DANIEL TOES ARE GENUINE FOES
IT SHALL TAKE THE POWER OF GOD
TO HOLD SUNNI & SHIITE CLAY & IRON
TOES IN ANY BOND FOR A LENGTHY PERIOD
DUE TO MANY CENTURIES OF INTENSE HATRED!
PART 4
September 13, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
FOR A FULL EXPOSITION OF THIS SUBJECT READ ARCHIVE PROPHECY UPDATE NUMBERS 233B, 234A, 235A, 236A, AND 236B ON OUR WEB SITE
Daniel 2:43,44 – And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. [44] And in the days of these kings shall the God
of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.
Revelation 17:13,17 – These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
[17] For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan will not be among the 10 toes/horns that initially attack Israel, but they will fall to the Antichrist who leads the 10 toes, and will be a part of his Caliphate Kingdom.
Begin Excerpt from History News Network
What Is the Difference Between Sunni and Shiite Muslims–and Why Does It Matter
?
By HNN Staff
Updated 12/18/06
The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.
The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs
–Mohammed’s successors–rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.
Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, “Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership” at the time of the Imam’s disappearance. Not “until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978” did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.
Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has to do with the Mahdi, “the rightly-guided one” whose role is to bring a just global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written, “The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will.”
In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni’s, a difference that is highly significant:
… for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate … as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.
In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by “the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt” following World War I. The victorious Europeans had “imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices.” Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European “schools and scientific and cultural institutes” that “cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western.”14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.
Osama bina Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11.
On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed: “What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. … Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.”
Juan Cole, a well-known historian of the Middle East, has pointed out on his blog, Informed Comment, that the split between Sunni and Shiites in Iraq is of relatively recent origin:
I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 year s. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we’re seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.
In December 2006 the New York Times reported that it is not just ordinary Americans who find it difficult to remember the difference between Sunnis and Shiites:
SURPRISE quiz: Is Al Qaeda Sunni or Shiite
? Which sect dominates Hezbollah?
Silvestre Reyes, the Democratic nominee to head the House Intelligence Committee, failed to answer both questions correctly last week when put to the test by Congressional Quarterly. He mislabeled Al Qaeda as predominantly Shiite, and on Hezbollah, which is mostly Shiite, he drew a blank.
“Speaking only for myself,” he told reporters, “it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”
Not that he’s alone. Other members of Congress from both parties have also flunked on-the-spot inquiries. Indeed, some of the smartest Western statesmen of the last century have found themselves flummoxed by Islam.
Winston Churchill — in 1921, while busy drawing razor-straight borders across a mercurial Middle East — asked an aide for a three-line note explaining the “religious character” of the Hashemite leader he planned to install in Baghdad.
“Is he a Sunni with Shaih sympathies or a Shaih with Sunni sympathies?” Mr. Churchill wrote, using an antiquated spelling. (“I always get mixed up between these two,” he added.)
And maybe religious memorization should not be required for policymaking. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, said that Mr. Reyes mainly needs to know “how the intelligence community works.”
Yet, improving American intelligence, according to General Odom and others with close ties to the Middle East and the American intelligence community, requires more than just a organization chart.
A cheat sheet is in order.
The Review asked nearly a dozen experts, from William R. Polk, author of “Understanding Iraq,” to Paul R. Pillar, the C.I.A. official who coordinated intelligence on the Middle East until he retired last year, to explain the region. Here, a quick distillation.
What caused the original divide?
The groups first diverged after the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, and his followers could not agree on whether to choose bloodline successors or leaders most likely to follow the tenets of the faith.
The group now known as Sunnis chose Abu Bakr, the prophet’s adviser, to become the first successor, or caliph, to lead the Muslim state. Shiites favored Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali and his successors are called imams, who not only lead the Shiites but are considered to be descendants of Muhammad.
After the 11th imam died in 874, and his young son was said to have disappeared from the funeral, Shiites in particular came to see the child as a Messiah who had been hidden
from the public by God.
The largest sect of Shiites, known as “twelvers,” have been preparing for his return ever since.
How did the violence start?
In 656, Ali’s supporters
killed the third caliph. Soon after, the Sunnis killed Ali’s son Husain.
Fighting continued but Sunnis emerged victorious over the Shiites and came to revere the caliphate for its strength and piety.
Shiites focused on developing their religious beliefs, through their imams.
Begin Excerpt from an Article in IMRI via THE HUDSON INSTITUTE
(CONTINUED FROM PART 3)
The Shiites of Saudi Arabia
by Joshua Teitelbaum
Published on Saturday, August 21, 2010
Current Trends in Islamist Ideology vol. 10
Hudson Institute, Inc. 1015 15th Street, N.W. 6th Floor Washington, DC 20005
www.currenttrends.org/research/detail/ the-shiites-of-saudi-arabia
Two thousand and three was a crucial year for the Shiites of Saudi Arabia.
