|
|
|
"Morality is doing what is right, regardless what we are told; |
|
Religious dogma is doing what we are told, no matter what is right." |
|
|
 |
Fatah's ideas represent a formidable intellectual challenge to Islamism. To read complete article click on the link below: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-eteraz/illusions-of-an-islamics_b_96698.html |
|
Fatah broaches the mother of all taboos A moderate Muslim longs for a more spiritual faith Muslims are self-secure enough to face hard truths about Islam, asserts Toronto's Tarek Fatah. He had better hope so. Many other authors inviting Muslims to critically examine their religion have had to fear for their lives ... Fatah, too, has received death threats over the years, to the point where he resigned two years ago as communications director for the Muslim Canadian Congress in an effort to lower his profile. This book will raise it again and he would be wise to look out for himself. Yet throughout Chasing a Mirage, Fatah comes across as somebody who genuinely believes that ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, Muslims truly are mature enough to face even the harshest truths he is prepared to tell. He speaks with deep affection for Islamic civilization, especially for its poetry and music, and its scientific and mathematical achievements. To read complete article click on the link below: |
||
 |
To read complete article click on the link below: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ ali_eteraz/2008/04/history_lessons.html
|
|
Muslims will be the losers if they don't wake up Islam's message of peace overshadowed by politics A few years back, Tarek Fatah wrote a letter to The New York Times, saying what the Muslim world needed was a Martin Luther, some visionary like the old German monk to stand up against corruption and trigger a profound return to the real essence of faith. Sitting with him in a Toronto diner one morning last week, on the publication of his first book, Chasing the Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of An Islamic State, Mr. Fatah said he no longer thinks a single person is required to lead the way as Luther did. Instead, all Muslims need to cut through all that has ruined Islam and look to Muhammad alone to win their religion back from corrupters of the faith. "More than needing a Martin Luther, we need to be reading what Islamic history tells us without filtering it through what the politicians, the imams and clerics of today say," he said. "Of course, we need people to challenge that, and in some ways we all have to be like Martin Luther but the role model is Muhammad himself." To read complete article click on the link below: |
||
 |
Muslim vs. Islamist: Who is who? An Islamist and a Muslim could be parallel. "An Islamist is also a Muslim but Muslim is not an Islamist," Tarek Fatah tells me. Sadly, many Canadians cannot distinguish between a Muslim and an Islamist. For them, these two are synonymous, but they are not -- as is shown in Fatah's 400-plus-page book, Chasing A Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, on shelves tomorrow. Fatah, 58, founder of Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a secular Muslim organization -- and host of the weekly television show, The Muslim Chronicle -- has written extensively about Muslims in Canada and elsewhere. He wants to help Canadians understand how radical Muslims have given a black eye to the entire Muslim community. To read complete article click on the link below: |
|
Canada's leading Indo-Canadian weekly says, "This book has guts and juice" Mirage, believe it or not, deserves unequivocal praise. At this moment in history it appears that the one God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has begun once again to insist on a central role in public life around the planet. Thanks to all the doctrinal variations of monotheism, relationships between politics and religions are precariously and dangerously entangled, with Muslims taking much of the zealous heat of the free world. In his no-nonsense opus Chasing A Mirage, Tarek Fatah blows the lid right off the many obvious inconsistencies of fundamentalist thinking and Islamist worldview. To read complete article click on the link below: http://www.weeklyvoice.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3330&Itemid=66 |
||
 |
