Today is Thursday; 26th of the Iranian month of Esfand 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 17th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani 1438 lunar hijri; and March 16, 2017, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

2614 solar years ago, on this day in 597 BC, the Babylonian tyrant, Nebuchadnezzar II (or Bokht an-Nasar in Arabic) after capturing the holy city of Bayt al-Moqaddas, replaced the Israelite king, Jeconiah (Yaqunia) with his own uncle Zedekiah (Sadqiya), thereby bringing under direct rule of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) the kingdom of Judah (Palestine), which until then was a tributary. Jeconiah was taken to Babylon as prisoner. Nine years later in 588 BC, when the evil Zedekiah, ignoring the advice of Prophet Jeremiah (Irmiyah), dared to side with Pharaoh Hophra of Egypt, the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar II descended with a mighty army and after an 18-month siege, captured Bayt al-Moqaddas, plundered it, and razed to the ground all edifices, including Solomon’s Mosque for the worship of the One and Only God. Zedekiah, along with his followers attempted to escape, but was captured, made to see his sons put to death, before his own eyes were pulled out, and carried fettered as a captive to Babylon, where he remained a prisoner until death. Nebuchadnezzar transported almost all the population of Palestine to Mesopotamia. It is worth noting that the recently executed Iraqi tyrant, Saddam of the repressive Ba’th minority, used to regard himself as reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, who is said to have been weaned on sow's milk.

1980 solar years ago, on this day in 37 AD, Roman Emperor Tiberius died at the age of 77 after a reign of 34 years in a paranoid state following the invasion of Syria by Iran’s Parthian Empire. The stepson and successor of Emperor Augustus Caesar, decades earlier he had been sent at the head of a large army to Armenia to try to wrest its control from Parthia, but failed to defeat the Iranians. However, after a year of negotiations, he was able to reach a compromise whereby the Iranians agreed to preserve Armenia as a buffer zone between the two empires and returned the prestigious standards of the legions they had captured during the wars against Parthia of the Romans under Marcus Crassus (53 BC – at the Battle of Carrhae), Decidius Saxa (40 BC), and Marc Antony (36 BC).  

1018 lunar years ago, on this day in 420 AH, the 8^th self-styled caliph of the Fatemid Ismaili Shi’ite Dynasty of Egypt, Syria and North Africa, Mohammad Ibn az-Zahir al-Mustansir, was born in Cairo and eight months afterwards was declared to succeed his father. He ascended the throne on 15^th Sha’ban, 427 AH at the age of 7 years. His rule lasted 60 years and four months, the longest of all the so-called caliphs, either in Egypt or anywhere else. The Fatemid rulers, who first established themselves in Mahdia in Tunisia, claimed descent from Ismail, the son of Prophet Mohammad’s (SAWA) 6^th Infallible Successor, Imam Ja’far as-Sadeq (AS). They soon shifted their seat of power to Egypt and established the city of Cairo, where they built the famous Islamic academy, al-Azhar, as a derivative of “az-Zahra” (the Radiant), the epithet of the Prophet’s Immaculate Daughter, Hazrat Fatema (SA). During their rule, they publicly revived in the “Azan” the original phrases of the daily call to prayer: “Ash-hado anna Amir al-Momineen Aliyan Wali-Allah” (I testify that the Commander of the Faithful, Ali, is the Friend of God), and “hayya ala khayr-il-amal” (hasten towards the best of deed). The Fatemid caliphate lasted for 270 years, and at its height, in addition to Egypt, it included varying areas of the Maghreb (North Africa), Sudan, Sicily, the Levant, and Hijaz.

914 lunar years ago, on this day in 524 AH, the acclaimed Arabic literary figure and poet, Hussain bin Mohammad Baar’e al-Baghdadi, passed away at the age of 81. He is considered an authority on grammar and lexicography, and later in life went blind. He has left behind his Diwan of poetry.

