Jihad and Veritas
Tomorrow Harvard's many communities will come together for the university's 351st commencement exercises. Yet it will be a campus divided, with the division made sharper when a university committee announced that my classmate and friend, Zayed Yasin, would deliver a commencement speech entitled, "Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad."

That single emotive word — jihad — has driven our usually civil campus into a frenzy. Many of my classmates have fervently opposed the administration's choice of speaker, asking the university to have Mr. Yasin removed from the program because the terrorists of Sept. 11 justified their actions in the name of jihad, which they define as a holy war against infidels.

Mr. Yasin, however, will be talking about a different jihad — one known to Muslims, but often lost in political discourse. In the Koran, jihad refers to the internal struggle with oneself to do what is right and does not entail violence. It is a universal ideal; Mr. Yasin is calling it by its Arabic name and asks his fellow graduates to apply this principle to their new lives.

Still, it would be terribly näive not to recognize the semantic tension here. A virtuous religious word has been perversely used by the likes of Osama bin Laden and his followers and now conjures up images of planes crashing into buildings. Some say that because jihad now means such drastically different things to different people, we should avoid such a divisive theme at a celebratory event.

But if we were to deny Mr. Yasin his use of the word, we would lose an opportunity to right some of the wrongs we have committed since Sept. 11. In the aftermath of the horrific attacks, our nation became a less tolerant place. Suddenly racial profiling of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians became a good idea; detaining immigrants without due process became a necessary evil; and Islam became the ideology of our enemies. Harvard, a bastion of liberal thinking, was not immune to this wave of anger. Columns vilifying Islam and Muslims appeared in the Harvard student newspaper, and many of my classmates callously referred to Islam as a violent religion.
Jihad http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/opinion/05HASA.html