In conversation with author Reza Aslan
The Post-American World
“This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about therise of everyone else,” begins the new work by Zakaria, editor ofNewsweek International and one of our most distinguished thinkers.
Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000, overseeing all Newsweek’s editions abroad. The magazine reaches an audience of 24 million worldwide. He also writes a regular column for Newsweek, which appears in Newsweek International and often The Washington Post. He is hosting a new foreign affairs program on CNN starting this spring, and in addition appears weekly on various CNN shows.
Zakaria came to the magazine from Foreign Affairs, the widely circulated journal of international politics and economics, where he was managing editor. Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a major research project on American foreign policy at Harvard University, where he taught international relations and political philosophy. He has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the website slate.com. Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role, which has been translated into several languages, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His most recent book, The Future of Freedom, was published in the spring of 2003 and was a New York Times bestseller. It was translated into 18 languages.
Zakaria has won two Overseas Press Club Awards with Newsweek reporting teams and has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. He won the Deadline Club award for his columns and numerous honors for his October 2001 Newsweek cover story, “Why They Hate Us.” In 1999, he was named “one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century” by Esquire Magazine. He serves on the boards of the Trilateral Commission, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and The Council of Foreign Relations among others.
He received a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He lives in New York City with his wife, son, and daughter.
Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is Middle East Commentator for NPR's Marketplace and Muslim Affairs Analyst for CBS News.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Santa Clara University, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa, and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology of Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He has served as a legislative assistant for the Friends' Committee onNational Legislation in Washington D.C., and was elected president of Harvard's Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a United Nations Organization committed to solving religious conflicts throughout the world. He is a member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and serves on advisory boards of both the Council of Foreign Relations and the Ploughshares Fund, which distributes grants to further peace and diplomacy throughout the world.
Until recently, he was both Visiting Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Iowa and the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Slate, Boston Globe, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, and others, and has appeared on Meet the Press, Hardball, The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher,The Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper, and Nightline.
His firs tbook, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam has been translated into half a dozen languages and was short-listed forthe Guardian (UK) First Book Award.
Born in Iran, he now lives in Santa Monica, CA, where he is a Research Associate at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy
