Today is Thursday; 25th of the Iranian month of Tir 1394 solar hijri; corresponding to 29th of the Islamic month of Ramadhan 1436 lunar hijri; and July 16, 2015, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.
1393 solar years ago, on this day in 622 AD, the Islamic lunar calendar began. It was fixed in 638 AD, 16 solar years after the passing away of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA), when confusion arose regarding the dates and years to be followed. During his caliphate Omar ibn Khattab, who had banned the written compilation of the Prophet’s hadith and even rejected the collection of the ayahs of the holy Qur’an in book form as Mus’haf after having deprived the Prophet’s divinely-decreed successor, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb (AS) of the political rule of the Muslim state, received a letter from the governor of Basra that the absence of any years on the correspondence he receives from Medina, make it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. Omar was clearly perplexed, and as usual the magnanimous Imam Ali (AS) came to his rescue by advising that the Islamic calendar should be dated according to the Hijra or migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina. Omar accepted the Imam’s advice, but as per the insinuation of Osman ibn Affan he fixed the date of the beginning of the Islamic year on the 1st of Moharram, in line with the pagan Arab custom of that time, even though the actual migration of the Prophet had taken place on the eve of Rabi al-Awwal.
803 solar years ago, on this day in 1212 AD, The Battle of al-Uqab or Las Navas de Tolosa, occurred in southern Spain between Muslims and Christians some 64 km from the city of Jaen (corruption of the Arabic ‘Khayyan’ which means crossroads of caravans), resulting in the defeat of the self-styled caliph, an-Nasser of the al-Muwahidin (Almohad) Empire of Morocco-Andalusia by the combined armies of the kingdoms of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. It marked the decline of Islamic Spain after five centuries of ascendancy, and was the outcome of a crusade against Spanish Muslims called by Pope Innocent III involving Christian mercenaries from all over Europe. The debacle was because of laxity on the part of the self-styled caliph, who proud of his vast army, left unguarded in the mountainous terrain some small passes through which the Christians led by Castile’s King Alfonso VIII sneaked in for the ambush while the Muslim camp was asleep. The result was a great slaughter of the Muslim forces, as an-Nasir fled the battlefield. Alfonso followed up his victory by immediately taking Ba’eza and Ubeda. The extensive effects of the Muslim defeat did not become apparent until two decades later after 1233, when the Almohad Empire disintegrated owing to dynastic squabbles and, lacking a central leader, the Muslim hold on Spain slipped rapidly before the Christian armies with the important centres of Islamic culture, Cordova and Seville, gradually falling to them.
799 solar years ago,on this day in 1216 AD, Innocent III, the most powerfully politicized Pope of the Catholic sect of Christianity, and the most hostile towards Muslims and Jews, died suddenly while on a visit to Perugia, Central Italy, at the age of 56 after an 18-year reign. He was seen in a vision the same day by the Nun Lugarda in her monastery at Aywieres in faraway Belgium, engulfed in flames for three of the most cardinal sins he had committed in life, and for which he said (before disappearing in anguish) that he would languish for centuries in purgatory as divine punishment. Named Lotario dei Conti di Segni at birth in Italy to a Roman family that produced nine popes, he believed in the superiority of the Church over temporal rulers, and on being selected pope, strove to make the kings and emperors of Europe subordinate to his authority. He also decreed that all Jews in Christendom should wear special identifying markings on their clothing. At the same time, he persecuted as heretics all those Christians that dissented with the Catholic Church. An instance in this regard was his ordering of wars that resulted in the massacre of 20,000 men, women and children of the Albigenses or Cathar sect of southwestern France, who viewed the Catholic Church as corrupt. An avowed enemy of Islam, Pope Innocent III, in total disregard to the Muslim-Christian peace accord in Palestine mobilised the 4th Crusade for invasion of Egypt, which, however, because of fears of facing the powerful Ayyubids, was diverted towards an easier target, that is, the fellow Christians of the Byzantine Empire, and led to the fall of Constantinople and its savage plunder – all of which were legitimized by the Pope, regardless of the permanent rift he was causing between the Greek and Latin Churches. Earlier in 1212 he had ordered a crusade involving Christian mercenaries against the al-Muwahadin Muslim rulers of Spain that resulted in the unmanly ambush of Las Navas de Tolosa (Battle of al-Uqab in Arabic), and huge massacre of civilians, incidentally on July 16.  