827 solar years ago, on this day in 1190 AD, before embarking on the Crusades against Muslims in Palestine, the Christian knights of England launched a massacre of Jews in York. The terrified Jewish population fled to Clifford’s Tower, which was set fire by a Christian priest, and hundreds of Jews were burnt to death. At a time when Jews enjoyed all rights in Muslim lands, even becoming viziers, they were subjected to periodic massacres in Europe for their rejection of Prophet Jesus and their slandering of his mother, the Virgin Mary.  

605 lunar years ago, on this day in 833 AH (1430 AD), the 6^th Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, conquered the city and district of Thessalonica in Macedonia from the Byzantine Empire. Thessalonica and its adjoining districts were lost by the Turks almost five centuries later during the First Balkans War in 1330 AH (1912 AD) to the new state called Greece (set up on the Ottoman Province of Yunanistan), while the rest of Macedonia, which had a sizeable Muslim population, was split up between Greece and Serbia (the former Ottoman Province of Servistan). The Greek Christians, who destroyed mosques and other sites of the centuries-old Islamic heritage, continue to suppress the Muslims of Thessalonica and treat them as second class citizens.

228 solar years ago, on this day in 1789 AD, German physicist Georg Simon Ohm, was born in Brandenburg. In 1825 he demonstrated through research and experiments on the electrochemical cell invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta that there are no “perfect” electrical conductors. All conductors have some resistance. The next year, he stated the famous law known in his honour as Ohm’s Law: “If the given temperature remains constant, the current flowing through certain conductors is proportional to the potential difference (voltage) across it.” or V=iR. He died at the age of 65.

176 solar years ago, on this day in 1841 AD, John Murray, Scottish naturalist who, as one of its founders, coined the name oceanography, was born. He studied ocean basins, deep-sea deposits, and coral-reef formation. As a marine scientist, he took part in the Challenger Expedition (1872-76), the first major oceanographic expedition of the world. He was first to observe the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the existence of marine trenches. He attempted with Buchan to construct from temperature and salinity observations a qualitative theory of water movement in the world's oceans. With Alexander Agassiz, he put forward a modified hypothesis for coral reef development, arguing against Charles Darwin's hypothesis and suggesting that subsidence was not always a controlling mechanism. He died in 1914, killed by a motor car.

172 solar years ago, on this day in 1845 AD, German mathematician and physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, was born. He conducted extensive research on different rays and discovered X-ray in 1895. The unit of radiation of X-rays and Gama rays is named after him as Roentgen. He died in 1923.

158 solar years ago, on this day in 1859 AD, the Russian inventor and scientist, Alexander Popov, was born. He conducted extensive studies to build a device that would be able to record and broadcast sound. Thus, in 1895, he succeeded in inventing the tape recorder. He died in 1905.

78 solar years ago, on this day in 1939 AD, on the eve of World War II, Czechoslovakia was occupied by German Nazi forces, following Adolf Hitler’s occupation of Austria.

77 solar years ago, on this day in 1940 AD, the Swedish author, Selma Lagerlof, died at the age of 82. She was the first woman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909.

72 solar years ago, on this day in 1945 AD, ninety percent of the city of Wurzburg in Germany was destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers. Over 5,000 men, women, and children were mercilessly killed by the British.

49 solar years ago, on this day in 1968 AD during the Vietnam War, American occupation troops cold-bloodedly massacred over 500 men, women and children in the village of My Lai that shocked the civilized world.

29 solar years ago, on this day in 1988 AD, Baghdad’s repressive B’ath minority regime bombarded the northeastern Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabche with internationally-banned chemical weapons, killing 5,000 men, women, and children, and maiming 10,000 others, at a time when Iraqi Kurdish combatants welcomed Iran’s Muslim combatants as liberators from Saddam’s tyrannical rule. Western regimes, such as the US, Germany, France and Britain, which had supplied Saddam with chemical weapons, remained silent in the face of these barbaric crimes against humanity. The UN also ignored the catastrophe for several years.

