Today is Sunday; 28th of the Iranian month of Mordad 1397 solar hijri; corresponding to 7th of the Islamic month of Zil-Hijjah 1439 lunar hijri; and August 19, 2018, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

2005 solar years ago, on this day in 14 AD, the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, died in Rome at the age of 77 after a 41-year reign, during which his greatest achievement was conclusion of a treaty with Emperor Farhad IV (Phraates) of Iran’s Parthian Empire that ensured peace in what are now Palestine, Syria, and Turkey; in addition to return of the Roman Eagle Standards lost by Crassus to the Iranians in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. He was also aware of the disastrous defeats suffered by Mark Antony in his campaigns against Iranians. Named Gaius Octavius, he was maternal grandson of the sister of Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, who in his will declared him his adopted son and heir. With Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, he formed a triumvirate to defeat the assassins of Caesar. Following their victory, the triumvirate divided the Roman Republic and ruled as military dictators. The alliance torn apart under the ambitions of its members: Lepidus was driven into exile and stripped of his position, while Antony committed suicide following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Four years later, Octavius declared himself emperor, with the title “Augustus Caesar”, thus ending the Roman Republic. The 8th month of the Julian calendar, was renamed “August” in his honour. Prophet Jesus (AS) flourished in his reign.

1325 lunar years ago, on this day in 114 AH, Imam Mohammad Baqer (AS), the 5th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), was martyred in Medina at the age of 57, through poisoning by Hisham ibn Abdul-Malik, the self-styled caliph of the usurper Omayyad regime. His epithet "Baqer al-Uloum" means Splitter and Spreader of Sciences, and he spared no efforts to promote the pure and pristine teachings of Islam in an era when foreign ideas and thoughts were confusing the minds of Muslims. His period of imamate was 19 years, and he was descended on both sides from the Prophet. He was laid to rest in the sacred Jannat al- Baqie Cemetery of Medina.

1333 lunar years ago, on this day in 106 AH, the jurisprudent and Hadith narrator, Tawous ibn Kaysaan al-Yamani passed away in Mecca. Said to be of Persian stock from Hamedan, he resided in Yemen and is narrator of the "munajaat" (whispered supplications) to God Almighty of Imam Zayn al-Abedin (AS), the 4th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). He is held in esteem by both Shi'a and Sunni scholars. Famous Iranian Sunni compilers such as Bukhari, Muslim Naishapuri, Tirmizi, etc. have recorded hadith on his authority.

1260 lunar years ago, on this day in 179 AH, Imam Musa Kazem (AS), the 7th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), after being detained in Medina by the tyrannical Abbasid caliph, Haroun Rashid, was brought to the Iraqi port city of Basra and imprisoned in the palace of the governor, Eisa bin Ja'far. For a year the Imam languished here before being taken to Baghdad and imprisoned in the house of Fazl bin Rabee'. In 183 AH, on the 25th of Rajab, Imam Kazem (AS) left the mortal world, a martyr, after his food was poisoned on the orders of Haroun, who knew that as long as the Prophet's rightful successor was alive, his claim to caliphate was under question by the people.

1076 lunar years ago, on this day in 363 AH, the scholar, orator, and historian, Ahmad ibn Ali ibn Thabet, popular as Khateeb al-Baghdadi, passed away in Baghdad at the age of 73. Born near Baghdad, he was the son of a preacher of Darzidjan and studied under his father and other scholars. His primary interest was hadith. At the age of 20 he went to Basra to collect hadith. He then travelled east to Iran and made two trips to Naishapur in Khorasan, collecting in his journey more hadith in Rayy and Isfahan. Back in Baghdad, he acquired fame as a preacher and orator, and it is said that teachers and preachers of hadith would usually submit to him what they had collected before they used them in their lectures or sermons. Initially a follower of the Hanbali School of jurisprudence, he switched over to the Shafe'i school – a change that made Hanbalis his bitter enemies and heap accusations against him. This sectarian hostility forced him to leave Iraq for Syria and settle in Damascus, where he preached for 8 years, and before returning to Baghdad, spent a year in Tyre, Lebanon. He was a prolific writer and has authored several books, the most famous of which is the voluminous history titled "Tarikh al-Baghdad".  He has quoted many of the hadith on the merits of Prophet Mohammad's (SAWA) Ahl al-Bayt, especially Imam Ali (AS) and Hazrat Fatema Zahra (SA).

933 solar years ago, on this day in 1085 AD, the Iranian Shafei jurisprudent and theologian, Ziya od-Din Abdul-Malik ibn Yusuf al-Juwayni, passed away at the age of 57 in Naishapur. He studied Ash’arite theology for several years and taught it to students, but with the establishment of the Seljuq sultanate by Toghril-Beg who was a Mu’atazali Hanafi, he was forbidden to teach it. As a result he left for Hijaz and during his four-year stay in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he came to acquire the epithet of Imam al-Haramayn. Years later, with establishment of the Nizamiya Schools by the famous Iranian minister of the Seljuqs, he was invited to Naishapur and asked to teach Ash’arite theology, though on his deathbed he regretted the time he invested in studying and debating the principles of this Sunni school.

