(MintPress)—“Wars between clans and tribes, tension between sects and groups, prejudice directed at religion or nationality – those were the problems of past centuries. And whether you are reading the news about Somalia or Libya or Europe or Oklahoma, those are the problems of our time.”
So says Eboo Patel, an American Muslim, scholar and social activist, in an article he wrote for his blog “The Faith Divide” published by the Washington Post.
The Man Behind the Movement
Patel is a Rhodes scholar who has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, as well as four honorary degrees. In 2009 he was appointed by President Barak Obama to serve his inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.
He also started a nonprofit organization, called the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), over a decade ago. It now has 30 some employees and a budget of $4 million. Patel is only 35.
As part of his work, Patel tours the country, often invited by colleges, universities and civic groups, to share his thoughts on religious pluralism, and explain why cultivating, “weaving it into the ecology” of college campus’ and communities across America is of paramount importance.
This week Patel made a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hamline University, where he met with college students, administrators and community members in the greater area to discuss interfaith leadership in a time of global crisis.
Bad News Good News
Patel says that most of the news stories on religion present it in one of four ways: as a bubble of isolationism, a bunker people hide within, as a barricade people hide behind, or as a a bomb or weapon, used to perpetuate violence.
Patel says the good news though comes in recognizing that those metaphors don’t fall from the sky. They are created by humans. Patel challenges people, many of them students he works with on college campus’ across America with the IFYC, to become a bridges for interfaith work. He uses the metaphor of a bridge, as opposed to a bubble, bunker, barricade or bomb, in describing the way in which people of faith should regard their role within society.
He encourages people to say “I am in the business of telling a different story,” shifting conversations that paint religions in violent opposition to one another, to highlight moments of interfaith cooperation and inter-religious respect within their traditions.
For example, Patel says that within his Muslim tradition the first person to recognize Muhammad as a prophet was his wife’s cousin, Waraka, who was also a Christian. Muhammad never asked Waraka to convert, and the two remained very close.
Similarly, Patel points out that in Christianity, the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan, a parable told by Jesus in the Gospels highlighting the proper ethical conduct for Christians. Revering the Samaritan, a religious “other”, is one example of respect and interfaith bridges being built early on in the Christian tradition, Patel says.
“Religion is something that lifts up the common good,” Patel adds.
Building Interfaith Bridges
“There’s no better place to build bridges than on college campus’,” Patel says. Students learn to appreciate knowledge and identify shared values while engaging in interfaith work in college – a phenomenon he admits does not often happen in other areas of society, which explains why, perhaps, he is invited to visit almost 75 campus’ across the US each year.
College is a place where he says students could potentially learn about Islam in a class in the morning, then walk outside an make friends with a group of Muslim students.
But when asked by a community organizer Sue Kennedy of the Minneapolis Area Interfaith Initiative what he would suggest for getting people in the general public more engaged around interfaith work, Patel says the program offered doesn’t matter so much as reaching out and personally extending invitations to people from different religious communities.
“Mobilizing people, getting people interested is the hard part,” Patel says, adding that if you extend one hundred invitation and only 40 people show up for the event, than you can call it a success.
“There’s a reason this doesn’t happen widely across the country,” he says, “it’s hard.”
But there is a pressing need for people to engage in this type of work, and to become a bridge for interfaith dialogue, Patel says, as “Usually the folks that want to talk about it [religion] are the people who want to use it as a barrier or a bomb.”
Patel describes “a lot of ugly noise” in our culture about religion, whether its coming from the media, society at large, or even academia, which must be drown out and overcome with more positive and constructive dialogues about religion.
One reason for this focus on religion as a negative force in the world may be “because it’s easier to quantify the bombings rather than the bridge building,” pointed out Hamline University professor of Religion Deanna Thompson.
Patel encourages people to ask themselves if they know positive things about other religious traditions, and colleges and universities should look at surveys of their students and realize that “if we have 40 percent of our population saying they don’t know anything about Mormons, and 70 percent saying they don’t have a positive view of Mormons, we have work to do.”
Interfaith Literacy
In the twenty-first century Patel interfaith literacy is more important than ever before. Patel says there are few high schools in America offering world religions courses, and even fewer college campus’ across the country with interfaith programs. A recent survey of American high school students revealed that only 36 percent know Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; 17 percent said it was the Jewish day of atonement, according to a study by the Bible Literacy Project.
In his 2005 book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University found that sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
Geanna Nesbit, a first-year student at Hamline, said she attended Patel’s lecture and became involved with interfaith work on campus after “seeing a lot of hate” in the conservative Baptist church she grew up in while living in South Dakota. “That’s one thing I want to change.”
“Interfaith literacy is part of the definition of being an educated person today,” Patel says.
Patel says in his book Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, which has recently been made required reading on several American college campus, including Hamline, “Pluralism – even religious pluralism – is everybody’s business, for both the obvious pragmatic reasons and the more poetic ones. After all, there are many places where people hear the music of transcendence. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, some folks find the beyond in the church of their choice, some folks find it in a Woody Guthrie song. We need all of those people – the hymn singers and the sun saluters, the Qur’an reciters and the mandala makers, the speakers of Hebrew and the readers of Sanskrit, the hip-hop heads and folk music fans – and more. We need a language that allows us to emphasize our unique inspirations and affirm our universal values. We need spaces where we can each state that we are proud of where we came from and all point to the place where we are going to. I fear the road is long. I rejoice that we travel together.”