Who has been winning the “civil war” between moderate and extremist Muslims so far?
It’s hard to call the civil war between the fundamentalists and their mainstream Muslim enemies. In the political realm, the fundamentalists are losing. In the 1980s and 1990s, they suffered some tremendous defeats. They were crushed in Egypt, Syria and Algeria. In other places, such as Jordan where they did not revolt outright, they were marginalized or co-opted. In the social and cultural arena, however, they have been making significant advances — by establishing networks of voluntary societies and by establishing social services like hospitals and schools that often provide better services than do their state-run counterparts. So, in the cultural sphere, their star has been rising. In politics, therefore, they sometimes show a disturbing ability to set the agenda, to capture the moral high ground, as they would seem to have done in the current crisis.
