Acts of Faith

On July 7, 2005, four young men walked through London with backpacks filled with homemade explosives. Hasib Hassain was twenty-two years old, the youngest and shyest of the group. Shehzad Tanweer loved Elvis Presley and cricket. Mohammad Sique Kahn had been a mentor at a primary school. Germaine Lindsay was, according to everyone who knew him, always happy and smiling.

Within minutes of each other that morning, they each detonated their bombs. They killed themselves and fifty-two innocent people. Two of the victims were on their way to work. One was a young mother seeing her children off to school. They never saw it coming. How could they? The young men in front of them looked like anyone else.

Eboo Patel was in London that day. When the news broke, he watched the faces of the bombers appear on screen. He heard their stories. And then something happened that he did not expect.

He recognized himself.

Patel was an American Muslim, the son of Indian immigrants. He had grown up in the Chicago suburbs, a brown kid trying to fit into a white world. He had been bullied in school, called "sand nigger" and "curry maker" by white kids who cornered him in the locker room. He had felt the same anger, the same sense of being an outsider, the same search for somewhere to belong. He had been a young man without a clear identity, without a grounding in his own faith, without anyone to show him what being Muslim could mean beyond empty rituals and a vague sense of difference.

"I felt like a piece of their story was part of me," Patel writes.

He imagined sitting down to dinner with Hasib Hassain's family, talking about Western foreign policy. He understood the anger. He had felt it himself. His own father had yelled at the television during the Gulf War, furious at the US for what he saw as the slaughter of Muslims. During the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, his father had repeated over and over: "They are using rape as a tool of war and the strongest military in the world is doing nothing."

Patel knew what it was like to watch your people suffer and feel powerless. He knew what it was like to be a Muslim without any "real grounding of how that was useful or relevant in my life." And he knew that someone like Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, a recruiter for radical Islam who Patel calls "a master institution and youth builder," had gotten to Hasib Hassain before someone like Patel could.

This is the question that drives Acts of Faith: Why do some young people turn to religious violence while others embrace pluralism? What makes the difference between a Hasib Hassain and an Eboo Patel?

Patel introduces what he calls the "Faith Line." It is not a line that separates religions. It is a line that runs through every religion. On one side are those who use faith as a justification for violence, hatred, and exclusion. On the other side are those who use faith as a call to service, compassion, and cooperation. The line does not divide Muslims from Christians from Jews. It divides Muslims from other Muslims, Christians from other Christians, Jews from other Jews.

The book that follows is part memoir and part treatise. Patel tells his own story to answer the question of why he ended up on one side of the Faith Line while young men like Hasib Hassain ended up on the other. He traces his journey from a childhood of empty rituals and racial bullying, through a college phase of angry identity politics, to a spiritual awakening at Oxford that finally gave him a stable identity as a Muslim. He shows how he was pulled back from the edge of radicalization not by religious authorities or family pressure, but by a YMCA youth program, a Catholic Worker community, and a grandmother who showed him what real faith looked like.

But Patel's story is not just about himself. It is about a generation of young people who are being targeted by religious totalitarians who know exactly how to exploit their desire for identity, purpose, and impact. The radicals have youth programs. They have recruitment strategies. They know that a young person searching for meaning will follow anyone who offers them a heroic role in a cosmic struggle.

Patel's argument is simple and urgent: the only way to stop the radicals is to reach young people before they do. And the way to do that is through interfaith cooperation rooted in service—bringing young people of different faiths together to serve their communities and discover their shared values.

But here is the question that Patel leaves hanging at the end of this opening section: If a young man like Hasib Hassain could have ended up on either side of the Faith Line, what made the difference? And more importantly, how many more young people are out there right now, waiting for someone to reach them before the radicals do?