Today is Monday; 28th of the Iranian month of Mordad 1398 solar hijri; corresponding to 17th of the Islamic month of Zil-Hijjah 1440 lunar hijri; and August 19, 2019, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

2006 solar years ago, on this day in 14 AD, the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, died in Rome at the age of 77 after a 41-year reign, during which his greatest achievement was conclusion of a treaty with Emperor Farhad IV (Phraates) of Iran’s Parthian Empire that ensured peace in what are now Palestine, Syria, and Turkey; in addition to return of the Roman Eagle Standards lost by Crassus to the Iranians in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. He was also aware of the disastrous defeats suffered by Mark Antony in his campaigns against Iranians. Named Gaius Octavius, he was maternal grandson of the sister of Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, who in his will declared him his adopted son and heir. With Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, he formed a triumvirate to defeat the assassins of Caesar. Following their victory, the triumvirate divided the Roman Republic and ruled as military dictators. The alliance torn apart under the ambitions of its members: Lepidus was driven into exile and stripped of his position, while Antony committed suicide following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Four years later, Octavius declared himself emperor, with the title “Augustus Caesar”, thus ending the Roman Republic. The 8th month of the Julian calendar, was renamed “August” in his honour. Prophet Jesus (AS) flourished in his reign.

1137 lunar years ago, on this day in 303 AH, Ali ibn Abdullah titled Saif od-Dowla (Sword of the State), the founder of the Hamdanid emirate of Aleppo which included northern Syria and western parts of Iraq, was born in Iraq to Abdullah Abi’l-Hayja, the ruler of Mosul. He was the younger brother of Hassan, titled Naser od-Dowla, the ruler of Mosul, and belonged to the Banu Taghlib Arab tribe. The family followed the school of the Prophet's Ahl al-Bayt and was famous for its patronage of scholars. Saif od-Dowla is famous for his military exploits against the Byzantine Empire, and is considered the epitome of the Islamic-Arab chivalrous ideal. He began his career as ruler of Waset in central Iraq and became involved in the power struggles of the Abbasid caliph, who ruled from nearby Baghdad. He realized that greater potential lay to the west, in Syria, then under the dominion of the Ikhshidid Turkic dynasty, which ruled Egypt as well. With the support of the local Banu Kilab tribe, he captured Aleppo and soon took Damascus. He then marched toward Egypt and took Ramla, but was unable to make further progress. His most important concern was with the Byzantine Empire. Almost every year he would mount raids into Asia Minor (western Turkey), and won a great victory near Germanikeia, killing Patrikios Leo Maleinos. He surrounded himself with prominent intellectual figures such as the celebrated Iranian-Islamic philosopher, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, and noted poets, including al-Mutanabbi and Abu Firas Hamdani – the latter was his cousin and brother-in-law and wrote the famous ode “ar-Rumiyaat” while in Byzantine captivity. Saif od-Dowla himself was a poet, and his delicate poem on the rainbow shows high artistic ability.

952 lunar years ago, on this day in 488 AH, the famous Spanish Muslim scholar, Mohammad Ibn Nasr al-Andalusi al-Humaydi, passed away in Baghdad at the age of 68. Born on the Mediterranean island of Majorca in a family from Cordoba (Qurtuba), he was a student of Ibn Abd al-Barr and later of Ibn Hazm, under whose influence he adopted the Zahirite School of jurisprudence, founded by Dawoud ibn Khalaf az-Zahiri of Isfahan (that was widespread among Sunni Muslims in Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Africa and Spain before the Turkic rulers forcibly replaced it with the Hanafi School – also founded by an Iranian, Abu Hanifa, the son of a Zoroastrian convert to Islam from Kabul). Due to persecution of Zahirites in Spain by the Malikites, Humaydi left his homeland for good. Initially, he went to Mecca to perform the Hajj, before traveling to Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and finally settling in Iraq. An outstanding scholar in hadith, history, Arabic grammar and lexicography, he wrote several books. Among his works is the biography of the notables of Islamic Spain, entitled “Jadhwat al-Muqtabis”, which is a mine of information on scholars who frequently travelled between the furthest points of the Islamic east and the west, such as the Iranian polymath, Ziryab who flourished at Cordoba at a time when Christian Europe was in the Dark Ages. Humaydi also wrote “at-Tafsir al-Ghareeb ma fi as-Sahihayn”, which is a linguistic commentary on the two “Sahihs” (canonical works of Sunni Muslims) of the Iranian hadith compilers, Mohammad bin Ismail Bukhari and Muslim Naishapuri.

