Today is Tuesday; 11th of the Iranian month of Mehr 1396 solar hijri; corresponding to 12th of the Islamic month of Muharram 1439 lunar hijri; and October 3, 2017, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1378 lunar years ago, on this day in 61 AH, survivors of the heartrending tragedy of Karbala, mostly women and children of the noble household of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), including Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS), the son and successor of Imam Husain (AS), entered the city of Kufa as captives, along with the severed heads of the martyrs, gruesomely mounted on lances. They were taken to the court of the ungodly governor, Obeidollah ibn Ziyad, whose attempt to ridicule the Prophet's family and to kill Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS), were thwarted by the bold remarks of Hazrat Zainab (SA), who praised God Almighty for enabling the Ahl al-Bayt to successfully pass the tests of martyrdom and sufferings. When the tyrant thought of disgracing the noble captives by parading them in the city, again Hazrat Zainab (SA) jolted the conscience of the masses through her eloquent sermons that drew tears from the people of Kufa and made them regret their lethargy in failing to assist the Prophet's grandson against the regime. Ibn Ziyad, fearing a public revolt quickly ordered dispatch of the caravan of captives to the Omayyad capital Damascus in Syria, but through unfrequented routes so as to avoid the anger and indignation of the people of the towns that lay in the way.

1344 lunar years ago, on this day in 95 AH, according to an account, Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS), the Survivor of the heartrending tragedy of Karbala, and the 4th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), was martyred through poisoning at the age of 57, exactly 34 years after the tragic martyrdom of his father, Imam Husain (AS). He was victim of the hatred of the Prophet's family by Walid Ibn Abdul-Malik, the 6th self-styled caliph of the usurper Omayyad regime. Born in Medina in 38 AH, his mother was the Iranian princess, Shahrbano. It was his ill-health as a youth of 23 years in Karbala that prevented him from joining the jihad in which almost all male members of the Prophet's family were martyred. His jihad was of a different kind, but not with the sword. Through his sermons in the court of the Godless Yazid, he made the message of his father triumphant, thus unmasking the hypocrisy of the Omayyad regime. Following release from captivity, for the next three decades, he enlightened the Ummah through prayers, supplications and definition of individual and social rights, including the rights of our own bodily parts upon us. He groomed a large number of scholars and scientists who spread the teachings of the Prophet's Ahl al-Bayt in different lands.

1117 solar years ago, on this day in 900 AD, the Alawid Emir of Tabaristan, Mohammad Ibn Zayd, known as “ad-Da’i as-Sagheer” (the Younger Missionary), attained martyrdom, a day after he was mortally wounded in battle near Gorgan, while defending his realm off the Caspian Sea coast of Iran against the Samanid invaders. He was 6th in line of descent from Imam Hasan Mojtaba (AS), the elder grandson and 2nd Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). The Samanid army decapitated his corpse and took his head to Bukhara, while the body was buried at the gate of Gorgan and soon became a centre of pilgrimage. His death ended the 36-year rule of the First Alawid state established in what are now the provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan by his elder brother Hassan Ibn Zayd, known as “ad-Da’i al-Kabeer” (the Elder Missionary), who was invited by the people of northern Iran to lead them against the Abbasid regime. Mohammad, who ruled for 16 years, had served as governor and commander during the 20-year rule of his elder brother when the Alawid realm was constantly invaded by the Abbasids and their local agents. A cultured figure, who appreciated poetry and composed poems of his own, his welfare policies increased popularity of his rule amongst the Iranians, whom he enlightened with the teachings of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt. He rebuilt the holy shrines of Najaf and Karbala – of Imam Ali (AS) and Imam Husain (AS) – that were destroyed some forty years earlier by the Godless Abbasid tyrant Mutawakkel. In 914, the Alawid state of Tabaristan was revived by Seyyed Hassan al-Utrush – 5th in line of descent from the Prophet’s 4^th Infallible Heir, Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS). He soundly defeated the Samanid occupiers at Burdidah on the River Burroud, west of Chalous. He had survived Mohammad Ibn Zayd’s defeat and martyrdom in the Battle of Gorgan 14 years earlier. He passed away in 917. The Alawid State lasted till 931.