Two Canadian authors warn against fundamentalist excesses Many Muslims believe Islam to be a way of life that encompasses all aspects of their lives. Fatah's book Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, is a hard-hitting book that challenges Muslims to dispose of the dream of establishing a formal, political Islamic state that governs using Islamic principles and laws. Instead, he urges Muslims to seek a "state of Islam" within themselves, in more of a spiritual sense, and adopt a secular approach to everyday life. Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, takes the reader on a journey that reflects on how modern attempts to establish a so-called Islamic state have failed. Fatah cites Pakistan (his birthplace and where he was jailed twice for his left-wing views as a student) and its failures to become the Islamic country it set out to be. Its failure to become a democracy (an Islamic principle) was the opening chapter in a long history of political turmoil and tragedy. He also analyses the deep-set hypocrisies within the Islamic regimes of Saudi Arabia and Iran where racial and tribal allegiances take precedence over piety. To read the complete review, click here: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/ story.html?id=d5e34953-8a80-4a67-8e62-1451163cff3a
|
|
Book exposes Islamists' agenda in West "This is the heaven we were promised. Let us not turn it into hell." A book by Tarek Fatah, the most vocal progressive Canadian Muslim activist, is finally out. It seems as if his friends and enemies alike were waiting for his book -- Chasing A Mirage: The Tragic Illusion Of An Islamic State (John Wiley & Sons). Frankly, many people were not expecting his book to be as articulate and well documented as it has turned out to be. Just as in his earlier activism, Tarek Fatah is going face-to-face with Islamists in Canada and around the globe. His book is a big challenge to the growing numbers of Islamic radicals in Canada who are striving ultimately for an Islamic state like the one the Taliban had in Afghanistan until 2001. Tarek challenges readers with his history of Islamic states since the beginning of Islam, all filled with corpses and bloodshed throughout the centuries up until the current day. He poses a hard question in his book: "So why is it that Islamists dream of the so-called Golden Age that never occurred?" To read the entire story, click below: |
||
 |
This book is written with passion of a political activist Fatah’s book is a voice from both sides of this equation. He has painstakingly gone through annals of Islamic history to tersely conclude: 'From Ridda (Apostasy) Wars of Caliph Abu-Bakr to the humiliating defeat of Caliph Mustasim, I have not found a single period that I could in all honesty say I would trade for my 21st-century existence as a Muslim living in a secular democratic society." It is an undeserved task to compare 21-st century living with any other period in history as Fatah is trying in the above paragraph. It seems his real motive is to challenge fanatics who idealize Muslim history and wish to bring it back at any cost. To read the entire article, please click the link below: http://www.chowk.com/articles/chasing-a-mirage-tragic-illusion-of-islamic-statetahir-qazi.htm |
 |
Chasing a Mirage "deserves to be widely read" Since Iran's leader Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced in 1989 the notorious religious-based opinion for Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, the world remains witness to the peril any writer faces when contemplating any critical study of Islam and Arab-Muslim history. It is a peril Fatah has had to contemplate in writing a book of much merit, and then being dismissive of Islamists in Canada who have threatened him for his "moderate" stand taken against them in public. Fatah provides an insightful reading of how Arab-Muslim history, in casting aside the universalism of Muhammad's message, headed into the dead end of tribal power and conquest out of which morphed the contemporary politics of Islamist chauvinists. To read the entire article, please click the link below: |
||
|
|
Muslim author's book calls on Canadians to condemn Islamists White liberals "should quit excusing extremists" Tarek makes a parallel plea, for Muslims to aspire to a "state of Islam," rather than an Islamic State, the current iterations of which take compulsion all the way to public beheading. His book will not impress hard-line Islamists. Canadians, however, may take it as evidence one can be a Muslim, and loyal to a secular state. We need to hear that more often from Muslims -- and also what Tarek says of white liberals, that they should quit excusing extremists. He certainly doesn't. To read the entire article, please click the link below: http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/ theeditorialpage/story.html?id=f68dd36f-fb8b-4357-9e3d-50a3c8937b25 |
|
Chasing a Mirage a "heavily researched yet easily read book." The
yearning for an Islamic state has been bloody and fruitless. This is a
major theme of Tarek Fatah’s heavily researched yet easily read book. He
goes back to the origins of Islam to show the wrong-headedness of the
notion. Mohammed, who developed the political system of Medina, did not
try to replicate that model when he moved to take control of Mecca. To read the complete review, please click below: http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=BookReviews&article=1050 |
