Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim in the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

Patel has been in Chicago for six months when he meets Brother Wayne Teasdale in the spring of 1997. Wayne has a PhD in philosophy and had spent a year in an Ashram in India after taking Hindu monastic vows. He wants Patel to start a youth interfaith movement. Patel is frustrated by what he sees as people of faith who lack the ability to take bold steps. He takes a job teaching in an alternative education program for urban minority high school dropouts. The school’s mission is to prepare dropouts who read at the fifth-grade level to pass the GED exam six months later. It would be a difficult task, even under ideal circumstances with traditional students. But Patel is confident because he has read a lot of education theory. When he meets the parents of the students, however, they don’t want to hear theory. They only want to know if their kids will learn to read.

One week later, he starts teaching and  realizes “[m]y liberal arts education had provided me with ways to understand what was wrong with the world but few skills to help me put it right” (63). Many of his male students are involved in gangs and have gang obligations that make them skip class for days at a time. Patel’s lessons are sneered at constantly, but he continues to try. By November, teaching no longer feels like an impossible challenge. Success encourages Patel, but he is lonely and feels that he does not have a community. He begins a weekly potluck dinner for Chicago activists, which becomes popular. Soon, six of them have a plan to live together in a rented space as a social justice community. They name their group Stone Soup, after a fable in which a group of people learn that they each have something unique to contribute to a meal. After a few months, although Patel enjoys his membership in the group, he still does not feel that it gives him an identity. He becomes more interested in the ideas of Wayne Teasdale. He goes to several of Wayne’s events with his friend, Kevin.

Wayne is a Catholic who also teaches Hinduism and Buddhism. He believes that all traditions have value. His beliefs are so scattered that Kevin and Patel do not understand how to create an interfaith movement based on his teachings, which give little coherent direction. Patel is also bored at the interfaith meetings he attends. They do not have much of an effect on the audience, and the speakers demonstrate little passion.

Patel receives a phone call from Charles Gibbs, the executive director of the United Religions Initiative (URI). He invites Kevin and Patel to the URI’s Global Summit, which will include other young people interested in starting a youth interfaith initiative. At the summit, Patel notices that “[i]n the discussions of our faith lives, two things stood out: our faith formation had occurred in the midst of religious diversity, and serving others was a core part of how we lived our religions” (72). Patel realizes that, despite volunteering in community groups, he has spent little of his time discussing faith and how it relates to service. And at the Catholic Workers house, the discussions had been about faith, but not about religious diversity.

Patel tells Charles Gibbs about his idea for the Interfaith Youth Corps, “a project where religiously diverse young people came together for one year in a residential community where they would live together and take part in community service projects” (73). Gibbs is supportive, and Patel leaves the conference with an idea, peers who are interested, and mentors prepared to help him learn. When Patel returns to Chicago and tells Brother Wayne, Brother Wayne insists that Patel go to Dharamsala and tell the Dalai Lama about his project. 

Patel had been to India once before, when he was 15. He spent the trip complaining about the food, the heat, the crowds, the smells, and the lack of ice in the water. He begins his second trip six years later:

I was angry at America. After all, it was America who had seduced me into adopting its styles and its scorn, forced me to sacrifice my true heritage in a devil’s bargain for acceptance, and then laughed viciously when it dawned on me that I would never be anything but a second-class citizen there (78).

When Patel and Kevin reach the home of Patel’s grandmother, Mama, in South Bombay, her servants are awake. They see Patel and cry as they hug him. “‘They took care of you when you were a baby, and now they see you grown,’” says Mama (79). In the morning, Patel tells the family that he wants to go buy Indian clothes. His cousin Saleem is confused, saying that American blue jeans are the best. Saleem calls Indian clothes “pajamas” (79).

Patel is conflicted by his desire to feel at home in India and the problems he has with the country, its structure, and its class system. He is uncomfortable with the idea of servants. His grandmother has three servants, and even though they love Patel, “[a]ll I saw was three people waiting on one person” (83).

When Patel and Kevin visit another of Mama’s homes in a village called Nargol, a new pair of servants carry their luggage and make their beds. Patel rises to use the bathroom in the night and passes through the servants’ quarters on the way. He trips over one of them in the dark. When the lights are on, he sees that the servants are sleeping on the floor, even though “[t]here was a bed in the other room, and it was empty. They had chosen to sleep on the floor, next to the empty bed. They could not conceive of it as their lot to sleep in a bed” (84). His cousin Saleem does not know a single person who works: everyone in his college is there because their parents gave them money and because “[l]abor lacked dignity” (85). Patel realizes that in America, status is more fluid than in India: “Even if I get a graduate degree and make a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class” (86).

Patel remembers reading the works of James Baldwin in college and identifying with his initial anger against America. But Baldwin also came to see America, despite its racism toward him and other black people, as home. He was more interested in changing his home than in leaving his country. He also came to believe that love between people of different identities was not only possible but necessary. “In college,” thinks Patel, “I had understood identity as a box to lock myself in and a bat to bludgeon America with” (88). Now he believes that, for him, the best version of America must embrace pluralism.

Baldwin’s writing helps Patel understand his relationship with India. He no longer feels the need to embrace India as his haven, but instead, wants to use his identity as an American with Indian heritage to work on behalf of American diversity. He and Kevin spend hours each day reading the novels of Indian writers, finding that “[t]he common theme that ran through these hopeful visions was India as a civilization whose diverse communities were in deep dialog with one another” (91). Patel recognizes the theme in the writing of Baldwin as well, and also as another version of the American Dream.

Patel and Kevin meet with the Dalai Lama in his palace. Kevin tells the Dalai Lama that he is a Jew, which reminds Patel that his friend has a more concrete identity than he does. Patel has been trying to convince himself that he is a Buddhist, but he does not find meditation effective. When he meditates, an old Muslim prayer his mother used to say to him, “Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad” gets stuck in his head and considers that “[p]erhaps this was God’s way of telling me something” (95).  

The Dalai Lama looks at Patel and says, “You are a Muslim” (96). He encourages the three of them to understand that as a Muslim, a Jew, and a Buddhist who are all talking and learning from one another, they are practicing interfaith. Then he says that all interfaith work is rooted in service: “As you study the other religions, you must learn more about your own and believe more in your own. This Interfaith Youth Corps is a very good project” (96).

One day in his grandmother’s apartment, Patel wakes up to find an unfamiliar woman there. Her father and uncle had been abusing her. Mama had taken her in from the prayer house, where they had met. She says that they will call her Anisa and protect her until a safe place can be found. When Patel protests that it is dangerous and that the uncle and father may come looking for her, his grandmother says Anisa might be the hundredth person she has done this for. She shows Patel a box of Polaroids she took of the people she protected or helped. Patel is astonished and asks why she does it. She says, “‘I am a Muslim. This is what Muslims do’” (99).