The First Muslim : The Story of Muhammad

Lesley Hazleton

Lesley Hazleton (born 1945) is a British-American author whose work focuses on the intersection and interactions between politics and religion. Hazleton has reported from Jerusalem for Time, and has written on the Middle East for numerous publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Nation, and The New Republic. Born in England, she was based in Jerusalem from 1966 to 1979 and in New York City from 1979 to 1992, when she moved to a floating home in Seattle, originally to get her pilot's license, and became a U.S. citizen. She has two degrees in psychology (B.A. Manchester University, M.A. Hebrew University of Jerusalem) TEDGlobal 2013: The Doubt Essential to Faith. Thumbnail: "When Lesley Hazleton was writing a biography of Prophet Muhammad, she was struck by something: The night he received the revelation of the Koran, according to early accounts, his first reaction was doubt, awe, even fear. And yet this experience became the bedrock of his belief. Hazleton calls for a new appreciation of doubt and questioning as the foundation of faith — and an end to fundamentalism of all kinds." TEDxRainier 2010: On Reading the Koran. Thumbnail: "Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Qur'an. 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