Today is Thursday; 24th of the Iranian month of Farvardin 1396 solar hijri; corresponding to 15th of the Islamic month of Rajab 1438 lunar hijri; and April 13, 2017, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1445 lunar years ago, on this day, 7 years before his migration from Mecca to Medina, Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) instructed a group of early Muslims, suffering from the persecution of pagan Arabs, to migrate to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), across the Red Sea, where the ruler, King Negus (Najashi) was a justice-loving monotheist. The 15-member group made up of 11 men and 4 women was led by the Prophet’s trustworthy companion Othman bin Madh’oun. A year later, the second migration of Muslims to Abyssinia took place when the Prophet instructed his paternal cousin, Ja’far ibn Abi Taleb (AS) to lead a group of some 88 persons. The pagan Arabs, alarmed at the hospitality accorded to the Muslims in Abyssinia, and resenting the spread of Islam, sent a delegation to King Negus, led by the notorious disbeliever, Amr ibn Aas, to extradite the believers. It is a well known fact of history, how Hazrat Ja’far (later at-Tayyar) refuted the accusations of the pagan Arabs in the Abyssinian court and by providing proof from the holy Qur’an of the prime position in Islam of Prophet Jesus (AS) and his virgin-mother, Mary (SA), convinced King Negus of the righteousness of Prophet Mohammad’s (SAWA) universal mission. Hazrat Ja’far (AS) returned to Arabia for good thirteen years later in 7 AH, incidentally on the day the impregnable Jewish fortress of Khayber was single-handedly conquered by his younger brother, the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali (AS). He attained martyrdom a year later in the Battle of Mu’ta against a joint force of the Byzantine Empire and its Christian Arab allies, the Ghassanids, in what is now Jordan. His elder son, Abdullah was married to Imam Ali’s (AS) elder daughter, the Prophet’s granddaughter, Hazrat Zainab (SA).

1436 lunar years ago, on this day in 2 AH, upon God’s command, the “qibla” or focal point of worship for Muslims changed from the direction of Bayt al-Moqaddqas in Palestine to the holy Ka'ba in Mecca. The change of direction happened when Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) was leading the prayers in Medina in the mosque known till this day as “Zu-Qiblatayn” or Mosque of the Two Qiblahs.

1375 lunar years ago, on this day in 63 AH, Hazrat Zainab (SA), the venerable granddaughter of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), was martyred in a garden outside Damascus by an enemy of the Ahl al-Bayt who struck a fatal blow on her head with a pickaxe. The Heroine of Karbala who bequeathed to posterity the life-inspiring mourning ceremonies of Moharram and Safar for her brother, Imam Husain (AS), needs no introduction. We offer condolences to all listeners, and later in our programme, we will present you a special feature on her life and times.

1162 lunar years ago, on this day in 276 AH, the Iranian philologist of Arabic, Abu Mohammad Abdullah bin Muslim ibn Qutaybah ad-Dinawari, passed away in Baghdad. He was born in Kufa in Iraq, while his father was from the Khorasani city of Merv in what is now Turkmenistan. Having studied hadith and philology he became qazi or judge in Dinawar, near Hamedan in western Iran, and afterwards a teacher in Baghdad. He was the first representative of the eclectic school of Baghdad philologists that succeeded the schools of Kufa and Basra. He is regarded by Sunni Muslims as an authority on hadith. Among his works are "Gharib al-Qur'an" on its lexical issues, "al-Imama wa al-Siyasa" in which he has exposed the deviation of the caliphate from its goals, and "ash-She'r wa'sh-Shu'ara" on poetry and poets.

