Eboo Patel
For the Washington Post

Are young Muslims going to be bombs of destruction or bridges of cooperation? That's the central question asked in Christiane Amanpour's documentary Generation Islam, which aired on CNN Thursday night, and for which I was interviewed.

There are 780 million Muslims in the world under the age of 25 – over 11 percent of the world's population. The median age in Afghanistan is under 18; the median age in Iraq under 20. Too many of these young people grow up in poverty. And while poverty doesn't cause extremism, it does create conditions that extremist groups like the Taliban exploit.

The Taliban's strategy is simple: build schools in villages too poor (and too poorly served by their governments) to afford their own.

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President Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, urges a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Eboo Patel
For On Faith
washingtonpost.com

Whoever selects and assigns the books on Islam for the Sunday New York Times Book Review needs to widen his reading and add some new names to his rolodex.

Last week there was a rave review of Bruce Bawer's alarmist book Surrender (the subtitle says it all: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom).

This week, the cover of the Book Review has a picture of a group of fully covered Muslim women set against a crowd of 'normal-looking' mostly-white Europeans with the headline "Strangers in the Land".

The review betrays more about the opinions of the reviewer – the noted and controversial academic Fouad Ajami – than the book under consideration, Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

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President Obama has initiated the United We Serve campaign,a call for all Americans to serve in their communities

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
The Washington Post

The annual ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) Convention took place this past weekend in Washington DC. Some 30, 000 Muslims gathered to celebrate the spiritual uplifting and intellectual enlightenment that their faith provides them. Those two themes stood alongside a third crucial dimension of the conference: civic engagement in America.

The typical pattern among immigrant Muslim communities (as is the case for many immigrant groups) was to send their charity back to the countries where their grandfathers were born - Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia. But in the past decade or so, immigrant Muslims have been following the lead of their African American counterparts and becoming increasingly involved here in America. As the American Muslim leader Maher Hathout is fond of saying: "Home is not where your grandfather was born but where your grandchildren will be buried."

Several million Muslims are proud to call America home (a fact illustrated by the theme of this year's convention – "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness") and are actively seeking to make it better through their civic engagement. There were several workshops on civic engagement in America at the convention, each dealing with a different dimension of how Muslims can work with others to improve the society in which we all live.

One of the most powerful visions I heard was from my fellow member of the President's Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Initiatives, Dalia Mogahed.

The modern face of Iran - seen in this June 15 photo - is also represented at anti-Ahmadinejad protests.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
The Washington Post

My guess (and let's be honest – when it comes to Iran, we're all guessing) is that two grand narratives are playing a shaping role in Iran right now - call them Grant Park and Karbala, otherwise known as the current Era of Obama and the ancient heritage of Shia Islam.

The celebration of Obama's election victory in Grant Park on November 5, 2008, matters for two reasons. The first is because that's the day Iran stopped being part of the Axis of Evil. For decades, The regime in Iran had successfully built support by creating an Us vs. Them framework with America playing the role of 'Them'. By making Iran part of the Axis of Evil, the Bush Administration embraced the role of 'Them'. However much young and progressive Iranians hated their regime, they hated being labeled Evil by a foreign power even more. If they had to choose between being punched in the face by the Iranian regime or being punched in the face by the Bush Administration, they chose the Persian fist. Obama's victory, and his subsequent reaching out to the Iranian people, changed the Us vs. Them framework.

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Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

In Cairo, President Obama stated in no uncertain terms the importance he places on interfaith cooperation. He also stressed that interfaith work should take the form of concrete service projects:

"Indeed, faith should bring us together. That is why we are forging service projects in America that bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews...Around the world, we can turn dialogue into Interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to action – whether it is combating malaria in Africa, or providing relief after a natural disaster."

For a long time, interfaith cooperation meant a group of senior theologians or religious leaders presenting a document about peace at a conference in a fancy hotel. That's all good stuff, but I remember going to some of those conferences in the late 1990s and having two questions – where are the young people, and where is the social action?

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President Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, urges a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
The Washington Post

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to bridge the great divides of his age by challenging the dominant paradigm and lifting up a new framework. King was clear: this isn't a black vs. white world, but a "live together as brothers or perish together as fools" world.

Today in Cairo, President Obama made his most King-like speech.
Obama came to Cairo to bridge one of the great divides of our age – between the United States and the Muslim world. And he drew from the same vision, grace and courage that King did.

He spoke of his admiration for Muslim civilization and its role across the ages in nurturing learning and progress, peace and pluralism. These are the same values that America has sought to advance. The stereotypes that Islam is only violent, or that America only seeks empire, are inaccurate and counterproductive. So is the focus only on the history of conflict. We have to begin our relationship on a different paradigm – the history of cooperation, and the power of our common principles.

