Another terrific piece by Amir Taheri in the Sunday Times. The sanity, balance and knowledge Taheri is bringing to bear on the crisis in the Islamic world is proving invaluable. Here’s a sample of his thinking yesterday:

Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. 'What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation,' he snapped. In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq...

Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration. Politicised Islam’s attempt at destroying individual freedoms is as much a threat to Islam as the inquisition was to Christianity. By preaching martyrdom as the highest goal for Muslims and beating the drums of 'the clash of civilisations', it is also a threat to world peace. To protect itself, Islam needs to revive its theology with emphasis on divinity. In other words, Islam must re-become a religion.

Plain speaking which is straight to the point -- today, almost unheard of on this subject.