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From: Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wed, Oct 24, 2012 5:36 am
Subject: [mukto-mona] FW: EBOO PATEL - THE INTERFAITH MAN
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:01:48 +0100
Subject: EBOO PATEL - THE INTERFAITH MAN
From: Hasan Essa <
Eboo Patel: The Interfaith Man
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Friday, October 26, 2012
Re: [mukto-mona] FW: EBOO PATEL - THE INTERFAITH MAN
Thanks for sharing the news about Mr. Patel. We need more like him in all corners of the globe.
-----Original Message-----
---------- Forwarded message ---------- October 23, 2012, 9:00 AM IST
During chaotic times in the religious world, such as now, one often wonders what can be done to get people to respect and honor different faiths and live in harmony.
Eboo Patel and his Chicago-based organization, the Inter Faith Youth Coalition, try to address just that, with a mission "to make religious pluralism a social norm within the course of a generation."
Mr. Patel is the president and founder of IFYC, an interfaith network of by Text-Enhance" href="http://us.mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#" target="_blank"college students at around 200 universities worldwide. IFYC, which launched in 2002, holds events it calls "Interfaith Leadership Institutes" at different universities with the aim of training undergraduates, staff, faculty and administrators to be movement builders for interfaith action.
Mr. Patel, who was born in 1975, and the IFYC have worked closely with Barack Obama's administration on a program called the President's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. Mr. Patel hopes to continue the program beyond November, regardless who wins the U.S. election.
"When it comes to faith and interfaith, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have a lot in common," Mr. Patel told The Wall Street Journal's India Real Time recently. "Their faiths have played a key role in inspiring them to become public servants, and they recognize the important of welcoming the contributions of people of all faiths and nurturing cooperation between them."
Mr. Patel, a Gujarati Muslim, says he became an interfaith activist because he has always believed that conflict between different faiths is one of the great problems in the world, and cooperation is one of the great hopes.
"Interfaith cooperation played a key role in everything from the American civil rights movement, to the swaraj movement in India, to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. I believe that if religious communities worked together to by Text-Enhance" href="http://us.mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#" target="_blank"apply shared values like compassion and hospitality we would be able to go a long way to solving many of the great problems in our world today, everything from poverty to malaria," he said.
Mr. Patel says his interest in interfaith issues began when he was very young. His best friends from his high school in Illinois were a South Indian Hindu, a Cuban Jew, a Nigerian Evangelical, a Mormon, a Lutheran and a Catholic. Interacting with them, he realized that while faiths have important differences in their doctrines and practices they also have important similarities around shared social values like mercy.
Mr. Patel went on to study sociology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and then to Oxford University on a Rhodes by Text-Enhance" href="http://us.mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#" target="_blank"scholarship to get a doctorate in the sociology of religion.
He has also written a book called "Sacred Ground," in which he argues that we need to be just as scientific and strategic about reducing religious tension as we try to be about reducing poverty and disease.
"In the book, I write about a 'science of interfaith cooperation,' pointing out that people's attitudes towards other religions, their relationships with people of other faiths and their knowledge of other traditions are closely linked," he says.
An effective interfaith program advances appreciative knowledge of different traditions, thus improving attitudes, Mr. Patel says, adding that this is the first by Text-Enhance" href="http://us.mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#" target="_blank"step in "bridging the social capital" between different faiths. This in turn serves as a bulwark against religious tension and violence, and a source of significant civic problem-solving.
Mr. Patel was awarded Hofstra University's 2012 Guru Nanak Interfaith Prize. The New York-based university gives the $50,000 prize every two years – its first recipient was the Dalai Lama in 2008. The award, named after the founder of Sikhism, is aimed at recognizing people who work to promote awareness and understanding between different groups. "Guru Nanak taught that we discover our oneness with humanity by exploring the differences that separate us," Hofstra University says on its website.
Bernard Firestone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the university, said in a statement that Mr. Patel had focused his efforts on engaging young people to promote cooperation, understanding, service and peaceful dialogue on college and university campuses.
Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.
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