Today is Thursday; 10th of the Iranian month of Tir 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 24th of the Islamic month of Ramadhan 1437 lunar hijri; and June 30, 2016, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1435 lunar years ago, on this day in 2 AH, the avowed enemy of Islam, Abu Lahab, died after suffering a blow to his head as a result of rage and anger on learning of the victory of Muslims over the pagan Arabs of Mecca at Badr – the first-ever armed encounter the polytheists imposed on Prophet Mohammad (blessings of God upon him and his progeny). Notorious for his rough manners, he was a step uncle of the Prophet and was married to the equally treacherous Arwa Omm Jameel, the sister of Abu Sufyan, the other archenemy of Islam. On the Prophet’s public proclamation of the message of Islam, he became a sworn enemy of his nephew, and along with his wife, left no stone unturned to harm him. He joined the other infidel Arabs in imposing the 3-year social-economic boycott of the neo Muslim community, and was part of the conspirators, who plotted to murder the Prophet on the Night of Hijrah (migration). Abu Lahab used to raise his hands to curse the Prophet while his wife who took great pride in wearing an ostentatious necklace, would at night strew thorns and prickly plants in the Prophet’s path to injure his feet. God Almighty revealed Surah al-Masad meaning Palm Fibre in condemnation of the wicked husband-and-wife pair. It reads: “Perish the hands of Abu Lahab, and perish he! Neither his wealth availed him, nor what he had earned. Soon he will enter the blazing fire; And his wife [too], the firewood carrier, Or ‘the informer.’ with a rope of palm fibre around her neck.”

1083 lunar years ago, on this day in 354 AH, the famous Arabic poet, Ahmad bin Hassan Kufi, known by his penname “Mutanabbi”, was killed near Baghdad during an encounter with highway brigands at the age of 51. Gifted with sharp intelligence and wittiness, he started writing poetry as a nine-year old. Among the topics he versified were courage, the philosophy of life, and the description of battles. Many of his poems were and still are widely read by Arabic speakers. His great talent earned him respect from many political leaders of his time, and he praised kings and emirs in return for money and gifts. He joined the court of Sayf od-Dowla in Aleppo and during his 9-year stay in Syria versified his most famous poems. There was great rivalry between him and many of the scholars and poets at Sayf od-Dowla's court, including the latter’s cousin and brother-in-law, Abu Firas al-Hamdani. Mutanabbi lost Sayf od-Dowla's favour because of his political ambition to be a governor. He had no other choice but to leave Aleppo for Egypt to join the court of Abu’l-Misk Kafur. Here also he failed in his political ambitions and after his ridiculing of Kafur in satirical odes, he left for Iraq, where he was killed.

727 lunar years ago, on this day in 710 AH, the prominent Iranian physician, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, poet and philosopher, Qotb od-Din Mahmoud Ibn Zia od-Din Masoud Kazerouni, known as Mullah Qotb Shirazi, was born in the southern Iranian city of Kazeroun. He studied medicine under his father, who practiced and taught medicine at the Mozaffari hospital in Shiraz. He also studied the “al-Qanoun fi’t-Tibb” (The Canon of Medicine) of the Iranian-Islamic genius, Abu Ali ibn Sina, along with its commentaries. In particular he read the commentary of Fakhr od-Din Razi on this book and raised questions of his own, resulting in the writing of his own commentary, where he resolved many of the issues of this book, especially in the company of the famous genius of his age, Khwaja Naseer od-Din Tusi, who established the observatory at Maragha in northwestern Iran. In Maragha, he learned other branches of science under the guidance of Naseer od-Din Tusi, who taught him astronomy as well as Ibn Sina’s masterpiece on remarks and admonitions titled “al-Isharaat wa'l-Tanbihaat”. One of the important scientific projects was completion of the new astronomical table or Zij. Qotb od-Din Shirazi subsequently traveled to Khorasan, where he stayed to study under Najm od-Din Katebi Qazvini in the town of Jovayn. Later he journeyed to Qazvin, Isfahan, Baghdad, and Qonya in Anatolia or modern day Turkey, where he studied the “Jam'e al-Osoul” of Ibn Atheer with Sadr od-Din Qonawi. The governor of Qonya made him judge of the cities of Sivas and Malatya, where he compiled “Miftah al-Meftah” on Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and “Ikhtiyaraat al-Mozaffariya” on astronomy. He was sent as envoy by the Ilkhanid ruler of Iran-Iraq, Ahmad Tekudar, to Sayf od-Din Qalawun, the Mamluk ruler of Egypt, where he collected various critiques and commentaries on Ibn Sina’s Qanoun and used them in his commentary on the “Kulliyaat”. The last part of Qotb ad-Din Shirazi's active career was teaching in Syria the “Qanoun” and the “Kitab ash-Shefa” – the philosophical magnum opus of Ibn Sina. He died while on a visit to Tabriz. He wrote in both Arabic and Persian on a wide variety of topics including medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, philosophy and religion. Among his works is “Nihayat al-Idraak fi Dirayaat al-Aflaak” on the movement of planets, and he identified observations by Ibn Sina on the transits of Venus and Mercury, centuries before European scientists.

