Kansas City Star, The (MO)
A Q&A with an interfaith visionary HELEN T. GRAY This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
October 31, 2009 Section: News Page: C12

Eboo Patel questioned how more youth could get involved in interfaith activities and then came up with an answer.

He combined his passions religious diversity and young people to start the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. In the last seven years it has inspired similar groups across the country, including in Kansas City.

The Indian-born American Muslim is the keynote speaker Nov. 10 at a major event of the Festival of Faiths, taking place throughout November in Kansas City.

This is the third year for the festival, sponsored by many community groups and offering a wide variety of activities designed to expand knowledge, interaction and appreciation of the diverse faith traditions.

Patel, 33, is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation and is a member of the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives. Also, this week s U.S. News & World Report lists Patel as one of America s Best Leaders 2009.

The following is taken from a phone interview with Patel.

Q. What has been your personal experience as a Muslim in America?

A. Largely positive. But a couple of challenging parts. Some people think Muslims are defined by the terrible events of 9/11 and attacks by extremists who call themselves Muslims. What concerns me is people who want to agree with Osama bin Laden that a community of 1.3 billion people is inevitably violent. There are genuine extremists in the world, and shouldn t we be trying to find them? But the vast part of my experience is how people are becoming positively educated on how Islam is a religion that shares important values with other faiths.

How did you become involved in interfaith work among young people?

I got tired of seeing stories of people of different faiths killing each other on the evening news. I didn t think that is how most people viewed their own religion and relationships between different religions.

Then the summer before I went to graduate school, I attended an interfaith conference, which was largely older people. I thought, How can we get more young people involved? A lot of the world is young, and too many of the foot soldiers of religious extremism are young. This is when the idea first hit me.

I went to graduate school in England and ran a number of interfaith youth service projects around the world, often as part of larger conferences. When I came back after finishing a doctorate at Oxford, I wanted to do this on a full-time basis and build a movement around this. Religious extremists want youth to be the bombs of destruction, and the rest of us should want young people to be bridges of cooperation.

Why and how did you start the Interfaith Youth Core?

I received the first grant in the summer of 2002 to start the core. I wanted to mobilize young people to be the voices and architects of an interfaith movement based on service to others. Young people from different religions do service projects together and articulate how their different faiths inspire them. Our vision, especially on college campuses, is young people regularly engaged in interfaith service projects and training people to run those projects.

We started running largely local Chicago projects. The first was a group of high school and college students working with a senior center. And every other week they had interfaith discussions. We started with eight students, and once or twice a year we had a larger event that drew over 100 youth.

People in other cities started hearing about the core. Now we are spreading the message through talks and the media and training people on campuses and in communities. We ran a national conference in 2003, which drew about 30 people. The one we had this week drew about 600 at Northwestern University.

How did you develop such a passion for interfaith work with young people?

My passion comes from my religion. In my religion in the Qur an, it says God made us different nations and tribes so we can know each other. This is at the core of my religion, and I believe it is at the core of other religions as well. I believe America is based on the idea of different backgrounds coming together to build the country. It is my duty to do this kind of work. I really believe that young people becoming interfaith leaders can change the world.

What is your reaction to the preparations made for the Festival of Faiths in Kansas City?

The preparations for the Festival of Faiths are as exceptional as any I’ve ever seen. I’m coming to Kansas City because you have remarkable leaders who said Kansas City is doing interfaith work. For example, we tell the Jon Willis story, a citizen inspired by the vision who is transformed. (Kansas City economist Willis heard Patel speak last year at a conference in Chicago. Willis has spent the past year helping create the Kansas City Interfaith Youth Alliance.)

What is the message you are bringing to Kansas City?

The message both to adults and youth is interfaith cooperation must be one of the great movements of our time, and you have to be its leaders. Adults teach young people how their religion inspires interfaith cooperation, how their faith inspires this. Adults need to be good models, form their own interfaith groups and invest in young people as interfaith leaders.

Young people can start their own interfaith service projects. Both groups can stand up against religious prejudice. Also, you can know what in your religion inspires you to build bridges. And you can know something positive about someone else s religion, what you admire.

Copyright (c) 2009 The Kansas City Star