813 solar years ago, on this day in 1204 AD, Constantinople fell to the Latin Catholic West European hordes of the Fourth Crusade, who unable to confront Muslims in Palestine, turned against their own co-religionists of the Greek Orthodox Church, temporarily ending the Byzantine Empire, as the final act in the permanent separation of the two Christian Churches. For three days the Crusader thugs looted and burned Europe’s largest and most civilized city, committing every crime and sin under the sun. The Latins (as the Byzantines called them because of their adherence to the Catholic sect of the Church of Rome) were viewed as lawless, impious, covetous, bloodthirsty, undisciplined, and (quite literally) unwashed hordes. During the siege and attacks and counterattacks of the two sides, nearly 35 percent of the city that had known peace for several centuries was destroyed, and over 50 percent of the population became homeless, in addition to the tens of thousands of people massacred. Many ancient and medieval Roman and Greek works were either stolen or destroyed. The Library was destroyed. Despite wearing crosses and pretentions to religion, the Crusaders ruthlessly and systematically violated the city's churches and monasteries, destroying, defiling, or stealing all they could lay hands upon, in addition to raping nuns. The medieval historian Speros Vryonis, gives a vivid account of the sack. He writes:

“The Latin soldiers subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale, which even the non-Christian Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Crusader thugs were astounded at the riches they found. The French, the Germans, the Italians, the Anglo-Saxons, and other West Europeans destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violating the chastity of Greek nuns, and murdering Orthodox clerics. The Crusader Catholics vented their hatred for the Orthodox Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church's holy vessels. The Byzantines were convinced that if the Muslims had taken the city they would not have committed such savagery as fellow Christians.”

As history bears witness, over two-and-a-half centuries later, when Muslims under Ottoman Sultan Mohammad al-Fateh peaceably conquered Constantinople, they renamed it Islambol (Istanbul), preserved its ancient monuments, and spared its population of any massacre. It should be noted that earlier in 1099 on seizing Bayt al-Moqaddas from the Fatemid Shi’ite Muslim dynasty of Egypt, the Crusaders had massacred over 70,000 Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and Kurdish men, women and children.

726 lunar years ago, on this day in 712 AH, the Iranian mystic and poet, Najm od-Din Zarkoub Tabrizi, passed away. He is the author in Persian of the “Futuwwat-Namah”, on the rites of “Jawan-mardi” or chivalry into which Sufis are initiated for serving the cause of God and humanity.

392 solar years ago, on this day in 1625 AD, the word "microscope" was coined as a suggested term in a letter written by Johannes Faber of Bamberg, Germany, to Federigo Cesi, Duke of Aquasparata and founder of Italy's Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynx). The science of optics is indebted to Muslim scientists who invented the telescope.

322 solar years ago, on this day in 1695 AD, Jean de La Fontaine, the famous French poet of the 17^th century, died. He is known above all for his “Fables”, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France.

274 solar years ago, on this day in 1743 AD, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), who later served two terms (1801-1809) as the Third US president, was born in what is now Albemarle County in Virginia in an English family. A controversial character, he was profoundly influenced by the British Empiricists, including John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. He qualified as a lawyer and was a noted bibliophile, possessing thousands of books. Despite his struggles for freedom from the British crown, he was an embodiment of slave-holding interests in the new republic, the USA, openly denying basic and birthrights to the black-skinned Africans enslaved by the white Europeans. His racist tendencies are evident by his famous statement that blacks were “in reason inferior” and “in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.” Over the course of his life he owned some 600 slaves, buying and selling them as required. Though he called slavery cruel, he included 25 slaves in his daughter’s dowry, took enslaved children to market for sale, had 10-year-old slaves working 12-hour-a-day in his nail factory, and fathered at least six children from a slave concubine. Jefferson also mistreated the Amerindian natives, forcibly moving Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River. Later, as president, he proposed in private letters beginning in 1803 a policy that under Andrew Jackson would be called “Indian Removal”, under an act passed in 1830.  As president, he made a deal with elected officials of the state of Georgia: if Georgia would drop its claims to "discovery" in lands to its west, the US military would help expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. His deal violated an existing treaty between the US government and the Cherokee Nation, which guaranteed its people the right to their historic lands. Jefferson believed that the Amerindian Natives should give up their own cultures, religions, and lifestyles to assimilate to western European culture. He openly said he had lost faith in Christianity, calling parts of the Bible a "dunghill" of "priestcraft and roguery". An imperialist to the very core, he became the first US president to launch wars abroad when he sent the navy to bombard Tripoli and the Muslim coastal cities of North Africa. Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83.

