A War Over How And Whether Islam Should Embrace Modernity?

Pivoting off an article by Tom Friedman, Yglesias considers the continuum of Muslim opinion:

There’s a huge conceptual space between wanting to “embrace modernity” in a way that a secular American Jew like Friedman or I would have amenable (after all, the Republican Party doesn’t meet that standard) and wanting to roam around the world killing everyone in the name of purifying Islam. If the entire Muslim world were governed by rights-respecting democracies it might be relatively easy to draw clear lines between dangerous violent people, and people just advancing a conservative political agenda. But that’s not the situation that exists, so you have a muddle of different actors who embrace violence to differing degrees against different targets and for different purposes.