Another One of Daniel’s 10 Horns becomes more Islamic!
April 25, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Daniel 7:24-27 – And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he
shall subdue three kings. [25] And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time. [26] But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end. [27] And the kingdom and dominion,
and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
Begin Excerpts from International Herald Tribune Article
Turkey’s majority party picks candidate with Islamic background
International Herald Tribune
By Sabrina Tavernise
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
ISTANBUL: Turkey’s majority political party chose a prominent leader with an Islamic background Tuesday to compete for the presidency, a move expected to extend the party’s reach for the first time into the heart of Turkey’s secular establishment.
The choice of Abdullah Gul, 56, the affable, English-speaking foreign minister who is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest political ally, is expected to be confirmed by Parliament in several rounds of voting that will begin Friday.
Turkey is a Muslim country, but its government, set up in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is strictly secular, and the presidency is its most important office.
The selection of Gul, whose wife wears a head scarf, is not likely to sit well with secular Turks who worry that their lifestyles – drinking alcohol, wearing miniskirts and swimming in coed pools – could eventually be in danger. But it will accommodate an emerging, observant middle class that wants more freedom to practice Islam.
Gul, who has long been his party’s public face abroad, nodded to those concerns in a news conference in Ankara after his nomination, saying, “Our differences are our richness.” His candidacy was a minor concession: The choice most distasteful to the secular establishment would have been Erdogan himself, who deftly bowed out.
Still, if Gul is confirmed, his party would occupy the posts of president, prime minister and parliamentary speaker, a lineup that the opposition party leader, Deniz Baykal, called “unfavorable.” Baykal’ s party later announced that it would boycott the vote.
The military, too, was concerned, issuing a veiled warning that the next president should be a faithful follower of the secular order. The deputy chief of the armed forces, General Ergun Saygun, said, “The next president should be tied to the Turkish republic’s main principles, which were defined in the Constitution – secularism, social state and democracy.”
Still, in a region where religion and government have over all been seen as hostile to modernity, Turkey has blended the two lightly.
The party Gul helped found, known by its Turkish initials, AK, sprang from Turkey’s political Islamic movements of the 1990s, but moderated significantly after gaining power on a national scale in 2002. Since then, it has applied pragmatic policies that helped create an economic boom and opened up the state in ways that the rigid secular elite had never imagined, in part to qualify it for membership in Europe.
“This party has done more for the modernization of Turkey than all the secular parties in the previous years,” said Joost Lagendijk, a member of the European Parliament.
“They were willing to open up the system, to challenge the elite.”
Although the party is publicly adamant about religion’s not entering policy, bristling at shorthand descriptions of it as pro-Islamic, it draws much of its support from Turkey’s religiously conservative heartland. Once on the periphery, these traditional Turks are emerging into mainstream society as a powerful middle class that has driven Turkey’s economic boom. They are also beginning to press Turkey’ s long-governing elite for change.
“These are the new forces, the new social powers,” said Ali Bulac, a columnist for a conservative, mainstream newspaper in Istanbul.
“They are very devout.
They don’t drink. They don’t gamble. They don’t take holidays.”
“They are loaded with a huge energy. This energy has been blocked by the state.”
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