Today is Sunday; 15th of the Iranian month of Esfand 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 6th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani 1438 lunar hijri; and March 5, 2017, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

3240 solar years ago, on this day in 1223 BC, the oldest recorded eclipse so far discovered, occurred according to a clay tablet retrieved from the ancient city of Ugarit in Syria. The ancient civilizations of Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq), were scientifically advanced while the Greeks and other Europeans lived in the dark ages as barbarians. In Babylon, according to discoveries, there are regular records of solar and lunar eclipses since the 8th century BC. The first recorded solar eclipse in China is 4th June 180 BC.

1654 solar years ago, on this day in 363 AD, the Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, moved from Antioch with an army of 90,000 to attack the Persian Sassanid Empire, in a campaign which would bring about his own death. After besieging the Iranian capital, Ctesiphon, in Iraq, near what is now Baghdad, he was outflanked by a formidable force led by Emperor Shapur II, who drove out the Roman forces. In the Battle of Samarra Julian was finally killed.

1052 lunar years ago, on this day in 386 AD, the Shafe’i Sufi scholar, Mohammad ibn Ali, known popularly as Abu Talib al-Makki, passed away in Baghdad. He was hadith expert and jurist as well, and author of “Quwwat al-Qulub” (The Nourishment of Hearts), a book used by the Iranian Shafe’i scholar, Abu Hamed Ghazali, as a source for some of the chapters of his work “Ihya Uloum ad-Din” (Revival of Islamic Knowledge).

1001 lunar years ago, on this day in 437 AH, the famous Iranian Ismaili Shi'a poet and scholar, Naser Khosrow, who was born in Qobadian in eastern Khorasan, which is now part of modern Tajikistan, started his journey to Fatemid Egypt to meet the Ismaili caliph. During the almost seven years he spent in travel until his return home, he visited different lands, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, and performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina four times. He penned his travels in the famous book titled “Safar-Namah” or Travelogue that contains an interesting description of the peoples, their culture, customs, the political and economic conditions, and geographical factors of the lands he visited. He was well versed in astrology, as well as philosophy and interpretation of the holy Qur'an. He had studied Arabic, Turkic, Greek, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and even Hebrew. In separate journeys he also visited Multan and Lahore, and the splendid Ghaznavid court under Sultan Mahmud in what is now Afghanistan. Naser Khosrow has composed some very fine odes in Persian in praise of Imam Ali (AS), the First Infallible Successor of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA).

971 solar years ago, on this day in 1046 AD, the famous Iranian Ismaili Shi'a poet and scholar, Naser Khosrow, who was born in Qobadian in eastern Khorasan, which is now part of modern Tajikistan, started his journey to Fatemid Egypt to meet the Ismaili caliph. During the almost seven years he spent in travel until his return home, he visited different lands, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, and performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina four times. He penned his travels in the famous book titled “Safar-Namah” or Travelogue that contains an interesting description of the peoples, their culture, customs, the political and economic conditions, and geographical factors of the lands he visited. He was well versed in astrology, as well as philosophy and interpretation of the holy Qur'an. He had studied Arabic, Turkic, Greek, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and even Hebrew. In separate journeys he also visited Multan and Lahore, and the splendid Ghaznavid court under Sultan Mahmud in what is now Afghanistan. Naser Khosrow has composed some very fine odes in Persian in praise of Imam Ali (AS), the First Infallible Successor of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA).

725 solar years ago, on this day in 1291 AD, Buddhist officials of the Ilkhanid Mongol Dynasty of Iran-Iraq, killed the vizier Sa’d od-Dowla ibn Hibbatollah ibn Muhasib Ebheri, for his treason against the state and the people, especially the overwhelming Muslim majority, in trying to introduce a new religion with the ruler, Arghun Khan, at its head. Born in an Iranian Jewish family, he was a physician by profession whose real name is believed to be Mordekhai ibn al-Kharbiya. A cunning, unprincipled and ungodly person, he earned notoriety for his heavy-handed collection of taxes, especially from Baghdad and the surrounding areas. After curing Arghun Khan of a disease, he was appointed vizier or prime minister of the state. He distributed posts among his family and clan members, and employed only Jews and Christians in his administration, thus alienating both the ruling Buddhists and the Muslim masses. His treachery, coupled with his arrogant behaviour, brought about his downfall and subsequent murder, at a time when the health of Arghun was fast deteriorating and he also soon died.

