Today is Wednesday; 19th of the Iranian month of Mehr 1396 solar hijri; corresponding to 20th of the Islamic month of Muharram 1439 lunar hijri; and October 11, 2017, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1378 lunar years ago, on this day in 61 AH, burial of the body of the Christian freedman Jown bin Huway, a former black Nubian slave of the Prophet’s loyal companion, Abu Dhar al-Ghifari, who was martyred in Karbala on the epic day of Ashura, in defence of Islam and Imam Husain (AS), took place. When Abu Dharr was exiled from Medina to the Rabadha desert by Othman ibn Affan, he went to the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb, who invited him to stay on as his companion. On the martyrdom of Imam Ali (AS) in 40 AH, Jown stayed with the Prophet’s elder grandson Imam Hasan (AS) and on the martyrdom of the latter in 50 AH, he joined Imam Husain (AS). When Imam Husain (AS) left Medina Jown insisted on accompanying him. At Karbala, Jown could always be seen at the side of Hussein. He was an old man, dark with gray curly hair. Because of his profound knowledge and pleasant manners he was greatly respected. On the night before Ashura, Imam Husain (AS) urged Jown to go away and seek safety, to which he replied: How is it fair that I benefit from your company and hospitality but abandon you in your hardship?

The next day, Jown helped repelled the first two attacks by the Omayyad hordes, and following the Afternoon Prayer, he charged into the battlefield, reciting the poem:

“I am a soul willing to die for Allah,

“And have a sword thirsty of the blood of His enemies

“Before I die I shall fight the enemies of Allah,

“With my sword and my tongue serve the Grandson of His Prophet.”

When he fell from his horse and was martyred by the cowardly enemies, the Imam rushed towards him and supplicated with the words: O God, have his face bright and his smell delightful; have him resurrected with the virtuous alongside Your Prophet and his progeny.

Jown’s black body that had miraculously turned white on his martyrdom, was identified after ten days and laid to rest by the Bani Assad tribesmen.

931 solar years ago, on this day in 1086 AD, Chinese historian and statesman Sima Guang, died at the age of 67. Perhaps the greatest of China’s historians, he wrote in several volumes the monumental “Zizhi Tongjian” which detailed in chronological order events in Chinese history from 403 BC to 959 AD. He was also a lexicographer and spent decades compiling in 1066 “Leipian” ("Classified dictionary.

879 solar years ago, on this day in 1138 AD, a devastating earthquake, the third deadliest in recorded history, struck the city of Aleppo and its environs in Syria, killing over two hundred thousand people, during the rule of the Turkish warlord, Emad od-Din Zengi. The worst hit area was Harem, where the Christian Crusaders from Europe had built a large citadel, which was destroyed along with the church. The nearby fort of Atharib, which was in the hands of Muslims, was also destroyed.

497 lunar years ago, on this day in 942 AH, the Spanish Christians led by King Charles V seized the Islamic city of Tunis on the North African coast from the Ottoman Turks and perpetrated a heinous massacre of at least 30,000 Muslims. The stench of the corpses was such that Spanish king soon left Tunis by placing Molay Hassan as a client ruler. The Spanish also took thousands of women and children as slaves, and set on fire tens of thousands of books and rare manuscripts.

445 solar years ago, on this day in 1572 AD, Sulaiman Khan Karrani, the Afghan Sultan of Bengal, or what is now the Indian province of the same name along with Bangladesh, died after a reign of six years. He had succeeded his elder brother Taj Khan Karrani and was followed by his sons Bayazid and Daud Khan who ruled the short-lived semi-independent state that acknowledged Mughal emperor Akbar Shah as the supreme ruler by reciting his name in the Friday Prayer sermons. Though northern India and parts of southern India were ruled by the Muslim rulers, they had not yet been able to conquer Orissa. So in 1568 Sulaiman Khan sent his son and the famous general Kala Pahar against the last Orissan Hindu king Mukunda Deva, who was defeated and the region annexed to the Afghan state of Bengal. The dynasty eventually ceased to exist with the Mughals conquering Bengal when Daud Khan made the fatal error of asserting full independence.

383 solar years ago, on this day in 1634 AD, the Burchardi Flood, also known as the "Second Grote Mandrenke", killed around 15,000 people in North Friesland, Denmark and Germany. It was a storm tide that struck the North Sea coast of North Frisia and Dithmarschen on the night between 11 and 12 October. Overrunning dikes, it shattered the coastline and caused catastrophic material damage. Much of the island of Strand was washed away, forming the islands Nordstrand, Pellworm and several Halligen.

360 lunar years ago, on this day in 1079 AH (corresponding to 1669 AD), the Ottoman Empire defeated a coalition of European armies to take over Crete from the Republic of Venice. Crete, the 5th largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, was under Turkish rule for over two centuries till 1898, when it was seized by a joint British-French- Italian-Russian force, which in 1913 handed it to Greece at the end of the 2nd Balkans War with the Turks. Over half of Crete’s population was made up of local Cretan Muslims, many of whom were forcibly converted to Christianity and the rest expelled by the Greeks to Turkey, Syria, and Egypt by 1923. Among the Cretan Muslims, who spoke Greek as their mother tongue and not Turkish, there were many who followed the Bektashi Sufi order founded by Iranian mystic, Haji Bektash Vali of Naishapur, Khorasan, and were hence followers of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt. All the mosques and Tekiyes were either destroyed or turned into churches by the Greek Christians, who a century earlier had remove all traces of four centuries of Turkish Muslim rule from Greece. It is worth recalling that Islam was brought to Crete a thousand and two centuries ago by Spanish Muslims, who ruled this island as the Emirate of Ikritish for almost 150 years from their capital Rabdh al-Khandaq (modern Heraklion).

