The L.A. Times has posted an article about a Muslim evangelist http://www.latimes.com/...
He has 2.6 million fans on facebook.
Amr Kahled is the Arab world's most successful televangelist, a charismatic guide for millions of Muslims.
Later in the article, we learn:
Khaled does not have the religious credentials to issue rulings on what is or is not permitted under Islam. His preaching takes the shape of a conversation that invites, not orders, listeners to follow the tenets of his faith.
A month ago, in my book The Middle East Revolutions (A Framework for Analysis), I predicted that Muslims would soon be experiencing spiritual awakenings just like this one.
In 1905, Evan Roberts was responsible for the Wales Revival. Roberts was a miner who heard God speak to him. Tens of thousands of people came to Roberts' meetings.
Much of the meetings were taken up with spontaneous outbursts and songs from members of the congregation. Roberts said that it was not for him to control the meetings.
The meetings control themselves, or rather the Spirit that is in them controls them.
The Azusa Street Revival of 1906-1909 is where Pentecostalism was born. It began on April 14, 1906, with an African American preacher, William J. Seymour, in Los Angeles, California. William Seymour had gotten his training from six weeks standing outside the doorway (he wasn't white) at a Bible College in Texas.
For 3 and a half years, people of all races and classes crowded into a former stable that held 1500 to hear Seymour preach.
This is also when Fundamentalists got their start.
A hundred years earlier, it was The Second Great Awakening in the United States, the Reveil (Revival) in France and the Netherlands, the Erweckung (Awakening) in Germany and Switzerland.
Peter Cartwright was one of the stars of The Second Great Awakening. He had only a few years of formal schooling - his nickname was “God’s Plowman.” As Cartwright wrote in his autobiography
A Methodist preacher in those days, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony, and some traveling apparatus...
This is also when Mormons got their start.
Take it back another hundred years and we have The First Great Awakening and the Pietist movement in Germany, while in England, Methodists got their start.
I've been working on a book categorizing kinds of revolutions in history for over a decade now (with a one year break for cancer). My entire "corpus" has gone through three complete rewrites and been rejected by numerous publishers and agents because I lack a platform. I'm not well-known.
Recently, after the Middle East revolutions began, I took matters into my own hands and decided to use about 1/4 of my data to put together specific predictions about what we might expect from these revolutions, based on my data.
I put it up on Kindle a month ago for $2.99: The Middle East Revolutions (A Framework for Analysis). http://www.amazon.com/...
There's a free app from Amazon people can download so it can be read on a computer. http://www.amazon.com/...
I have a Ph.D. from Cornell in Government, but that, of course, doesn’t guarantee that I'm not a crank.
Of course, if I'm not, then the book could prove very helpful to anyone wishing to understand what is going on.