Conclusion: Saving Each Other, Saving Ourselves

My heart has grown capable of taking on all forms

It is a pasture for gazelles

A table for the Torah

A convent for Christians

Ka’bah for the Pilgrim

Whichever the way love’s caravan shall lead

That shall be the way of my faith.

IBN ARABI

“My dear brothers and sisters, Assalamu Alaikum. I come to you in this beautiful house of worship with the Muslim greeting of peace.” It was February 2004, and I was listening to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf give the Sunday sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church. He talked about Islam as a tradition meant for all places and times, a faith that had sustained billions of followers for more than a thousand years and contributed enormous quantities of beauty to human civilization. Imam Feisal wore a traditional white robe from the Middle East, and his accent bore the traces of his past: the Arab world, Malaysia, England. But his message was about the here and now. In that church where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous speech against the Vietnam War, Imam Feisal talked about the emergence of a twenty-first-century American Islam.

I approached Imam Feisal after his sermon and told him about the Interfaith Youth Core. He understood the vision immediately and suggested that I visit him and his wife, Daisy Khan, at their home the following evening. The living room of their apartment on the Upper West Side was set up like a mosque, with prayer rugs stretched from wall to wall. I arrived at dusk. We said the Maghrib prayer, then talked about how America, with its unique combination of religious devotion and religious diversity, was the ideal place for a renewal of Islam. “In the twentieth century, Catholicism and Judaism underwent profound transformations in America,” Imam Feisal observed. “I think this century, in America, Islam will do the same.” Imam Feisal said that it was young American Muslims, a generation both unabashedly American and unmistakably Muslim, who would shape American Islam. And he hoped that my generation in America could reach out to our peers across the Muslim world, approximately 70 percent of whom were under thirty years old, and we could renew Islam together.

Islam is a religion that has always been revitalized by migration. The waters of the faith, says one scholar, are so clear that they pick up the colors of the rocks they flow over. Islam in India looks Indian; in China, Chinese. The cultural tradition of contemporary Islam owes enormous debts to Indian architecture, Persian cuisine, Turkish poetry, Arabic calligraphy, and Greek philosophy. What colors will America add to Islam?

America is a nation that has been constantly rejuvenated by immigrants. For centuries, they have added new notes to the American song. There is now a critical mass of Muslims in America. About 75 percent are people who undertook a geographic migration, coming from South Asia, the Middle East, and various parts of Africa. Approximately 25 percent were born in the United States, mostly African Americans, who chose the spiritual migration of conversion. Most estimates put the total population of Muslims in America at six million, about the same as the number of Jews and almost triple the number of Episcopalians. What notes will Islam contribute to the American song?

Imam Feisal introduced me to a community answering both questions at once. At the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference that he and Daisy convened in the spring of 2004, I met the best of my generation of Muslims: artists and bankers, African American converts and Middle Eastern immigrants, Sunnis and Shias, women who wore headscarves and women who didn’t. We woke up early to do Sufi chants with Imam Feisal, had heated debates over how best to participate in American politics, and rolled off our chairs laughing at the act of the Muslim comedian Azhar Usman. Three themes emerged in the discussion: Islam had to be a big tent for all believers, not a small room for only the purists; Muslims needed to contribute to all aspects of human civilization, not obsess exclusively over a handful of causes; and American Muslims needed to be just as concerned with the future of the country we lived in as we were about the places of Islam’s glorious past.

I had grown up comfortable with diversity but unclear about my identity. Finally, I had found a community I could call my own.

Jen had the opposite experience. Her parents wanted her to have a strong Jewish identity, so they raised her entirely within a Jewish bubble. She grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, attended a Jewish school, and went to Jewish summer camps. One day, at a restaurant, Jen grew visibly upset around a dark-skinned employee. Her mother realized that Jen’s discomfort was based on her limited contact with non-Jews, and that if Jen was going to make her way in a diverse world, she needed to come out of the Jewish cocoon. How to do that while maintaining a strong Jewish identity? Jen’s parents hoped the Interfaith Youth Core’s Chicago Youth Council would help.

