboo Patel |
Eboo Patel ’96
LAS has the radical idea that people
from different religions shouldn’t
kill each other.
“Why are religious extremists
getting to young people before we
do?” he asked. “Why
don’t we build a different
pattern, a pattern of religious
pluralism?”
Patel, a Muslim, founded the Interfaith
Youth Core to do just that. First
envisioned in 1998, IFYC is based
on the premise that when young people
from different faiths are brought
together on a service project, mutual
understanding and respect develop.
It’s a matter, said Patel,
of creating space for people to
tell a little bit about their stories.
It’s a way of thinking that
encourages people to relate to one
another in a positive way.
“The way I see it, you can
either dance or fight,” said
Patel, whose Indian immigrant parents
raised him and his brother, Rahim
’98 BUS, in the Chicago suburb
of Glen Ellyn. “Me, I say,
let’s dance first and fight
later because you’ll always
remember the dance. See what I’m
talking about?”
Patel encourages lots of dancing
through the model of IFYC, whose
members have fanned out to more
than 45 campuses, reaching more
than 4,000 students, faculty, staff
and campus administrators through
speeches, training, classes and
workshops. The organization’s
community work projects offer both
the chance to pitch in locally and
the opportunity for young volunteers
to discuss how their religion inspires
them to contribute. While courses
at the University of Illinois cover
the academic study of religion,
IFYC’s campus affiliate, Interfaith
in Action, has drawn hundreds of
students to volunteer together,
teaching them not only about community
needs but about each other. In such
a way, IFYC moves beyond platitudes
on religious tolerance to the realm
of concrete action.
Patel’s vision – “to
build a movement that encourages
religious young people to strengthen
their religious identities, foster
inter-religious understanding and
cooperate to serve the common good,”
as IFYC’s mission statement
explains – has resonated with
a wide range of people and organizations.
A mere four and a half years since
his first grant in 2002 –
$35,000 from the Ford Foundation
– thousands of people have
come to IFYC and said, “This
is me. I want to be part of this.”
While money and attention flow to
Patel from myriad directions, he
thinks the true key to the success
of his mission lies with America’s
college campuses. Patel believes
the United States became more racially
tolerant in large part because university
settings embraced the idea of racial
diversity. He is hoping that college
campuses will do for religious pluralism
what they did for civil rights.
There are so
many forces trying to hand me a
divisive and dour narrative of a
'clash of civilizations,'"
Rahman said of being a young Muslim
today. "This has never held
true to me nor made any sense to
me."
Case in point: Reem Rahman.
“I first met Eboo when he
was speaking to the Chancellor’s
Scholars Program … about ‘New
Leadership,’” said the
21-year-old UI junior, who later
devoted herself to Interfaith in
Action projects. “Just that
first encounter my freshman year
on campus rocked my world view and
has shaped the way that I interact
with and see this world.”
Patel’s “world view”
has made its mark in many sectors.
In addition to IFYC’s impact
on campuses, the U.S. State Department
has conferred with Patel about sectarian
violence in Baghdad, Iraq. As part
of its “America at the Crossroads”
series, which looks at the post-9/11
world, the Public Broadcasting Service
will include IFYC and its founder.
Patel has been profiled by National
Public Radio, CNN and the BBC and
has worked with such leaders as
Queen Rania of Jordan and former
President Clinton. IFYC also has
partnered with organizations like
the Religious Advisory Council of
the Council on Foreign Relations
and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
To help realize its mission, IFYC
created Days of Interfaith Youth
Service, a national event that pairs
volunteer students with community
groups. For the past several years,
Interfaith in Action has taken the
lead in coordinating the day’s
activities. The 100 or so students
who have participated each year
break into teams of eight or 10,
each with an Interfaith in Action
mediator or leader, and assist places
such as foodbanks, homeless shelters,
homes for the aged or disabled and
the Boys and Girls Club.
“It’s really a partnership
with local organizations,”
said Nick Price
’06 LAS, who as a Christian
and a UI undergraduate in religious
studies was active in IFYC. “We
contact them and say, ‘We
want to help; what do you need?’”
Afterward, the same small group
gathers, usually over a meal. A
discussion begins with a question
such as, “I would love to
hear how your faith inspires you
to care for those whom we helped
today.” In explaining how
the scripture, stories, rituals
and heroes of their particular tradition
speak to these projects, students
may spur others to relate to a similar
teaching in their backgrounds.
“It is amazing how –
when you focus on a shared value
– how people begin to resonate
with one another,” said the
23-year-old Price, who now works
at the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
organization in Champaign.
UI junior Hemang Srikishan, 20,
said those dialogues come about
more easily because a sense of community
and comfort has been building throughout
the day. “Through the course
of the day, we get to know each
other,” the psychology student
said.
Srikishan, raised with a Hindu father
and a Jainist mother, first volunteered
in an Interfaith in Action service
day to support a friend serving
on the board of the campus chapter.
