The mosque network gives Islamists a communications infrastructure no other opposition can rival

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. At different times and in different places, the army has acted for democracy, as in Turkey, or for fundamentalism, as in the Sudan. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to arguments about entrenched religious institutions as infrastructure, similar to political-institution analyses in Milgrom’s law merchant and work on how monopolistic communication networks confer political power.