"New Atheists are Wrong about Islam-- Here's How Data Proves it"-- Elias Isquith, Salon
I just noticed this article which appeared Thursday on Salon.com. The title is regrettable for an OP here, and I'd have preferred to call it "Muslims are not as distinctive as many think, a new study shows." But DU doesn't allow us to change article titles, so I'll just ask that people engage the content of the article and not the title. These paras summarize the research findings:
I found that Muslims in general are less distinctive than many of us think. In many ways there is really very little difference between Muslims and everybody else. Sometimes I use “everybody else” as the reference category, and sometimes I use Christians in particular, because Christianity and Islam are by far the world’s biggest faith traditions…
Even in some areas in which we expect … I didn’t find a great deal of difference. For example, many people think that Muslims are really intent on fusing religious and political authority, that there’s really no room in Islamic thinking for independent civic sphere that is not run by religious authorities, and in which religious authority and doctrine predominate, meaning there’s little room for an independent civil society and public sphere. Well, I found in this survey data that … Muslims and Christians don’t differ very much on this question, and that most Muslims, once one controls for everything that needs to be controlled for in these statistical analyses, actually do not want to fuse religious and political authority…
Some, of course, do. Some absolutely do. But some Christians do as well … There are many American Christians who are skeptical about dividing church and state rigorously. That’s true for many Muslims as well. But a majority of both Christians and Muslims seem to embrace at least some separation of sacred and secular in politics. That’s one finding that was perhaps surprising and also showed that Muslims are less distinctive than we might think.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It is about flawed human beings promoting all sorts of screwed up ideologies from nationalism (which is what has made Buddhists and Hindu's in those regions act against their teachings) to religious justifications for bigotry to the very narcissistic and solipsistic certainty that all must think like me or they are ignorant 'others'.
Us versus them! Primate dominance games didn't stop just because we evolved a frontal cortex. 
The need to be right, when we can learn so much from accepting that fact that we are so often wrong. Even when we are right, we are usually wrong to a degree. Dogma, be it religious or political, tends to exclude the grey areas, not to mention color.
So sorry to hear about your dad. My thoughts are with you. Sounds like you have a wonderful relationship with him.
