Today is Sunday; 5th of the Iranian month of Ordibehesht 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 16th of the Islamic month of Rajab 1437 lunar hijri; and April 24, 2016, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.
3495 solar years ago, on this day in 1479 BC, Thutmose III ascended the throne of Egypt as a year-old child on the death of his father Thutmose II, but power shifted to his stepmother and aunt Hatshepsut, who though a regent, effectively ruled for 22 years as the 5th Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty until her death. Thutmose III now assumed absolute power as the 6th Pharaoh and ruled for the next 32 years, until his death and was succeeded by his son, Amenhotep II. Thutmose III created the largest empire Egypt had ever seen – from Niya in North Syria to the Fourth Cataract of the River Nile in Nubia. In 1457 BC, he fought the Battle of Megiddo with a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh in Palestine. It is believed to be the first battle recorded in relative detail. This battle is also the first recorded use of the composite bow and the first body count. All details come from Egyptian sources—primarily the hieroglyphic writings on the Hall of Annals in the Temple of Amun-Re at Karnak, Thebes (now Luxor), by the military scribe Tjaneni. The battle resulted in the rout of the Canaanite forces. Tell Megiddo or Har Megiddo, as it is called in Hebrew, was corrupted to "Armageddon” in the Greek translation of the Bible, and is associated with some crucial battles in history. It is supposed to be the site (although its authentication is open to doubt), of the last battle in the end times between the forces of good and evil. Of the two other crucial battles that took place in Megiddo, is the one fought in 609 BC between the Egyptians and the Israelites, in which Pharaoh Necho II while leading his army to fight the Babylonians in Syria, defeated the Kingdom of Judah and killed King Josiah, as recorded in the Old Testament. The last and the best-known Battle of Megiddo was in 1918 during the closing months of World War I when a British force made up of soldiers of different lands including Arabs and Indian Muslims, and led by General Edmund Allenby defeated the Ottoman Turks to seize control of Palestine.
3200 solar years ago,on this day 1184 BC, Troy on the coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) was burned by Greeks who entered it deceitfully by using a huge wooden horse, which the unsuspecting Trojans took inside their impregnable city, unaware that in its belly hid a select group of soldiers. After midnight, Ulysses and his comrades got out of the wooden horse and opened the gates for the rest of the army which under pretext of withdrawal had moved out of sight, only to burst in and massacre the sleeping Trojans. A different date (June 11) is given for the end of the 10-year long Trojan War that had started following the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the ruler of Sparta by Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, as per the calculations of the geographer and mathematician Eratosthenes, the librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria, then the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt.
1464 solar years ago, on this day in 552 AD, the first systemized academy for writing and translating of books was set up in southwestern Iran in what is now Khuzestan by the Sassanid emperor, Khosrow I Anushirvan in the town of Gundishapur, established by Shapur I three centuries earlier.In 489, when Roman Emperor Zeno ordered closed the Nestorian Christian theological and scientific center in Edessa, the academy and staff moved into the territory of the Sassanid Empire and were absorbed into the School of Nisibis in what is now Turkey. Here, Syriac-speaking Christian scholars, together with Hellenistic philosophers expelled from Athens by Emperor Justinian in 529, carried out important research in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics, before shifting deeper into Iran in Gondishapur. The refugees were commissioned to translate Greek and Syriac texts into Pahlavi. They translated various works on medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and useful crafts.Anushirvan also invited the scholars of the east from China and India, and sent the physician Borzouyeh to the Subcontinent for this purpose. These visitors translated Indian texts on astronomy, astrology, mathematics and medicine and Chinese texts on herbal medicine and religion. Borzouyeh is said to have himself translated the Panchatantra from Sanskrit into Middle Persian as KalilavaDimna, which after the advent of Islam, was translated into Arabic and later into Persian Dari.
1314 solar years ago, on this day in 702 AD – as per the Gregorian calendar – Imam Ja’far Sadeq (AS), the 6th Infallible Heir of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), was born in Medina. We mark events of the fruitful life of the Prophets and the Imams as per the Islamic lunar calendar, but whenever these historical occasions coincide with the solar calendar, as is the case today, we take the opportunity to enlighten the seekers of truth. To be brief, Imam Sadeq (AS), who was born on 17th Rabi al-Awwal 83 AH, needs no introduction, since it was he who bequeathed to posterity the dynamism of the "Sunnah” and "Seerah”, that is, the genuine practice and behavior of his ancestor the Prophet that stands out as the "Shari’a” or proper way of guidance for the believers. During his 34-year imamate, he trained for the benefit of humanity as many as 4000 scholars in various branches of science, including the Father of Chemistry, Jaber ibn Hayyan, who was known to medieval Europe as Geber. The "Fiqh al-Ja’fari” (Ja’fari School of Jurisprudence) is his immortal legacy, which unlike the other schools of jurisprudence, is based on ration and intellect within the framework of God’s Revealed Word, the holy Qur’an and the Hadith of the Prophet.
898 lunar years ago, on this day in 539 AH, the hadith scholar of Spanish Muslim origin, Mohammad ibn Abdul-Malik ibn Khayroun, passed away. Among his extant works is the book "al-Miftah”.
