Today is Tuesday; 11th of the Iranian month of Aban 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 1st of the Islamic month of Safar 1438 lunar hijri; and November 1, 2016, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1401 lunar years ago, on this day in 37 AH, the Siffin War was started by the Omayyad rebel, Mu’awiyah ibn Abu Sufyan, as a result of his refusal to step down, following his dismissal from the governorship of the Province of Syria by the Prophet’s First Infallible Successor, Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb (AS). The war that lasted four months was fought in the region called Siffin, besides the River Euphrates in what is now the Reqqa District in Syria, a short distance from the city of Aleppo. In the final battle of the Siffin War, when Mu’awiyah was on the verge of defeat, his comrade-in-crimes, Amr Ibn al-Aas, ordered the Omayyad troops to raise on spear-points, what he claimed to be copies of the holy Qur’an, in order to deceive the people and sue for peace. Despite the warnings of Imam Ali (AS), many among his forces were deceived and refused to continue the battle against the demoralized enemy troops. These gullible people forced the Imam to enter into arbitration with Mu’awiyah, and when the result turned out against their nefarious desires, they openly rebelled against the Prophet’s rightful successor. These misled people called Khwarej or renegades are considered outside the pale of Islam. It is an irony of Islamic history that Mu’awiyah, who had reluctantly accepted Islam to save his life at the fall of Mecca to Muslims two years before the passing away of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA); was made governor of the newly conquered Christian majority province of Syria. Here, through propaganda and forging of hadith, he built a strong base against the Ahl al-Bayt. After the martyrdom of Imam Ali (AS), he seized the caliphate from Imam Hasan Mojtaba (AS) through deceit, thus laying the groundwork for the Godless Omayyad Dynasty that terrorized Muslims for 91 years.

1377 lunar years ago, on this day in 61 AH, some 20 days after the heartrending tragedy of Karbala, the captive children and womenfolk of the Prophet’s Household, along with the heads of Imam Husain (AS) and the other martyrs, mounted on spear-points, were dragged in fetters to the court of the Godless Yazid Ibn Mu’awiyah in Damascus. The Omayyads decorated the bazaars and streets to mock at the family of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). They celebrated the occasion as a day of festivity. Nonetheless, despite the severe sufferings, the noble captives, including the Hazrat Ruqayya (SA), the less-than-four-year daughter of Imam Husain (AS), bore themselves with dignity. Yazid rejoiced, saying he had avenged the blood of his infidel ancestors, killed in the battles they had imposed on the Prophet at Badr and Ohad. The Imam’s sister, Hazrat Zainab (SA) and the Imam’s son and successor, Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS), delivered memorable sermons at Yazid’s court and the Great Mosque, to expose Omayyad blasphemy against the Prophet's grandson and Ahl al-Bayt. The conscience of the Syrian people was thus aroused, alarming Yazid and making him release the noble captives.

1251 lunar years ago, on this day in 187 AH, the vizier, Ja’far Ibn Yahya Barmaki was killed by his own boon companion, the crafty tyrant, Haroun Rasheed, who styled himself as the 5th caliph of the usurper Abbasid regime. Haroun imprisoned other members of the family, thus ending the over 55-year domination of the Barmakids, who were of Iranian origin from Balkh, and who after helping the Abbasids to usurp the caliphate, had for three generations headed administrative affairs. Their downfall was because of court intrigues by fellow Iranian commanders from Khorasan.

