As you know or may not know, I believe we are nearing the end of the Church Age: a period of time that followed the Resurrection of Christ in 30AD (approx) to the present in 2013AD. The Church Age was unknown to the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament and thus events outlined in the Old Testament have no bearing in our present time until the close of the Church Age which is yet unknown and is currently ongoing. However, we see today many outlines and forms in the shadows that will ultimately show themselves in the full light of day tomorrow. One of those forms is the political/military entity known as the King of the South.
All prophecies in the Old Testament relate to Israel and her future King. With the return of the state of Israel in 1947-48 onto the world stage the Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel have the potential of becoming activated. In the book of Daniel, the nation of Israel is surrounded by four antagonists which it must contend with until the return of her glorious King and his army which in turn will establish Israel as the preeminent nation of the nations of the world. The four antagonists are divided like the four directions of the compass: North, South, East and West with Israel at the center. The antagonists are geographically located thusly from the center of political gravity which is located in Israel.
The King of the South is the great kingdom of Egypt. At least "great" from its glorious past. But it is to the future we seek to understand the makeup of this antagonist which will arise to challenge the nation of Israel which by the way will be the last "king of the south" to do so forever! I say this because Egypt has gone through many transformations politically and religiously speaking since the Book of Daniel was written however as time draws to a close on the Church Age I believe we can discern the ultimate political makeup of this King and kingdom as prophesied in the Old Testament.
I've written in the past that Egypt along with Saudi Arabia are the twin cultures/political entities that makeup the core of the Sunni Moslem world. The Sunni world rises and falls with them and I believe that a new Moslem Caliphate will arise centered on the Sunni Moslem religion which in turn will expel Iran and any Shiite influenced country such as Syria from its political and military orbit. I believe the Sunni Moslem world centered in Egypt politically and Saudi Arabia religiously is the King of the South of the Old Testament.
With the advent of the so called Arab Spring, we see a consolidation of the Sunni Moslem world currently taking place much to the chagrin of those in the West that want to see a more unified global political order with the West as the cockpit of this politico-commercial paradigm. A Moslem Caliphate will challenge this paradigm.
From Foreign Affairs we see the consolidation occurring internally within Egypt itself:
Addressing graduates of military academies is a standard responsibility for high-ranking military officers all over the world. But last week, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the commander of Egypt’s armed forces, which recently deposed the country’s first freely elected president, went far beyond the conventions of the genre in a speech to graduates of Egypt’s Navy and Air Defense academies. Sisi’s true audience was the wider Egyptian public, and he presented himself less as a general in the armed forces than as a populist strongman. He urged Egyptians to take to the streets to show their support for the provisional government that he had installed after launching a coup to remove from power President Mohamed Morsi, a longtime leader of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. “I’ve never asked you for anything,” Sisi declared, before requesting a “mandate” to confront the Muslim Brotherhood, whose supporters have launched protests and sit-ins to denounce the new military-backed regime.I believe what we are seeing here and in other parts of the globe specifically in Russia is the marriage once again of religion with the state. For awhile during the 20th Century, religion had run its course and secular atheistic government was the order of the day with all its attendant tragedies that was the Communist International order. The conservative estimate of the losses suffered internally by these types of governments was at least 100 million souls murdered during this time period. The Ottoman Empire after World War One was disassembled by Ataturk and the Caliphate abolished. In order to maintain the regime brutality was the order of the day mainly directed against Moslems. However, time has shown that from a state perspective, the dismantling may have been disadvantageous as far as victory on the battlefield is concerned. The article expands further:
Sisi’s speech was only the latest suggestion that he will not be content to simply serve as the leader of Egypt’s military. Although he has vowed to lead Egypt through a democratic transition, there are plenty of indications that he is less than enthusiastic about democracy and that he intends to hold on to political power himself. But that’s not to say that he envisions a return to the secular authoritarianism of Egypt’s recent past. Given the details of Sisi’s biography and the content of his only published work, a thesis he wrote in 2006 while studying at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, it seems possible that he might have something altogether different in mind: a hybrid regime that would combine Islamism with militarism. To judge from the ideas about governance that he put forward in his thesis, Sisi might see himself less as a custodian of Egypt’s democratic future than as an Egyptian version of Muhammed Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani general who seized power in 1977 and set about to “Islamicize” state and society in Pakistan.
