Today is Thursday; 10th of the Iranian month of Aban 1397 solar hijri; corresponding to 22nd of the Islamic month of Safar 1440 lunar hijri; and November 1, 2018, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.

1088 lunar years ago, on this day in 352 AH, the Arabic poet, Abu'l-Qassem Ali ibn Ishaq al-Baghdadi, passed away at the age of 42. Incidentally, he was born on this same day of 20th of Safar. Most of his poetry is on the unrivalled merits of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) and the Infallible Imams. He lived for some time at the court of Amir Saif ad-Dowlah Hamdani in Aleppo and has praised this gallant ruler for his love of the Ahl al-Bayt, as well as his exploits against the Byzantines.

811 lunar years ago, on this day in 629 AH, the Sunni Hanbali narrator of hadith, Abu Bakr Ibn Noqtah, died in Baghdad. He travelled widely over Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt to gather hadith, and is the author of the book “at-Taqyeed”. Among his students is the well-known religious scholar and historian, Ibn Asaker, the author of the voluminous book History of Damascus, who has recorded in his work the details of 400 ayahs of the holy Qur'an that God revealed to Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) on the merits of his vicegerent, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb (AS).

804 solar years ago, on this day in 1214 AD the important port city of Sinope on the northern-most edge of Anatolia on the Black Sea coast, surrendered to the Seljuq Turks led by Sultan Kaykavus, who defeated and captured King Alexios of Trebizond. It was a strategic victory that severed the link between the Christian kingdom of Trebizond and the Byzantine Empire, enabling the Muslims to complete the conquest of what is now Turkey. In ancient times, Sinope had been a battleground between Persians on one side, and the Greeks and Romans on the other. From 281 to 62 BC, it was part of the kingdom of Pontus (of Iranian origin), whose greatest ruler was Mithridates VI (Persian Mithradatha or "Gift of Mithra"), who during his 57-year reign, was one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable and successful enemies, during what are known as the Mithridatic Wars. Over three centuries after the Roman occupation Sinope was Christianized. The first time Sinope encountered Muslims was a combined force of Turks, Persians, and Arabs, dispatched by Abbasid Baghdad in 858. In 1081 it was captured by armies of the Isfahan-based Great Seljuq Empire in the reign of Malik Shah. After 1265, Sinope became home to two successive independent emirates the Pervane and the Jandarids, following fall of the Persianized Seljuqs. The Ottoman Sultan Mohammad II forced Ismail, the last emir of Sinope to surrender in late June 1461 without a fight.

352 solar years ago, on this day in 1666 AD, Sam Mirza was crowned as the 8th Emperor of the Safavid Dynasty of Iran, with the title Shah Safi II, after a 7-day mourning for his father, Shah Abbas II. His mother was a Circassian, and being brought up in the harem he had little experience of the world outside. He also suffered from poor health. The first year of his reign was markedly unsuccessful. A series of natural disasters, combined with devastating raids by the Cossack Stenka Razin on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, convinced court astrologers that the coronation had taken place at the wrong time. The ceremony was repeated on March 20, 1667, with the Shah changing his title to Suleiman I. He had little interest in administrative affairs, and left political decision-making to his grand viziers, whose power increased during his long reign of 28 years. As a result, corruption became widespread and discipline in the army was dangerously lax. He made no attempt to exploit the weakness of Safavid Iran’s traditional rival, the Ottoman Empire after the Turks suffered a severe defeat at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. During his reign, Iran also suffered raids by the Uzbeks and Kalmyks. He was succeeded by his elder son, Sultan Hussain, a pious person.

263 solar years ago, on this day in 1755 AD, a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami destroyed Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, killing almost ninety thousand people. Heavy damage resulted from ensuing fires and tsunami flooding across the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco killing thousands of people.

214 lunar years ago, on this day in 1226 AH, the scholar Mirza Baqer Khwansari was born in Khwansar near Isfahan to the prominent religious leader Mirza Zayn al-Abedin Khwansari. He became a leading jurisprudent, hadith expert, litterateur, and researcher of his time. As head of the Isfahan seminary, his classes were attended by such scholars of repute as Shaikh ash-Shari’ah Isfahani, Seyyed Abu Turab Khwansari, Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Yazdi and others. He authored several books including “Qurrat-al-Ayn” and “Rowdhaat al-Jannat fi Ahwal al-Ulema wa’s-Sadaat” – the latter being a biographical encyclopedia of scholars in several volumes.

197 solar years ago, on this day in 1821 AD, Panama was annexed to Columbia following its liberation from Spanish colonial rule. Panama was seized by Spain in the year 1501, and following the discovery of gold mines in this country, the Americans interfered to loot this region. Finally, in 1903, struggles of the people of Panama bore fruit and this land gained its independence. The Republic of Panama, spread over 77,082 sq km, is located in southern Central America. The Panama Canal passes through this country connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

137 lunar years ago, on this day in 1303 AH, prominent Iranian Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ja’far Shushtari, passed away. His power of speech, piety, and strong memory was known to all. He was an accomplished jurisprudent and spent all his life, guiding people and carrying out religious duties. He groomed several students and authored numerous books, including “Usoul ad-Din” (Fundamentals of Religion)

134 solar years ago, on this day in 1884 AD, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted at a meeting of the International Meridian Conference in Washington, USA. Subsequently the International Date Line was drawn up and 24 time zones created. It is commonly used in practice to refer to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Greenwich Village, located on the 0 Latitude, lies some ten km east of London.

100 solar years ago, on this day in 1918 AD, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated following its defeat in World War I, resulting in the emergence of Austria and Hungary as two independent states in Central Europe. Austria and Hungary respectively cover almost 84,000 sq km and 93,000 sq km.

