Eboo Patel’s Sacred Ground is nothing if not thought provoking. Patel’s has succeeded in his mission to enlighten and challenge his readers’ beliefs about Islamic faith, religious prejudice in America, and personal/civic responsibilities. The lessons Patel teaches his readers come about through his captivating storytelling. Patel has used the narration of his life’s story and work to teach the significance of interfaith understanding and action. Throughout this, we meet the inspiration movers in Patel’s life like Shaykh Hamza, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Zayd Patel, and the arguably more important shakers like Tarek Elmasry, Ron Kinnamon and Christiane Amanpour. As we follow Patel through his journey as leader of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), we are inadvertently forced to reflect on personal ideologies, prejudice, and responsibility in the context of Islamophobia in the United States. For a majority of the generations of now young adults born in the late 1990s, we have only ever known Islam in the context of 9/11. My peers and I were only three or four years old then, but we cannot deny that in
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To summarize, two young fish swim passed an older fish who asks them “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” to which one young fish responds and says to his friend, “What the hell is water?” The young return to the old fish proceed to ask numerous questions about water and fins and swimming. (Prothero, 153). Patel uses this story to emphasize the struggle of growing up in a ‘monoculture’ of which only knows one point of view is lacking in concern for any kind of outside point of view or experience. In the context of Sacred Ground, essentially, the less we know about our own religion, the less we know and care to know about other religions. However, this wasn’t the first time I had heard the importance of interfaith
To summarize, two young fish swim passed an older fish who asks them “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” to which one young fish responds and says to his friend, “What the hell is water?” The young return to the old fish proceed to ask numerous questions about water and fins and swimming. (Prothero, 153). Patel uses this story to emphasize the struggle of growing up in a ‘monoculture’ of which only knows one point of view is lacking in concern for any kind of outside point of view or experience. In the context of Sacred Ground, essentially, the less we know about our own religion, the less we know and care to know about other religions. However, this wasn’t the first time I had heard the importance of interfaith