A young Muslim who worked at a corner shop in Leeds expressed the same frustration from his perspective: "The older generations and the younger ones just don't talk like you think they should. Extremists don't walk into mosques and say 'Excuse me, would you like to join me in blowing up London?' It just doesn't work that way." What he meant was that extremists take the time and energy to build strong relationships with young Muslims, while too many members of the established older generation don't even try to connect.

Reading this, I could not help but think of a funeral I had attended for the mother of a twenty-year-old Muslim friend. Sohail was sleeping when a neighbor knocked on the door and said that his mother, an active woman in her fifties, was lying on the front lawn. She had had a heart attack while shoveling snow off the driveway. [The imam's] sermon at the burial consisted of this statement: "This woman was a good Muslim and taught Qur'an and Hadith to her children. You must follow her example and teach Islam to your children." Not a word of comfort about the spiritual meaning of death and the afterlife in Islam...Only a short, cold command. During the most difficult time in Sohail's life, his religious leader failed him. If Sohail ever had a question about faith, the absolute last person he would seek out is this man.

I was lucky. My free fall was stopped by the YMCA. Since my mother had started working, I had been in afterschool care and summer camp at the B. R. Ryall YMCA in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where I was raised. Kids who wouldn't talk to me in school befriended me at the Y. One day, when my parents were especially late picking my brother and me up, I decided to walk home. I never stopped to think that I didn't have a key. I was on the roof of my house removing my bedroom window when I heard frantic shouting from the driveway. It was my father and several of the Y staff. They had been driving around Glen Ellyn for the past hour looking for me. My dad was furious. He explained that my impulsiveness had worried and inconvenienced a lot of people. I was a little scared going to camp the next day. But Sheila, one of the camp counselors, rubbed my head and said, "I tired my feet out looking for you, kiddo. Man, I'm glad we found you. You're one of my favorites here, and I don't want anything bad to happen to you." I almost jumped into her arms.

As I grew older, my camp counselors encouraged me to join the Leaders Club, a YMCA group for teenagers that focused on volunteering as a key to leadership development. If Y camp was where I first discovered I could be liked, the Central Region Leaders School is where I first recognized I could create and contribute. People were always asking me to take charge of something. Staff members sought my advice on how to deal with troubled participants. I was asked to give nominating speeches for people running for president of Leaders School and was elected to the council one year myself.

The YMCA's secret is simple; it stems from a genuine love of young people. The conventional wisdom is that young people are scrambling for their place in the world. It's not a place young people need so much as a role, an opportunity to be powerful, a chance to shape their world. And so the YMCA nudges them in the direction of leadership-fourteen-year-olds in charge of ten-year-olds at camp, college students coaching high school basketball teams.

At Leaders School, we sang a song called "Pass It On." It uses the metaphor of fire to speak about the sharing of religious faith. I would sing it around the house for weeks after Leaders School was over. In one of the moments when my father was feeling especially righteous about his "Muslim-ness," I overheard him expressing concern to my mother that the YMCA, which was after all the Young Men's Christian Association, was teaching us Christian songs. "Do you think they are trying to teach Christianity to our kids?" he asked, the tone of his voice a kind of auditory chest thumping.

"I hope so," my mother responded. "I hope they teach the kids Jewish and Hindu songs, too. That's the kind of Muslims we want our kids to be."

In that offhand reply, overheard when I was a teenager, my mother guessed the arc of my life.

This is an edited excerpt of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, by Eboo Patel, Beacon Press, July 2007