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People pray at the University of Notre Dame to protest Obama's commencement address.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

One concrete result of the controversy at Notre Dame this weekend was a much larger audience for President Obama's Commencement Address. What we witnessed was a near perfect demonstration of public leadership in an environment of polarization. Obama is at his best when others are squabbling and he plays the role of saying, "We can do better than this."

I confess to a special interest. I owe my American citizenship to Notre Dame. The University accepted my father's application to its MBA program thirty years ago (at the time, he was one of only a handful of international students on campus, and doubly in the minority as a Muslim). He loves the University with all his heart – it was his gateway to America. I grew up watching Notre Dame football players touch the yellow "Play Like a Champion Today" sign as they ran out of the locker room onto the field. The President must have touched that sign before his speech, because it was worthy of all those great Notre Dame legends, from Knute Rockne to Joe Montana to Touchdown Jesus.

Harvard scholar Howard Gardener says that the most important thing that leaders do is tell a new story about the possibility of the world, and then embody it themselves. Obama accomplished that masterfully in three basic steps in his speech.

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Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

Picture religious violence. What images come to mind? A plane crashing into the World Trade Center on 9/11? A videotape confession by a suicide bomber?

The perpetrators of religious violence are masters of marketing. They want you to see them commit acts of violence, and they want you to associate it with their religion. In fact, the violence is in many cases simply an excuse for the image. The goal is not the murder of a few, it is the poisoning of many with the pictures of violence, with the ultimate hope being the incitement of a religious civil war in cities like Baghdad.

Now picture interfaith cooperation. Did your brain-screen go fuzzy? I wish interfaith images came just as readily and were just as clear as images of religious violence. In fact, I believe one of the reasons we lack a strong, cohesive interfaith movement is because of the absence of such clear visual reference points.

But there is cause for hope from, of all places, Northern Ireland. When I visited Belfast last year, an official told me that bombs used to go off so frequently in the city that people wouldn’t even look up from their newspapers. The tension was still thick between Protestants and Catholics; the situation, he told me, could well go either way.

It looks like Northern Ireland chose the path of peace. The murders of two British soldiers and a policeman last week – the types of acts that previously burned hateful, sectarian images into people’s minds – did not widen the faith divide in Ulster, it actually brought them together.

A community that has seen thousands of deaths over several decades of faith-based civil war, instead saw (as the New York Times here described it) “sworn enemies (filing) into a provincial church on Friday to mourn as one … Some who were there said that never in Northern Ireland’s modern history had there been quite such an improbably gathering of old foes.”

Old IRA guys mourned with diehard unionists. There were silent vigils held in Belfast and other cities around Northern Ireland. The Catholic priest who delivered the eulogy at the funeral said that an attack on the police (once a hated institution amongst the Catholic population) amounted to “an attack on the whole population of Northern Ireland.”

The images from Belfast, and what I recently saw in Bombay Revival, are images of hope. I hope they burn inside our brain as deeply as the pictures of religious violence.

Eboo Patel
On Faith

Night is falling and I can see the Gateway of India from my Sea View room at the Taj in Mumbai, my favorite hotel in the world. There are boats coming and going, people eating and arguing, vendors buying and selling. A few minutes ago there was a band playing Sufi Muslim love songs, and now there is some sort of parade approaching - maybe a wedding, maybe a political rally. Drummers dressed in red uniforms, horn players in orange, dignitaries (the groom and his family?) in carriages drawn by oxen, a group of uniformed schoolchildren walking by, clapping along, utterly delighted.

The carnival of India.

It is chilling to think if I was sitting in this same room on November 26, 2008, I would have been witness to the nightmare of India, when a group of ten terrorists hijacked a boat and came ashore on the spot that I am staring at now, and attacked the building I am sitting in with guns and grenades - six explosions in total in this hotel.

They killed nearly 200 people and injured over 300 more, but they failed in their most important pursuit - to create a religious civil war in a city that had fallen prey to the ugliest version of the clash of civilizations in the recent past.

So why was this time different? Why did Mumbaikers overwhelmingly view November 26 as a case of pluralism vs. extremism, rather than Hindu vs. Muslim?

I've been asking journalists and religious leaders in the city this question, and here's what they've had to say:

1) The Muslim community came out against the terror attacks immediately and clearly and strongly. They organized press conferences and marches. They refused to bury the terrorists in Muslim cemeteries. "Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery," the Indian Muslim journalist MJ Akbar told Tom Friedman in a widely read column.

2) The media paid attention. Zeenat Shaukat Ali, a Professor of Islamic Studies at St. Xavier's College and founder of an interfaith project in Mumbai, told me that Indian Muslims have long spoken out against terrorism, but their voices had rarely been carried by the media. This time, the media were not looking for messages of division, but instead messages of unity - and the Muslims of Mumbai were there with that message front and center.

