Eboo Patel

MY FIRST JOB out of college was teaching at-risk black and Puerto Rican kids in an alternative high school setting. At 20 years old, fresh from a critical theory-oriented undergraduate curriculum, I basically taught what I had read in college: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, Noam Chomsky. I was thrilled to do it. After all, in front of me were the people that I had studied in those critical-theory classes—“the oppressed.” And here I was to deliver liberation.

“Is this going to get me my GED?” a skeptical student named Angel asked me at one point. “If I pass, I get $1 an hour more at Cub Foods, and my girlfriend is pregnant, so, you know, I gotta get that. I ain’t slanging [dealing drugs] no more.”

I wanted to tell Angel that I was providing him far more than material gain. I was the bearer of soul freedom.

When Joel, the math teacher at the school, caught wind of what I was doing, he about put me up against the wall. “Are you crazy?” he said. “You walk in here from your privileged life and start delivering oppressive-systems mumbo jumbo to kids who need to learn how to read? Teach them that they need to work their butts off to pass the damn test. Stop giving them an excuse to blame the system.”

It is one of the most important lessons I’ve ever gotten in my life: People closest to a tough situation usually want to find the most direct way out, not the most ideological critique of injustice.

ISSUES RELATED to race were at the center of my growing political consciousness when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. Two were especially impactful: racism in the criminal justice system and racism in cultural representation.

The Rodney King beating happened when I was in high school, and there was almost nothing said about it in the largely white, professional, middle-class suburb where I grew up. In fact, the remarks that I do remember were sympathetic to the police.

The crew I ran with in college changed all that. They raised questions such as: Do you think if the officers were black and the person being beaten was white that the national conversation would be the same? Do you think that the continuous portrayals of black people as criminals had nothing to do with the acquittal of the police officers?

Those kinds of questions shifted my worldview—for the better, I believe. Given that, it should come as no surprise that the news stories I paid the most attention to in 2015 were about issues of race, the criminal justice system, and cultural representation. Basically, I was consumed with #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite.

SOME TIME ago I took a long walk with a favorite professor of mine from the University of Illinois. I talked about how I’d turned my undergraduate activism in the campus diversity movement into a full-time career, and he told me an interesting story about identity.

The week before, he had needed to shift his 9 a.m. class to 8 a.m. because of a mid-morning appointment. He promised his students he’d bring in Panera to make up for dragging them out of bed so early. One of his students, a white kid from a rural area in Illinois, had asked, “What’s Panera?”

Everybody else in his highly diverse class knew what Panera was, he stated matter-of-factly, making that white student’s distinctive experience all the more striking. “Shouldn’t any campus diversity movement that takes identity seriously be open to her uniqueness?” he asked me.

I stifled a laugh and turned the conversation to another dimension of identity, one that I felt really mattered. Surely my professor friend knew that the assigned role of white people in campus diversity programs is to listen to the bigotry that people of color have experienced and apologize for the ways they have benefited from racist systems. The only time they are allowed to speak proactively is if they occupy one of the other “preferred” identities—if they are gay, or female, or have recently converted to a minority religion.

In the weeks since Donald Trump was elected president—in between being scared out of my mind about the violent attacks on ethnic and religious minorities in America (my kids’ names are Zayd and Khalil)—I’ve thought about that rural white student. The place she’s from voted overwhelmingly for Trump. I wonder if she did. I wonder why I never wondered much about her before.

THE ATTENTION generated by Captain Humayun Khan’s Iraq war activities (as related by his father, Khizr Khan, at the Democratic National Convention) is not the first time that a military story was used to try to tamp down prejudice against U.S. Muslims. In 2008, Gen. Colin Powell responded to the charges about Barack Obama being a Muslim by saying “What if he is?” Powell then cited the image of a mother hugging the gravestone of her American Muslim son at Arlington Cemetery as an illustration of Muslim contributions to the nation.

I respect Captain Khan’s military service. Yet I can’t stop thinking about an issue that his father reportedly raised with him when he was leaving for Iraq: Are you troubled at all by this war? Lots of Americans were, concerned both about the questionable evidence used to justify the war and the many lives that were sure to be destroyed during it.

As most soldiers would, Captain Khan stated that decisions about which wars to fight were above his pay grade.

But it does raise a question for those American Muslims who were disturbed enough by the contours of the Iraq war to withhold their support: Are there ways other than going to a war you don’t believe in to express your patriotism and be welcomed by your country?

I’d like to think that there are, and that American Muslims have in fact demonstrated them. Take Salman Hamdani, who was a young American Muslim emergency medical technician on his way to work on 9/11 when he saw the planes fly into the buildings. He rushed over to the site of the attacks to help whomever he could, and died in the rubble there. The police investigated him for possible ties to terrorism because of his Muslim faith and Pakistani heritage.