934 solar years ago, on this day in 1085 AD, the Iranian Shafei jurisprudent and theologian, Ziya od-Din Abdul-Malik ibn Yusuf al-Juwayni, passed away at the age of 57 in Naishapur. He studied Ash’arite theology for several years and taught it to students, but with the establishment of the Seljuq sultanate by Toghril-Beg who was a Mu’atazali Hanafi, he was forbidden to teach it. As a result he left for Hijaz and during his four-year stay in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he came to acquire the epithet of Imam al-Haramayn. Years later, with establishment of the Nizamiya Schools by the famous Iranian minister of the Seljuqs, he was invited to Naishapur and asked to teach Ash’arite theology, though on his deathbed he regretted the time he invested in studying and debating the principles of this Sunni school.

876 solar years ago, on this day in 1153 AD, Baldwin III of the usurper Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem occupied the city of Ascalon (Asqalan in Arabic) in Palestine near Gaza, which was a strong bastion of Egypt’s Fatemid Shi’a Muslim dynasty and a site of pilgrimage, since it had a mausoleum, believed to be the site of burial of the holy head of the Martyr of Karbala, Imam Husain (AS). He marched with a huge army of Christian mercenaries from Europe and began to destroy the surrounding orchards in January.  For five months there were many skirmishes and victories and defeats on both sides. Ascalon was vast and virtually impenetrable; behind its massive walls and gates were determined defenders including Arabs, Iranians, and Berbers. Just when the Crusaders were tired and planning to leave, an accidental fire in one of the towers of Ascalon, made them stay. After bitter fighting the city surrendered, and the Fatemids took away to Cairo for reburial what they considered to be the head of Imam Husain (AS), the grandson of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). Half a century earlier in 1099, the Battle of Ascalon was fought outside the city during the First Crusade and the occupation of Bayt al-Moqaddas by the Crusaders. Although it led to the defeat of the Fatemids, the city’s defenders made of large contingents of Arabs, Iranians, and Berbers, ensured that it remained in Egyptian hands. The fall of Ascalon thus led to the downfall of the Fatemid Dynasty. Amalric succeeded his brother Baldwin as king of the usurper kingdom of Jerusalem in 1162, and led several expeditions from Ascalon into Egypt. The Kurdish adventurer, Salah od-Din Ayyubi, taking advantage of Crusader assaults, imposed himself in Cairo as Prime Minister, and then seized power himself. In 1187, he took Ascalon and in 1191, during the Third Crusade, he demolished the city because of its potential strategic importance to the Christians. It was again occupied by the Crusaders but retaken in 1247 by Egyptian Muslims. In 1270, Baybars, the Turkic Mamluk sultan of Egypt, ordered the citadel and harbour of Ascalon to be destroyed. Ascalon was rebuilt in the 16th century as an Arab town during Ottoman rule. In the British Mandate period over Palestine, it had a large edifice on top of a hill with a fragment of a pillar showing the place where the head of Imam Husain (AS) was supposedly buried. In 1948 Ascalon was seized by the illegal Zionist entity, its name changed to Ashkelon, and its Arab inhabitants driven away from their homes. In July 1950, the shrine was destroyed at the instructions of General Moshe Dayan in accordance with the Israeli policy of erasing all Muslim historical and religious sites.

661 lunar years ago, on this day in 779 AH, Mujahid Shah, the 3rd ruler of the Bahmani Sultanate of the Deccan (southern India) was assassinated at the age of 22 in his capital Gulbarga after a rule of only three years, by his jealous uncle, Daud Shah, who in turn was killed a month later on the orders of his niece Rouh Parwar Agha (sister of the deceased Mujahid Shah) and replaced by her younger brother, Mohammad Shah II. The court language of the Bahmanis, who traced their origin to the pre-Islamic Iranian hero Bahman, was Persian, and they promoted Iranian culture, art and architecture.

