15 Quotes by Eboo Patel

The tradition you were born into was your home, Brother Wayne told me, but as Gandhi once wrote, it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen. “It’s good to have wings,” he would say, “but you have to have roots, too.

Religious extremists want to show us that the only possibility is for us to kill each other, so September 11 is not only heinous murder, it is also global performance. It is also putting an idea into the world, an idea of destruction.

I as a Muslim believe deeply in the differences that are within Islam. But I also take seriously the idea that we have to come to know one another.

Even when we feel like we have found theological common ground – like Abraham as the patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims – we quickly discover that even those paradigms have their limits. There are a million Hindus in this country, and over three million Buddhists, and neither of those communities would be called Abrahamic. But they live in America, too, and we have to have a paradigm that includes them.

Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read.

What we pluralists have to do is to say to the people standing on the faith line, particularly the young ones, no, pluralism is the wish of the creator. It is the greatest opportunity for humanity.