722 solar years ago, on this day in 1294 AD, following the murder of a Christian boy in Bern, several Jews were executed and the survivors expelled from Switzerland. In the 1620s Jews were banished from Swiss towns, and from 1776, they were allowed to reside only in the two villages of Lengnau and Oberendingen, in what is now the canton of Aargau.

674 solar years ago, on this date in 1342 AD, Zafar Khan, the founder of the Muzaffarid Dynasty of Gujarat, was born in Delhi to Wajih ul-Mulk, who before embracing Islam was a Rajput of the Tanka clan by the name of Sadharan. Wajih ul-Mulk’s sister was married to Sultan Feroze Shah Tughlaq, who in 1391 appointed his wife’s nephew Zafar Khan as governor of the western province of Gujarat. When after the death of Feroze Shah, the subcontinent was invaded by the fearsome Turkic conqueror, Amir Timur in 1398, and the Tughlaq Sultanate collapsed, Zafar Khan declared himself sultan of Gujarat with the title Muzaffar Shah I. He died in 1411 after a 20-year reign. His son, Ahmad Shah I built the city of Ahmadabad as the new capital. The dynasty ruled for almost 200 years, until the conquest of Gujarat by the Mughal Empire. The sultanate reached its peak of expansion under Mahmoud Shah I Begara, reaching east into Malwa and west to the Gulf of Kutch. During the Muzaffarid rule, Ahmadabad grew to become one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world, and the sultans were patrons of a distinctive architecture that blended Islamic elements with Gujarat's indigenous Hindu and Jain architectural traditions. The court language was Persian and the Sultans of Gujarat maintained infrequent ambassadorial relations with Iran.

437 solar years ago, on this day 1579 AD, the prominent Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Mohammad Pasha Sokolovich, was assassinated at the age of 73. A Serb by birth who converted to Islam at an early age he was raised among the special Jan-Nisari Corps. His rapid rise through the ranks of the Ottoman imperial system, eventually brought him positions as Head of the Imperial Guard, High Admiral of the Navy, Governor-General of Rumelia, Third Vizier, Second Vizier, and as Grand Vizier – a position he held for over 14 years under three Sultans: Suleiman, Selim II, and Murad III. In addition to his native Serbo-Croat, he was fluent in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Venetian-Italian. He had taken part in wars against Safavid Iran as head of a force of Serbs and Greeks, but later, due to Shah Tahmasp's diplomacy and proposal of a lasting peace accord, he advised the Ottoman Sultan to accept it. He was a great builder and constructed many mosques, schools, musafer-khanas (inns) and bridges in Istanbul, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Mecca.

108 solar years ago, on this day in 1908 AD, a massive explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Central Siberia in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The explosion (epicentre 60.886°N, 101.894°E), is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5-to-10 km above the Earth's surface. It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history. In 2013, a team of researchers led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published analysis results of micro-samples from a peat bog near the blast epicentre showing fragments possibly of meteoric origin. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 3 to as high as 30 megatons of TNT — roughly equal to the United States' Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb tested on March 1, 1954; about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; and about two-fifths the power of the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba (the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated). The Tunguska explosion knocked down an estimated 80 million trees over an area covering 2,150 square km. It is estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.

96 solar years ago, on this day in 1920 AD, the Iraqi people, led by Ayatollah Mirza Mohammad Taqi Shirazi, rose against the British occupiers. The British after initial defeats resorted to treachery by martyring Ayatollah Shirazi through poisoning and exiling Shaikh Mohammad Hussain Kashef al-Gheta to Iran. They then deprived the Shia Muslim majority of Iraq of representative rule, by installing in Baghdad an imported king – Faisal, the son of the British agent, Sharif Hussain of Hejaz.

