According to Muhammad, “The Mahdi is the peacock of all angels and of the dwellers of the heavenly realm, he is dressed and adorned with the cloaks of light.” (Ibin Al-Sabbagh in AlFusul Al-Muhimma, transmitted by Ibin Abbas.)

If we didn’t know any better, we might be convinced that New York Times writer Tim Arango read God’s War on Terror (published in 2008 but took years to complete) before writing his recent article on Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We have been expressing concerns similar to those expressed by Arango with one exception. The Bible beat both of us to it.

Nonetheless, Arango writes:

Sprawling over nearly 50 acres of forest land that was once the private estate of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a new presidential compound has nearly 1,000 rooms, an underground tunnel system and the latest in anti-espionage technology. It is larger than the White House, the Kremlin and Buckingham Palace.

Here is a video of Erdogan’s sprawling Presidential Palace, fit for a peacock:

The lavishness doesn’t end there:

The reported price: nearly $350 million.

Then there is a new high-tech presidential jet (estimated price, $200 million), not to mention the new presidential office in a restored Ottoman-era mansion overlooking the Bosporus, all of which have been acquired to serve the outsized ambitions of one man: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Erdogan has been in power for more than a decade, an Islamist politician and prime minister who was often touted as a role model in the Muslim world for having reconciled his faith with democracy. But these days Mr. Erdogan stands for something quite different, having essentially pulled a Putin. Like Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, it does not matter which position he holds: He is his nation’s paramount leader.

In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.

“He really has both offices, in a lot of ways,” said Steven A. Cook, a Turkey expert and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Mr. Erdogan.

At the beginning of the year, none of this was assured. Still reeling from the sweeping antigovernment demonstrations of the summer of 2013, Mr. Erdogan was confronted with a wide-ranging corruption scandal that targeted him and his inner circle, prompting many analysts to predict the demise of his government.

Instead, he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.

In a recent speech, Mr. Erdogan offered an assessment appealing to his religious Sunni Muslim base — and echoed by militants with the Islamic State — that the Middle East crisis stems from the actions of the British and French after World War I, and the borders drawn between Iraq and Syria under the Sykes-Picot pact. Mr. Erdogan invoked Sykes-Picot saying, “each conflict in this region has been designed a century ago.” He suggested a new plot was underway, and that “journalists, religious men, writers and terrorists” were the collective reincarnation of T.E. Lawrence, the British diplomat and spy immortalized in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”

“It is our duty to explain to the world that there are modern Lawrences who were fooled by a terror organization,” he said, without saying exactly whom he was talking about.

Ahmet Davutoglu, the former foreign minister, is Turkey’s prime minister. But Mr. Erdogan is the one on the phone with President Obama discussing Turkey’s role in combating the Islamic State while the White House has to remind American diplomats to also include Mr. Davutoglu in discussions between the two countries.

Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.

Some have suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO?!

We’ve been screaming it from the rooftops for quite a while (just copy and paste the following into Google: [“Shoebat” “Turkey” “NATO”] and see what comes up).

Next, have a look at the paragraph that’s most heavily in bold above. As was explained – and reiterated by us consistently since – in God’s War on Terror, after WWI the Ottoman Empire in Turkey was dismantled. The Muslim Brotherhood was then founded a few years later with one primary purpose – to resurrect that Ottoman Empire. While Arango doesn’t reference the Brotherhood in his article, he does mention the Sykes-Picot agreement, which is what was put in place after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire that Erdogan has made no bones about wanting to re-establish.

As for the Muslim Brotherhood, it was founded with a 100-year plan to re-establish the Ottoman Caliphate. As we approach the 2020’s, that plan is coming much closer to maturity. The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi was born right about the time of his group’s founding in the 1920’s. He understands that plan all too well. He’s working toward it.

In fact, when ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a Caliphate earlier this year, al-Qaradawi would have none of it; he traveled to Turkey and met with Erdogan.

As Shoebat.com reported, the purpose of that visit was for al-Qaradawi to express solidarity with Erdogan on behalf of the Brotherhood. Al-Qaradawi insisted that al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate was not to be taken seriously because the next Caliphate will be established according to the Brotherhood’s 100-year plan.

If Mr. Arango begins writing about such things, we might really start getting suspicious about where he’s getting his information.

Here is al-Qaradawi praising Erdogan specifically this past August: