Sunni and Shi’a Muslims are two incredibly diverse, complicated, contested, even frequently overlapping religious identities, numbering in the hundreds of millions across dozens of countries and over a millennium of history. Republicans and Democrats are members of the two dominant American political parties. How are these two categories comparable? The short answer is: They’re not.
And yet Thomas Friedman seems to disagree. In his latest New York Times op-ed, “Win, Lose, But No Compromise,” the paper’s longtime columnist casually conflates the two. In response to the Republicans and Democrats who put party loyalties ahead of their country’s welfare, as he sees it, he asks, “Are we all just Sunnis and Shiites now?”
The shorter answer is: No.
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