875 solar years ago, on this day in 1153 AD, Baldwin III of the usurper Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem occupied the city of Ascalon (Asqalan in Arabic) in Palestine near Gaza, which was a strong bastion of Egypt’s Fatemid Shi’a Muslim dynasty and a site of pilgrimage, since it had a mausoleum, believed to be the site of burial of the holy head of the Martyr of Karbala, Imam Husain (AS). He marched with a huge army of Christian mercenaries from Europe and began to destroy the surrounding orchards in January.  For five months there were many skirmishes and victories and defeats on both sides. Ascalon was vast and virtually impenetrable; behind its massive walls and gates were determined defenders including Arabs, Iranians, and Berbers. Just when the Crusaders were tired and planning to leave, an accidental fire in one of the towers of Ascalon, made them stay. After bitter fighting the city surrendered, and the Fatemids took away to Cairo for reburial what they considered to be the head of Imam Husain (AS), the grandson of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). Half a century earlier in 1099, the Battle of Ascalon was fought outside the city during the First Crusade and the occupation of Bayt al-Moqaddas by the Crusaders. Although it led to the defeat of the Fatemids, the city’s defenders made of large contingents of Arabs, Iranians, and Berbers, ensured that it remained in Egyptian hands. The fall of Ascalon thus led to the downfall of the Fatemid Dynasty. Amalric succeeded his brother Baldwin as king of the usurper kingdom of Jerusalem in 1162, and led several expeditions from Ascalon into Egypt. The Kurdish adventurer, Salah od-Din Ayyubi, taking advantage of Crusader assaults, imposed himself in Cairo as Prime Minister, and then seized power himself. In 1187, he took Ascalon and in 1191, during the Third Crusade, he demolished the city because of its potential strategic importance to the Christians. It was again occupied by the Crusaders but retaken in 1247 by Egyptian Muslims. In 1270, Baybars, the Turkic Mamluk sultan of Egypt, ordered the citadel and harbour of Ascalon to be destroyed. Ascalon was rebuilt in the 16th century as an Arab town during Ottoman rule. In the British Mandate period over Palestine, it had a large edifice on top of a hill with a fragment of a pillar showing the place where the head of Imam Husain (AS) was supposedly buried. In 1948 Ascalon was seized by the illegal Zionist entity, its name changed to Ashkelon, and its Arab inhabitants driven away from their homes. In July 1950, the shrine was destroyed at the instructions of General Moshe Dayan in accordance with the Israeli policy of erasing all Muslim historical and religious sites.

356 solar years ago, on this day in 1662 AD, French author and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, the innovator of calculation devices, died at the age of 61. In the last years of his life, he wrote a book on Christianity titled “Provincial Letters”.

164 solar years ago, on this day in 1854 AD, the First Sioux War began when US soldiers killed Lakota chief ‘Conquering Bear’. These wars were part of the genocidal policies to exterminate the native Amerindians, and lasted till 1891, resulting in the massacre of thousands of ‘Red Indians’.

147 solar years ago, on this day in 1871 AD, American aviator Orville Wright, who with his elder brother Wilbur, invented the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight (17 Dec 1903), was born in Dayton, Ohio. The history of aviation is as old as Man’s quest to fly since antiquity. The earliest known record is of Yuan Huangtou, a Chinese prince, who was briefly airborne by tying himself to a kite. In the heyday of Islamic science and civilization, there are records pertaining to the Spanish Muslim polymath, Abbas ibn Firnas, who flew from Jabal al-Arus Hill by employing a rudimentary glider in the 9th century AD – a thousand years before the airplane was invented.

142 solar years ago, on this day in 1876 AD, British Assyriologist, George Smith, died at the age of 36 of dysentery in Syria, on his way home from a 3rd trip to Mesopotamia (Iraq). In 1874, Smith had completed the translation of the complete Epic of Gilgamesh – the Chaldaean account of the Great Flood – one of the oldest-known written works of literature which he discovered at Nineveh.

126 solar years ago, on this day in 1892 AD, prominent Iranian calligrapher, Mirza Reza Kalhor, passed away at the age of 64 in Tehran. Born in Kalhor, near Kermanshah in western Iran, he was an expert in horse riding and archery before coming to Tehran and learning the art of calligraphy from Mirza Mohammad Khwansari, whom he outshone. His fame attracted the attention of the Qajarid king, Nasser od-Din Shah, who appointed him as his tutor in calligraphy. Kalhor who never took advantage of his ties with the royal court, led a simple life by subsisting from the earnings he received in copying books and manuscripts.

