Before a question has fully been asked, he defends himself against the various things that have been said about HIS and himself, saying that he is neither an anti-Semite, nor a supporter of terrorism. You can tell I’ve done this before, he says dryly.

Yasin says his is not a political speech—it is not about Israel, Palestine, Sept. 11 or U.S. foreign policy. Instead, he says, it is about supporting “jihad” as it has been used by the majority of the world’s Muslims through 1,400 years of Muslim scholarship.

“It’s the importance of striving to do the right thing,” he says. “We have an obligation to struggle and to morally engage ourselves with what’s going on in the world.”

Over the course of a 40-minute conversation, it becomes clear that Yasin doesn’t hesitate to say what he thinks.

“Harvard is not nearly the best place to hone one’s moral compass,” he says—pointing to attitudes of competitiveness, an aggressive drive to succeed, and selfishness that are “somewhat common” and “can cloud moral issues.”

Some of the criticism of his speech, he says, stems from his having Islam and America relate in a positive manner. He’s seen this on House e-mail lists and in personal ad hominem attacks: “There is a group of criticism that fundamentally objects to having a Muslim-American give the speech,” he says. “That’s very saddening. I expected better of the Harvard community.”

“I’m very naturally a very direct, a very forthright person,” Yasin says. “[Even] if I wanted to, I couldn’t hide anything. Sometimes I would like to, but I can’t pull it off.”

And yet, few people know the senior causing all the trouble—he’s never met most of the critics who are speaking so sharply about him.

“Part of his intention was to make people think harder, but I don’t think even he anticipated it would be this big of a problem,” says Hamad, who was SAS president at the same time Yasin was HIS president. “He’s really sincere and honest. It’s just personal attacks, and he’s a very good-hearted person.”

As Yasin talks excitedly about the various extracurriculars he’s been a part of at Harvard, aspects of his personality that would never be brought up on “Hardball” come into focus.

He started out doing a lot of technical theatre work, he says, but then got burned out by mid-fall of sophomore year. He worked as an EMT his first year at Harvard, and has also been heavily involved in the Harvard-Radcliffe Friends of the American Red Cross, an organization which does CPR and First Aid instruction, food pantry volunteering and disaster services. He also served as president of the group.

But his most visible campus role—and one which had at times brought him criticism and controversy before “American Jihad,” in some disputes with leaders of Harvard Hillel—was as president of HIS his junior year.

It was a difficult job, he says, because it was so multifaceted: ministering to a religious community with internal religious diversity, dealing with the University administration and serving as the community’s public voice. He admits there are a lot of things he wishes he had done differently during his year as president—but the large amount of public speaking he did during his tenure helped him to become more articulate.

A biomedical engineering concentrator, Yasin says he likes to build things and put them together. Last summer he worked in the Harvard Biorobotics lab, where he worked on a project which explored the mechanics of heart disease surgery. The project aimed to use robots to perform minimally intensive heart surgery through pencil-sized holes, instead of the more traditional method of cracking open the patients chest.

The previous summer, Yasin, then a Weissman intern, worked in Zambia developing public health information systems. But it was the summer he spent with children in Albanian refugee camps, the summer after his first year at Harvard, that indirectly brought him grief over “American Jihad.”