In 638 ce, Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, peacefully surrendered the city and the welfare of the Christian community to the Second Caliph Omar bin Al- Khattab in person. In an age when conquest was often characterised by intolerance and violence towards a conquered community, the terms of surrender of Jerusalem, which is known as the Pact of Omar, were generous and humane:
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
This is what the servant of God, Omar bin Al-Khattab, the Commander of the Faithful, has offered the people of Jerusalem: their security, granting them protection for their selves, their money, their churches, their children, their lowly and their innocent, and the remainder of their people. Their churches are not to be taken, nor are they to be destroyed, nor are they to be degraded or belittled, neither are their crosses or their money, and they are not to be forced to change their religion, nor is any one of them to be harmed.
We can’t miss that he is a Savior. Within a few years the Muslims had also conquered parts of Egypt to the South and Asia Minor and Armenia to the North.
But is he an Antichrist?
This is not a religious question so much as it is a political question. For Antichrist, religion is a means to a political end. There is no question that YHVH used the Persian Empire to provide both salvation and tribulation to Israel and the Gentiles, depending on their relationship to him. The same opportunities for blessing or persecution applies to the succeeding Middle Eastern Empires.
And just like Christianity and Judaism, Islam split into more or less righteous or corrupt political factions.
“The original schism between Islam’s two largest sects was not over religious doctrine. It was over political leadership.”
The Hashemites, or “Bani Hashem” are descendants of…the Prophet Ismail…the son of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham)….“Hashem”…was the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad. The Hashemites are thus the direct descendants of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali bin Abi Talib, who was also the Prophet’s paternal first cousin and the fourth caliph of Islam…
[W]hen the Islamic Prophet Muhammad died…a debate emerged about who should be his successor…one group (which eventually became the Shiites) felt Muhammad’s successor should be someone in his bloodline, while the other (which became the Sunnis) felt a pious individual who would follow the Prophet’s customs was acceptable.
The great majority — upwards of 85 to 90 percent — of the world’s more than 1.6 billion Muslims are Sunnis…from West Africa to Indonesia…
the Shiites are…in Iran, predominance in Iraq and sizable populations in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
A shallow, religion-oriented analysis…dominates…Western thinking about most issues in the Middle East…New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asserts that the “main issue in the Middle East is the 7th century struggle over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad – Shiites or Sunnis…”
Therefore rule from Islam’s holy city Jerusalem.
A pillar of Mohammed’s re-institution of monotheism is jihad, or imposition of YHVH’s / Allah’s righteous rule over the earth, expanded outward into all three previous Empires:
- Babylon/Iraq
- Persia/Iran and India
- the ancient Greek homeland of Asia Minor and Greece
- the Christianized paganism of the European Roman Empire through the land gateway at Constantinople and seaports around the Mediterranean.
When we compare a map of the classical Roman Empire with the same territory during the Middle Ages it is easy to see the Moslem takeover of the south-eastern half of the classical Roman Empire, with the north-western Christian half shrunken down within the boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea.
By the Middle Ages we can confidently assign an Islamic identity to Daniel’s king of the south and a Christian identity to the king of the north.
Seljuq, also spelled Seljuk, ruling military family of the…Turkic tribes that invaded southwestern Asia in the 11th century and eventually founded an empire that included Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and most of Iran. Their advance marked the beginning of Turkic power in the Middle East.
Salah ad-Din Yusuf / Joseph ibn Ayyub / son of Job, known in the Western world as Saladin, played a major role is shaping the middle east of the 12th and 13th centuries...
At the young age of 32 years Saladin had taken control of the Egyptian Sultanate and formed his own Dynasty, the Ayyubids (named for his father).
Understanding that there are repeating cycles of history within the long stretch of history, the following simply focuses on obvious examples, beginning at Daniel 11:9 onward.
“So the king of the south shall come into his kingdom, and [then] shall return into his own land.”
At the death of the Seljuk ruler in Anatolia Saladin took the opportunity to expand into Syria as sole master of the Middle East. At the height of his power, he ruled a unified Muslim region stretching from Egypt to Arabia. He was successful at uniting the Muslim sects against their common enemy, the Christians, and wresting Jerusalem from the Christians in September of 1187.