357 solar years ago, on this day in 1662 AD, French author and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, the innovator of calculation devices, died at the age of 61. In the last years of his life, he wrote a book on Christianity titled “Provincial Letters”.

165 solar years ago, on this day in 1854 AD, the First Sioux War began when US soldiers killed Lakota chief ‘Conquering Bear’. These wars were part of the genocidal policies to exterminate the native Amerindians, and lasted till 1891, resulting in the massacre of thousands of ‘Red Indians’.

148 solar years ago, on this day in 1871 AD, American aviator Orville Wright, who with his elder brother Wilbur, invented the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight (17 Dec 1903), was born in Dayton, Ohio. The history of aviation is as old as Man’s quest to fly since antiquity. The earliest known record is of Yuan Huangtou, a Chinese prince, who was briefly airborne by tying himself to a kite. In the heyday of Islamic science and civilization, there are records pertaining to the Spanish Muslim polymath, Abbas ibn Firnas, who flew from Jabal al-Arus Hill by employing a rudimentary glider in the 9th century AD – a thousand years before the airplane was invented.

143 solar years ago, on this day in 1876 AD, British Assyriologist, George Smith, died at the age of 36 of dysentery in Syria, on his way home from a 3rd trip to Mesopotamia (Iraq). In 1874, Smith had completed the translation of the complete Epic of Gilgamesh – the Chaldaean account of the Great Flood – one of the oldest-known written works of literature which he discovered at Nineveh.

127 solar years ago, on this day in 1892 AD, prominent Iranian calligrapher, Mirza Reza Kalhor, passed away at the age of 64 in Tehran. Born in Kalhor, near Kermanshah in western Iran, he was an expert in horse riding and archery before coming to Tehran and learning the art of calligraphy from Mirza Mohammad Khwansari, whom he outshone. His fame attracted the attention of the Qajarid king, Nasser od-Din Shah, who appointed him as his tutor in calligraphy. Kalhor who never took advantage of his ties with the royal court, led a simple life by subsisting from the earnings he received in copying books and manuscripts.

124 solar years ago, on this day in 1895 AD, China was forced to handover the Island of Formosa to Japan as per the Shimonoski Treaty. Known as Taiwan today, the island returned to Chinese sovereignty as per decisions of the Potsdam Conference following Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1949, when the communists emerged victorious in the Chinese civil war the pro-western former government authorities fled Beijing to Taiwan and with US meddling declared the island independent. Beijing insists on the return of Taiwan to mainland China.

100 solar years ago, on this day in 1919 AD, the British occupation of Afghanistan ended as per the Treaty of Rawalpindi, following the end of the 3rd Anglo-Afghan war. The term Afghanistan was used for the first time in 1857 as official name of a country, although the local tribes were known as 'Afghans' for centuries. The first independent Afghan state was set up in 1747 by Ahmad Khan Durrani, an ethnic Pashtun general of Nader Shah Afshar of Iran, who on the latter's death seized control of the eastern parts of Iranian Khorasan and the Pashto-speaking regions of the Moghal Empire of India, as well as the Punjab, to declare himself king. British attempts to meddle in Afghanistan led to the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-to-1842. Thereafter, a seesaw struggle ensued between the two sides with the British aggressively pushing their colonial policies in Kabul through threats, diplomacy, and wars, until formal independence in 1919. Afghanistan, which is under US occupation for the past 17 years, was throughout history part of successive Persian empires, while its eastern parts were occasionally under Indian rule. Today it shares borders with Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and covers an area of 652,000 sq km.

96 solar years ago, on this day in 1923 AD, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, French-Italian sociologist, economist and philosopher, died at the age of 75. In 1906 he made the famous observation that 20% of the population owned 80% of the property in Italy. This was later generalized by Joseph M. Juran and others into the so-called Pareto principle – also termed the 80-20 rule. Pareto also popularized the term "elite" in social analysis.

