Eboo Patel

Delivered at the Colgate University Baccalaureate.

In the early days of Islam, when the Muslim community was small and fledgling, and being harassed and hunted by the powerful tribes of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad -8 may the Peace and Blessings of God be upon Him -- sent...

I spent my high school years in suburban Chicago dreaming of the future comforts of fat paychecks. When I went to college at the University of Illinois in Champaign, I saw the other America -- homeless Vietnam vets drinking mouthwash for the alcohol, minority students shunted to the back of...

One of the great teachings in Islam is to learn from and respect the traditions of others while remaining committed to your own. The Quranic line that God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another sums this up for me.

And one of...

Religious prejudice has become a major campaign issue during the Republican primaries this fall. Not surprisingly, it's the "M" word. Surprisingly, the M word in question is not "Muslim." While Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain have both made remarks about the alleged dangers of sharia law in American courts, the...

Ten years on, I'm remembering the literature I read and the music that kept me going in the days and months after 9/11. I had Rumi and Whitman on my bedside table, reading them back to back, alternating between selections of the "Mathnawi" and poems from "Leaves of Grass", sometimes...

What's the Dalai Lama's secret? He's got over two million Twitter followers, people buy his books in droves, his speeches sell out stadiums. In a highly cynical age, he's held the public's attention for over two decades with some pretty elementary ideas: the essence of human nature is to be...

In 1630, John Winthrop sailed across the Atlantic Ocean seeking sacred ground. Hounded in England, the Puritans would be free to worship as they wished in the New World. A footnote in someone else's story over there, they would author their own destiny here. But Winthrop didn't expect the soil...

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and high-profile conservative intellectual, announced yesterday that he is officially in the running for the Republican nomination for president. Along the way he's been playing the politics of religion.

In the speeches and media appearances he did in preparation for his run,...

As I listened to President Obama explain the chain of events that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, I couldn't help but think of my friend Eric Greitens. Eric's doctorate at Oxford was on the effects of war on children. Imagine my surprise when he told...

Lately, Congress appears to be obsessed with Muslims.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is holding hearings Tuesday (March 29) on "Protecting the Civil Rights of American Muslims," and Chairman Peter King has announced a second set of hearings on "Radicalization in the American Muslim Community" in the House...

President Obama has made interfaith cooperation a priority from the beginning -- literally. In his inaugural address, he said:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are...

A few years ago I did a cable television interview on the youth bulge in majority-Muslim countries. It's a huge group, I told the anchor, and they have the potential to make a really positive contribution to the world.

The images played on the screen during my interview were of...

Davos, Switzerland -- Young people are upending the Middle East. They have both the numbers (approximately two-thirds of the Middle East is under 30) and the facility with the tools of 21st Century revolution (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to do so.

It was young people shouting "death...

The World Economic Forum -- like the Clinton Global Initiative, the TED Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival and other such global confabs -- is a carnival of ideas, opportunities, dreams and confessions.

It's less manic than CGI, not quite as laid back as TED, but definitely part of the same...

One hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote, "The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."

History proved DuBois correct. His century saw the struggles against, and ultimately the victory over, systems that separated and subjugated people based on race...

No one is happier to wave goodbye to 2010 than American Muslims. Favorability ratings for our faith actually declined this year. Leading public figures compared Muslims to Nazis, swift-boated one of our most respected religious leaders and basically suggested we were planning a hostile takeover of America.

But there was...

About the best thing that's said about Muslims these days is they can't all be bad. Maybe so, others insist, but they all have that potential. This is the logic of prejudice, which holds up the worst elements of a community and fears that the rest will follow.

America is...

When the forces of intolerance rear their ugly heads, the forces of inclusion go into action.

Consider Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, when more than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers -- mostly college students from the North -- spent a summer in Mississippi, the state with the lowest black...

"You've got to be kidding me," I thought to myself when I heard that the ADL had come out against the location of Cordoba House. An organization dedicated to fighting bias is telling Americans who happen to pray in Arabic that it's "not right" to build an institution focused on...

In the late 19th century, the forces of religious division in America targeted Catholics. Josiah Strong's book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis, referred to Catholics as "the alien Romanist" who swore allegiance to the pope instead of the country and rejected core American values such...