Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is an American Ismaili of Gujarati Indian heritage and the founder and president of Interfaith America (previously known as Interfaith Youth Core), a Chicago-based international non-profit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation. ^{1 2} He was a member of President Barack Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. ¹ His Ismaili affiliation is his own: in his own words, "I'm an American Muslim. I'm part of the Ismaili Community of Islam, which is a small Shia Community of Islam." ³

Patel was born in Mumbai, India, in 1975 and grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where he attended Glenbard South High School. ^{2 1} He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his undergraduate studies and earned a degree in sociology, and he has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. ¹

Patel details his life and career extensively in his 2007 autobiography Acts of Faith, in which he notes that he became interested in religious diversity in college, where conversations on multiculturalism and multiple identities did not involve religious identity. ¹ After graduating he taught at an alternative education programme for high-school dropouts in Chicago and, inspired partly by Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, founded a cooperative living community for activists and artists in Chicago's Uptown neighbourhood. ¹ Finding no community organisation that touched on diversity, service and faith together, specifically one that worked with young people, he developed the idea for the Interfaith Youth Core, formulated through his relationship with Brother Wayne Teasdale and blessed by the Dalai Lama, to bring young people of different faiths together around service and dialogue. ¹

While a student at Oxford, Patel ran numerous interfaith youth projects in India, Sri Lanka and South Africa; he officially founded IFYC in 2002 with a Jewish friend and a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. ¹ Patel and IFYC partnered with White House officials in developing President Obama's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, launched in 2011. ¹ The organisation, now Interfaith America, works with governments, universities, private companies and civic organisations to promote cooperation across religious differences, and Patel received the National Conflict Resolution Center's 2024 National Peacemaker Award. ²

His books are Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (2007), which won the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion; Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America (2012); Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (2016); Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise (2018); and We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy (2022). ^{1 2}

Patel's record documents his faith as Ismaili on three independent attestations: the English article's lead, the Carnegie Corporation profile, and his own self-introduction in the Bush Center interview, quoted in the summary above. ^{1 2 3}

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