22 solar years ago, on this day in 1995 AD, Hojjat al-Islam Seyyed Ahmad Khomeini, the younger son of the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (God bless him), passed away at the age of 50. Born in the holy city of Qom, he studied under his prominent father, and later joined him in exile in Najaf. He played an important role in communications between his father and the revolutionaries in Iran. Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution, he returned to Iran along with his father. During the six years, which he was alive after his father, he continued to support the Islamic Republic System and the leadership of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

20 solar years ago, on this day in 1997 AD, the prominent teacher of the famous seminary of holy Qom, Ayatollah Ahmad Payani Ardabeli, passed away at the age of 69. Born in Ardabel, northwestern Iran, at the age of 20 he moved to Qom for higher studies, and after completing his religious education, embarked on teaching at the seminary. He was also politically active during the events leading to the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. 

11 solar years ago, on this day in 2006 AD, the notorious terrorist, Abdul-Malek Rigi, supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity, send his henchmen to pose as security forces on the southeastern Zabol-Zahedan road in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan Province in order to indiscriminately kill people. As a result, almost 30 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in cold blood. Four years later Rigi was caught by Iranian security personnel while travelling from Dubai to a Central Asian country for a secret meeting with a senior American official. The plane carrying him was forced to land at Bandar Abbas airport, and after due trial, he was executed in June 2010 for his numerous crimes against humanity.

5 solar years ago, on this day in 2012 AD, Aziz Abu Saber, Brazilian geologist and environmentalist, passed away in his hometown Sao Paulo. He was one of Brazil´s most respected scientists, honoured with the highest awards of Brazilian science in geography, geology, ecology and archaeology. Graduated in geography, he was a former president of the Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science), Emeritus Professor of the University of Sao Paulo and member of the highest rank - Order Grão-Cruz in Earth Sciences - of the Academy of Science. Among the awards, he has received the UNESCO Prize on Science and the Environment in 2001 and the Prize to the Intellectual of Brazil in 2011. The contributions of Abu Saber to science range from the first research of oil camps in Brazil's northeast to surveys of Brazil's natural realms and the restoration of the history of forests, camps and primitive humans over geologic time in South America. He made central contributions to biology, South American archaeology, and to Brazilian ecology, geology and geography. He has published more than 480 works, most of them scientific publications. Among his scientific proposals are FLORAM, the Code of biodiversity and his theory of refuges related to the Amazones. Abu Sáber was the first person to classify scientifically the Brazilian and South-America territory in morphoclimatic domains.

3 solar years ago, on this day in 2014 AD, the people of Crimea voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine to join Russia. In ancient times, Crimea was the home of the Iranian tribes of Cimmerians and Scythians, before being colonized by the Greeks, who were followed by the Romans, the Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Khazars, the Byzantine Empire, the Qipchak Turks, and the Muslim Mongols of the Golden Horde. The area became the site of overlapping interests and contact between the medieval Slavic, Turkic and Greek spheres, and a center of slave trade. Slavs were sold to Byzantium and other places in Anatolia during this period. In the 1230s, this status quo was swept away by the Mongol invasions, and Crimea was incorporated into the territory of the Golden Horde throughout the 14^th century. The Crimean Muslim Khanate, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, succeeded the Golden Horde and lasted from 1449 to 1779, building a glorious Muslim civilization. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin. Crimea was seized by Russia in 1783. From 1853 to 1856, it was the site of the principal engagements of the Crimean War – a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. During the Russian Civil War, following the victory of the Red Army over the White Army, it became part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1921 as the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (which became part of the Soviet Union in 1922). In the Second World War the peninsula was occupied by Nazi Germany from July 1942 to May 1944. After its liberation, it was downgraded to the Crimean Oblast, and Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin ordered the mass deportation of the Crimean Muslim Tatars for alleged collaboration with the Nazi forces. A total of more than 230,000 people were deported, mostly to Uzbekistan, at the time about a fifth of the total population of the Crimean Peninsula. In 1954, by an internal political action by Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Crimea became a territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union. In 1991, on the disintegration of the USSR, it became part of independent Ukraine as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. In the wake of the crisis created in Ukraine by the West, the Crimean people held a referendum and decided to join Russia.

AS/ME