Today is Tuesday; 23rd of the Iranian month of Azar 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 13th of the Islamic month of Rabi al-Awwal 1438 lunar hijri; and December 13, 2016, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1306 lunar years ago, on this day in 132 AH, Abu'l-Abbas Abdullah ibn Mohammad as-Saffah, formally styled himself as caliph of the new dynasty of the Abbasid usurpers after routing the Omayyad tyrants and exterminating almost all of them in successive battles, culminating in the Battle of Zab. He was called "Saffah" because of the bloodshed he unleashed. He wreaked such a horrible vengeance on the Omayyads that he even dug up the graves of all their caliphs, including Mu'awiyah ibn Abu Sufyan, and burned their bones. He died after some four years and was succeeded by his younger brother, the notorious Mansour Dawanikhi. The Abbasids based their dubious claim to the caliphate on their descent from Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttaleb, an uncle of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). The main reason for their attracting of people's support against the Omayyads – chiefly of the Iranians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Hijazis, and Egyptians – was their deceptive slogan of returning the political rule of the Islamic realm to the Prophet's progeny the Ahl al-Bayt. This happened in the era of Imam Ja'far as-Sadeq (AS), the 6^th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). But once the Abbasids consolidated their power, they turned against the Prophet's progeny and indulged in the same cruel acts, imprisoning, torturing and martyring many of these noble descendants, including 6 of the Infallible Imams.

1148 lunar years ago, on this day in 290 AH, the prominent scholar, jurist, and judge, Qazi Abul-Hassan Jurjani was born. He served as chief judge of the city of Rayy and its surroundings, which today are the southern suburbs of Tehran. He died in Naishapour, in Khorasan in 366 AH and his body was taken for burial to his native Jurjan, which today is known as Gorgan in northern Iran near the Caspian Sea. He authored several books including an exegesis on the holy Qur'an and a critical assessment of history titled "Tahzib at-Tarikh".

967 solar years ago, on this day in 1048 AD, the Iranian Islamic multi-sided genius, Abu Rayhan Mohammad Ibn Ahmad al-Birouni, passed away at the age of 78 in Ghazni. He was born in the outer district of Kath, the capital of Khwarezm in Central Asia. The word Birouni means "outer" in Persian and hence his surname. His first twenty-five years were spent in Khwarezm where he studied jurisprudence, theology, grammar, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and other sciences. His native tongue was Khwarezmian, an Iranian language that died out with the Turkification of Central Asia. He also distinguished himself as a geographer, historian, chronologist and linguist, and is considered an impartial writer on customs and creeds of various nations. While in Mazandaran at the Ziyarid court, he wrote his first important work: “al-Asaar al-Baqiyya an-al-Qoroun al-Khaliyya” (Chronology of Ancient nations and Vestiges of the Past). With the conquest of the region by Mahmoud Ghaznavi he became court astrologer and accompanied the Turkish Sultan on his invasions of India, where he lived for several years and learned the Sanskrit language, in addition to becoming familiar with various aspects about India – the result of which was the highly analytical work in Arabic “Kitab Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind”. Of the more than hundred books written by him, some 65 percent are devoted to astronomy, mathematics, and related subjects like geography and geology. In physics, he introduced experimental scientific methods, and unified statics and dynamics into the science of mechanics, while combining the fields of hydrostatics with dynamics to create hydrodynamics. Birouni also devised his own method of determining the radius of the earth by means of the observation of the height of a mountain and carried it out at Nandana in India. Several centuries before Copernicus and Galileo at a time when Christian Europe was immersed in the dark ages, Birouni, who adhered to the School of the Ahl al-Bayt of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), has stated in his works that the earth is round and spherical. In mineralogy, this Iranian Muslim genius determined the specific density of several metals and minerals with remarkable precision. He wrote almost all his works in Arabic except for “Kitab at-Tafhim”, which is in Persian, and in which he has scientifically proven the movement of the earth around the sun and the force of gravity.

812 solar years ago, on this day in 1204 AD, the Jewish-Arabic scholar, philosopher and physician, Abu Imran Musa bin Maimoun (called Maimonides by the West) died in Egypt near Cairo at the age of 65. He was born in Cordoba, in Islamic Spain and flourished during the reign of the Almoravid Dynasty. After leaving Spain, he lived for several years in Morocco, before settling in Egypt. He wrote extensively in both Arabic and Hebrew and this is firm proof that at time when Jews were persecuted and massacred in Christian Europe, they enjoyed freedom in the Islamic World.

