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1-Page Summary of Acts of Faith

Overall Summary

Acts of Faith is a book by Eboo Patel. It tells the story of his life, from childhood through to founding an interfaith group as a young adult. The themes in the book are faith, family and religious doubt, pluralism and anger.

The author of Acts of Faith, Rajiv Patel, begins the book by telling a story about four suicide bombers in London. He states that he was disturbed to realize that their stories were similar to his own when he was younger and without a clear identity. The central question of this book is how nonviolent religious leaders can reach young people before radicals do.

The book is about a man who has an identity crisis. He’s raised in a Muslim family, but he doesn’t have much faith until later on in his life. His parents are not very religious and they don’t really practice their religion either. At some point, the author goes to India where he meets with the Dalai Lama about creating an interfaith youth group for young people from different religions. After going to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and studying under one of his professors, Patel converts to Islam and finds peace with himself by embracing his new faith wholeheartedly.

The rest of the book looks at how easy it is to recruit young people who don’t have purpose yet. Patel gives examples of terrorist organizations that recruit these vulnerable youth and uses his own organization, IFYC (Impact Foundation for Youth), to reach out to them before they get recruited by violent groups.

The book ends with him marrying Shehnaz and dedicating the rest of his life to her. He also views his work as a calling rather than a career. As he states, the only way we can save our planet is by saving each other.

Introduction: “The Faith Line”

This book is about the different faiths that people have and how they engage with one another. It uses two examples to illustrate this point: Eric Rudolph, a Christian fundamentalist who was sentenced to life imprisonment for bombing an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama; and Dan Gayman, a man who helped Eric Rudolph evade capture. The author asks why these people acted the way they did by presenting their own theories of religion and faith.

The second group is from Whitwell, Tennessee. They give tours of a German railway car that was used to transport Jews to death camps during the Holocaust. Whitwell has 2,000 residents and is within 100 miles of where the Ku Klux Klan was founded. These middle school students are giving these tours because their principal taught them to care about people different from themselves. For Eboo Patel, this group and Eric Rudolph are on opposite sides of The Faith Line.

The author remembers watching a documentary about Whitwell, Tennessee students who were making paper clips to raise money for their school. The documentary is called Paper Clips. What if Linda Hooper had gotten to Eric Rudolph before Dan Gayman did?

Patel is an American Muslim from India. In college, he realizes that all of his heroes were people of deep faith who also believed in religious cooperation. They worked to help young people avoid totalitarianism and zealotry by endorsing religious pluralism.

Chapter 1: “The Crossroads of the Identity Crisis”

On July 7, 2005, four men walked through London with explosive backpacks. They detonated the bombs within minutes of each other. Two innocent victims were killed in the blasts. The author describes two of those victims and imagines what they must have been thinking right before their deaths.

The author compares the 7/7 bombers with 9/11 hijackers. The former were not obviously evil, but instead they were normal people who loved cricket and Elvis Presley. They also had friends and mentors.