704 lunar years ago, on this day in 735 AH, the celebrated Gnostic and ancestor of the Safavid Emperors of Iran, Safi od-Din Ardabili, passed away at the age of 84 and laid to rest in his hometown Ardabil, northwestern Iran. Named Seyyed Ishaq at birth, he was the son of Seyyed Amin od-Din Musavi – a descendent of Imam Musa al-Kazem (AS), the 7th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). With acquisition of knowledge he acquired the epithets Abu’l-Fath, Shams od-Din and Safi od-Din. A disciple, spiritual heir and son-in-law of the prominent Gnostic, Shaikh Zahed Gilani of Lahijan, he founded the Safaviyya Order, which earned respect from the rulers of the day, including the ferocious Central Asian conqueror, Amir Timur. Over the following 170 years, the Safaviyya Order gained political and military power, finally culminating in the foundation of the Safavid dynasty by Shah Ismail I that lasted for almost two-and-a-half centuries.

572 solar years ago, on this day in 1445 AD, the Egyptian Sunni scholar Abdur-Rahman Jalal od-Din as-Suyuti was born in a family of Persian origin that had migrated from Iran during the Mamluk period and settled in Asyut, in Upper Egypt from where it derived the family name as-Suyuti. A follower of the Shafe’i School, he was an expert in jurisprudence, hadith, history, exegesis of the Holy Qur'an, and Arabic grammar and literature. His books are still taught in Islamic seminaries. In his exegesis titled "ad-Dur al-Manthour" (Scattered Pearls), he has pointed to the ayahs revealed by God Almighty on the outstanding merits of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt, i.e. Hazrat Fatema Zahra, Imam Ali, Imam Hasan and Imam Husain (peace upon them). He also wrote a separate book on the Merits of the Ahl al-Bayt.

278 solar years ago, on this day in 1739 AD, the Treaty of Nis was signed in Eastern Serbia by the Ottoman and Russian Empires to end the 4-year Russo-Turkish War, which was the result of the Russian effort to gain Azov and Crimea on the Black Sea coast in what is now Ukraine. Austria entered the war in 1737 on the Russian side, but was forced to make peace with the Ottomans in the separate Treaty of Belgrade, surrendering Northern Serbia, Northern Bosnia and Oltenia. As a result, Russia was compelled to give up claim to Crimea and Moldavia, although the Ottomans allowed it to build a port at Azov without fortifications and without a fleet in the Black Sea.

151 solar years ago, on this day in 1866 AD, the Vienna Treaty was signed between Austrian Empire and Italian city states, ending Austrian interference and paving the way for the unity of Italy in 1870.

87 solar years ago, on this day in 1930 AD, the Orientalist and Iranist, Friedrich Carl Andreas, died in Germany. Born in Batavia, Java, Indonesia, he was of mixed Armenian, German, and Malayan descent. After education in Hamburg and Geneva, he pursued Iranian and other Oriental studies at Göttingen, Halle, and Leipzig universities, before completing his graduate work in Copenhagen and Kiel. Between 1875 and 1881, he conducted field work in India with the Parsees or Zoroastrians of Iranian origin, and later in southern Iran. His research in Europe focused on the languages and MARCH of the Iranic region of Ossetia in the Caucasus and the Indo-Afghan borderlands. From 1903 till his death in 1930, he was professor of Western Asiatic Philology at Göttingen. The works of several Iranologists, such as Kaj Barr, Arthur Christensen, Bernhard Geiger, Walter Bruno Henning, Paul Horn, Wolfgang Lentz, Herman Lommel, and Oskar Mann, are clearly influenced by him. Among his fundamental insights was the recognition that the difference between “Arsacid” (Parthian) and “Sasanian” (southwestern) Middle Iranian Language is essentially one of dialect, rather than of time sequence. Working with the Manichean fragments from Turfan in Xingjian, he separated the texts written in Parthian (which he called the “northern dialect”) and identified another “Pahlavi dialect” as the Sogdian or the eastern Iranian language of what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

