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

On July 7, 2005, Hasib Hassain walks with three other young men—Shehzad Tanweer, Mohammad Sique Kahn, and Germaine Lindsay—through London. Their backpacks are filled with makeshift explosives. That morning they each detonate their bombs within minutes of one another, taking their own lives and others. Patel describes two of the innocent victims and imagines how they must have been unaware that the young men in front of them were about to detonate bombs.

Patel compares the men of the July 7 bombing with those who committed the 9/11 hijackings that led to the fall of the World Trade Center: specifically, that nothing in the history of the bombers or the hijackers marks them as obviously “evil” (3). Tanweer loved Elvis and Cricket. Kahn was a mentor at a primary school. Lindsay was, according to acquaintances, always happy and smiling. Hassain was the youngest and shyest of the bombers.

At Matthew Murray High School in Leeds, Hassain had been singled out and bullied by tough white kids. His parents told him that he needed to pray more. Instead, he organized a group of Pakistani Muslim youths who fought back. His parents sent him abroad to the Muslim world, hoping that its influence would temper his new taste for confrontation. Instead, he came back in a state a cousin called “brainwashed” (5) and joined the inner circle at the Iqra Learning Center, which preached hatred for the West. The center’s bookstore sold aggressive anti-American propaganda that Hassain, and others, saw as a call to fight.

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad was a recruiter for radical Islam, “a master institution and youth builder” (6). He used the July 7 bombings as a tool, speaking reverently of the bombers at rallies against British foreign policy. People like him got to Hassain before people like Patel could.

Patel is in London on the day of the bombings. He reflects on his history and how religious violence has always been part of it. He thinks about the four locations where the bombers carried out their attacks and wonders if he will ever feel safe walking through them again. When he sees their faces and hears the stories of the bombers on the news, he feels recognition, as though “[a] piece of their story was part of me” (8). Patel imagines sitting down to dinner with Hassain and his family, talking about western foreign policy, and understanding Hassain’s anger. His parents were never able to relate to his struggles:

[he] remember[s] feigning illness so I could stay home from school as a teenager, afraid to tell my mother the truth: that a group of white kids in gym class had taken to corning me in the locker room, tearing off my shorts, hitting me with wet towels, all the while shouting ‘sand nigger’ and ‘curry maker’ (9).

Patel doubts that Hassain’s parents would have understood their son any better.

Patel’s father yells at the TV during the Gulf War of 1990-1991. He is furious when reporters mispronounced Iraq. He hates US President George Bush, who, after deciding not to send the American military to Baghdad, had made a decision that was tantamount to slaughtering thousands of Muslims who trusted him, according to Patel’s father. During the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Patel’s father grows even angrier with the US government. “They are using rape as a tool of war and the strongest military in the world is doing nothing,” he repeats often (10). Seeing that his father, whose faith was usually in the background, could become so angered at Western influence on the Muslim world, Patel finds it easy to understand that Hassain, whose ties with this culture were far deeper than his father’s, could be spurred into action by a charismatic recruiter.

Like Hassain, Patel felt a sense of being excluded from mainstream society and of being Muslim without any “real grounding of how that was useful or relevant in my life” (11). And he knew that people who shared his identity were being treated horribly elsewhere. In high school, Patel began taking risks and hanging out with rough kids. His grades slipped. He believes that had he been approached at the time by someone like Sheikh Omar, he could have stepped onto the path of radicalization.

Muslims like Patel’s parents create a bubble in which the family lives, believing that their children will want to stay in the bubble and will uphold the family’s religious and cultural traditions. Patel believes that strong leaders are needed to influence young people, but the leaders that exist do not focus on Muslim youth. He believes that not enough Muslim leaders are trying, but that “[r]eligious totalitarians like Sheikh Omar are exceptionally perceptive about the crisis facing second-generation immigrant Muslims in the West” (12).

Patel remembers the funeral of the mother of a twenty-year-old Muslim friend, Sohail. She had been shoveling snow when she suffered a heart attack in her front yard. The Imam who conducts the funeral looks uncomfortable as he speaks about the importance of continuing to teach Islam to children, as Sohail’s mother had and speaks “[n]ot a word of comfort about the spiritual meaning of death and the afterlife in Islam. No arm around Sohail’s shoulder” (14). Patel observes that “[i]f Sohail ever had a question about faith, the absolute last person he would seek out is this man” (15).