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Eboo Patel
Washington Post
Interfaith Youth Core

In the middle of the Q and A section of my talk on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in this heartland city of Bhopal, a student from the local technical college stood up and said, "Sir, I have prepared a 15-minute lecture on Martin Luther King Jr. that I would like to read to you. Sir, would you like to hear it?"

He wasn't kooky activist, he wasn't kidding and no one in the audience laughed at him. He is part of middle India, earnest and aspirational India, ready to-do-whatever-it-takes-to-make-it India. After the program was over, he ran up to me excitedly and thrust the text into my hands. It was written in a schoolboy's cursive, in blue ballpoint pen. "I don't want to take your only copy," I told him. "Don't worry, sir, I have memorized the speech." I don't doubt it.

I'm on a brief speaking tour of India sponsored by the U.S. State Department, using the legacy of King and Gandhi as a springboard to explain why the world's oldest democracy and the world's largest should lead the world on the critical issue of interfaith cooperation.

If there is one term that describes contemporary India, it is aspiration. What is particularly refreshing to me is to watch that striving not just in India's economy, but also in other parts of its democracy.

The Chair of the country's first journalism department told me that there are somewhere between 35,000-40,000 newspapers in India - about a thousand of them in English - with new ones sprouting up all the time.

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Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
The Washington Post

A few weeks ago, Obama made a big statement by conducting his first interview after taking office with Al-Arabiya, an Arab TV network. In the interview, he said: "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy...But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions."

And this is the part that I hung on to – Obama's desire to reach out to the Muslim world is not a rhetorical gesture, but a concrete initiative. And he's making it happen already.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Jakarta in Indonesia as part of an effort to honor the hard-won democracy of the country and to include the oft-neglected region of Southeast Asia. She said: "If you want to know if Islam, democracy, modernity and women's rights can coexist, go to Indonesia."

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President Obama announced Thursday that he is changing the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

Eboo Patel
The Washington Post

It was striking to hear the similarities in the speeches that Tony Blair and Barack Obama gave at the National Prayer Breakfast last week. They each told their personal stories of growing up in nonbeliever households and finding their way to faith. They each quoted "Golden Rule" type scriptures from different faiths. They each spoke more of faith-inspired service to the world than the inner life of prayer and the soul. And they talked about interfaith cooperation as an antidote to religious extremism.

As Blair said, "If faith becomes the property of extremists, it will originate discord. But if, by contrast, different faiths can reach out to and have knowledge of one another, then instead of being reactionary, religious faith can be a force for progress."

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President Obama announced Thursday that he is changing the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core

Two things struck me about President Obama’s Faith-based office yesterday: this matters to him, and he expects it to get things done.

I’ve been asked to serve on the Advisory Council for the Office , and had the honor of being part of a 30 minute Oval Office meeting with the President yesterday. He set out our charge pretty quickly: cooperate to serve others during this time of need in America, and be a positive example of interfaith engagement in a world torn by religious conflict. He spoke about the importance of engaging talented young people, of reaching out to the Muslim world, of working across religious diversity and also the secular / faith divide. The focus isn’t so much what happens in churches, synagogues and mosques – it’s what all those Christians, Jews and Muslims do in the world together.

Obama’s office has several concrete initiatives, all of which seem designed to avoid controversy and to deliver results. Engage faith communities and other service organizations in helping Americans during this economic crisis; reduce abortions and work with at-risk girls and unwed mothers; strengthen fatherhood and reach out to at-risk young men; and encourage interfaith cooperation at home and abroad.

The Advisory Council has been told that we will be divided into Task Forces along these four priorities and asked to generate recommendations for actions that will get results.

I look at this as the chance to achieve the dream of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, where the Protestant leader Charles Bonney said: “From now on, the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but on the giant ills that afflict humankind.”

Nafees Syed, a Muslim college student, says President Obama's early words and actions send a powerful, positive signal to Muslims.

Eboo Patel
Washington Post

Many things were lost on 9/11 – three thousand lives, a nation's innocence and the fiction within the American Muslim community that it could live in this country without having to tell the broader society much about its traditions (the African-American Muslim community is an important exception to this).

After getting over the shock of the sheer horror of 9/11, after mourning the victims of the attacks, American Muslims realized that Osama bin Laden had just taught Americans his version of Islam 101. And because Americans were largely ignorant of this 1400-year-old faith of over a billion people, many believed it. 9/11 taught American Muslims a crucial lesson: if there is a vacuum out there about something important, and you don't fill it, someone else will.

