Tarek Fatah, host of the weekly TV show The Muslim Chronicle, neatly sums up the thesis of his tendentious new book, Chasing A Mirage -- The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, thusly:
"....the Quran did not prescribe that Islam should take on a political form -- an entity that is the Islamic State. Yet in the aftermath of the Prophet's (Muhammad's) death, two streams of Islam emerged. One was political and imperial, seeking power and domination, reverberating through the ages and resulting in war and bloodshed among Muslim brothers. The other Islam was spiritual, which unleashed the human spirit, triggering an age of enlightenment that once was the hallmark of science, literature, music and mathematics."
Fatah clearly lays the blame for the culture of hatred prevailing in Muslim nations today on "the duplicity of imams who decry the West for the ills that affect Muslims."
