THE BOSTON GLOBE: This is a scene that immediately captured my imagination: Last week, in the preacher's room at Memorial Church in Cambridge, the Dalai Lama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of nonviolence, turned to one of Harvard's leading scholars of Islam and asked him about the meaning of jihad.
The 73-year-old Dalai Lama had been to Harvard multiple times, and on a couple of occasions had met William A. Graham, a noted Koranic scholar who for the last several years has been the dean of Harvard Divinity School. The Dalai Lama, preparing to give his speech about the teaching of compassion, was apparently thinking about the role of a divinity school at an institution like Harvard when he turned to Graham and asked him about Islam.
"We were simply talking about the virtues of doing comparative religion studies, which he believes in, and he said so many things are misunderstood, like jihad," Graham told me a few days later by phone. "He said he was thinking about the differences between greater and lesser jihad in Muslim jurisprudence. He had a few things to say about it - I didn't get much of a chance to respond to anything - but he's quite correct that the word 'jihad' has been misused. Any traditionalist who knows his Islamic law knows that jihad is fundamentally defensive." Dalai Lama Asserts that Compassion Is Emphasized by Islam >>> By Michael Paulson | Sunday, May 10, 2009
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