To their credit, Muslims in America and elsewhere have been very busy since 9/11, as an important new report from the United States Institute of Peace highlights. It states, "Violent extremists are on one edge of the Muslim community, but they are counterbalanced by a growing movement of Muslim peacemakers."

The paper first and foremost debunks the falsehood that Muslim leaders have not spoken out against terrorism, pointing out that 13 American Muslim organizations issued a statement immediately after 9/11 that said: "Holding to the ideals of both our religion and our country, we condemn all forms of terrorism, and confirm the need for perpetrators of any such acts of violence to be brought to justice." It lists several other such statements from Muslim organizations around the world.

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Martin Luther King Jr. waves to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

Eboo Patel and Samantha Kirby
Interfaith YouthCore

As we honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. today, we look forward to tomorrow's historic inauguration. And as this inauguration realizes an important dimension of King's dream about racial diversity and equality, it is another dimension of America's multiculturalism that has caused the most controversy for the Obama team: religion.

Americans may be surprised to learn that, just as King's dream has guided Obama regarding matters of race, so has his vision provided a great deal of inspiration regarding religious diversity.

The frenzy surrounding prayer at President Obama's inauguration events doesn't surprise us. At last count, an openly gay Bishop, a prominent Evangelical preacher, a white female Muslim, and three Rabbis from different branches of Judaism will each be offering prayers over the next few days.

Through these choices, Obama points out a simple fact: America is a religiously diverse nation. What's more, he is intent on embracing and engaging this diversity in a new way even if this means gathering some folks in a room together that may not agree on what to do in Israel-Palestine or about the nuptial rights of gays and lesbians.

Since the civil rights movement, Americans have been talking about diversity. We engage in discussion about race, gender, class and sexuality - but at these tables, religious diversity is too often neglected. Obama takes up this challenge at his inauguration.

In doing so, he follows the lead of Rev. King, who marched in Selma side by side with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; Rev. King, who spoke of non-violent action inspired by the "satyagraha" taught by Mahatma Gandhi.

King's ultimate vision was not just about race or nation, but new relationships – between people from different backgrounds, between America and the world, and between humanity and God.

Half a century ago, when we talked about diversity, race was the most pressing issue at hand. Race-based post-colonial movements were rising everywhere. Today, when we talk about diversity, we must address faith. The evening news too often feels like a series of murders committed to the soundtrack of prayer.

America - the most religiously diverse nation in the world and the most religiously devout nation in the West - can find its own diverse religious communities falling into the clash of civilizations paradigm, or choose to embrace and model interfaith cooperation.

At the root of King's spirit was the motivation to bring diverse people together on common ground. President Obama is carrying on that theme with the diverse religious leaders featured at his inauguration. But Presidents aren't the only people who can bring diverse faiths together, and inaugurations aren't the only example of common ground.

Today, more than 200 volunteers of diverse faiths have gathered on the banks of the Anacostia River, the "forgotten river" of Washington DC. They work side by side to plant trees, clean the polluted water, and engage in interfaith dialogue, asking one another, "What from your faith tradition calls you to serve today? Tell me the story of social action that inspires you, so that it may inspire me as well. "

These volunteers honor and claim Dr. King not only as a leader of the civil rights movement, but as a faith hero who built bridges between religious communities through common social action. The project's organizers reflect the diversity of the young people they bring together: Earth Conservation Corps, Unity Walk, the Points of Light Institute, Interfaith Works and the Institute for Faith and Service.

As conflict continues overseas, today provides a picture of the best America has to offer: citizens from different backgrounds coming together to create common action for the common good.

This is precisely what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted. And it's precisely the America that President Obama is imagining.

Editor's note: Eboo Patel is founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core (www.ifyc.org) and author of "Acts of Faith." Samantha Kirby is a Public Interest Program Fellow at the Interfaith Youth Core.

Sandra Samuel holds Moshe Holtzberg at the Mumbai airport in India on their way to Israel on December 1.

Eboo Patel
Executive Director, Interfaith Youth Core

He reminds me of my son.

That was my first thought when I saw the picture of Moshe Holtzberg — 2 years old, dark eyes, full lips — wearing a green shirt, clutching an orange ball and wailing "Dada."

My almost-2-year-old son just learned how to say "Dada." He walks around the house and claps his hands and repeats "Dada" in his own peculiar toddler rhythm. When I leave for work in the morning, he sometimes reaches for me and wails "Dada" with a tinge of sadness in his voice.

But not like Moshe's sadness. His parents are gone to God. They are not coming back. They were ripped from Moshe by terrorists who perversely believed that Islam is a totalitarian faith, a faith defined by destroying diversity. Mumbai, the city they attacked, is defined by its diversity — a masala of cultures that included Moshe's family of Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn.

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