In person Yasin is confident and direct. He does not use many hand gestures, but mostly communicates inflections with his voice and eyes. And on this day, despite the whirlwind of the previous week and the reporter in his dorm suite, he is relaxed.
His belongings in disarray, he mentions that he hasn’t even packed. He cracks more jokes. Asked to describe his high school self, he says how he played clarinet, and also wrestled for three years: “I wasn’t very good at it. Pretty bad, actually.” Explaining his “eclectic” musical tastes, he says he likes a lot of Irish and folk music, and Hindi music as well. Commercial music, he says, feels processed and “very refined,” but English or American or Irish folk is “less processed. When you listen to folk music, it still has that raw edge—like biting into sugar cane.”
He lists the many interviews he’s given: WBZ radio, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, Fox’s local outlet and Fox News (where he appeared with Galper), with still others yet to come.
“I was on the phone at 7:10 this morning on Texas talk radio,” he says, laughing.
Because he has been so busy, he says, he hasn’t been practicing the speech itself much, which he says he needs to focus on more now.
He says he has changed much since high school—he is now a lot more focused, driven, spiritual and religious, and is “maybe not as angry as I’d been in high school.”
“I’ve always talked too much,” he says—but adds that his experience leading two organizations has prepared him for the week just past.
“If I hadn’t had that kind of experience over the past two to three years, I wouldn’t have been able to do this,” Yasin says. He has been helped, he adds later, by an “incredible amount of support” from people both inside and outside Harvard, even from those who do not usually weigh in on these kinds of political issues (though his original intent, he has noted before, was to have a nonpolitical speech).
This summer he will be going to northern Pakistan on a Stride Rite fellowship, where he will be working in “medical informatics,” doing disease mapping and technology work—using the Internet to allow rural doctors to stay in contact with big-city hospitals.
In high school, he says, he backpacked and hiked a lot—and consequently he is looking forward to doing field work in Pakistan’s mountains.
After medical school, international health is his planned career, although he’s not sure if he’ll stay in it long-term, referring to the “international health nomadic thing.”
“You want to put your efforts where they’re most needed, and that’s often internationally,” Yasin says. “[But] I want to live a semi-normal life. We’ll see how it all works out.”
But before Pakistan, Commencement—and Yasin’s long-awaited speech—remain. When it is suggested that the controversy is one big misunderstanding, an extended exercise in wordplay, Yasin subtly acknowledges that things could have been handled differently—but mostly sticks to his guns.
The compromise, he says, is “maybe not the explicit sign-off they’re looking for,” but he feels it is justified. The sentence he agreed to add, furthermore, was simply added to a paragraph in a similar vein that was already there. And while he will say that there has been some wordplay through the controversy—the speech’s title has now been changed because of a fear that having the word jihad upfront would distract the audience from the speech’s message, he says, perhaps tellingly—he does not regret his decision to go forward.
“The way things have turned out, any use of the word jihad in the public sphere, the Harvard sphere, would have produced such a strong response. Once the word jihad was uttered, such a reaction was inevitable, sadly,” Yasin says. “If anything, this has convinced me more and more that this is a speech that needs to be given.”