89 solar years ago, on this day in 1930 AD, Russian orientalist, Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold also known as Wilhelm Barthold, died at the age of 61. He specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples (Turkology). He was the first to publish obscure information from the early Arab historians on Kievan Rus, which later emerged as Russia. He also edited several scholarly journals of Muslim studies, and contributed extensively to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Bartold wrote three authoritative monographs on the history of Islam, namely, Islam (1918), Muslim Culture (1918) and The Muslim World (1922). He also contributed to the development of Cyrillic writing for the Muslim countries of Central Asia. Most of his writings were translated in English, Arabic, and Persian. Bartold's collected works were reprinted in 9 volumes between 1963 and 1977, and whilst Soviet editors added footnotes deploring his 'bourgeois' attitudes, his prestige was such that the text was left uncensored, despite not conforming to a Marxist interpretation of history. His works include: “Ulugh-Beg”, “Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion”, “Mussalman Culture”, "A Short History of Turkestan", and “An Historical Geography of Iran”.

66 solar years ago, on this day in 1953 AD, the US staged a coup in Iran to overthrow the legal government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq in retaliation for nationalization of the oil industry and returned to the Peacock Throne the fugitive British-installed Pahlavi potentate, Mohammad Reza. The coup plotters mobilized a number of thugs to take to the streets and attack government centres with the assistance of mercenaries in the security forces. General Fazlollah Zahedi, a US pawn, announced the collapse of the Mosaddeq administration and his own appointment as the premier through the radio network. The consequence of the coup was Washington’s total domination over Iran’s sources, which continued until the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

44 lunar years ago, on this day in 1396 AH, Ayatollah Aqa Rahim Arbab Isfahani passed away in his hometown Isfahan at the age of 99. He was a student of leading ulema of the Isfahan seminary such as Abu’l-Ma’ali Kalbasi, Akhund Mullah Mohammad Kashi, and the Gnostic, Mirza Jahangir Khan Qashqai. He was a fellow student with Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Boroujerdi.

41 solar years ago, on this day in 1978 AD, an arson attack on Cinema Rex in Abadan, southwestern Iran by SAVAK, the notorious state-terrorism tool of the Pahlavi regime, resulted in a massive blaze that burned to death beyond recognition at least 470 Iranian men and women. Agents of the Shah locked the doors and doused the place with gasoline before setting it on fire in a vain bid to put the blame on the Iranian Muslim people during the events leading to the triumph of the Islamic Revolution. The crime shocked the world. The Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA) from his exile in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, issued a letter of condolences that read: “To all respected people of Abadan. The highly tragic news of burning-to-death of hundreds of our compatriots by that calculated state (Pahlavi regime) has resulted in severe sorrow and regret. I can’t imagine any Muslim, and even a human being, would commit such a violent crime except for those who are accustomed to brutality and savagery by nature…”

35 solar years ago, on this day in 1984 AD, prominent Iranian physician and bacteriologist, Mrs Azar Andami, passed away at the age of 58. Born in Rasht, she dedicated her life to the promotion of medical sciences in Iran, and won international acclaim. A crater on Venus has been named in her honour as “Andami” by the International Astronomers Union (IAU).

30 lunar years ago, on this day in 1410 AH, the great scholar, Ayatollah Seyyed Morteza Ferouzabadi, passed away at the age of 81. Born in holy Najaf, he studied under such leading scholars as Seyyed Abu’l-Hassan Isfahani and Seyyed Ali Qazi Tabatabai. An avid researcher who wrote several books, his most important work is titled “Faza’el al-Khamsa min as-Sihah as-Sitta”. As the title suggests, in this authoritative 3-volume book, he has extracted from the six canonical Sunni hadith books the unsurpassable merits of the Five Peerless Personalities, that is, Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), Imam Ali (AS), Hazrat Fatema Zahra (SA), Imam Hasan (AS) and Imam Husain (AS). Another of his well-researched work is titled “as-Saba’ min as-Salaf” on the dubious characteristics of seven of the leading Salaf or early converts, who are mistakenly revered by certain Muslim sects despite having caused the greatest sedition in Islam.

28 solar years ago, on this day in 1991 AD, a group of the Soviet Union’s army commanders staged a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev to end his policy of reforms, while he was holidaying in the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. However, Boris Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Federation, foiled the coup. The ensuring developments speeded up the end of the suffocating, anti-religious and totalitarian Soviet Union in December 1991 and led to the emergence as independent republics of many of the lands occupied by Czarist Russia.

AS/SS