802 solar years ago, on this day in 1214 AD the important port city of Sinope on the northern-most edge of Anatolia on the Black Sea coast, surrendered to the Seljuq Turks led by Sultan Kaykavus, who defeated and captured King Alexios of Trebizond. It was a strategic victory that severed the link between the Christian kingdom of Trebizond and the Byzantine Empire, enabling the Muslims to complete the conquest of what is now Turkey. In ancient times, Sinope had been a battleground between Persians on one side, and the Greeks and Romans on the other. From 281 to 62 BC, it was part of the kingdom of Pontus (of Iranian origin), whose greatest ruler was Mithridates VI (Persian Mithradatha or "Gift of Mithra"), who during his 57-year reign, was one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable and successful enemies, during what are known as the Mithridatic Wars. Over three centuries after the Roman occupation Sinope was Christianized. The first time Sinope encountered Muslims was a combined force of Turks, Persians, and Arabs, dispatched by Abbasid Baghdad in 858. In 1081 it was captured by armies of the Isfahan-based Great Seljuq Empire in the reign of Malik Shah. After 1265, Sinope became home to two successive independent emirates the Pervane and the Jandarids, following fall of the Persianized Seljuqs. The Ottoman Sultan Mohammad II forced Ismail, the last emir of Sinope to surrender in late June 1461 without a fight.

350 solar years ago, on this day in 1666 AD, Sam Mirza was crowned as the 8th Emperor of the Safavid Dynasty of Iran, with the title Shah Safi II, after the traditional 7 days of mourning for his father, Shah Abbas II. His mother was a Circassian, and being brought up in the harem he had little experience of the world outside. He also suffered from poor health. The first year of his reign was markedly unsuccessful. A series of natural disasters, combined with devastating raids by the Cossack Stenka Razin on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, convinced court astrologers that the coronation had taken place at the wrong time. The ceremony was repeated on March 20, 1667, with the Shah changing his title to Suleiman I. He had little interest in administrative affairs, and left political decision-making to his grand viziers, whose power increased during his long reign of 28 years. As a result, corruption became widespread and discipline in the army was dangerously lax. He made no attempt to exploit the weakness of Safavid Iran’s traditional rival, the Ottoman Empire after the Turks suffered a severe defeat at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. During his reign, Iran also suffered raids by the Uzbeks and Kalmyks. He was succeeded by his elder son, Sultan Hussain, a pious person.

261 solar years ago, on this day in 1755 AD, a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami destroyed Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, killing almost ninety thousand people. Heavy damage resulted from ensuing fires and tsunami flooding across the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco killing thousands of people.

195 solar years ago, on this day in 1821 AD, Panama was annexed to Columbia following its liberation from Spanish colonial rule. Panama was seized by Spain in the year 1501, and following the discovery of gold mines in this country, the Americans interfered to loot this region. Finally, in 1903, struggles of the people of Panama bore fruit and this land gained its independence. The Republic of Panama, spread over 77,082 sq km, is located in southern Central America. The Panama Canal passes through this country connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

132 solar years ago, on this day in 1884 AD, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted universally at a meeting of the International Meridian Conference in Washington, USA. Subsequently the International Date Line was drawn up and 24 time zones created. It is commonly used in practice to refer to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Greenwich Village, located on the 0 Latitude, lies some ten km east of London.

98 solar years ago, on this day in 1918 AD, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated following its defeat in World War I, resulting in the emergence of Austria and Hungary as two independent states in Central Europe. Austria and Hungary respectively cover almost 84,000 sq km and 93,000 sq km.

88 solar years ago, on this day in 1928 AD, President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, took another anti-Islamic step in order to sever links between Turkish Muslims and their rich culture, by passing a law for forced adoption of the Latin Alphabet to replace the traditional Arabicized Persian Alphabet of the Turkish language. He set the 1^st of January 1929 as the deadline to switch to the new script or face penalties. Ataturk, who had earlier replaced the shari’a law with Swiss-Italian civil code, banned recitation of the holy Qur’an on the radio, prohibited the Azaan or call to the daily prayers from mosques, turned Sufi hospices, like the Iranian Gnostic poet Mowlana Roumi’s mausoleum in Konya into museums, forced the people to adopt European dress, and unveiled Turkish women, intended to deprive the coming generations of familiarity with the holy Qur’an, hadith and Ottoman history. The earliest known Turkish alphabet was the pre-Islamic Orkhon script used by the Turks in their original homeland on the Mongolian-Chinese borders. After conversion to Islam and their influx into the Iranian Plateau and Anatolia, Turkic tribes adopted the Arabicized Persian script and used it for over a thousand years. It was well suited to write Ottoman Turkish which incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Meanwhile, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Soviets replaced the Arabicized Persian script of the various Turkic languages with the Cyrillic script.

