Struggle for the Soul of a New Generation

Before the August 1 issue of Rolling Stone even hit the newsstands, NPR did a piece on the firestorm surrounding is cover. The controversy wasn't over the feature article entitled "Jahar's World", an in-depth profile of the surviving alleged Boston bomber. It was about the image on the cover--a handsome, tousle-headed youth. People were saying that not only the photo but its placement on RollingStone's cover made the kid, referred to as a monster in the article, look like a rock star. New England-based Tedeschi Food Stores had already announced that it would not carry the issue.

            The article itself, based on numerous interviews with people who knew Tsarnaev, including fellow students from his high school in Cambridge, MA, is a thorough study of how such a well liked, successful student, who seemed to fit right into his American community, went so horribly wrong. Janet Reitman traces the Chechen immigrant’s devolvement and recruitment into Muslim extremism by his older brother, his partner in the bombing. Although there were some telltale signs that Jahar was becoming militantly anti-American, the changes mostly slipped under the radar or were ignored when they surfaced. There were family problems—isolation, the parents’ failure to succeed economically in the US and returning to Chechnya, Jahar staying behind with his brother Tamerlan, who was being drawn deeper and deeper into a fundamentalist community. 

            The Rolling Stone article examines how religious and political extremists can recruit a young person by playing on his loneliness and longing for a home he has never really known. Aside from the cover glamorizing a young terrorist, the article fails to take the most crucial step and look at solutions to a growing international problem. Enter Eboo Patel, a Bridge Person if ever there was one. Patel, the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a

Generation (Beacon Press, 2007) begins his book with tales into which Jahar’s story would fit only too well. Patel tells how Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremists have all reached out to disaffected youth, recruiting them to commit acts of terror around the world. He goes on to challenge the pluralists among us, asking what we are doing to reach out with a different message.

Patel also tells about his own difficult search for identity as a young Muslim growing up in America. Unlike Jahar, Patel’s parents, Indian immigrants, enjoyed economic success in the US. Despite that, he was at one point drawn, not to Muslim extremists but to the neighborhood bad boys, “the boys who ride dirt bikes,” as his mother referred to them. What saved him, Patel says, is his parents’ insistence that he continue his association with the YMCA. There, engagement in community service kept him, as he gradually returned to the Muslim roots he had left, from extremism. It was through community service that he learned what he had in common with Americans from diverse backgrounds.

And it is interfaith community service that is at the heart of the organization he cofounded, Interfaith YouthCore (IFYC). In IFYC young people, particularly college students (and it was as he began college that Jahar was led into his diabolical act), engage in community service activities with youths of many faiths and backgrounds. Besides serving together, they talk and learn about what they have in common. They build bridges among themselves and others. Eboo Patel’s core belief is that “religion is a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.” If those of us who are cultural and religious pluralists are to save our world from extremist disasters, we must be as active as the extremists in recruiting youth to opportunities in which they can experience their commonalities and learn to respect their differences.

Take a quiz to find out how much you know about interfaith cooperation in diverse ethical and religious traditions. For example, do you know which U.S. President, while addressing a Jewish community and affirming America’s commitment to interfaith cooperation, insisted that “the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”?