Why I Always include Morocco as One of the Ten Toes
Is described by the AP World News Article which Follows
A terrorist extremist movement is steadily extending West
Morocco will eventually fall to their ever increasing Influence
All African countries north and east of the huge Sahara Desert
Will become a part of the great Islamic Caliphate of the Antichrist
When he has conquered Land of Egypt after bypassing Big Negev!
AugusT 12, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Daniel 11:42,43 – He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape. [43] But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.
The first time I ever set foot in French Morocco was in 1952, while it was still owned by France. I traveled extensively across Arab lands, and was there in December of 1952 when a revolt broke out between the French Authorities and Moroccan political parties.
This uprising led to the outlawing of a new in-country Communist party and the exile of its Sultan from the country in 1953.
I was back in the states attending Advance Forecasting in a USAF IHL when Morocco was granted independence by France in 1956. I returned overseas in 1959, returning to the U.S. in 1961, working as a synoptic analyst and severe weather forecaster in the Federal Office Building in Kansas City, from which I returned overseas in 1965.
Morocco is indeed a moderate Arab country, but I am convinced that it will not be able to hold the line against internal radical elements, and will end up in the camp of Daniel’s 10 toes when push comes to shove.
Begin World News AP Excerpt
Uproar Over Loud Prayer Calls In Muslim Morocco
RABAT, Morocco,
August 9, 2008
(AP) The muezzins’ calls echo well before daybreak, summoning the Muslim faithful to daily prayers and reminding foreign tourists in the Moroccan capital how far they are from home.
But the rising decibel level is deepening fault lines between a government drive to modernize and a wave of rigorous political Islam.
Morocco, a country of 33 million people, gets more than 7 million tourists a year. And there are worries that some may be put off by the five heavily amplified calls a day, each lasting five minutes, to “hasten to the prayer, hasten to the prayer.”
Muslim purists counter that authorities are compromising religion to please Westerners and the country’s liberal elite.
The frictions are happening in a country that is considered moderate on matters of religion and is a U.S. ally and at a time when there are fears that al-Qaida is establish ing itself
in North Africa.
Morocco has lately been shaken by two different cases in which the government, or wealthy Westerners, have been accused of plotting to force down the volume on the muezzins who make the call to prayer.
Nouzha Skalli, the minister for family and social affairs, is accused of seeking legislation to lower the volume on muezzins in tourist zones.
Newspapers have asked whether Skalli, a feminist and former Communist, is trying to curb Islam and impose secularism on the overwhelmingly Muslim society. Some hard-line imams have cursed her during public sermons.
“It made huge waves, even a tsunami,” Skalli said in an Associated Press interview.
She wouldn’t say what exactly she had proposed, because it happened at a closed-door Cabinet meeting. But she denied suggesting a law to muzzle the muezzins and said her statements were taken out of context.
“It was a complete manipulation,” she said.
Skalli views her job of promoting women’s rights as part of a wider struggle between two models of society: one of “modernity, equality and openness” versus “closing-off and backwardness.” She suspects she was targeted “because I’m a woman and because I represent modernity.”
Earlier this year Annie Laforet, a Frenchwoman, was blamed for the closure of a mosque next to the luxury guest house she runs in the old town, or medina, of picturesque Marrakech. The claim, which Laforet denied, caused outrage in the local press, and Laforet says she received death threats on Islamist Web sites.
Local authorities backed her denial and then reopened the mosque, from which the prayer call now blares every morning about 4:30 a.m., and then again an hour later.
“It’s a bit loud, but it’s fine,” Laforet said. “Tourists know it’s part of living in the medina.”
Still, Mohammed Darif, a Moroccan political scientist and expert on Islamism, says hard-liners increasingly are depicting the tourist influx as a threat to Muslim values.
The wealthy may support the government’s pro-Western and liberal values, he said. “But the Morocco of poverty, backward countryside and urban slums is increasingly averse to tourism and the internationalized elite.”
He said some Moroccans complain of walled-off resorts that make them feel unwelcome.
“It’s discrimination by wealth, and tourism is highlighting the sore,” he said.
Olivier Roy, French author of “Globalized Islam,” says the tensions are a new phenomenon, and that the former French colony has “a history of cohabitation” in which Western hippies of the 1960s and ’70s were welcome visitors.
Roy says louder calls to prayer are a product of Salafism, a rigorous strain of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia.
“Thirty years ago you could barely hear the muezzin,” he said.
Also, he said, the audio technology used for prayer calls has improved, and imams are in competition to fill their mosques.
Islam is the state religion in Morocco and the king is the “Commander of the Believers.” The state trains and appoints all imams, but ends to avoid dictating standards of public behavior.
Criticizing any form of Islamic practice is difficult in the Arab world because no Muslim wants to stand accused of being irreligious, Roy said.
But as conservatives have become more outspoken, so have moderates. For a Cabinet minister to say anything critical of prayer calls “would have been unthinkable only 10 years ago,” he said.
Miloud al-Atifi is an imam who doubles as the muezzin in his small mosque in Sale, a poor suburb of Rabat.
He takes a benign view of the muezzin uproar.
“The prayer cleanses the soul, it’s fundamental,” he explained, but loudspeakers are simply a technical aid and can be toned down if, for instance, they’re near a hospital.
They are helpful in competing with honking cars, he says, but nowadays believers can have the call piped in on their cell phones. He also notes that the Council of the Ulemas, Morocco’s highest theological authority, has held that the pre-dawn prayer call should be a hushed one.
As for tourist zones, the imam doesn’t think there’s a debate.
“If there are only non-Muslims around, it makes no sense to even have a call for prayer.”
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