Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran | Video on TED.com
Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran. And what she found -- as a non-Muslim, a self-identified "tourist" in the Islamic holy book -- wasn't what she expected. With serious scholarship and warm humor, Hazleton shares the grace, flexibility and mystery she found, in this myth-debunking talk.
Lesley Hazleton explores the Quran and finds much that is quite different from what is reported in commonly cited accounts.
A
psychologist by training and Middle East reporter by experience,
British-born Lesley Hazleton has spent the last ten years exploring the
vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion, past and
present, intersect. Her most recent book, After the Prophet: the Epic
Story of the Shia-Sunni Split, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN-USA
nonfiction award.
She lived and worked in Jerusalem for thirteen
years -- a city where politics and religion are at their most incendiary
-- then moved to New York. She came to Seattle to get her pilot's
license in 1992, saw the perfect houseboat, and stayed. By 1994, she'd
flown away all of her savings, and has never regretted a single cent of
it. Now her raft rides low in the water under the weight of research as
she works on her next book, The First Muslim, a new look at the life of
Muhammad.
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