Sayyeda, a young woman from a traditional Muslim family, joined the CYC at about the same time Jen did. I watched them, a devout Jew and a devout Muslim, each raised in the bubble of her own community, slowly come to know each other. They built their relationship by volunteering together—tutoring children, spending time with senior citizens, painting the walls of community centers. After a particularly challenging afternoon with refugee children on the North Side of Chicago, I saw Sayyeda recite to Jen Sura Asr from the Qur’an, about the importance of staying patient while doing good work. During an interfaith discussion on the importance of teachers in different religions, Jen talked about a famous Jewish scholar named Rashi and how he gave his daughters the same duties as his sons. I could see Sayyeda’s mind working on that idea. She had spent the past several years thinking about gender issues within Islam, and hearing Jen point to Rashi had made her curious about whether Islam had a similar teacher. They also had several lighter moments together. Before leading a discussion on shared values between religious communities at the Catholic Theological Union, they slipped away to the restroom together, then came out laughing hysterically. “What’s so funny?” I asked. They had been trading the prayers that Jews and Muslims say while using the bathroom.

“Honestly, it’s like talking to another Muslim,” Sayyeda said of their friendship. “I have the same relationship with Jen as I do with some of my Muslim friends. I find that kind of ironic.”

Jen nodded. “Anyone spiritual goes through very similar struggles in their lives. Would I go to Sayyeda to talk about how to practice modesty? Absolutely, because she’s exemplary in her modesty. Even if we have different traditions, we still grapple with the same ideas.”

One of the ideas that Jen and Sayyeda both grappled with was being committed to your own tradition while empathizing with another person’s perspective. During one CYC meeting, Sayyeda confessed, “It seems like most of my life I’ve only been looking at one side. I’m struggling with this idea of seeing both sides. I’ve been opened up to these new cultures, these new faiths, new people. I guess it’s better to open up the lid in a box than to just close it.” She explained that she had not gone to a protest on behalf of Palestine because she didn’t feel as if concrete solutions were offered and she didn’t feel right about just denouncing something.

Jen’s eyes flipped wide open as she listened to Sayyeda. “I was invited to go to the anti-protest to that Palestinian rally. And as much as I support Israel, never would I go and protest someone else, and it’s probably out of a direct relationship with you,” she said, gesturing to Sayyeda.

“See, yeah, that’s it,” Sayyeda said. “I used to look at a newspaper and see a heading that says, ‘Palestinian Terrorist Blows Himself Up.’ And as sad as this sounds, I could understand why. But now, it seems like there are much better alternatives than to turn to violence.”

“We had a really pro-Israeli event at my Jewish youth group, and somebody told the story of an Islamic leader being assassinated and people started clapping,” Jen said. “I was about to stand up and say, ‘What are you doing? That’s a human life. You can’t clap when somebody dies.’” She choked back tears, then continued. “I find myself in every situation arguing the opposite side, because now I know you and I see both sides.”

“Same here,” said Sayyeda.

We talked about the Muslim concept of being a mercy upon all the world. Jen brought up the saying of the first-century Palestinian rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” Understanding the other person’s point of view, we determined, was a core value in both Islam and Judaism.

To see the other side, to defend another people, not despite your tradition but because of it, is the heart of pluralism. It is this same ethic that I see exemplified in the Indian art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. It is about a young Muslim photographer and a young Hindu housewife who come from very different backgrounds and have very different temperaments but find themselves on the same cross-country bus. The bus stalls in a part of the country where riots are raging. Muslim and Hindu mobs are roaming the area and murdering people of the other religion. A group of extremist Hindus climb aboard the bus and start checking IDs. They murder the ones with Muslim names. When they approach the young Muslim photographer, the Hindu woman stops them and says that he is her husband. The two finally escape the Hindu extremists on the bus and make it to a nearby village, only to find themselves in the midst of a group of Muslim extremists. The photographer risks his life to protect the woman and the baby, claiming that they are his own.

I saw the film in a theater in Bombay. I thought about the times when my family there had to lock themselves in their home for fear of the raging Hindu and Muslim mobs on the streets of their city. I thought about my own failure to protect my Jewish friend in high school when people had targeted his religion for ridicule. I thought about what the young religious extremists we read about in the news every day could have been if different influences had gotten to them first. I thought about the meaning of pluralism in a world where the forces that seek to divide us are strong. I came to one conclusion: We have to save each other. It’s the only way to save ourselves.