But even though he overthrew a government dominated by Islamists, there is reason to suspect that Sisi’s true goal might not be the establishment of a more inclusive, secular democracy but, rather, a military-led resurrection and reformation of the Islamist project that the Brotherhood so abysmally mishandled. Indeed, after Morsi became president, he tapped Sisi to become defense minster precisely because there was plenty of evidence that the general was sympathetic to Islamism. He is reputed to be a particularly devout Muslim who frequently inserts Koranic verses into informal conversations, and his wife wears the conservative dress favored by more orthodox Muslims. Those concerned about Sisi’s views on women’s rights were alarmed by his defense of the military’s use of “virginity tests” for female demonstrators detained during the uprising against Mubarak. Human-rights activists argued that the “tests” were amounted to sexual assaults; Sisi countered that they were intended “to protect the girls from rape.”And when we say "democratic mark" then we are talking about a "Western" oriented democratic mark, of course. Again, this return to religion and its marriage to the state is also being sown in Russia under Vladimir Putin. In Moscow, the marriage of the Eastern Orthodox Church to the State has been ongoing for 20 years now. So between China and Europe we see a massive continental divide from Moscow to Cairo that is dividing the world with Israel at the center with regimes that are unified with the local religion and governments in the West and East that are moving away from such an arrangement. An exception may be made in the West but for a short time only per the Book of Revelation. The article concludes:
Morsi likely also found much to admire in the thesis that Sisi produced at the U.S. Army War College, which, despite its innocuous title (“Democracy in the Middle East”), reads like a tract produced by the Muslim Brotherhood. In his opening paragraph, Sisi emphasizes the centrality of religion to the politics of the region, arguing that “for democracy to be successful in the Middle East,” it must show “respect to the religious nature of the culture” and seek “public support from religious leaders [who] can help build strong support for the establishment of democratic systems.” Egyptians and other Arabs will view democracy positively, he wrote, only if it “sustains the religious base versus devaluing religion and creating instability.” Secularism, according to Sisi, “is unlikely to be favorably received by the vast majority of Middle Easterners, who are devout followers of the Islamic faith.” He condemns governments that “tend toward secular rule,” because they “disenfranchise large segments of the population who believe religion should not be excluded from government,” and because “they often send religious leaders to prison.”
But Sisi’s thesis goes beyond simply rejecting the idea of a secular state; it embraces a more radical view of the proper place of religion in an Islamic democracy. He writes: “Democracy cannot be understood in the Middle East without an understanding of the concept of El Kalafa,” or the caliphate, which Sisi defines as the 70-year period when Muslims were led by Muhammad and his immediate successors. Re-establishing this kind of leadership “is widely recognized as the goal for any new form of government” in the Middle East, he asserts. The central political mechanisms in such a system, he believes, are al-bi'ah (fealty to a ruler) and shura (a ruler’s consultation with his subjects). Apologists for Islamic rule sometimes suggest that these concepts are inherently democratic, but in reality they fall far short of the democratic mark.
If Sisi’s thesis truly reflects his thinking -- and there is no reason to believe otherwise -- it suggests not only that he might want to stay at the helm of the new Egyptian state but that his vision of how to steer Egyptian society differs markedly from those of the secular-nationalist military rulers who led Egypt for decades: Gamal Abdel al-Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat, and Mubarak. The ideas in Sisi’s thesis hew closer to those of Zia ul-Haq, who overthrew Pakistan’s democratically elected government in 1977 and soon began a campaign of “Islamicization” that included the introduction of some elements of sharia into Pakistani law, along with a state-subsidized boom in religious education. It is worth noting that Sisi has gone out of his way to court the Salafist al-Nour Party, by ensuring that the constitutional declaration issued on July 13 preserved the controversial article stating “the principles of sharia law derived from established Sunni canons” will be Egypt's “main source of legislation.” He also tried to undercut support for the leaders of the Brotherhood by appealing directly to their followers, referring to them as “good Egyptians” and “our brothers.” These moves may have been intended to inoculate him against the charge that the coup was anti-Islamist -- a critical point, since Islamism still enjoys broad support in many parts of Egyptian society. But it may also reflect a genuine belief in and commitment to Islamism.The question that is left to us to ask is why? Why is Egypt pursuing this course as well as Russia. What long term agenda are they pursuing and will the West be forced into a confrontational position with the King of the South? I suspect, we may know sooner than expected.
If Sisi continues to seek legitimacy for military rule by associating it with Islamism, it could prove to be a disaster for Egypt. At the very least, it would set back the democratic cause immeasurably. It would also reinforce the military’s octopus-like hold on the economy, which is already one of the major obstacles to the country's economic development. And it would also pose new dilemmas for the military itself: somehow it would need to reconcile serving the strategic objectives of Islam and those of its American patrons. It’s not clear whether that circle could be squared. And the experiment would likely come at the expense of the Egyptian people.