As part of the general reform trend that swept the country after 9/11, and fearful of the extremism represented by al-Qaeda, leading Saudi Shiites joined liberal Sunni Islamist reformers in publishing a January petition entitled, “Vision for the homeland.”26 This was a landmark event since leading Islamists had previously not agreed to sign petitions with Shiites. Several of the signatories were received by then-Crown Prince Abdallah. The petition called for an end to corruption and greater accountability, but did not call for the overthrow of the regime.
But there can be no doubt that the most significant recent event for Saudi Shiites was the downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The Shiites felt empowered-even emboldened.
Najaf, the heart of Shiism, had been liberated. Seeing millions of their Iraqi brethren freely carrying out the rituals of Ashura, they felt their time had now come within Saudi Arabia-a Shiite state in Iraq would bring Saudi Shiites their due. One Shiite religious official, who preferred to remain anonymous, told a reporter: “If a Shia state takes place in Iraq, we can be assured that there will be justice.
It will be based on the religious teachings of the prophet, and after that the Saudi Shia will be in a better situation.” In an uncharacteristically public move, Shiite leaders expressed their satisfaction with the end of the Baath regime, but followed their expression of happiness with a call to improve their own situation. The leading Shiite figure, Shaykh Hasan al-Saffar, said that now Saudi Shiites were “determined to claim some of their rights while defending the nation’s unity.”27 Saffar’s views epitomized the dilemma of the Saudi Shiites-making an effort to achieve equality while trying to avoid a backlash that could put the Shiites back many decades.
While the Shiite rise in Iraq planted hope in the hearts of Saudi Shiites, it also brought their problematic situation into focus. For this reason Saffar felt obligated to stress national loyalty in order to avoid an accusation of Shiite separatism.
Fortunately for the Shiites, then-Crown Prince Abdallah was a supporter of reconciliation. The Shiites published a memorandum signed by 450 activists, which some delivered personally to Abdallah on April 30, titled “Partners in the Homeland.” The title reflected Shaykh Saffar’s moderate tone as a loyal Saudi Arabian Shiite who was only seeking integration into Saudi society. The fact that they were received by Abdallah gave them hope. They were particularly concerned about heading off Wahhabi extremists, who might be worried about Shiite triumphalism. The memorandum demanded a public declaration of equality among all citizens, specifically including Shiites. It demanded Shiite representation in Saudi-led international Islamic forums and charities, and asked the royal family to issue and express support for dialogue between ulama of all the religious sects in the kingdom. They were at pains to emphasize their loyalty, particularly at a time when they were accused of being more loyal
to Iran than to Saudi Arabia.
Further demands included letting Shiites into government positions, official statements against discrimination, an end to detentions and travel bans, the right to publish Shiite material and perform Shiite rituals, and an end to the publishing of official texts that discriminate against the Shiites. The petitioners also demanded the recognition of an independent Shiite judiciary. If there was one overarching point it was to demonstrate loyalty, while demanding in return public statements by members of the royal family that the Shiites were equal citizens and that their rights should be respected.28
The signatories emphasized that the request for equality did not contradict their loyalty to the state. While aware that the royal family bases its legitimacy on being a Wahhabi state, by definition anti-Shiite, they are equally aware that the Al Saud represent their main defense against unrestricted Wahhabi fanaticism.
But as luck would have it, less than a month after the audience with Crown Prince Abdallah, Saudi Arabia was hit by a series of devastating terrorist attacks. On May 12 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Pen
insula carried out its biggest operation in over a decade, attacking simultaneously three Riyadh compounds used to house foreigners. Dozens were killed. A full-scale al-Qaeda insurgency was underway.29 It was likely that there were members of the royal family who wondered if it was the right time to begin a serous dialogue with the Shiites, who were anathema to extremist Wahhabis like al-Qaeda and its supporters.
But Crown Prince Abdallah was determined to make some progress with the Shiites, come what may, and his views carried the day. In June 2003, the first “National Dialogue” was held in Riyadh. It lasted four days, and brought together more than fifty clerics and intellectuals, both Sunni and Shiite. This was the first time that such a meeting had been held, and it involved establishment Wahhabi ulama as well as some former oppositionists who had termed the Shiites infidels. While the content of the discussions were not made public, the official Saudi Press Agency praised the gathering and quoted Abdallah as favoring such “quiet dialogue.”30
For the Shiites, the fact that the dialogue took place at all was an achievement, particularly since it was attended by both establishment Wahhabi ulama and more radical figures. After all, these ulama had met with Muslims who worshipped in ways and had beliefs that were not in accordance with Wahhabi practice. But at the same time, the Shiite leadership did not receive any direct support from ulama or royal family members for integrating them into the political and economic life of the country. It is likely that the Saudi leadership believed that while a dialogue was desirable, under the current situation overt support for the Shiites was a risk they were not willing to take.
Moreover, the ongoing al-Qaeda-led Sunni insurgency had dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for any real reconciliation with the Shiites. In sum, one could say that the Shiites had gained some points in the dialogue, but remained far from any serious change in their basic situation.
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