505 solar years ago, on this day in 1512 AD, Flemish (Dutch) philosopher and cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, who coined the word “Atlas” for a collection of maps, was born in Rupelmonde in the county of Flanders – present day Belgium, where his family which was from Gangelt in the Duchy of Jülich on the borders of Netherland in present day Germany, was visiting at the time of his birth. Also known as Gerhard de Kremer, he spent the first six years of his life in Gangelt when famine forced his family to move along with him to his birthplace, where after finishing school he graduated from the University of Louvain and then completed higher studies at Antwerp. Highly influenced by Muslim geographers, their travels and world maps, such as Seyyed Mohammad al-Hassani al-Idrisi (who flourished centuries earlier in Sicily under King Rogers II), his dream was to publish a volume of maps, which would give a history of the world since creation. His "Atlas", the first section of which came out in 1569, contained a chronology of his version of creation till 1568. He died at the age of 82

479 solar years ago, on this day in 1539 AD, Nuno da Cunha, the notorious anti-Muslim governor of Portuguese possessions in India from 1528 to 1538, was shipwrecked and drowned off the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the African continent, while on his way to Portugal. Son of the equally infamous anti-Muslim Tristan da Cunha, in 1527, on his way to India from Portugal Nuno da Cunha had raided Muslim merchant vessels off the coast of the Portuguese occupied Islamic territory of Mozambique and then looted the Muslim city of Mombasa in present day Kenya. In 1529, he sacked and burned the port city of Daman, about 160 km north of Mumbai in the Muslim state of Gujarat. In 1533 he seized Vasai from the Sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, who in February 1537 was treacherously killed by the Portuguese while negotiating with them on a ship anchored off the coast. The Sultan’s body was dumped into the sea.

459 solar years ago, on this day in 1558 AD, the tobacco plant, which is native to the Americas, was introduced into Spain by the physician Francisco Fernandes, as a healing herb. Cultivation in France may have started earlier in 1556 with importation of seed from Brazil by André Thévet. He claimed to have cultivated it at Angoulême before Jean Nicot sent the seed to François II. Yet it is Nicot, the French ambassador to Lisbon, whose name survives in the word “nicotine”. The habit of smoking tobacco was initiated from England from the example of Sir Francis Drake (27 July 1586) who borrowed it from the Amerindians. Ralph Lane, the first governor of Virginia has been credited as the first English tobacco pipe smoker.

401 solar years ago, on this day in 1616 AD, Nicolaus Copernicus's book, “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”, was banned by the Catholic Church, 73 years after his death on fears that his publicizing of scientific facts, which he had borrowed from the works of Islamic scientists, including Iran’s Abu Rayhan Berouni, would undermine people’s faith in Christianity.

286 solar years ago, on this day in 1731 AD, the prominent Hanafi jurist of Syria, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabalusi, passed away at the age of 90 and was buried in Damascus. A prolific writer who wrote several books, he was a member of both the Qaderiyya and Naqshbandi Sufi orders. Once, after visiting the shrine of Prophet Mohammad’s (SAWA) granddaughter, Hazrat Zainab (SA) on the outskirts of Damascus, he expressed doubts on whether this was actually the holy site at which the Heroine of Karbala had been laid to rest. No sooner did he leave the place he fell from his mount and broke his leg. He realized his error and in that very condition of pain he dragged himself towards the blessed tomb in a state of repentance with the following rhymed phrases on his lips:

      “Zainab bint Haider, ma’dan al-‘ilm wa’l-huda,

      ‘Indaha Bab Hitta, fa adkhulu al-baab sujjada.

      “(Zainab the daughter of Haider, the Mine of Knowledge and Guidance,

       Her threshold is Door of Repentance, so enter it [head bowed] in prostration.)”

At that very moment Shaikh Abdul-Ghani Nabalusi felt his broken leg miraculously cured and he stood up relieved of pain as if nothing had happened to him. Among his books is “Shifa as-Sadr fî Fadha'il Laylat-an-Nisf min Sha'ban wa Laylat- al-Qadr” (Curing the heart on the Virtues of the Night of 15th Sha'ban and the Night of Qadr)

226 solar years ago, on this day in 1791 AD, Bangalore was captured by the British during the Third Anglo-Mysore War against Fath Ali Khan Tipu Sultan, who despite the loss of Devanhalli and Chik Balapur to the aggressors by March 21, strongly defended his capital Seringapatam through scorched earth policy. Lord Cornwallis imposed a harsh treaty forcing Tipu Sultan to cede half of his territories, and took two of his sons as hostages by demanding thirty-three million rupees, which the Sultan paid in two installments and got his sons back. The Sultanate of Mysore, which the British overthrew, was a Persianate state that maintained cordial relations with Iran, which during the time of Karim Khan Zand had sent a detachment of soldiers to support Nawab Haider Ali Khan.

