Excerpt: The son of Ismaili immigrants from Mumbai, Patel was raised on Chicago’s Far North side. During high school in the suburbs, Patel mixed with Hindus, Jews and evangelical Christians and suffered the occasional racial slur at lunch.
At the University of Illinois he fell in with a radical crowd before gravitating towards social justice and the Catholic Worker organisation, which is devoted to helping the poor. During this period, his father regularly railed against American leaders for their failure to help Muslims suffering in Bosnia and Iraq.
Patel experienced something of a religious awakening around 1998
via US interfaith group reaches across spiritual divide – The National.
Ismailimail 