While Srikishan had been interested
in religion in general, the service
day kindled an interest in interfaith
work; eventually, he became deeply
involved in the organization.
As did Rahman. The young Muslim
woman helped organize the event
during her freshman and sophomore
years and created a management guide
for future use.
For Rahman, who is studying cognitive
neuroscience, the lessons last far
beyond the end of the service day’s
work. She said she applies the “habits
of listening empathetically, creating
safe spaces and creating common
grounds” wherever she is –
in business and her living community,
with her friends and family and
as a civil rights and community
activist.
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| University
of Illinois students help out
at the Eastern Illinois Food
Bank in Urbana during last year’s
National Day of Interfaith Youth
Service. |
Patel believes in emphasizing those
common grounds. While one may think
that religious antagonism may occur
between, say, Jews and Muslims or
Buddhists and Christians, he sees
it another way. The “faith
line,” as Patel calls it,
lies between those who think like
totalitarians and those who think
like pluralists.
Totalitarians believe that their
religion is the only way of “being,
believing and belonging,”
as Patel puts it, and that they
must destroy all others. Pluralists
– who Patel thinks make up
98 percent of the world’s
population – believe in the
“live and let live”
model. If pluralists were to take
an active stand, he said, the totalitarians
would wither and die.
“My own understanding of
the immense possibilities of humanity
and human interaction are shaped
by this vision of pluralism,”
Rahman said.
Patel’s understanding of human
interaction came about on the UI
campus, which helped him explore
his own questions about social justice
and diversity.
“I wanted to be involved in
the life of the mind,” he
said
of his expectations of college.
“Someone would mention a book,
and I’d go read it. I didn’t
just want to be a student; I wanted
to be an intellectual explorer.
“That’s what I like
about Illinois. There are lots of
types of lives possible on campus.”
For helping him imagine the possibilities,
Patel particularly credits the Campus
Honors Program and Allen Hall’s
guest-in-residence program, which
draws a wide range of accomplished
people to campus. He found faculty
and staff, whom he called “the
gems of this campus,” eager
to guide his intellectual exploration.
Among those mentors were Howard
Schein, PHD ’74 LAS,
program director of Allen Hall,
who introduced Patel to the work
of Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 recipient
of the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work on microfinancing; CHP’s
Sonia Carringer and Richard Burkhardt,
who helped admit Patel to the program;
and Bruce Michelson, professor of
English and current CHP director,
who supervised Patel’s honors
thesis on social justice projects
in America, a project, said Patel,
“that expanded my view on
what it meant to turn ideas into
reality.”
“I found a ton of responsiveness
on whatever door I knocked on at
the University,” he said,
“and my world view has been
framed by this experience. I’ve
knocked on a lot of doors since
then.
“The truth is – that
skill of going out and finding things
instead of having them handed to
me has served me better than anything
else in my whole life,” he
said.
And while campus life opened Patel’s
eyes in many ways, it was his own
father who pointed out the absence
of religious issues in the campus’s
diversity movement.
“What about the hundreds of
thousands of Muslims being killed
in Bosnia in religious identity-based
war?” his father asked. “Why
is no one talking about that?”
That conversation planted a seed
in Patel’s mind that continued
to germinate, during which time
he graduated and returned to Chicago.
There he taught in the inner city
and built an “intentional
living community” (aka “commune”)
for artists and activists. Upon
receiving a Rhodes scholarship,
Patel went to Oxford, where he earned
a doctorate in the sociology of
religion and began doing interfaith
service projects.
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| A group of
“Muslim sisters,”
including UI junior Reem Rahman,
at far right, prepares to split
into work groups. |
Patel envisions those types of
projects becoming ingrained in every
house of worship.
“In 30 years, I’d like
religious pluralism to be written
into the socio-cultural DNA of America,”
he said. “It will just be
part of the deal. Your pastor might
say, ‘Next Sunday, we’re
going to build a house with the
Muslim and Jewish communities.’
Then we will ask, ‘What is
it about being Muslim or Jewish
or Christian that inspires you to
build a house?’”
Patel believes that the message
of IFYC can change the fabric of
society, much as the Peace Corps
did.
“The Peace Corps was not just
about the number of young people
participating,” he said. “It
was the idea that was important,
the idea of the American vision
of the world that counted. It’s
a kind of effort that transforms
civil society.”
And he sees plenty of reason to
feel optimistic.
“I’ll tell you a great
story,” Patel said. “It
was just after Sept. 11, and I was
in Chicago visiting my parents.
I was driving by a mosque, so I
dropped in to pray.
“When I got there, I saw a
large group of Christians and a
large group of Jews in the lobby
of the mosque. I asked the imam
what was going on, and he told me,
‘They are protecting the mosque.’
“That there is the best of
America.”
Aronson is a full-time,
freelance writer who lives in Urbana
with her husband and two children.
Editor’s note:
Eboo Patel’s book, “Acts
of Faith: The Story of an American
Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul
of a Generation” (Beacon Press
Publishers), is due out this summer.
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