171 lunar years ago, on this day in 1268 AH, the highly efficient Prime Minister of Iran, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, was dismissed from his post by Naser od-Din Shah Qajar, following court intrigues by local agents of foreign powers, on loss of their illegal interests, because of his political and administrative reforms. Rising from the lower rungs of the society through hard work, honesty, and voracious appetite for knowledge and new techniques, his achievements include the vaccination of Iranians against smallpox, economic development of the fertile Khuzestan Province, foundation in Tehran of the Dar ol-Fonoun Academy which taught medicine, surgery, pharmacology, natural history, mathematics, geology, and natural science to train the civilian and military staff, cancellation of the one-sided treaties with the Russians and the British, promotion of education, launching of a newspaper, and above all the timely crackdown on the seditious Babi-Bahai plot against Islam and the country, resulting in the execution of the heretic Mohammad Ali Bab. In the end, Amir Kabir was martyred in Kashan and with him died the prospects of an independent Iran led by meritocracy.

118 solar years ago, on this day in 1899 AD, a bloody battle broke out between the British intruders and the Boers or Dutch settlers of South Africa. The Boers were defeated and South Africa became a British colony, until it gained independence in 1931.

102 solar years ago, on this day in 1915 AD, the French biologist and entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, died at the age 92. He was the first scientist to conduct comprehensive research on the mechanism of instinctive reactions among animals, especially birds, for maintenance of their lives, gathering valuable data in this domain.

33 solar years ago, on this day in 1984 AD, Iranian poet and researcher, Abdul-Karim Amiri Firouzkouhi, passed away at the age of 75. Born in a village near the northern city of Firouzkouh, he started writing poetry since his youth, while acquiring Islamic sciences. His poems have a religious theme and he composed poetry in the different genres including odes and lyrics. He has left behind a 2-volume Diwan. Among his other works, is a comprehensive introduction to the Diwan of the renowned poet, Sa’eb Tabrizi.

33 solar years ago, on this day in 1984 AD, the exegete of Holy Qur'an, and university lecturer, Ayatollah Mirza Khalil Kamarai, passed away. He was a product of the Qom Seminary, and due to his opposition to the irreligious and despotic policies of the ruling regime, was detained and incarcerated in 1962 by the British-installed and US-backed Shah. Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he started theology lectures at Tehran University. He has left behind several compilations in Persian and Arabic, including a complete exegesis of Holy Qur'an, and the book: "Onsor-e Shuja'at" (Element of Valour) on the exemplary life of Imam Husain (AS) and the Immortal Martyrs of Karbala.

27 solar years ago, on this day 1990 AD, the Assembly for Proximity among Islamic Schools of Jurisprudence was established in Tehran on the orders of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in order to focus on the commonalities between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims for promoting the solidarity of the Ummah and preventing discord and misunderstandings. Earlier, in the 1950s a similar body was set up by Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Borourjerdi who sent a delegation of scholars to Egypt’s al-Azhar for exploring common views and points, resulting in the acceptance of the Ja’fari School of Jurisprudence as one of the legal systems that Muslims could follow. Presently, the Assembly for Proximity among Islamic Schools is quite active in the fields of various Islamic sciences shared by Muslims of all denominations.

26 solar years ago, on this day in 1991 AD, the activities of the Soviet Union's security organization, known as KGB, ended awhile before the collapse of Soviet Union. KGB was founded in 1954 to counter the operations of the CIA and other western spy agencies. Its duties included suppression of opponents of the Communist Party, as well as espionage and counterespionage operations inside and outside the Soviet Union. KGB was the most effective leverage of the communist party's strength. With the dissolution of KGB, its duties were divided between two Russian intelligence organizations.

12 solar years ago, on this day in 2005 AD, Shan ul-Haq Haqqi, Urdu linguist and writer of the Subcontinent, passed away in Canada at the age of 88 while undergoing medical treatment. Born in Delhi to Ehtasham od-Din Haqqi, who wrote a study of the famous Iranian poet, Hafez Shirazi titled “Tarjuman ul-Ghayb”, along with an Urdu translation of “Diwan-e Hafez”, he was a product of Aligarh Muslim University. After migration to Pakistan in 1948, he became a notable Urdu poet, writer, journalist, broadcaster, translator, critic, researcher, linguist and lexicographer of Pakistan. In addition to his regular professional duties, he remained associated with the Urdu Dictionary Board for 17 years from 1958 to 1975, compiling a 24-volume dictionary. He compiled two other dictionaries – “Farhang-e Talaffuz” which is a pronouncing dictionary of Urdu, and the Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary, which is a translation of the eighth and ninth editions of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. He also translated into Urdu the Hindu Sanskrit classic “Bhagvad Gita”.

7 solar years ago, on this day in 2010 AD, Callixte Mbarushimana, a Rwandan leader of the FDLR rebel group and a former UN employee, was arrested in Paris on charges of leading rebels who committed mass rapes and killings in Congo in 2009. The International Criminal Court charged him with 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including killings, rape, persecution based on gender and extensive destruction of property committed by the FDLR during most of 2009. He was extradited to the ICC on 25 January 2011, but was released on 23 December 2011 as the ICC, under political pressure, found there was insufficient evidence for prosecuting him. He is also participated in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 – a genocidal mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority. During the approximate 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994, an estimated one million Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 70% of the Tutsi and 20% of Rwanda's total population. The genocide was planned by members of the core political elite known as the Akazu, many of whom occupied positions at top levels of the national government. Perpetrators came from the ranks of the Rwandan army, the National Police (gendarmerie), government-backed militias including the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, and the Hutu civilian population.

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