God the estate agent

The Isis destruction of ruins in Syria serves of course to claim the past for Islam. But this is a continuation of a century long claim that the Near East is Islamic and not a mixture of faiths and people. Edward Said, a cultured and intelligent man did the same, creating a them and us separation-the west was Christian, the east Moslem. Orientalism is another name for Islamic. Isis have attempted to make that a reality. The Moslem Brotherhood attempt the same in Egypt. Islam is the dominant faith in these parts but not the only one.

Of course, Moslems here are merely following the Hebrew faith that presented the idea that a faith has its own defined territory-its a kind of landowner and god an estate agent.