This is not practically a piece of news, but a quote out of its context. Blair shares his evaluation of Koran in words that show high appreciation: progressive, reforming, inclusive, practical, tolerant, ahead of its time, basis of a whole prosperous empire in the early Middle Ages. He choses to speak about the bright side of religious ideas, letting aside the dark by-products of their followers which also abound in the human history, and the phenomenon applies to almost any religious idea. Religious ideas always exhilarated the human sensibility or improved goodness, but they also had their downsides, their Mr. Hyde, twisting some people's minds and hearts, making them do bad things, along with the good ones. Therefore, Blair's ... More »

In the opening of this long piece Blair zips past 750 years of history, jumping from Islam's heyday (of which the end was marked by the Mongols' sack of Baghdad in 1258 CE) to the twentieth century and Islamic radicalism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Wahhabis. This is in support of his position, well-stated, that the world is engaged in a struggle between civilization and anti-civilization.