Young people can change the world, this Muslim interfaith organizer says. They just need a chance to share their traditions with each other.

Eboo Patel greatly admires the Catholic tradition. He counts among his religious heroes Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement; he attended Pope Benedict XVI's meeting on dialogue during the pope's recent U.S. trip; and his family even cheers for the Fighting Irish (his father earned an M.B.A. at Notre Dame).

Yet Patel still remains a devoted Muslim. Catholics and people of other faiths, in fact, helped Patel return to his Ismaili Muslim tradition and become one of America's leading young Muslim visionaries, as named by Islamica Magazine.

His vision-which he says is both Muslim and American-is one in which young people share the wealth of their spiritual traditions to inspire social action. Through his organization, Interfaith Youth Core, Patel has found that dialogue actually strengthens young people's own religious identities, just as it did for him.

"Dialogue constantly shows you that your tradition is one that encourages compassion and cooperation, and it's worthwhile for you to consider and to act on it," Patel says.

Patel personally takes inspiration from the Muslim creation story. "With God's breath, we are given a great goodness," he says, "and to discover that and to express it is the human purpose on earth."

Why should young people be part of interfaith work?
One reason is that they are living with diversity. Older generations encountered people of other religions in college or maybe in their 20s, but today young people grow up with it. My best friends in high school included a Mormon, a Cuban Jew, a South Indian Hindu, a Nigerian evangelical, a Catholic, a Lutheran. That's happening earlier and earlier for many young people today.

I think a second big issue is that so often religious extremism is carried out by young people. For me at least that means that we need to be investing in the power and the potential of young people for a very different cause, and that's the cause of religious pluralism and interfaith cooperation.

Why are young people attracted to extremism?
I think it's two big things: One is the desire to have a clear identity, and the second is a desire to make an impact on the world. Religious extremists are very good at marketing their radical product to a category of people who particularly seek clear identities and a way to make an impact.

How do religious extremists market themselves to young people?
Al Qaeda is a youth organization. There is a reason that every time you see a suicide bomber on television the person is 22 years old. It's because Al Qaeda got to them when they were 11 or 14 or 16. Al Qaeda thinks about the social psychology of 12-year-olds and has influenced a set of schools. You get to people when they're young and inject poisonous ideas in them. Al Qaeda's institution is set up to identify, recruit, train, and deploy young religious extremists.

The Christian Identity Movement is another example. Benjamin Smith, who 10 years ago in Chicago went on a shooting rampage targeting African Americans, Jews, and Asian Americans, was 21 years old. The movement has a powerful presence online, which is, of course, where young people spend a lot of time.

A lot of conferences with interfaith in the title are full of older people. If interfaith cooperation is about senior theologians talking and religious extremism is about young people taking action, we lose.

Would the people who were recruited to extremist groups respond to an alternative model?
What's striking about the "recruits" to a lot of these religious extremist outfits-and I'm speaking about the situation in the West, not in Pakistan or the Palestinian Territories-is that they're remarkably normal kids. It's simply the set of influences that got to them at a time in their lives when they were seeking a clear identity and a way of making a powerful impact.

This is the point of my book. I basically say that this could have been me, but not because I'm weirder than anybody else. Religious extremism is particularly prominent now, but in previous eras it could have been a violent political extremism like anarchism or violent Marxism.

I taught in the inner city of Chicago for two years, and the difference between my students who were in gangs and my students who weren't in gangs was very simple. The ones recruited into gangs got involved in them.

What alternative do you offer young people?
The Interfaith Youth Core views itself as the hub of a movement. That's why we call it the "core" rather than "corps." We have a couple of strategies. We have a training program to give people the knowledge and skills to start their own interfaith service project. We also sponsor a global program called the Days of Interfaith Youth Service, which this year will take place in dozens of cities and campuses around the world. The leaders we train bring together hundreds of people from different religious backgrounds to tutor children, to clean rivers, to visit the sick and the elderly, and to talk about how their religious traditions inspire these actions.

A Day of Interfaith Youth Service is a gateway to creating an interfaith council that does volunteer projects on a regular basis or a congregational exchange in which five congregations decide to meet and tutor the same group of children every month.

Can you give an example of how this works?
A couple of years ago at the University of Illinois, there was some significant tension between Muslims and Jews. A group of five Illinois students interned with us for a summer, and we put them through a very intense training program. Back on campus they started Interfaith in Action, a group that met on a regular basis to talk about how different religions inspire social action.

Then they put this into practice at the end of the year in a Day of Interfaith Youth Service. Those five students got more than 100 students to come out and to embody the message campus-wide. A group of younger students volunteered to organize it the following year.

That's how the Interfaith Youth Core grows-that's how this is a movement. It's probably happened on more than 100 campuses across the country.

But how can events like this affect global issues such as terrorism and religious extremism?
So much of this is in how you frame it. There's a story about three people, each of them laying bricks. You ask each person, "What are you doing?" and the first person says, "I'm laying bricks." The second person says, "I'm building a wall." The third person says, "I'm erecting a cathedral."

We tell young people that they're not just engaged in a local interfaith service project, they're building religious pluralism in a very tangible way. Each brick that is laid for interfaith cooperation or religious pluralism is part of a cathedral. Young people have to imagine themselves as a part of that bigger thing.

I was just in the United Kingdom, where we have a group of people in Belfast in Northern Ireland who organized a Day of Interfaith Youth Service. They wanted to know what's happening in Boston. They wanted to know that they're part of a movement. I came back to Chicago, and I told stories of Belfast. The Interfaith Youth Core catalyzes this all over the world.