81 solar years ago, on this day in 1935 AD, Palestinian author and thinker, Edward Sa’eed, was born in a Christian family in the city of Bayt al-Moqaddas. He left for the US at the age of 17 for higher studies and obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. A relentless supporter of the Palestinian cause, he enlightened the international community about the oppression of the Palestinian people by the illegal Zionist entity. He was elected to the Palestine National Parliament in 1977, but resigned in 1991 in protest to the compromise with Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization. He authored several books including “Culture and Imperialism”, “The Politics of Dispossession”, and “Covering Islam”. In his most important book “Orientalism”, he describes how Oriental scholars have turned into tools of Western colonialists to justify the looting of the wealth of Eastern nations by Western colonial states. He died in the US in 2003.

65 solar years ago, on this day in 1951 AD, during Operation Buster-Jangle in Nevada, the US government deliberately exposed six thousand five hundred American soldiers to 'Desert Rock' atomic explosions, as a live field test to determine radiation effects on humans, without informing them that they were being treated as laboratory animals.

64 solar years ago, on this day in 1952 AD, the first US test of a thermonuclear device, a hydrogen bomb dubbed “Mike,” was carried out at Eniwetok Atholl in the Pacific, 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. It exploded with a blinding white fireball more than three miles across, completely obliterating Elugelab and leaving an underwater crater – 6240-ft wide and 164-ft deep – in the atoll where an island had once been. An estimated eighty million tons of soil were lifted into the air by the blast. It was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb the US had criminally dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and a blast greater than all the explosives used during World War 2. The mushroom cloud rose to 135,000 ft (the top of the stratosphere) and eventually spread to 1000 miles wide. Within nine months, the Soviet Union tested its own hydrogen bomb, as part of the balance of terror between the two dangerously-armed nuclear powers.

62 solar years ago, on this day in 1954 AD, with the establishment of the Algerian Liberation Movement, the battle for independence from French colonial rule started. France had occupied Algeria in 1830 after defeating the Ottoman Turks. The Algerian people were never happy with French rule and there were sporadic uprisings until the establishment of the full-fledged liberation movement after World War 2, especially, when Algerians came to know about the plan being drafted in Paris to annex their country to France. Finally, in 1962, the struggles of the Algerian Muslims bore fruit, after the death of a million people, and the French troops were forced to pull out of Algeria. Ahmed bin Bella, was elected as the first Algerian president, and three years later was overthrown in a coup by Defence Minister Colonel Houari Bo-Mohiyeddin. Algeria is the largest country in Africa, the Arab World and the littoral states of the Mediterranean Sea. It is also the tenth-largest country in the world. It is bordered in the northeast by Tunisia, in the east by Libya, in the west by Morocco, in the southwest by Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Mali, in the southeast by Niger, and in the north by the Mediterranean Sea. Algeria's size is almost 2.4 million square km with an estimated population of around 40 million.

53 solar years ago, on this day in 1963 AD, the Pahlavi regime executed Tayyeb Haaj Rezaie. Born in 1901 in Tehran, he had supported the end of the corrupt Qajarid dynasty and the coming of the Pahlavis, but soon became disillusioned with this oppressive British-installed regime and its anti-Islamic policies. As a staunch devotee of the Chief of Martyrs, Imam Husain (AS), he was inspired by the personality of the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA) and became one of the leading activists of the Khordad 15 (June 5) Uprising. He and his brother, Ismail, were arrested by the regime, physically tortured in prison, given death sentence by the kangaroo court, and thus achieved martyrdom. 

3 solar years ago, on this day in 2013 AD, Iran launched its first submarine for tourists in the Persian Gulf waters – an all-Iranian-made undersea vehicle. The submarine, dubbed “Morvarid” (Pearl in Persian), serves tourists in Kish Island.

AS/MG