Today is Monday; 14th of the Iranian month of Esfand 1396 solar hijri; corresponding to 16th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani 1439 lunar hijri; and March 5, 2018, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

3241 solar years ago, on this day in 1223 BC, occurred the oldest recorded eclipse, according to a clay tablet discovered in 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.

1655 solar years ago, on this day in 363 AD, 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 killed.

1018 lunar years ago, on this day in 421 AH, famous Spanish Muslim poet, Ahmad ibn Mohammad Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli, passed away at the age of 74 in his native Spain. He was from Castile as is clear from his surname 'Qastalli', and played a vital role in promotion of Arabic poetry in the Iberian Peninsula with his new style. His poems, in addition to their high literary and artistic value, are a reliable source of developments in Islamic Spain. These have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, English and other languages as the Arabic heritage of Europe.

972 solar years ago, on this day in 1046 AD, famous Iranian Ismaili Shi'a poet and scholar, Naser Khosrow, who was born in Qobadian in eastern Khorasan, which is now in 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).

726 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. 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.

516 lunar years ago, on this day in 923 AH, Hejaz came under Ottoman authority when Sharif Barakaat II sent keys of the Holy Ka’ba in Mecca and the Prophet’s Holy Shrine in Medina to Sultan Selim I, following the victory of Turkish troops over the Mamluk dynasty of Egypt, which had hitherto held suzerainty over Hejaz, and Syria. Selim, who three years earlier, had managed to turn into a narrow victory a certain defeat at the hands of the Safavids of Iran at the Battle of Chaldiran, prior to which he had carried out a general massacre of Shi'a Muslims in Anatolia and deported thousands of them to the Balkans for fear of their siding with Shah Ismael Safavi, now decided to attack Syria because of the growing Iranian influence there. He won an easy victory and then marched on to Egypt, the news of which, prompted Sharif Barakaat of Hejaz to switch allegiance from the defeated Mamluks to the victorious Ottomans. For four centuries the Turks ruled Hejaz until the Ottoman defeat in World War 2 and dismemberment of their empire by the British and local agents, including Sharif Hussain of Hejaz, two of whose sons were made kings and granted new countries as kingdoms – Abdullah in Jordan, and Faisal in Iraq. The crafty British then allowed the Wahhabi desert brigand from Najd, Abdul-Aziz Aal-e Saud, who was on their payroll, to attack Hejaz in 1924, drive out Sharif Hussain (who since 1917 had styled himself as king), massacre tens of thousands of Muslims, desecrate the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina, and establish the spurious state called Saudi Arabia, on condition of endorsing the plan for creation of the illegal Zionist entity called Israel in Palestine, by settling tens of thousands of European Jews.

506 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 Flanders – present day Belgium, where his family which was from Gangelt 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.

488 lunar years ago, on this day in 950 AH, Ottoman Turks concluded a treaty with France to run the French Mediterranean port of Toulon. The Ottoman flag was hoisted in Toulon as almost all the French left the port. The Ottomans introduced the Azan for the five-times-daily prayers in this port, and turned the cathedral into a mosque during their 8-month stay. In this period under the command of the famous Turkish admiral, Khair od-Din Pasha (known as Barbarossa or Redbeard to the Europeans), the Ottoman navy, equipped with 30,000 troops raided the Spanish and Italian coasts and defeated the combined attacks by Spanish-Italian navies. The Ottomans left after King Francis I of France paid a sum of 800,000 in the currency of those days and released all Turks and Arabs who were forced to work on French galleys. Khair od-Din Pasha died two years later, but Toulon was again used as a safe harbour for several months, some three years later by another Ottoman admiral, Turgut Raees.

480 solar years ago, on this day in 1539 AD, Nuno da Cunha, the notorious anti-Muslim governor of Portuguese possessions in India, was shipwrecked and drowned off the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, while on his way to Portugal. Son of the equally infamous anti-Muslim Tristan da Cunha, in 1527, on his way to India Nuno da Cunha had raided Muslim merchant vessels off the coast of Portuguese occupied 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 Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, whom the Portuguese treacherously killed in February 1537 after inviting him for negotiations on an anchored ship. The body was dumped into the sea.

460 solar years ago, on this day in 1558 AD, the tobacco plant, which is native to the Americas, was introduced into Spain by 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 envoy to Lisbon, whose name survives in the word “nicotine”. The habit of smoking tobacco was initiated from England through Francis Drake who borrowed it from the Amerindians.

402 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.

287 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. 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)

227 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 maintaining relations with Iran, whose ruler Karim Khan Zand had sent soldiers to support Nawab Haider Ali Khan.

194 solar years ago, on this day in 1824 AD, the British launched the first of their three wars on Burma from 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 – that is, 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, nearly 13 million pounds sterling (roughly 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.

191 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.

191 solar years ago, on this day in 1827 AD, 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”.

123 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 started six years of military service with the East India Company in India and mastered Persian, which was then the official language of the Subcontinent. In 1833 he was sent to Iran along with other officers to train Qajarid troops. The training accord was aborted, but Rawlinson stayed for two years near the city of Kermanshah to study Old Persian inscriptions, especially the cuneiform characters at Bisotoun. He began to transcribe the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian written by the Achaemenid Emperor, Darius the Great, sometime between his coronation in 522 BC and his death in 486 BC. In 1840, in view of Rawlinson’s mastery of Persian, he was appointed 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 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 1859 he was sent to Tehran as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, but after a year returned to Britain, where he spent the rest of his life as MP, Director of the Council of India, and Trustee of the British Museum – 1876 till his death. His works include four volumes of cuneiform inscriptions, published between 1870 and 1884. “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”.

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

65 solar years ago, on this day in 1953 AD, Dictator Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union died at the age of 74. Georgian by birth, he was involved in the communist struggle against the Czarist rulers, for which he was deported to Siberia in 1913 and remained in exile until victory of the 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 ruthlessly continued the purging of opponents inside and outside the Communist Party. During World War II, he 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.

53 solar years ago, on this day in 1965 AD, the March Intefadha erupted in Bahrain against the British. 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.

48 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.

7 solar years ago, on this day in 2011 AD, Alenush Terian, hailed as “Mother of Iranian Astronomy”, died in Tehran at the age of 91. Born in an ethnic Armenian Christian family in Tehran, her father was a poet who had translated the epic “Shahnameh” from Persian to Armenian. She graduated in 1947 from the University of Tehran, and began her career in the physics laboratory of the university as chief of laboratory operations. She left for France for higher studies and in 1956 obtained her doctorate in Atmospheric Physics from Sorbonne University of Paris. On return to Iran she became Assistant Professor in thermodynamics at University of Tehran. Later she worked in Solar Physics in the then West Germany for a period of four months, and in 1964 became the first female Professor of Physics in Iran. In 1966, Professor Terian became Member of the Geophysics Committee of University of Tehran. In 1969 she was elected chief of the Solar Physics studies at this university and began to work in the Solar Observatory of which she was one of the founders. Professor Terian retired in 1979. Her 90^th birthday celebration was attended by a number of Iranian parliamentarians and over 100 Iranian Armenians.

2 solar years ago, on this day in 2016 AD, Email inventor Raymond Samuel Tomlinson 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.

AS/ME