193 solar years ago, on this day in 1824 AD, the British launched the first of their three wars on Burma from neighbouring India. The war, which ended on 24 February 1826, began primarily over the Burmese bid to expand influence into the Arakan and control what are now the northeastern parts of India – Assam, Manipur, Cachar, Jaintia and Tenasserim. It was the longest and most expensive war in British Indian history. Fifteen thousand European and Indian soldiers died, together with an unknown number of Burmese army and civilian casualties. The high cost of the campaign to the British, five million pounds sterling to 13 million pounds sterling (roughly 20 billion to 50 billion in US dollars at today’s rates), led to a severe economic crisis in India in 1833. The Burmese were also forced to pay an indemnity of one million pounds sterling, and sign a commercial treaty. For the Burmese, it was the beginning of the end of their independence. The Third Burmese Empire, which for a brief period had become a threat to British India, was crippled. The Burmese would be crushed for years to come by repaying the large indemnity. The British would make two more wars against a much more weakened Burma, and swallow up the entire country by 1885.

190 solar years ago, on this day in 1827 AD, Italian physicist, Alessandro Volta, passed away at the age of 82. He invented a device for measurement of electricity, known as Electrometer. He also invented electrical batteries. The electricity measurement unit is named after him as Volt.

190 solar years ago, on this day in 1827 AD, the French mathematician, Pierre Laplace, died at the age of 78. He emphasized on the theory that the Earth had separated from the Sun millions of years ago and its crust gradually cooled down and hardened. His books include “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities”.

122 solar years ago, on this day in 1895 AD, British orientalist and expert on Persian language, Major-General Henry C. Rawlinson, died at the age of 85 in London. Elder brother of the historian George Rawlinson, he was an army officer, politician, and orientalist, regarded as Father of Assyriology. In 1827 he went to India as cadet under the East India Company and after six years of military service, during which he became proficient in Persian language, which was then the official language of Subcontinent. In 1933 he was sent to Iran along with other English officers to train Qajarid troops. Disagreements between Iran and Britain ended in the departure of the British officers, but Rawlinson stayed and spent two years near the city of Kermanshah to study Old Persian inscriptions, especially those in the hitherto undeciphered cuneiform characters at Bisotoun. He began to transcribe the Old Persian portion of the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (a later form of Akkadian) written by the Achaemenid Emperor, Darius the Great, sometime between his coronation in the summer of 522 BC and his death in autumn of 486 BC. In 1840, in view of Rawlinson’s mastery of Persian language, he was appointed British political agent at Qandahar in Afghanistan where he stayed for three years, and cautioned London that Russia might invade and occupy the Central Asian khanates of Khoqand, Bukhara and Khiva – which the Russians did three decades later. In 1845, he was appointed British political agent in Ottoman Arabia, and settled in Baghdad, where he devoted himself to cuneiform studies. Here he made a complete transcript of the Bisotoun inscription, which he successfully deciphered and interpreted. In 1849 he returned to London and handed his collection of Babylonian, Sabaean, and Sassanid antiquities to the British Museum, which gave him a considerable grant to enable him to carry on the Assyrian and Babylonian excavations. In 1851, he published his memoirs of the Bisotoun inscriptions and was back in Baghdad the same year to carry on more excavations until 1855 when a riding accident forced him to return to London. In 1959 he was sent to Tehran as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, but after a year left Iran for Britain, where he spent the remainder of his life as MP for a 3-year term, Director of Council of India, and Trustee of the British Museum from 1876 till his death. Rawlinson's published works include four volumes of cuneiform inscriptions, published under his direction between 1870 and 1884 by the British Museum; “The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Bisotoun”, and “Outline of the History of Assyria”; “A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria”; “Notes on the Early History of Babylonia”; and “England and Russia in the East”. He contributed articles on Baghdad, the Euphrates and Kurdistan to the Encyclopædia Britannica,  

111 solar years ago, on this day in 1906 AD, US occupation forces in the Philippines, brutally massacred almost a thousand Muslims in the First Battle of Bud Dajo, leaving only six survivors.

