He's coming a bit late to this party, but the Toronto Star's Richard Gwyn thinks the recent Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy is really about a clash between the moderate and fundamentalist schools of Islam.

Some excerpts:

It's unavoidable now that painful questions have to be asked about why there should be so much violence so continuously across the Islamic world.

Such questions would be academic except that they are being asked now by Muslims themselves.

(Jihad) Momani isn't alone. A Yemeni journalist, Muhammed al-Assadi, similarly questioned whether the reaction to cartoons that really were just silly, wasn't wildly overdone.

Significantly, a number of the world's most renowed Islamic scholars recently issued a declaration calling for moderation in the response to the cartoons. Even in cleric-dominated Saudi Arabia, opinion may be beginning to change as a result of the disaster at Mecca.

Columnist Hussein Shubakshi recently wrote for the daily Al-Sharq al-Awast that imams couldn't go on clinging to the past, "(as if) the sharia is valid in all eras and places."

Shubakshi, though, lives in London where his paper is published. And Momani, back in Amman, is now under house arrest.

Their questions really are brilliant. But they are very brave men.