Back from the Third Crusade Richard the Lionheart would describe him in glowing terms. “His military genius and treatment of Christian prisoners has Saladin as one of the finest knights of his generation, the true embodiment of chivalry.”
“But his sons shall be stirred up, and shall assemble a multitude of great forces: and one shall certainly come, and overflow, and pass through: then shall he return, and be stirred up, even to his fortress.
At Saladin’s death in 1193, like Alexander he divided his empire among his relations. His sons were “stirred up” by a power struggle in which Saladin’s brother, al-˓Adil with “a multitude of great forces” emerged triumphant by 1202 and “stirred up” reorganized Saladin’s inheritance in favor of his own family / fortress. With so much stirring of the pot the Ayyubid dynasty faded away and completely disappeared in one lifetime.
And the king of the south shall be moved with choler, and shall come forth and fight with…the king of the north: and he [the king of the north] shall set forth a great multitude; but the multitude shall be given into his [the king of the south’s] hand. And when he [the king of the south] hath taken away the multitude, his heart shall be lifted up;
In 1453 Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire finally achieved to the long-cherished dream of conquering Constantinople. Employing newly invented cannon, the Ottomans breached Constantinople’s ancient land wall. This historic event removed what was once a powerful defense for Christian Europe against Muslim invasion.
“and he [the king of the south, the Ottoman emperor] shall cast down many ten thousands:
The first period of Ottoman history was characterized by almost continuous territorial expansion, during which Ottoman dominion spread out from a small northwestern Anatolian principality to cover most of southeastern Europe and Anatolia. The political, economic, and social institutions of the classical Islamic empires were amalgamated with those inherited from Byzantium and the great Turkish empires of Central Asia and were reestablished in new forms that were to characterize the area into modern times.
In 1453 Mehmet II “the Conqueror”, took Constantinople, the gateway to Europe, and Islam surged into Christendom.
Like conquerors before him, with the taking of the capitol city Mehmet II also claimed the European title Kayser-i Rûm, i.e. Caesar of Rome / Emperor.
All subsequent Sultans of the Ottoman Empire kept Kayser-i Rum as one of their many titles.
The Islamic ruler is absolutely the equivalent of the Christian ruler with the element of religion serving to whip up national support for war between:
- the Christian ruler of the north: European Roman Catholics and their Protestant offspring as well as the Eastern Orthodox Churches much more set in the ancient cultural traditions, and
- the Muslim ruler of the south.
A change in religion from
- Classical Pagan Rome to
- Roman Catholic under Constantine to
- Eastern Orthodox after the Great Schism
- to Islam
didn’t change the identity of the Fourth Empire any more than changing demographics in Texas changes its American identity.
Based on Daniel, the essential identifier of the Fourth Empire is not religion per se, but political control – through religion – of Jerusalem.
At its peak in the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire was one of the biggest military and economic powers in the world, controlling… territory that stretched from the Danube [in the northern king’s domain] to the Nile [in the southern king’s domain], with a powerful military, lucrative commerce, and impressive achievements in fields ranging from architecture to astronomy…
“but he [the Muslim king of the south] shall not be strengthened by it.
the Ottoman Empire succumbed to what most historians describe as a long, slow decline…
only between 5 and 10 percent of its inhabitants could read… the empire had a shortage of well-trained military officers, engineers, clerks, doctors and other professions…
“the king of the south shall be stirred up to battle with a very great and mighty army; but he shall not stand:
Allied with Germany in WWI, in the end the Ottoman empire lost nearly a half a million soldiers, most of them to disease, plus about 3.8 million more who were injured or became ill. In
for they…that feed of the portion of his meat [i.e. his highest ranking government officials] shall destroy him.” (Daniel 11:25-26)
During WWI a military officer rose to power by thwarting the Allied invasion of the Dardanelles and subsequently negotiating independence for a newly formed state of Turkey after the European powers divided up the shattered Ottoman Empire. The last Ottoman Sultan was deposed in 1909 by the revolutionary group calling themselves The Young Turks. He took the name Ata-Turk / Father of the Turks – think Ab-rahim / Father of Many Nations – as the first president of the modern Republic of Turkey. Over the next two decades, Atatürk created a modern state that would grow under his successors.
