Rich, with due respect to Taheri, I have to confess that I am tempted to tune out instantly when someone stresses that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “political, not a religious” organization — as if there were in Islam an analogy to the Western sense the the religious and political spheres are severable. I find it especially difficult to take when we then get to the very next sentence, wherein Taheri explains: “A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera.” Well, I’ll be darned, a politcal-not-a-religious organization that happens to have its own in-house sheikhs.

He then goes on to explain the origins of what is portrayed as a misconception about the banning of images — except, if we read carefully, it turns out that maybe it’s not a misconception at all: “The issue has never been decided one way or another,” Taheri concedes, before adding, again, that “the claim that a ban on images is ‘an absolute principle of Islam’ is purely political. ” (Italics mine.)

I hope Taheri is right, and that someday there is something resembling a broadly accepted separation of mosque and state. But to argue as if that is already so is unpersuasive, to put it mildly. And whether the incitement here is religious or political, and whether it involves a clear religious injunciton or an arguable one, does not change the fact that you can’t have a riot without rioters who think something has happened that actually merits rioting over. If at a gut level, something as puny as these cartoons sparked the kind of eruption we’re seeing from thousands of Muslims, that’s an enormous problem, and it is not confined merely to so-called “political Islam.”