90 solar years ago, on this day in 1928 AD, President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, took another anti-Islamic step in order to sever links between Turkish Muslims and their rich culture, by passing a law for forced adoption of the Latin Alphabet to replace the traditional Arabicized Persian Alphabet of the Turkish language. He set the 1^st of January 1929 as the deadline to switch to the new script or face penalties. Ataturk, who had earlier replaced the shari’a law with Swiss-Italian civil code, banned recitation of the holy Qur’an on the radio, prohibited the Azaan or call to the daily prayers from mosques, turned Sufi hospices, like the Iranian Gnostic poet Mowlana Roumi’s mausoleum in Konya into museums, forced the people to adopt European dress, and unveiled Turkish women, intended to deprive the coming generations of familiarity with the holy Qur’an, hadith and Ottoman history. The earliest known Turkish alphabet was the pre-Islamic Orkhon script used by the Turks in their original homeland on the Mongolian-Chinese borders. After conversion to Islam and their influx into the Iranian Plateau and Anatolia, Turkic tribes adopted the Arabicized Persian script and used it for over a thousand years. It was well suited to write Ottoman Turkish which incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Meanwhile, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Soviets replaced the Arabicized Persian script of the various Turkic languages with the Cyrillic script.

83 solar years ago, on this day in 1935 AD, Palestinian author and thinker, Edward Sa’eed, was born in a Christian family in the city of Bayt al-Moqaddas. He left for the US at the age of 17 for higher studies and obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. A relentless supporter of the Palestinian cause, he enlightened the international community about the oppression of the Palestinian people by the illegal Zionist entity. He was elected to the Palestine National Parliament in 1977, but resigned in 1991 in protest to the compromise with Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization. He authored several books including “Culture and Imperialism”, “The Politics of Dispossession”, and “Covering Islam”. In his most important book “Orientalism”, he describes how Oriental scholars have turned into tools of Western colonialists to justify the looting of the wealth of Eastern nations by Western colonial states. He died in the US in 2003.

67 solar years ago, on this day in 1951 AD, during Operation Buster-Jangle in Nevada, the US regime deliberately exposed 6,500 American soldiers to 'Desert Rock' atomic explosions, as a live field test to determine radiation effects on humans, without informing them that they were being treated as laboratory animals.

66 solar years ago, on this day in 1952 AD, the first US test of a thermonuclear device, a hydrogen bomb dubbed “Mike,” was carried out at Eniwetok Atholl in the Pacific, 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. It exploded with a blinding white fireball more than three miles across, completely obliterating Elugelab and leaving an underwater crater – 6240-ft wide and 164-ft deep – in the atoll where an island had once been. An estimated eighty million tons of soil were lifted into the air by the blast. It was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb the US had criminally dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and a blast greater than all the explosives used during World War 2. The mushroom cloud rose to 135,000 ft (the top of the stratosphere) and eventually spread to 1000 miles wide. Within nine months, the Soviet Union tested its own hydrogen bomb, as part of the balance of terror between the two dangerously-armed nuclear powers.

64 solar years ago, on this day in 1954 AD, with establishment of the Algerian Liberation Movement, the battle for independence from French colonial rule started. France had occupied Algeria in 1830 after defeating the Ottoman Turks. The Algerian people were never happy with French rule and there were sporadic uprisings until the establishment of the full-fledged liberation movement after World War 2, especially, when Algerians came to know about the plan being drafted in Paris to annex their country to France. Finally, in 1962, the struggles of the Algerian Muslims bore fruit, after the death of a million people, and the French troops were forced to pull out of Algeria. Ahmed bin Bella, was elected as the first Algerian president, and three years later was overthrown in a coup by Defence Minister Colonel Houari Bo-Mohiyeddin. Algeria is the largest country in Africa, the Arab World and the littoral states of the Mediterranean Sea. It is also the tenth-largest country in the world. It is bordered in the northeast by Tunisia, in the east by Libya, in the west by Morocco, in the southwest by Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Mali, in the southeast by Niger, and in the north by the Mediterranean Sea. Algeria's size is almost 2.4 million square km with an estimated population of around 40 million.

39 solar years ago, on this day in 1979 AD, the prominent religious scholar, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Ali Qazi Tabatabaei, was martyred by the Forqan terrorist outfit in his hometown Tabriz, northwestern Iran. He was initially taught by his father, before joining the seminary to study under the prominent ulema, including the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA). During his political struggles against the Shah’s despotic regime, he was imprisoned and banished to remote areas several times. After victory of the Islamic Revolution, he was appointed as Imam Khomeini’s representative and the Friday Prayer leader of Tabriz.

38 solar years ago, on this day in 1980 AD, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s oil minister, Mohammad Javad Tondgouyan, along with several oil ministry officials, while on inspection visit to installations in the southwestern parts of the country, was abducted by the invading Iraqi forces, a month after Saddam's launching of the unprovoked war on Iran at the behest of the US. Initially, Saddam’s Ba’th minority regime denied the abduction, but finally claimed he had committed suicide in captivity. Medical examinations of the corpse, coupled with eyewitness accounts of Iranian POWs proved the Ba’thists martyred the Iranian oil minister through torture.

12 solar years ago, on this day in 2006 AD, Iran awarded the top prize in an international cartoon contest on the alleged holocaust in Europe during World War 2, to a Moroccan artist for his depiction of the illegal Zionist entity’s apartheid wall in the West Bank of River Jordan with a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp on it. It suggests that the Israeli repression of Palestinians is worse than Nazi Germany’s supposed suppression of Jews.

AS/SS