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Today, on the anniversary of King's martyrdom, I am speaking on King's legacy at Westminster Abbey, where King is one of a handful of Americans honored with a statue.  

I will speak of King in London as a global interfaith hero – rooted in his Christian faith and the American promise even while he revolutionized them, constantly learning from other traditions and reaching out to the world.  

In 1950, when King was a young student in a Christian seminary, he went to see a lecture on Mahatma Gandhi in Philadelphia. Learning about Gandhi's Hindu-based satyagraha (soul force) movement to free India stirred something in King. He had always believed in the Christian ethic of nonviolence, but thought it was relevant only for personal relationships. He was amazed that Gandhi had made that ethic the basis of a successful social reform movement.  

Five years later, when King was named the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he copied Gandhi's approach in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The people who marched with him called their movement "Christian love", but King knew that it was a Hindu named Mahatma Gandhi who had, as he put it, "furnished the method."  

In 1959, as the civil rights movement was gaining ground, King went to India to study Gandhi's legacy firsthand. He marveled at the religious diversity of the subcontinent, how Gandhi had brought people of all faiths and classes together to work nonviolently for freedom.  

When he returned to Montgomery, King got up in the pulpit of his church and spoke these words: "O God, our gracious heavenly father. We thank thee for the fact that you have defined men and women in all nations, in all cultures. We call you this name. Some call thee Allah, some call you Elohim. Some call you Jehovah, some call you Brahma. Some call you the Unmoved Mover."  

King's ultimate vision was not just about race or nation, but new relationships – between people from different backgrounds, between America and the world, between humanity and God. That is why people from every country and faith derive inspiration from his legacy, a legacy best summed up in one of King's final books, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community: "The great new problem of mankind (is that) we have inherited ... a great ' world house' in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu ... Because we can never again live apart, we must somehow learn to live with each other in peace."

 King does not belong only to people who look like him, or pray like him or speak like him.

King belongs to people who live up to his legacy of pluralism.

LONDON: An Indian American who claims inspiration from Martin Luther King and is working with former British prime minister Tony Blair to roll out a global inter-faith youth movement has unusually become America Abroad's poster boy for the black civil rights leader's message on the 40th anniversary of his assassination.

On Friday, four decades after the black leader was silenced by the bullet of his white racist assassin James Earl Ray, Mumbai-born, Chicago-based Eboo Patel arguably ensured King's voice carried farther than ever before.

Patel, 32, a sociologist by training and good samaritan by instinct, is the son of hard-working, middle-class, aspirational Ismaili Muslim immigrants to the US.

In delivering the keynote address at official ceremonies held here to mark the 40th anniversary of King's death, he arguably takes King's song of equality and natural justice out of its traditional confine of black pulpits and African-American podiums and to audiences as diverse as British Asians, European Muslims and 21st-century
Patel told this paper he was "ridiculously honoured" to be chosen to explain King's continuing relevance in our turning world, rather than eminent black American figures such as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who might conventionally be considered the Baptist preacher's rightful heirs.

"I emphasise what King learnt from India and Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha movement and thereby I close the loop on what this Indian (Patel) is learning from an all-American hero," he said.

With the great and the good of the governing Labour Party, British clergy and civil society in attendance at the . all-day event, Patel said it was King's primary message about pluralism, "which is the thread that runs through America, India and Islam" that helped him make sense of his own heavily hyphenated identity – Indian, Muslim, American.

Patel's recently-published book which is named 'Acts of Faith' details his tortured search for identity as "a brown Muslim in a white world".

King, who famously went to India in 1959 and met Gandhi's followers, became convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom after reading the Mahatma's words "Through our pain we will make them see their injustice".

Even though King's 'I have a dream' speech is still considered among the greatest ever made and his non-violent campaign for inspired millions, Patel says it may now be time to bring the wider post-9/11 world outside America to King's primary message about "the beloved community", where brotherhood is a reality.