82 solar years ago, on this day in 1934 AD, the Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, took place. Also called Operation Hummingbird, the 3-day bloody purge resulted in a series of political murders, including Hitler’s one-time ally Ernst Roehm. Leading figures of the left-wing Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party, along with its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were murdered, as were prominent conservative anti-Nazis (such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923). Hitler used the purge to attack or eliminate critics of his new regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, as well as to settle scores with old enemies. At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds, and more than a thousand perceived opponents were arrested. The purge strengthened and consolidated the support of the Reichswehr for Hitler. It also provided a legal grounding for the Nazi regime, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. The Night of the Long Knives was a turning point for the German government. It established Hitler as "the supreme judge of the German people," as he put it in his July 13, 1934 speech to the Reichstag.

72 solar years ago, on this day in 1946 AD, the US, within a year of its state terrorism of dropping atomic bombs on the unsuspecting Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a field test to gauge how many million people will be annihilated, criminally dropped an atomic bomb from an airplane over the Bikini Lagoon in the Pacific Ocean onto a target group of 73 ships moved there for the purpose. Named "Able," the explosion caused a 520-foot burst. The Gilliam and Carlisle transport ships were sunk, and 18 other ships were damaged, in addition to the radiation that wiped out marine life in the region. The US is the world’s most dangerously armed nuclear power.

56 solar years ago, on this day in 1960 AD, the Democratic Republic of Congo declared its independence from Belgium, with Joseph Kasavubu, and Patrice Lumumba, elected as president and premier respectively. In 1965, US agent, General Mobutu Sese Seko seized the country through a coup, and started to brutally suppress the people. In 1970, he renamed the country as Zaire and declared himself president for life. In 1997 following his ouster, the country reverted to its original name of Democratic Republic of Congo. It covers an area of 2.3 million sq km, and shares borders with Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, Central Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.

41 solar years ago, on this day in 1975 AD, Ayatollah Seyyed Hassan Musavi Bojnourdi, passed away in holy Najaf, Iraq, at the age of 80. Born in Bojnourd in Khorasan, after initial studies in holy Mashhad, he left for Iraq at the age of 27 to study under such leading scholars of the Islamic seminary of Najaf as Seyyed Abu’l-Hassan Isfahani, Mirza Hussain Na’ini, and Ziya od-Din Iraqi. He reached the status of Ijtehad and soon became an authority in theology, jurisprudence, exegesis of the holy Qur’an, hadith, philosophy and Arabic and Persian literature. As a leading teacher of the Najaf Seminary he was devised a new method for Ijtihad courses, and wrote the book “al-Qawa’ed al-Fiqhiyya” on it. He was in contact with Islamic centres around the world, including Egypt’s al-Azhar Academy.

38 lunar years ago, on this day in 1399 AH, the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), took the decisive step of designating the last Friday of the fasting month of Ramadhan as the Qods International Day in order to mobilize Muslims for liberation of Bayt al-Moqaddas and Palestine. Since then, every year, millions of people in Iran and world countries stage rallies demanding the end of the illegal Zionist entity.

27 solar years ago, on this day in 1989 AD, General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir toppled the elected government of Sadeq al-Mahdi in Sudan, through a coup, and by enticing Islamist leader, Hassan at-Turabi, formed the Sudan National Congress Party to install himself as the executive head of the new government. In 1999 Bashir turned against Turabi and subjected him to frequent bouts of imprisonment lasting several years till 2010, especially after he called on the dictator to surrender himself to the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity in Darfur where Bashir’s brutal Janjaweed militia tortured and massacred thousands of ethnic African Muslims. Bashir, who has betrayed the aspirations of the Sudanese people, has currently sold himself to Saudi Arabia and sent troops to Yemen in the US-Israeli directed campaign against the popular Ansarullah Movement.

25 solar years ago, on this day in 1991 AD, the curtain came down on the apartheid regime of South Africa, with the collapse of white minority rule that since 1948 had brutally discriminated against the black majority.  Although the US, Britain, and several western states maintained close relations with the racist regime; the overwhelming majority of world countries had severed their ties with South Africa. The UN General Assembly issued a total of 52 resolutions against racism and termed it as a crime against mankind and a flagrant violation of human rights. Finally, the struggles of the indigenous black people, led by Nelson Mandela brought the racist regime to its end. On December 1993, the new Constitution based on equality of rights of blacks and whites was ratified by the parliament of South Africa and the next year in April 1994 the first fair and free elections saw Nelson Mandela chosen as president.

AS/ME