Mind Over Matters

Fareed Zakaria loves to explain how the world works.

It's something he does every week as host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), where he debates public policy and pressing international matters with intellectuals, politicians, entrepreneurs and others. In one episode, however, he took a more personal approach, as he told emmy contributor Ann Farmer.

Recently you began your show by saying, "I am a Muslim," and talked about how you felt appalled by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's call for a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S.

That was a tough one for me. I've never really written about myself in terms of my identity; the color of my skin; my ethnic, national origin. I've always wanted people to listen to me because of what I had to say and because of the facts, analysis, the logic.

But in this particular case, what Trump was doing was dehumanizing a whole group of people. One way I thought to show people that it's a bad idea was to point to myself, to stand up and be counted. I'm actually a non-practicing Muslim. I haven't been inside a mosque, other than as a tourist, for 35 years.

As a boy growing up in Mumbai, what ignited your passion in world affairs?

I found myself drawn to the great drama of world politics at the time, the Cold War and the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

My mother managed to buy the excerpts from Henry Kissinger's memoirs, from when he was secretary of state and national security advisor. I read them voraciously. So it's been a peculiar kind of coming full circle to have Kissinger on the show every now and then.

Your post-9/11 Newsweek column, titled "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?" put you on the map.

I was on Meet the Press and every show you can imagine. But more importantly, I was struck by the degree that people — by understanding that history, understanding the social science behind some of the phenomenon — found it gave them a greater sense of, not comfort, but security.

There was a radical imam in London who issued a fatwa against me. So the one consequence of that article was that for the next three or four months, all of my mail was screened.

What sets your news show apart?

If you watch most shows, what you're getting is a sort of political theater that is now not only somewhat dull, but predictable. What I wanted to do was to provide people with insight, with facts.

Which guests have impressed or surprised you the most?

The guy I was most impressed by, in some ways, was Lee Kuan Yew, [the first prime minister] of Singapore. He's the guy who takes this country — one of the poorest in the world — and turns it into a country that is wealthier than Great Britain and most western European countries.

What's it like interviewing President Barack Obama?

He has studied the subject you are asking about in great depth. And he has real intellectual confidence in what he is saying. He's sometimes not the best interview subject, because he can be so thoughtful that the paragraphs can go on for a while.

In fact, the last time I interviewed him, I took this risk and said, "Mr. President, your people have told me that you really only have twenty minutes. There are so many things that I need to cover — I hope you don't consider it rude if I were to say it would be really helpful if the answers could be short."

And he turned to me and said, "Are you telling the president of the United States that he needs to cut his answers short?"

You've written best-selling books and currently contribute a weekly column to The Washington Post. How does hosting a television show compare to working in print?

If we do it well, it has an impact that is just so much greater than any other medium.... I mean, you read a book and it stays with you forever. But television has an immediacy that the visuals provide that nothing else quite matches.

On camera you appear alert, engaged and no-nonsense. Some guests might even find you intimidating.

I suppose I do insist on a sort of intellectual rigor. So if they say something that is false or contradictory, I probably do point it out.

When you interviewed Ribal al-Assad, a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, you weren't shy about trying to nudge him into a meaningful conversation about Syria. You said, "Forget what you wish would happen — what will happen?"

How often do you get to talk to a relative of Assad — the guy at the center of all this carnage in Syria and the rise of ISIS and so much more? This was a guy who knows him and grew up with him in some ways. And I thought he was just selling a line.

He was indirectly making the case for his father to be made a kind of interim head of Syria, which was a fantasy. But it was what was motivating his participation.

You talk a lot about the Middle East.

Because there's so much violence, so much instability and so much craziness.... My PhD thesis is on American policy, so I'm one of those rare people who knows what [U.S. President] Chester Arthur's foreign policy was. But the Middle East just draws you back.

As part of your CNN contract, you also produced the documentary Long Road to Hell: America in Iraq. It generated international headlines when Tony Blair appeared to apologize for mistakes in that invasion. Did you really ask Blair if he was Bush's poodle?

I wanted to see how he reacted. He's a man who has thought about this and read every piece of criticism and internalized it, so he wasn't startled.

And one of the reasons I was able to get that apology out of him was because I didn't ask it in a condemnatory or threatening or hostile way.

You also noted that you were originally in favor of the Iraq invasion.

I felt that if I was to hold people accountable, I had to hold myself accountable.

Your next documentary for CNN, Why They Hate Us [airing March 28], follows up on your 9/11 essay. What's it going to say that you haven't already said?

We looked at the essay and asked how relevant is it today, with the rise of ISIS, with the rise of these lone radicalized terrorists from San Bernardino to France to Indonesia.

You received an Emmy nomination for your interview with China's Premier Wen Jiabao. What was special about it?

The most special thing was that we got it. The Chinese politicians or leaders don't have to face elections. So they don't give interviews.

A recent guest described his study on rising death rates for lesser-educated white middle-aged Americans. You subsequently became the target of a fake news blog that claimed you called for the jihad rape of white women. This suggests that some people felt threatened by that news report.

We highlighted an extraordinary study done by this year's Nobel Prize-winning economist, and I got a lot of nasty emails and tweets in response. Essentially I was the target of this trolling campaign.

Somebody created a fake news site, claimed this outrageous, disgusting stuff, and it got tweeted and retweeted. And so I opened my show this Sunday talking about it.