765 solar years ago, on this day in 1250 AD, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, died at the age of 56 after a 30-year reign. An ethnic German, residing in Sicily with his capital at Palermo, which still had Muslim culture and a sizeable Muslim population, at his coronation, he said to have worn the red silk mantle bearing an Arabic inscription that had been crafted during the reign of Roger II, indicating the date 528 AH of the Islamic calendar. It incorporated a generic benediction (du’a), wishing the wearer “vast prosperity, great generosity, high splendour, fame, magnificent endowments, and the fulfillment of wishes and hopes. This robe is housed in the Schatzkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Fredrick was a multilingual man of learning, who was well versed in Arabic, and interacted with learned Muslims. Since scholarly knowledge played an important role at the courts of Muslim rulers, the questions Frederick sent to Muslim scholars included optical phenomena like the curving of objects in water. The Pope and the Church were hostile to him because of his religious tolerance, at times excommunicating him. On being crowned, he settled some 60,000 Sicilian Muslims in southern Italy – 20,000 in Lucera (Lugherah in Arabic), 30,000 in Apulia and its surroundings, and the rest in Stornara, Casal Monte Saraceno, Castel Saraceno and Campania. These included Iranians of Sicily as well, in particular, the Khwarizmi community of Palermo. The Muslim population of southern Italy, along with local converts from Christianity as well as descendants of Arabs and Berbers who had settled centuries earlier, thrived for another 80 years, till their towns and cities were sacked in 1300 by Charles II of Naples, who expelled (to Albania), forcibly converted to Christianity and sold into slavery most of the population, besides turning mosques into churches. Fredrick II also enlisted Muslims into his personal bodyguards, as they had the advantage of immunity from papal excommunication, and with their help he kept a menagerie which had not only monkeys and camels, but also a giraffe and an elephant. In February 1229, Fredrick II took part in the 6^th Crusade to Palestine to annul papal excommunication, and through a treaty with the Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamel, took control of Bayt al-Moqaddas (Jerusalem), Bethlehem and Nazareth, that stipulated Muslim control of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. In 1244, he lost Bayt al-Moqaddas and other towns that were liberated by the Muslims including the powerful Iranian Khwarazmian clan based in Egypt.

295 solar years ago, on this day in 1721 AD, Alexander Selkirk, Scottish sailor and pirate, who spent more than four years as a castaway after being marooned on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean, died of yellow fever at the age of 45 during a voyage and was buried at sea. By the time he was rescued, he had become adept at hunting and making use of the resources he found on the island. His story of survival was widely publicised when he returned home, and partly became a source of inspiration for the writer Daniel Defoe's fictional character Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk spent four years stranded on the Juan Fernandez Islands – he lived on Mas-a-Tierra [Closer to Land] which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. It  is interesting to note that Defoe’s novel was also inspired by the Latin/English translation of the book “Hayy ibn Yaqdhan” by the Spanish Muslim polymath Ibn Tufail, who drew the name of the tale and most of its characters from an earlier work by the Iranian Islamic multi-sided genius, Abu Ali Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

262 solar years ago, on this day in 1754 AD, Mahmud I, Ottoman sultan (born 1696) Placed on the throne by the Albanian admiral Khalil who deposed his uncle Ahmad III in 1730, died after a reign of 24 years, during which he was engaged in fruitless wars in Europe and on the western borders of Iran, while Nader Shah Afshar was on his expedition to India. On 24 November 1731, Khalil was strangled by the sultan's order and 7,000 of those who had supported him were also put to death.

232 solar years ago, on this day in 1784 AD, Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer, best known for “The Dictionary of the English Language”, died at the age of 75. He made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. After nine years of efforts, his work titled “A Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1755. It had a far-reaching effect on modern English, and until the completion of the “Oxford English Dictionary”150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. He famously said: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” (to which had Ambrose Bierce replied, “I beg to submit that it is the first”). Johnson, an antagonist of slavery, left behind an annuity and much of his personal property to his black valet, Francis Barber.

146 solar years ago, on this day in 1870 AD, France invaded West Africa. During the decade-long war, thousands of French soldiers were killed and wounded, while there is no mention of the greater number of African people killed by the French occupiers. Military technology enabled the French to subdue and occupy Senegal, Guinea, and Ivory Coast by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of black people. These countries remained under French colonial rule till the second half of the 20^th century.

113 solar years ago, on this day in 1903 AD, the renowned Iranian physician and researcher, Dr. Mahmoud Najmabadi, was born. In addition to his medical practice, he was a university lecturer, keenly interested in Islamic-Iranian medicine. He wrote several books to introduce the well-known physicians of Iran and the Islamic World, such as Mohammad ibn Zakariya Razi, and translated some of their books. He published 45 books and journals, including “A Glance at Islamic Medicine”; “History of Medicine in Iran”; and “Mohammad Zakariya Razi: Iranian Physician, Chemist and Philosopher.”

112 solar years ago, on this day in 1904 AD, several ulema and freedom-seekers of Tehran decided to leave the Iranian capital en masse in protest to the injustices of the Qajarid king, Mohammad Ali Shah. Ayatollah Seyyed Abdullah Bahbahani, and Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Tabatabai, the pioneers of Iran’s Constitutional Movement, migrated to the holy city of Qom, along with several of their followers. The condition set for their return was implementation of Islamic rules and regulations across Iran and establishment of the Ministry of Justice.

