Amir Taheri has written a great deal of worthwhile material, but I can't add his New York Post piece "No One Speaks For All Muslims" to the list. It's a classic example of the dhimmitude that whitewashes any blot on the master's record. To wit:
". . . many commentators in the West, especially in the United States, have presented Mahathir as a spokesman for the Muslim world as a whole. Mahathir has no such position."
OK, Amir, I'll grant you that. But this is a straw man. What about the fact that millions of Muslims around the world agree with Mahathir?
"There is no mechanism through which any particular opinion could be presented as that of all, or even a substantial number, of Muslims. . . . No, Mahathir was not talking on behalf of Islam. He was talking as a political leader who happens to be a Muslim, in a country where non-Muslims account for nearly half the population. Some Muslims liked what he said, and some did not. But this could be true of a statement made by any politician anywhere in the world."
This implies that all, or a substantial number, disagree with Mahathir. But there are some reasons to suspect that this is not the case. For one thing, Muslims are set against Jews in core texts of Islam, as witness this famous Hadith: "Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim, book 41, no. 6985, and many other places). The Qur'an (Sura 5:59-60) says that the People of the Book were cursed by Allah, who turned them into apes and pigs. Muslims make this connection all the time, particularly for Jews, such that the "apes and pigs" epithet is quite commonly applied to Jews by Muslims worldwide. Even the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Sunni Islam's most influential voice, has declared Jews "the enemies of Allah, descendants of pigs and apes."
But from Taheri you get none of this. To him, Mahathir is just a lone politician shooting his mouth off. Is Taheri aware of the traditional bases for Islamic anti-Semitism? Or is he just hoping that we're not?
Who's Amir Taheri Kidding?
Amir Taheri's column shatters an illusion: that an alleged ideological friend and apostate Muslim, can shed the assumptions of his origins -Iran and Islam.
To suggest that because Islam has no central ecclesiastical authority without fessing up about the hard core of nasty Islamic beliefs is nonsense. Then to suggest that because of that "democracy" that Muslim "politicians" like Mahathir Mohamad are no different that other politicians in "speaking out" is sheer balderdash. The outgoing Malaysian PM (I believe he disappears like the great pumpkin on Halloween) views himself as a caliph and Malaysia as a caliphate, despite some necessary catering to the wealthy overseas Chinese and Hindu minorities who compose the highly productive business, technical and entrepreneurial class in his country. Why else would he have forced the adoption of sharia as the code for domestic relations matters for Muslim Malaysians? Moreover, why did he violate the political and human rights of dissidents like his former Deputy PM and clap him into gaol [jail in US speak] without rights of due process? Why are non-Muslim human rights advocates in Malaysia put into preventive detention without so much as a bye-your-leave? Because as head of the Malaysian Caliphate he is an absolute autocrat, like the rest of the 50+ Islamic leaders who applauded his judenhass speech at the Organization of Islamic Conference, now two weeks ago. He wasn't speaking politically so much as he was speaking from the dark core of Islam that characterizes the Others, the non-believers, as "pigs and monkeys." He has consistently used the dark heinous anti-Jew precepts of Islam, as one observer mentioned last week, so that he can demonize a virtually non-existent Jewish minority in Malaysia to draw attention away from the wealthy overseas Chinese and Hindu techno/business/entrepreneurial minority who run the economic engines that produce wealth for him and his cronies. Sorry for being cynical, but that's what I've heard. That is why Singapore broke away in the mid-60's so as to assure some measure of traditional western human rights and political presence for these same minorities in the Straits, despite the benevolent Confucian autocracy of the Lee family.
So Amir Taheri, the cosmopolitan Iranian flitting about that diaspora, has let Mahathir off the hook of judenhass by saying that Islam's anarchy enables him to speak out as he did and that is a danger. Balderdash, as I said earlier. It simply deflects critical examination of why the "reform" of Islam in the last century as articulated by Qutb and his disciples has simply caused a reversion to the Arab Muslim "retroactive supercessionism" of the 7th Century C.E,. in Medina/Mecca. A nascent xenophobic Arab militarist clique and beliefs that allowed it to sweep away the remnants of the Sassanian and Byzantine empires, slaughtering raping and dispossessing Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus and Buddhists from their homelands.
Perhaps Amir Taheri ought to read a realistic translation in English or Farsi from the classical Arabic of the Qur'an, hadiths and clerical rulings from both Sunni and Shia ayatollahs and imams to understand what it's all about. For sure, it isn't about the lack of a central authority. Because Islam already has one: the perfection of the illiterate brigand and caravansary merchant Muhammad's scribblings based on dictated remarks of the Angel Gabriel. For an apostate Muslim, Taheri still hasn't got the message, has he?