"The young Turks," Iran, Egypt--do they want to restore Caliphate?

Submitted by Richard Stoecker (United States), Dec 27, 2012 at 08:07

The young Turks, radical Islam and Caliphate restoration

Once before a family dinner with my brother and his wife, in which a Turkish student my brother was working with was going to be a guest, my sister-in-law told me not to talk about religion, but I had heard that Turkey was more secularist than other countries and was curious. My sister-in-law said she didn't want anybody "dying for his faith" at this friendly dinner.

Without meaning to, I asked the guest if a visitor to Turkey could find hot dogs and whiskey if he sought them. This was a hypothetical question I hadn't intended to ask. I said it before I had time to check myself. The visitor replied yes.

As I see the Turks helping the rebels in Syria, Islamists having taken over in Egypt, Islamists fighting to gain a foothold in Iraq, and the Arab Spring having turned into an advance of radical Islam throughout the Middle East, I ask myself will all of this result in an attempted restoration of the Caliphate which Muslims have not had since the fall of the Ottoman Empire?

The kind of Caliphate that might exist today would be more of a threat to the U.S. than the Ottoman Empire, simply because radical Islam hs been on the rise and the weapons held today by Islamists are more deadly than those of the past.

We need to hope for the best--a continuation of hot dogs and whiskey in Turkey--and plan for the worst.

Richard Stoecker

Sparta, MO

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