When Patel’s mother starts working, he is in an aftercare program and summer camp program at the YMCA, where he befriends kids who won’t talk to him at school. When he is older, Patel joins the Y’s Leader’s Club, which focuses on helping teens volunteer to build leadership skills. He attends a one-week camp called Leader School and finds that he enjoys the increased responsibility. When school begins again, his grades improve and he stops hanging out with the rough kids. Patel credits the YMCA for stopping his descent into anger: “The YMCA’s secret is simple; it stems from a genuine love of young people. The YMCA knows that, deep down, young people need more than just a place” (16).

Patel grows up with rituals. As soon as he is able to talk, his mother teaches him the “Du’a,” a six-part prayer to be recited once by Ismaili Muslims (Patel’s branch of Islam) in the morning and twice at night. Each night, his mother tells him, “‘Say “Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad” as you go to sleep. It will protect you’” (19). But as his mother works and she and Patel’s father rise in the American corporate structure, the rituals fade from Patel’s life.

Patel’s mother emphasizes that Islam is a diverse religion. The Ismaili’s are distinct among other Muslim sects because they believe they have a living and present Imam to guide them. Then, the current Imam is Karim al-Husseini, also known as the “Aga Khan” (20). An Imam’s responsibility is to guide the spiritual and material life of his followers, including leading the daily prayers at a mosque and encouraging higher education.

Patel’s father graduated from Notre Dame with an MBA in the mid-1970s before moving with his family to Chicago so he could work in marketing. Patel’s mother was a teacher who was also studying to become an accountant. She was ecstatic after passing the CPA exams. She became an accounting professor at the College of DuPage when the family moved into a Chicago suburb. When Patel goes to birthday parties, his mother calls ahead to make sure that no one serves him a hot dog because“[f]or many years my closest connection to Islam was my mother’ insistence that I not eat pork” (23). Despite this, “[m]y energy was focused on trying to fit in as a brown kid in a white world” (22).

During high school, Patel experiences periods of wanting to grow closer to God. Sometimes he goes to morning prayers with his mother. He is confused to find he admires a basketball player at school, even though the other kid professes not to believe in God. “‘It makes me think he’s missing something,’” Patel tells his mother(24).

In junior high, Patel was placed in Challenge classes, which hold students to a higher standard. Patel’s science teacher in sixth grade, Mr. Schrage, says something that changes Patel’s life. On the first day of seventh grade, Patel walks into Mr. Schrage’s class. “‘Didn’t we get rid of you last year?’” says the teacher, completely serious and challenging (25). Patel is upset, but “[m]y anger was interrupted by a scarier thought: Am I smart enough?” (26). Patel decides to prove to Schrage, and himself, that he can be an exceptional student. After class, he goes to Schrage and says, “‘I want to be in Challenge science. I want to write the best research paper you have ever seen’” (26). Schrage tells him to find a topic by the following week.

Patel spends weeks writing a paper on chiropractic medicine. The finished product is seventy-two typed pages. Mr. Schrage says he is going to use it from then on as his best example of what a seventh-grader can accomplish. By the time he enters high school, Patel is an academic overachiever who dreams of attending an Ivy League college. He wants to leave the leaders program to focus on his homework, which disappoints his parents. His mother talks him into continuing to volunteer at the YMCA.

One day Patel’s father insists that Patel begin reading literature. He does not want Patel’s education to be “purely functional” (30). Patel immediately falls in love with the novels of John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, and Mark Twain and the writings of Thoreau, especially his essay “Civil Disobedience,” which is “the beginning of a broader shift in my thinking. In my head, I loved ideas. In my gut, I knew they only counted when connected to reality” (31).

Patel begins dating a bookish Mormon girl named Lisa. One afternoon, Lisa tells Patel that her body is “out of bounds” for him, meaning that “[t]he battle between my Muslim upbringing and my male hormones was resolved by Lisa’s Mormon values” (34). Physical desires thwarted, Patel and Lisa grow more intimate while discussing books and poetry. Patel is surprised that Lisa is smarter than he is, but he is even more surprised that this makes him want to cheer for her and her academic success, not to compete with her.

A long-term relationship with Lisa would require Patel to convert to Mormonism. After a year together, Lisa leaves to go to Brigham Young University in Utah, while Patel goes to the University of Illinois, which he soon views as his “natural habitat” (36). When he talks on the phone with Lisa, she asks him if he is reading the Book of Mormon, still hoping for his eventual conversion. When he says no, they both agree that they need to move on.