Shouldn’t sacrificing your life to rescue others merit the embrace of others in your country, or at least shield you from their suspicion?

I WAS ONCE on a panel with a counselor who proudly claimed her identity as a woman as the reason for her feminist approach to counseling. Toward the end of the discussion, she told the story of a client who frustrated her. A highly educated middle-aged mother of three, this woman (the client) had stepped off the career track to take care of her children. The children were now grown, and she had come to counseling to think through her next steps. My fellow panelist encouraged this client to claim her identity powerfully and express it in public fiercely. The client liked this idea. Some weeks later, she told her counselor that she had gone back to the Catholic church of her childhood and started to attend pro-life rallies.

“That wasn’t what I meant when I told her to claim her identity and express it in public,” the counselor deadpanned, and the liberal university audience laughed along with her.

The exchange left me feeling queasy. Here was a counselor purporting to empower the identity and expression of a client in a period of transition and then being disappointed that her client hadn’t chosen the identity and expression the counselor desired. And the public affirmation of the counselor in a room full of people who clearly shared her worldview felt doubly unsettling.

BY ABOUT SIXTH grade, a set of kids in the professional middle-class suburb where I grew up stopped doing homework, or really much work at all. They’d goof around in everything from math class to gym period. Getting average grades or being sent to the principal’s office for misbehavior didn’t seem to bother them that much. And their parents seemed to greet it all with a shrug.

It looked like good fun to me, so I figured I’d give this not-giving-a-damn thing a try. My parents greeted my Bart Simpson attitude with something stronger than a shrug.

I remember their fury after a school meeting where the teacher must have explained that my grades had fallen because I spent class time chatting with friends rather than focusing on worksheets. Right before the hammer came down, I attempted a weak protest: “But none of the other kids are doing work in class either,” and ticked off a set of names that my parents knew.

“You are not like them,” came the stern response.

This confused me. I thought I was like them. I played sports and video games, watched MTV and worshipped skateboarder Tony Hawk, just like all the other 12-year-old boys.

“If you are not head-and-shoulders above the next candidate in a hiring process,” my mother sternly said, “they will not give you the job.” She repeated: “You are not like them.”

TUNISIAN FRENCH scholar Nadia Marzouki published a book in France in 2013 with the title L’Islam, une religion américaine? In 2017, the book was updated with the events of the Trump campaign and additional analysis and republished in the United States as Islam: An American Religion.

Somehow along the way, as religious studies scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan notes, the question mark was dropped. The reasons are not entirely clear. Did something dramatic happen during those four years, not just to Muslims but, more important, by Muslims? Was it a marketing gimmick by the new publisher, Columbia University Press?

Either way, it raises a fascinating question: What does it mean to be an American religion, and can Islam in America be said to constitute one?

I SPEAK ON about 25 college campuses a year, which affords me a front row seat for current trends in identity politics. One of the things I’ve noticed is that when people say they are engaged in “diversity work,” what they often mean is that they are busy mobilizing their preferred identity groups toward their approved politics. The main role they see for those on the other side is to be defeated.

But the real challenge of living in a diverse democracy is not dealing with the differences you like, it’s working with the differences you don’t like.

In his excellent new book, Confident Pluralism, John Inazu, a professor at Washington University Law School and board member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, takes a long look at how to do this, with special attention to religious differences.

Disagreements with regard to religious matters are some of the most challenging ones around. That’s because religion is about ultimate concerns. Not only do faith traditions deal with issues—creation, salvation, morality, human purpose—that are inherently ultimate in nature, they imbue matters that may otherwise be viewed as mundane with a sense of ultimacy. That’s not just a random group of people over there, that’s the church, or the umma. That’s not just any old piece of land, that’s the place where the Second Temple once stood, or where Lord Rama was born.

Inazu opens his book with a sobering quote from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned.”

He is reminding us right off the bat that the stakes could not be higher.

WHEN IT IS prayer time, Rami Nashashibi prays. His Muslim faith is the core of his life and work, inspiring the two decades of advocacy he has done on behalf of the poor and marginalized on the South Side of Chicago.

But when prayer time arrived on an unseasonably warm day in December, Nashashibi paused. It was just days after the terrible terrorist attack in San Bernardino, where extremists calling themselves Muslims murdered 14 people and injured many more. Nashashibi was in his neighborhood park with his three kids, and he found himself suddenly struck by fear at the thought of praying in public and therefore being openly identified as Muslim at a time when so many equated that term with terrorist.

That neighborhood park happened to be Marquette Park. Fifty years earlier another man of faith stood not far from where Nashashibi was standing, and he too felt fear. That man was Martin Luther King Jr. He had come to Chicago in 1966 to raise awareness about discriminatory housing practices on the South Side. His march through Marquette Park was met with racist sneers and vigilante violence. A brick thrown his way actually hit him in the head and brought him to his knees.