149 solar years ago, on this day in 1868 AD, the Abyssinian War ended as British and Indian troops captured Maqdala but were deprived of taking as prisoner, Emperor Tewodros II, who committed suicide captivity, and thus became a symbol of the defiant independence of the Ethiopian people. The British burned Magdala and its churches, and looted many historical and religious artifacts, including manuscripts and the crown of Tewodros II,

144 solar years ago, on this day in 1873 AD, some 153 African-Americans were cold-bloodedly massacred at Colfax, Grant Parish, Lousiana, by white Democrats, and the bodies thrown into the river. It was preceded since 1870 by systematic killings of scores of black people by the racist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi to deny them voting rights.

121 lunar years ago, on this day in 1317 AH, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Abu’l-Qasim Musavi Khoei, was born in Khoy in Iran’s West Azarbaijan Province. After initial studies in Tabriz, he left for holy Najaf in Iraq at the age of 13 to continue his studies. Here, his piety and knowledge attracted the attention of the India-based Iranian religious scholar, Mirza Ahmad Najafi-Tabrizi, who gave his daughter in marriage to him and lodged him in his own house. Mirza Ahmad used to frequent the semi-independent state of Banganapalle in south India, ruled by a Seyyed family of Iranian origin, who were patrons of scholars and learning. Soon Ayatollah Khoei mastered logic, rhetoric, theology, jurisprudence and philosophy, and in the process attained the status of Ijtehad. In 1971, he succeeded Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohsin al-Hakim as the leading Marja’ of the Islamic world and thereafter groomed a large number of scholars from Iran, Iraq, the Subcontinent, Bahrain and Lebanon. Among his valuable books are “Lectures in the Principles of Jurisprudence”, in 10 volumes, “Islamic Law” in 18 volumes, and "Mu'jam Rijal al-Hadith" in 24 volumes. The last named is an authoritative work on evaluation of narrators of hadith. During the 8-year war imposed on Iran in the 1980s by the US through Saddam, he refused to yield to the Ba’thist minority regime’s pressures to denounce the Islamic Republic, even though his house was frequently subjected to water and electricity cuts. He passed away in Kufa at the age of 96, a year and some five months after Saddam brutally crushed popular uprising of the Iraqi people. It is believed the regime martyred him through poisoning.

108 solar years ago, on this day in 1909 AD, the Turkish military reversed the Ottoman countercoup of March 1909 to force the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and replace him with his brother, Mohammad V. The countercoup was an attempt to dismantle the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire and replace it with autocracy. Abdul Hamid’s bid for return to power gained traction when he promised to restore the caliphate, eliminate secular policies, and revive the sharia-based legal system. A military coup in June 1908, led by the so-called Young Turks, had stripped Abdul Hamid II of his power, reconstituting the parliament and constitution he had suspended three decades earlier. The Sultan, however, had maintained his symbolic position, and in March 1909 attempted to seize power once more by stirring populist sentiment throughout the Empire. Because the coup was an attempt to undermine the Young Turks, it became known as the Countercoup, which was largely made possible by the Ottoman Empire's gradual disintegration, especially the loss of Bulgaria to complete independence within a year of the Young Turk Revolution. The failure of the Countercoup, however, brought the Committee of Union and Progress back from disarray, ending Arab-Turkish solidarity, closing Arabic journals and outlawing societies, such as the Arab-Ottoman Brotherhood. The Committee of Union and Progress, which was dominated by some influential Jews, made a major mistake in calling for "Turkification" of all the Arab subjects of the Empire. This stirred nationalist sentiments and moves for independence by the Arab population, making Britain skillfully exploit inter-Muslim differences to defeat the Ottomans in World War I.

98 solar years ago, on this day in 1919 AD, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place in Amritsar in Punjab, India, when British troops massacred in cold blood hundreds of unarmed demonstrators and injured over a thousand others. The perpetrator of the massacre was Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, who on hearing that a crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 people had assembled at the Jallianwala Bagh, placed his riflemen on a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd that included men, women, and children. The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 killed.