123 solar years ago, on this day in 1895 AD, China was forced to handover the Island of Formosa to Japan as per the Shimonoski Treaty. Known as Taiwan today, the island returned to Chinese sovereignty as per decisions of the Potsdam Conference following Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1949, when the communists emerged victorious in the Chinese civil war the pro-western former government authorities fled Beijing to Taiwan and with US meddling declared the island independent. Beijing insists on the return of Taiwan to mainland China.

99 solar years ago, on this day in 1919 AD, the British occupation of Afghanistan ended as per the Treaty of Rawalpindi, following the end of the 3rd Anglo-Afghan war. The term Afghanistan was used for the first time in 1857 as official name of a country, although the local tribes were known as 'Afghans' for centuries. The first independent Afghan state was set up in 1747 by Ahmad Khan Durrani, an ethnic Pashtun general of Nader Shah Afshar of Iran, who on the latter's death seized control of the eastern parts of Iranian Khorasan and the Pashto-speaking regions of the Moghal Empire of India, as well as the Punjab, to declare himself king. British attempts to meddle in Afghanistan led to the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-to-1842. Thereafter, a seesaw struggle ensued between the two sides with the British aggressively pushing their colonial policies in Kabul through threats, diplomacy, and wars, until formal independence in 1919. Afghanistan, which is under US occupation for the past 17 years, was throughout history part of successive Persian empires, while its eastern parts were occasionally under Indian rule. Today it shares borders with Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and covers an area of 652,000 sq km.

95 solar years ago, on this day in 1923 AD, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, French-Italian sociologist, economist and philosopher, died at the age of 75. In 1906 he made the famous observation that 20% of the population owned 80% of the property in Italy. This was later generalized by Joseph M. Juran and others into the so-called Pareto principle – also termed the 80-20 rule. Pareto also popularized the term "elite" in social analysis.

88 solar years ago, on this day in 1930 AD, Russian orientalist, Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold also known as Wilhelm Barthold, died at the age of 61. He specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples (Turkology). He was the first to publish obscure information from the early Arab historians on Kievan Rus, which later emerged as Russia. He also edited several scholarly journals of Muslim studies, and contributed extensively to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Bartold wrote three authoritative monographs on the history of Islam, namely, Islam (1918), Muslim Culture (1918) and The Muslim World (1922). He also contributed to the development of Cyrillic writing for the Muslim countries of Central Asia. Most of his writings were translated in English, Arabic, and Persian. Bartold's collected works were reprinted in 9 volumes between 1963 and 1977, and whilst Soviet editors added footnotes deploring his 'bourgeois' attitudes, his prestige was such that the text was left uncensored, despite not conforming to a Marxist interpretation of history. His works include: “Ulugh-Beg”, “Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion”, “Mussalman Culture”, "A Short History of Turkestan", and “An Historical Geography of Iran”.

65 solar years ago, on this day in 1953 AD, the US staged a coup in Iran to overthrow the legal government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq in retaliation for nationalization of the oil industry and returned to the Peacock Throne the fugitive British-installed Pahlavi potentate, Mohammad Reza. The coup plotters mobilized a number of thugs to take to the streets and attack government centres with the assistance of mercenaries in the security forces. General Fazlollah Zahedi, a US pawn, announced the collapse of the Mosaddeq administration and his own appointment as the premier through the radio network. The consequence of the coup was Washington’s total domination over Iran’s sources, which continued until the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

40 solar years ago, on this day in 1978 AD, an arson attack on Cinema Rex in Abadan, southwestern Iran by SAVAK, the notorious state-terrorism tool of the Pahlavi regime, resulted in a massive blaze that burned to death beyond recognition at least 470 Iranian men and women. Agents of the Shah locked the doors and doused the place with gasoline before setting it on fire in a vain bid to put the blame on the Iranian Muslim people during the events leading to the triumph of the Islamic Revolution. The crime shocked the world. The Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA) from his exile in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, issued a letter of condolences that read: “To all respected people of Abadan. The highly tragic news of burning-to-death of hundreds of our compatriots by that calculated state (Pahlavi regime) has resulted in severe sorrow and regret. I can’t imagine any Muslim, and even a human being, would commit such a violent crime except for those who are accustomed to brutality and savagery by nature…”

34 solar years ago, on this day in 1984 AD, prominent Iranian physician and bacteriologist, Mrs Azar Andami, passed away at the age of 58. Born in Rasht, she dedicated her life to the promotion of medical sciences in Iran, and won international acclaim. A crater on Venus has been named in her honour as “Andami” by the International Astronomers Union (IAU).

27 solar years ago, on this day in 1991 AD, a group of the Soviet Union’s army commanders staged a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev to end his policy of reforms, while he was holidaying in the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. However, Boris Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Federation, foiled the coup. The ensuring developments speeded up the end of the suffocating, anti-religious and totalitarian Soviet Union in December 1991 and led to the emergence as independent republics of many of the lands occupied by Czarist Russia.

AS/ME