85 solar years ago, on this day in 1932 AD, Iraq was granted independence by Britain, although London continued to keep close control of affairs of the country it had created after World War I. In 1958, the monarchy installed in Baghdad by the British who imported Faisal I from the Hijaz – the son of their agent Sharif Hussein. The land of Iraq is the cradle of human civilization, and it is here the Father of the human race, Adam, as well as Prophet Noah repose in eternal peace. Throughout history Bayn an-Nahrayn or Mesopotamia as the Land of the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates was known, saw the rise and fall of great civilizations that contributed to the scientific progress of mankind, such as the Sumerian, the Akkadian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean, and the Babylonian. In 539 BC, the emerging Achaemenian Empire of Iran, under Cyrus the Great, took control of Iraq, which remained in Persian hands for two centuries until defeat by Alexander of Macedon in 331 BC in the Battle of Gaugamela near Mosul. In 247 BC, the Parthians defeated the Seleucid successors of Alexander to revive Iranian independence and a century later drove the Greeks out of Iraq, where they built their new capital, Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad). The Parthians were replaced in 224 AD by the Sassanid Dynasty which also maintained its capital in Ctesiphon till its fall to the Muslim Arabs in 637 AD, which means that for almost 8 hundred years this city in Iraq, also known as Mada'en was the capital of Iranian empires. The greatest glory for Iraq, however, was the shifting of the Islamic capital from Medina to Kufa in 36 AH (657 AD) by the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb (AS), whose martyrdom in this land after over four years of the only instance in history of the model government of social justice further increased its significance. Iraq is also the place where the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Husain (AS), attained immortal martyrdom in Karbala in 61 AH (680 AD). In 132 AH (749 AD), after the end of the 90-odd years of tyranny of the Damascus-based Omayyad dynasty, Iraq once again became the centre of the Islamic world, with the shifting of the capital to Hirah by the equally oppressive Abbasid caliphs, who built Baghdad in 145 AH (762 AD) on the Iranian model as the new capital. With the weakening of Abbasid rule, Iraq became part of the empire of the Iranian Buwaihid dynasty in 945 AD, and 110 years later in 1055 AD it became part of the Iran-based Seljuqid Empire. In 1258 AD Baghdad was sacked by the Mongol hordes of Hulagu Khan and along with the rest of Iraq was part of the Iran-based Ilkhanid Empire for the next century. Thereafter, it was contested by the Iran-based Turkic dynasties such as the Timurids, the Qara Qoyounlu, and the Aq Qoyounlu, until the emergence of the Safavids of Iran who made it part of the Persian Empire once again, before Shah Tahmasb lost it to the Ottoman Turks of Sultan Sulayman. Shah Abbas I retook Iraq, while his successor lost it to the Turks. It was hotly contested by the Iranians and the Ottomans and the last Iranian king to hold Iraq was Nader Shah until his assassination in 1747. In 1917, with the Ottoman defeat in World War I it passed into British hands. Today, after the end of the 35-year reign of terror of the tyrannical Ba'th minority regime, Iraq is once again independent under an elected government, supported by the majority of people. Modern Iraq shares borders with Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. It is worth noting that according to Islamic prophecies, in the end times, Kufa in Iraq, will be the seat of the global government of the Prophet’s 12th and Last Infallible Heir, Imam Mahdi (AS).

38 solar years ago, on this day in 1978 AD, the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), following restrictions placed on his political-religious activities by Iraq’s Ba’th minority regime, travelled by car towards Kuwait on a valid visa. The Kuwaiti regime, however, denied him entry under pressure from the Shah's despotic regime. He then obtained a visit visa for France and flew to Paris.

27 solar years ago, on this day in 1990 AD, Germany was re-unified with merger of the socialist German Democratic Republic and capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, after 45 years of division as a result of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945.

5 solar years ago, on this day in 2012 AD, Indian Islamic scholar, Dr. Mohammad Abdul Haq Ansari, passed away in Aligarh at the age of 81. Born in Tamkohi in what is now Uttar Pradesh State, he completed Islamic studies from Darsgah-e Islami, Rampur in 1953, did bachelors in Arabic in 1957, M.A. in philosophy in 1959, PhD in 1962 from Aligarh Muslim University, and M.T.S in Comparative Religion and Theology from Harvard University, USA in 1972. He served as Professor and Head of the Department of Arabic, Persian and Islamic Studies, Vishwa Bharti University, Shantiniketan, Bengal, from 1965 to 1978. He was the president of Jamaat-e-Islami-e Hind from 2003 to 2007. He was also Chancellor of the Jamia Islamia, Shantapuram in Kerala. His book “Learning the Language of Qur’an” is considered as one of the best English guides for beginners of Qur'anic studies. Among his works, before he taught at universities in Saudi Arabia, are well-researched books on two of the Iranian philosophers, titled “The Ethical Philosophy of Miskawaih” (1964), and “The Moral Philosophy of al-Farabi” (1965). He died in October 2012.

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