Mosque networks give Islamist opposition an infrastructure no tyranny can fully suppress

Evidence

Where the so-called fundamentalist Muslims and democrats are both in opposition, the former have an immense advantage. In the mosques and preachers, they dispose of a network for meeting and communication that no government, however tyrannical, can entirely control and no other group can rival. Sometimes a tyrannical regime has eased the path of the fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositions. Only one other group in society has the cohesion, the structure, and the means to take independent action, and that is the army—the second major motor of political change in the region. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Islam-West representation cluster: this is a mechanism explanation of Islamist resilience that complicates Western depictions of fundamentalism as merely coercive/terroristic.
• QUESTION: Lewis wrote pre-9/11; does the mosque-network argument hold up against the state-sponsored mosque hierarchies of Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s post-2013 crackdown?