64 solar years ago, on this day in 1953 AD, the dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, died at the age of 74. He was a Georgian by birth and was involved in the communist struggle against the Czarist rulers, for which he was deported to Siberia in 1913 and remained in exile until the victory of Russian revolution in 1917. He rose in ranks during the rule of Vladimir Lenin, and following the latter’s death in 1927, he staged a coup with the help of Leo Kamenov and Grigori Zinoviev in order to prevent Leon Trotsky from succeeding Lenin. Stalin gradually eliminated his partners and became autocratic ruler. He ruthlessly continued the purging of opponents inside and outside the Communist Party, and during World War II, assumed the posts of premier and commander-in-chief of the Soviet army. Until his death, he ruled with an iron fist, and killed over six million people, besides ordering mass deportation of millions of others from their ancestral homes and hearths. For instance, in 1944, he ordered the mass deportation of Caucasian Muslim nations. Chechens and Ingush were deported to Kazakhstan for resisting Soviet rule on the allegations of abetting the Germans. Around a million persons were evicted and loaded onto special railway cars. More than a third of the population died on the way. Also deported were the Karachays, Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks.

52 solar years ago, on this day in 1965 AD, the March Intefadha erupted in Bahrain against British colonial presence. It was a popular uprising by the long-suppressed majority of the Persian Gulf island state and called for overthrow of the Aal-e Khalifa minority regime, which still clings to power with US-British help, despite the massive uprising underway these days. Bahrain belonged to Iran and in the 1800s was seized by the Aal-e Khalifa, who were pirates infesting Khor Abdullah waterway between southern Iraq and what is in now Kuwait, from where they were driven out by the Ottomans.

49 solar years ago, on this day in 1968 AD, former Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq passed away at the age of 85. He was appointed Minister of Finance, later became Minister of Foreign Affairs and was subsequently elected MP to the national assembly. While in parliament, with the support of Islamic and nationalist groups, he passed the law for nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. Despite British pressure, including economic blockade, the nationalization process continued. In 1952 Britain ordered the Shah to dismiss Mosaddeq, but he was soon re-appointed due to a popular uprising in his support, which in turn forced the Shah into exile in August 1953. Shortly thereafter on August 19, the American CIA and Britain’s MI 6, launched the coup codenamed “Operation Ajax”, led by Iranian army general Fazlollah Zahedi, to remove Mosaddeq and restore the fugitive Shah to power. Mosaddeq was arrested, tried for treason, and placed under house arrest, while Foreign Minister Hussain Fatemi was executed. Zahedi succeeded him as prime minister, and brutally suppressed all opposition to the Shah.

47 solar years ago, on this day in 1970 AD, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect on ratification by 43 nations including Iran, calling for a world free of weapons of mass destruction. Today Iran continues to adhere to the NPT for peaceful use of atomic energy, in contrast to the diabolical policies of the US – the world’s most dangerously nuclear-armed power.

31 solar years ago, on this day in 1986 AD, the eminent jurisprudent and researcher, Allamah Zabihollah Mahallati, passed away at the age of 93 in Tehran. Born in Mahallat, after completing studies in his hometown, he left for Iraq for higher studies at the famous seminary of holy Najaf, where during his 11-year stay he benefitted from the classes of such prominent scholars as Ayatollah Abdul-Hussain Rashti, Ayatollah Seyyed Hassan Sadr, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Firouzabadi, Ayatollah Sheikh Mohammad Jawad Balaghi, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Abu’l-Hassan Najafi, and Grand Ayatollah Mirza Mohammad Hussain Na’ini. He then moved to the holy city of Samarra, where during his twenty-five year-stay he benefitted from the great bibliophile, Sheikh Aqa Bozorg Tehrani, and later held his own classes on religious sciences, in addition to writing books. In 1940 he returned to Iran and took up residence in Tehran, continuing his scholarly research and writing books. He authored the 6-volume “Riyyaheen ash-Shari’ah” which is an encyclopedia of prominent Muslim ladies throughout history. Among his other works mention could be made of the 12-volume “History of Samarra” and 8-volume “Waqa’e al-Ayyam” on the timeline of major events of history, and “Kashf al-Gharour” on the harm to society on women without veil in public.

One solar year ago, on this day in 2016 AD, Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, the inventor of Email, died at the age of 74 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, US. Born in New York, he was a pioneering computer programmer who in 1971 implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since. He thus fundamentally changed the way people communicate.

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