What NPR is trying to say is that “the Muslim world” is highly diverse. Which it is.
Your counter-argument is not, I think, a particularly good one.
“Theocratic rule” means rule by God, or rule by priests. Neither applies in the Muslim world, with the exception of Iran, and that’s the first true Muslim theocracy that has ever existed.
Muslim rule, at least since the first few caliphs, has always consisted of men taking control with military force and ruling (in theory) by sharia, but in practice as they see fit. This has always created great stress between the rulers and the people and their religious teachers, who are always trying to encourage more devout rule.
Intermittently this has broken out in “reformers” taking power to bring rule “back to Islam.” However without exception the rulers quickly become decadent and corrupt, as we see with the kings and dictators throughout the Muslim world today.
I think you’d have a better argument against NPR if you pointed out that the Muslim world is MUCH LESS diverse than just a few decades ago. Saudi and other petro countries have been funding initiative to “purify” Islam around the world. They’ve been quite successful. The average Muslim of today is far more radicalized than 50, much less 200, years ago.
One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read was the story of a young Irish woman who rode her bicycle alone from Dublin to New Delhi in 1963. She was treated with great courtesy by Muslims in Iran and Afghanistan.
http://www.amazon.com/Full-Tilt-Ireland-India-Bicycle/dp/1906011419
What’s interesting is to try to imagine how long an Irish girl who tried to do the same today would last. Would she even make it all the way across Turkey?
The entire muslim world bows to the capital of the empire five times a day every single day. That capital is a segregated city with a death penalty for any non-muslim who’d dare enter.
There is a muslim world, it is united on some matters, and it is incompatible with the rest of the world.
Islamic law has a notion of “muslim territory”. Prisoners of war and “refugees” must be taken back to muslim territory before they are put into slavery.
What other “religion” sees the world this way? It’s a political system. Communism was/is united as well. The USSR and China aided North Vietnam. Cuba aides North Korea. Venezuela aligns with the other dictators.
Communists in America loved Mao, North Vietnam, North Korea (see Dalton Trumbo), Stalin, Castro, et al.