Cognitive Radio (CR) has been recently proposed as a promising technology to remedy the problems of spectrum scarcity and spectrum underutilization by enabling unlicensed users to opportunistically utilize temporally unused licensed spectrums in a cautious manner. In Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs), data routing is one of the most challenging tasks since the channel availability and node mobility are unpredictable. Moreover, the network performance is severely degraded due to large numbers of path failures. In this paper, we propose the Fault-Tolerant Cognitive Ad-hoc Routing Protocol (FTCARP) to provide fast and efficient route recovery in presence of path failures during data delivery in CRAHNs. The protocol exploits the joint path and spectrum diversity to offer reliable communication and efficient spectrum usage over the networks. In the proposed protocol, a backup path is utilized in case a failure occurs over a primary transmission route. Different cause of a path failure will be handled by different route recovery mechanism. The protocol performance is compared with that of the Dual Diversity Cognitive Ad-hoc Routing Protocol (D2CARP). The simulation results obviously prove that FTCARP outperforms D2CARP in terms of throughput, packet loss, end-to-end delay and jitter in the high path-failure rate CRAHNs.