745 solar years ago, on this day in 1271 AD, the Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, started his journey to China at the age of 17 through Anatolia, Iran, and Turkestan, in the company of his father Nicolo and uncle Maffeo, after they had returned from a historic trip by any Italian to the court of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, in Khanbaliq (present day Beijing). They stayed in China for 21 years, departing in 1292 by sea through Southeast Asia as escorts for Princess Kokachin, whom the Great Khan sent to Iran as a bride for his grandnephew, Arghun Khan, the Ilkhanid Mongol ruler of Iran-Iraq and parts of Syria and Anatolia. It took two years for Marco Polo and the bridal party to reach Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, where they learned Arghun Khan had died and was succeeded by his son, Ghazaan Khan, who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Mahmoud (he eventually married the Princess in his capital Maragheh). Marco Polo continued his journey and in 1295, after 24 long years and 24,000 km of travelling by land and sea, he finally returned to his hometown, Venice, which was at war with Genoa. Marco was taken prisoner and during imprisonment, related his memoirs to Rustichello da Pisa, mentioning his observations of the lands he had visited, including the use of paper money in China, which made the Italians mock and ridicule him as a madman.
705 solar years ago, on this day in 1311 AD, General Malik Kafur returned to Delhi from his victorious campaign in the Deccan (or southern India) and presented Sultan Ala od-Din, the second and greatest king of the short-lived Khalji Turko-Persian Dynasty of Northern India 241 tonnes of gold, 20,000 horses, and 612 elephants laden with treasure, including the famous diamond "Koh-e Noor” (or Mountain of Light), excavated at Golkandah. Originally a Hindu from Khambat in Gujarat, western India, he was known as "Hazar-Dinari” (or Thousand Dinar – the price paid for him by the Sultan), and on embracing Islam, rapidly rose to become an able general, who brought south India into the fold of the Muslim World, when Islamic faith was fast spreading in all directions – Russia, eastern Europe, West Africa and southeast Asia.
285 solar years ago, on this day in 1731 AD, Daniel Defoe, the British author and spy, died. His works include the novels "Robinson Crusoe,” "Roxana” and the pamphlet "The Shortest Way with Dissenters.” Defoe based part of his narrative on the story of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years stranded in the Juan Fernandez Islands – the island Selkirk lived on was named Mas-a-Tierra [or Closer to Land] at the time and was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Defoe was also inspired by the Latin/English translation of the book "HayyibnYaqdhan” by the Spanish Muslim polymath IbnTufail, who drew the name of the tale and most of its characters from an earlier work by the Iranian Islamic multi-sided genius, Abu Ali IbnSina (Avicenna). The plot of IbnTufail’s work is very different, and tells the story of an autodidactic feral child, raised by a gazelle and living alone on a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
139 solar years ago, on this day in 1877 AD, the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in alliance with the Christian communities of the Balkan Peninsula, and its troops entered Romania by crossing the Prut River. Fought in the Balkans and in the Caucasus for almost a year, the Russians, capitalizing on the weakness of the Ottomans, established control over the Black Sea and created new states in the Balkans. The Turks, despite some initial success, suffered heavily as a result of lack of defence strategy. The Russian march on Istanbul was halted by the humiliating terms of the Treaty of San Stefano on March 3, 1987, by which the Ottoman Empire, after five centuries of Muslim rule, was forced to grant independence to its provinces of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Russia also seized several Turkish provinces in the Caucasus, namely Kars and Batum in Georgia, in addition to occupying Erzurum near to the borders of Iran, with the help of Armenians, before eventual withdrawal. Taking advantage of the Ottoman defeat, the Austria-Hungarian Empire seized Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Turks, while Britain occupied Cyprus. Many towns and cities which had distinct Turkish-Islamic features with mosques, tekkiyes, bazaars, baths, libraries, and public fountains (such as Sofia the capital of Bulgaria), were destroyed and later replaced with Christian churches. Of the 1.5 million Muslims in pre-war Bulgaria, half of them disappeared by 1879, with 200,000 massacred and the rest becoming permanent refugees in Ottoman territories. A large library containing books in Turkish, Arabic and Persian, was destroyed when a mosque in Turnovo was burned in 1877. This great setback for native European Muslims happened within half-a-century of their massacre, expulsion and forced Christianization in the province of Yunanistan, which West European powers detached from the Ottoman Empire and gave it the ancient pre-Christian name of Greece.
100 solar years ago, on this day in 1916 AD, the wide-scale protest of the people of Ireland against British occupation started, following the rise of the independence-seeking Sinn Fein movement, and led to intense sectarian battles between the Christian sects of Protestants and Catholics. Sinn Fein was against the British policy of dividing Ireland into two parts – north and south. In 1922, Southern Ireland announced its independence as a republic, while Northern Ireland continued to remain under British rule, wracked by sectarian clashes.
36 solar years ago, on this day in 1980 AD, the stealth US military attack on Iran with a number of choppers and planes, floundered in the sands of Tabas in the northeastern parts of the country in the dead of night, as desert sands miraculously swirled to blind and confuse the pilots, resulting in confusion and collision amongst the US aircraft. Soon there were huge flames all around as aircraft were reduced to ashes and American soldiers turned into charred bodies, without the Muslim nation of Iran knowing what was really happening. It was indeed heavenly help for the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the panicked Americans fled the country leaving behind burned machines and dead bodies. The well-rehearsed invasion shattered President Jimmy Carter’s plan for re-election by freeing the American spies being held in the Den of Spies in Tehran, as the American embassy had become. On the humiliating military failure of the US, the Father of Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA) noted now that the Great Satan conducted an absurd act, and the courageous Iranian nation should get prepared for a confrontation with the foes with reliance upon God’s Infinite Power.
(Courtesy: IRIB English Radio – http://parstoday.com/en)