84 solar years ago, on this day in 1932 AD, the Source of Emulation, Ayatollah Shaikh Abdullah Mamaqani, passed away at the age of 59. Born in holy Najaf to the great scholar Ayatollah Mohammad Hassan Mamaqani, who personally groomed him, he in turn groomed many scholars and wrote several books, including the 3-volume “Tanqih al-Maqal fi Ilm ar-Rijal”, “Miqyas al-Hidaya fi Ilm ad-Daraya”, and “al-Fawa’ed at-Tibbiyya”. His famous Will to his sons has been translated into several languages, including English. It contains important points on the Five Fundamentals of Faith (Usoul Din), as well as the benefits of “Ziyarah” to the shrines of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) and the Infallible Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, and the importance of “Azadari” or mourning ceremonies for the Martyr of Karbala, Imam Husain (AS).

79 solar years ago, on this day in 1937 AD, the Nanjing Massacre took place in China, when Japanese occupation troops began carrying out several weeks of mass rape and barbaric killing of civilians after the fall of Nanjing. Imperial Japan, which was involved in World War 2, has a bleak, black and bloody record of occupying Southeast Asian countries and mercilessly massacring fellow Buddhists, including those of the Korean Peninsula.

53 solar years ago, on this day in 1963 AD, the prominent Egyptian scholar and dean of al-Azhar, Sheikh Mahmoud Shaltut, passed away at the age of 70. A disciple of the school of thought of Sheikh Mohammad Abduh, the student of the famous Iranian pan-Islamist reformer, Seyyed Jamal od-Din Asadabadi, after assuming chairmanship of al-Azhar in 1958, he announced his vision for reform. Shaltut attempted to prove that the shari’a law was not an obstacle to modern society, but rather a guide through the changes modern society brings with it. He was fervently determined to see al-Azhar achieve greater independence from the state’s control. Sheikh Shaltut is remembered for encouraging harmonious interactions between the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. He maintained close relations with Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Borujerdi and zealously campaigned for open discussion and cooperation between the two branches of Islam. Shaltut issued a fatwa declaring the Ja’fari or Twelver Shi’a School, as a legally valid Islamic system of jurisprudence, permissible to any Muslim adhering and practicing it for fulfillment of religious rites. This fatwa is still seen as a symbol of hope for those aspiring for reconciliation between the two main branches of Islam.

20 lunar years ago, on this day in 1418 AH, the prominent jurisprudent, Ayatollah Seyyed Reza Baha od-Dini, passed away in his hometown Qom at the age of 92 and was laid to rest in the holy mausoleum of Hazrat Ma’souma (SA), the daughter of Imam Musa Kazem (AS), the 7^th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (blessings of God upon him and his progeny). A product of the Qom seminary, his teachers included Shaikh Abdul-Karim Ha'iri Yazdi, Seyyed Mohammad Hojjat Kohkamari, Seyyed Mohammad Taqi Khwansari, Seyyed Sadr od-Din Sadr, and Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Boroujerdi. For over twenty years, Ayatollah Baha od-Dini taught jurisprudence, Arabic literature and other Islamic sciences at the seminary. Later he was mostly occupied by discussions, private and public classes of moral teachings which lasted until the end of his life. His students include the Ayatollahs Martyr Morteza Motahhari, Ahmad Jannati, Ali Mishkini, Ahmad Azari Qomi, Mohammad Fazel Lankarani, and Martyr Seyyed Mostafa Khomeini. Some of his moral classes and interviews on spiritual cleansing have been published in his two books of “Sulouk Ma’nawi” (Spiritual Conduct) and “Nardiban Asman” (Staircase to the Sky). The Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Seyyed Ali Khamenei in his message of condolences on the passing away of Ayatollah Baha od-Dini, said: “He was a teacher of ethics and the wayfarer towards God. He was the ultimate guide of the self-sacrificing youths at the frontiers during the holy defense and the candle of the gatherings of Basij forces.”

13 solar years ago, on this day in 2003 AD, Saddam, the former Iraqi dictator was caught in his hideout near his hometown Tikrit by Kurds and placed under custody. The repressive Ba’th minority regime was ironically overthrown by its own creators, the US and Britain. The nabbing of the brutal dictator led to euphoria among world people, especially of Iraq, Kuwait, and the Islamic Republic of Iran – victim of the 8-year war he had imposed on the orders of the US. While the world was eager to hear Saddam's confessions of his US-backed crimes against humanity, the Americans kept him under tight control so that he would not be able to admit his close ties with the western regimes. A person of doubtful paternity, Saddam came into the limelight in 1968 following seizure of power by the Ba’th Party through coup. In July 1979, five months after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, he was ordered by his British and US masters to take over as president from General Ahmad Hassan Bakr. During his 24-year reign of terror he massacred millions of Iraq people, both the Shi’ite Arab majority and the Sunni Kurds. This ruthless dictator was finally hanged on 30th December 2006.

AS/SS