Amir Taheri

Quotes

• “What normal country has three former presidents, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Muhammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who can’t obtain passports to travel abroad? And dozens of former high officials in jail, plus an ex-prime minister, Mir-Hussein Mussavi, and a former speaker of parliament, Mehdi Karrubi, under house arrest without charge?”
• “Some poets still write about the hair and eyes and body of a beloved and depict scenes of joy when lovers meet to drink and dance and be merry. But that is not the kind of poetry that the Islamic movement, grown on the concept of jihad and martyrdom, wants.”
• “Poetry interprets the chaos of human life and tries to bestow meaning on it. Without imagination there could be no poetry; and imagination chained by ideology produces only propaganda.”
• “Syria these days reminds me of an orphan surrounded by real enemies and false friends, forming a club of cynics, and trying to seize control of its destiny.”
• “The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation. Both have enough of a popular base to hang on for some more time even if they did not receive succor from the outside which they regularly do. At the same time neither is strong enough or is ever likely to have the popular base to impose its agenda on Syria.”
• “The division of the world into two mutually exclusive camps - the City of War and the City of Faith - lies at the heart of Islam's traditional view of existence. Places where Islam rules supreme and its laws are strictly obeyed are known as Dar al-Iman or the City of Faith. The rest of the world is signified under the title of Dar al-Harb or the City of War.”

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