51 solar years ago, on this day in 1966 AD, Iraqi President, Colonel Abdus-Salaam Aref, was killed in an air crash, while returning to Baghdad from Basra, after a blasphemous attempt during a public address to ridicule the famous censuring of the rebellious people of Basra by the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali (AS), following the historical Battle of Jamal. On hearing the president's speech on radio the people of Iraq were greatly saddened at his ridiculing of the Imam's statements. In holy Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohsin al-Hakeem, went to the holy shrine of Imam Ali (AS) and clinging to the metal enclosure wept bitterly and prayed fervently, before leaving the place in a state of profound grief. No sooner had he left the shrine, when the radio cut its regular broadcasts to announce the death of the Iraqi president in air crash. Abdus-Salaam Aref had seized power in 1963, in a coup with the help of the Ba’thists, against President General Abdul-Karim Qassem, who was killed. 

42 solar years ago, on this day in 1975 AD, the brutal killing of 26 Palestinians in Lebanon by the Israeli-backed Phalangist Christian militia, set off the 15-year Lebanese Civil War in which Israel, France, and the US were all brutally involved and indulged in unprintable atrocities.

33 solar years ago, on this day in 1984 AD, India moved into the Siachen Glacier to annex more territory from the Line of Control that determined the border with Pakistan, thus bringing swift response from the latter. The Siachen Glacier is located in the eastern Karakoram Range in the Himalaya Mountains and is the world’s highest battleground. It lies immediately south of the great watershed that separates the Eurasian Plate from the Subcontinent in the extensively glaciated portion of the Karakoram, called the "Third Pole" (after the North and South Poles). The borders of China also meet here. Both India and Pakistan maintain a permanent military presence in the region at an altitude of over 6,000 meters above sea level. Between 1984 and 1999, frequent skirmishes took place between the two countries. However, more soldiers have died in Siachen from harsh weather conditions than from combat. The conflict has damaged the ecology of the glacier which is fast melting, mainly because of chemical blasting, done for constructing camps and posts, and laying of oil pipelines by India to supply kerosene and aviation fuel to its soldiers in this remote and uninhabited place.

31 solar years ago, on this day in 1986 AD, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khatami Lankarani, passed away at the age of 75 in his hometown Isfahan. A product of the seminary of holy Najaf, in Iraq, where he studied under such prominent ulema as Grand Ayatollah Mirza Mohammad Hussain Na’ini, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Abu’l-Hassan Isfahani, and Ayatollah Mohammad Jawad Balaghi, he attained the status of Ijtihad. He taught at both Najaf and Samarra, where he lived for a while, before forcibly expelled by the repressive Ba’th minority regime. On return to his native Isfahan in 1971, he devoted himself to grooming students.

10 lunar years ago, on this day in 2007 AD, Chairman of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Faiz Meshkini, passed away at the age of 86. Born in Meshkin Shahr in Ardabil Province, he studied at the Qom Seminary under Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Borujerdi and the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA). He joined the movement against the despotic rule of the Shah, and as a result suffered imprisonment and banishment to the remote parts of the country. He was Friday Prayer Leader of Qom for several years, and his sermons were eagerly listened for their religious and political analyses.

9 solar years ago, on this day in 2008 AD, a terrorist bomb blast at the “Martyrs of Shiraz Hussainiya” in the city of Shiraz, led to the martyrdom and injury of several people. Its perpetrators, who were agents of the enemy intelligence services, were caught in a Tehran hotel and given due punishment.

14 solar years ago, on this day in 2003 AD, following the fall of Saddam and the American occupation of their country, the people of Iraq staged the first public demonstrations after three decades of suffocating Ba’th minority rule, calling for establishment of Islamic government amid vociferous cries of “Allah-o Akbar” (Allah is Greatest) and “la ilaha il-Allah” (there is no god but Allah). The huge rally called for end of occupation, holding placards and chanting such slogans as “No to the US & Israel”, and Bush & Saddam are Alike”.

AS/ME