Tom Friedman's World
Joshua White
January 1, 2002
Religious pluralism may just be the most interesting idea in international politics today. And Thomas Friedman, the witty, mustachioed New York Times columnist, may just be its most interesting advocate. Friedman is something of a celebrity journalist. He began his career reporting from war-torn Beirut, and now 23 years later he has garnered two Pulitzers, two bestsellers, and a reputation as one of the most insightful political commentators in the worldwide press. I need to offer my own personal disclaimer up front: I'm a Tom Friedman junkie. (All Friedman junkies call him "Tom.") I find him sometimes brilliant, sometimes naive, sometimes prescient, sometimes infuriating. But never dull. Especially when it comes to religion.
It's nearly impossible to write about the Middle East without writing about religion. When Tom Friedman arrived in Beirut in 1979, he found a fractured religio-political landscape: conflict among Druze, Shiites, Sunnis, Maronites, and Phalangists; factions within factions within factions. His experience several years later in Jerusalem was disturbingly similar. The factions were different, of course, but the problem was essentially the same. The common question seemed to be this: What are we to do with deeply-held religious beliefs and deeply-set religious identities in a pluralistic world?
For Tom Friedman and his American peers, 11 September 2001 didn't so much change the question as restate it. As New York became, in the words of Yossi Klein Halevi, "our Jerusalem on the Hudson," the question began to hit close to home; there was a sense among the political elite that neither the roots nor the consequences of 11 September could be understood without getting at the fundamental question of what religious ...
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