628 lunar years ago, on this day in 807 AH, the Egyptian Hanafi historian, Ibn al-Furat, passed away in his hometown Cairo at the age of 72. His history "Tarikh ad-Duwwal wa'l-Muluk" focuses largely on the Crusades. The work survives in fragments. His work is of importance for modern scholars due to its high level of detail and the mostly verbatim use of a wide variety of sources, including Christian and Shi’a. Some of these works survive through his reuse of them.
332 solar years ago, on this day in 1683 AD, the Manchu Qing Dynasty naval forces under the traitorous commander Shi Lang defeated the Kingdom of Tungning in the Battle of Penghu near the Pescadores Islands. Founded in 1642, the Qing Dynasty lasted till 1912.
174 lunar years ago, on this day in 1272 AH, the virtuous scholar Seyyed Hassan Sadr Ibn Seyyed Hadi as-Sadr was born in the holy city of Kazemain, near Baghdad in Iraq. At the age of 16 he went to holy Najaf to study under the leading ulema and nine years later moved to Samarra to study under the celebrated scholar, Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi (famous for his fatwa against tobacco consumption in Iran). He returned to Kazemain seventeen years later and soon became the leading mujtahed. He passed away in 1354 at the age of 82. He groomed many students and wrote several books such as the "Role of Shi’ite Scholars in Development of Islamic Sciences”, The Shi’ite Muslims and Promotion of Islamic Arts”, and a refutation of the absurd viewpoints of the pseudo scholar Ibn Taimiyya.
143 solar years ago, on this day in 1872 AD, Norwegian explorer, Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen, was born. He interrupted his studies in medicine to join the first winter expedition to the Antarctic, sailing in 1897 on a Belgian expedition. On his next voyage he established the Northwest Passage. In 1904 he located the site of the North Magnetic pole. When he turned his attention to the Antarctic, he achieved his quest to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. After three unsuccessful attempts, he was among the first to cross the Arctic by air in 1926 when he made a flight from Spitsbergen, across the North Pole to Alaska.
125 solar years ago, on this day in 1890 AD, the Parkinson Disease and how it develops were identified by English physician, James Parkinson. The main reason for this illness is brain malfunctions, and currently no certain treatment has been found for it.
70 solar years ago, on this day in 1945 AD, the US misused science and technology to explode the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, thereby triggering a race for weapons of mass destruction to the detriment of humanity. The atomic bomb was invented by two refugee German scientists, Professor Rudolph Peierls and Otto Frisch. They designed a "blueprint" for making an atom bomb in 1940 after fleeing to the US from Nazi Germany. It actually began when the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, working in the US, invented an apparatus which produced the first atomic chain reactions. In 1940 both the Americans and British were researching the atom bomb and when the United States entered WW2, the British joined the American "Manhattan Project" and production of the bomb went on ahead in the US, which is the only power to have criminally used the atomic bomb on the hapless Japanese people as field test, when World War 2 was virtually over.
67 solar years ago, on this day in 1948 AD, following resistance, the Palestinian city of an-Nasserah (Nazareth), revered by Christians as the childhood hometown of Prophet Jesus (AS), fell to the Israeli troops, and has since been under Zionist occupation. The population is still predominantly Arab (99 percent), with Muslims making up 69 percent and Christians 30 percent.
61 solar years ago, on this day in 1954 AD, Henri Frankfort, Dutch-American archaeologist who established the relationship between Egypt and Mesopotamia and completed a thoroughly documented reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian culture and art, died at the age of 57. The excavations he directed in Egypt and later in Iraq were conducted with exemplary archaeological scholarship. He wrote 15 books and monographs and about 73 articles about archaeology and cultural anthropology. Among his books are "Kingship and the Gods” and "Review of Cylinder Seals: A Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East".
43 lunar years ago, on this day in 1393 AH, Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Hussaini Zanjani passed away at the age of 85 and was laid to rest in the mausoleum of Hazrat Ma’souma (SA). After Islamic studies in his hometown Zanjan, he moved to Qom on revival of the Seminary of the holy city by Ayatollah Shaikh Abdul-Karim Ha’eri and mastered jurisprudence, theology, history and literature. He was well aware of contemporary issues and authored "Khayr al-Omour”.
36 solar years ago, on this day in 1979 AD, Iraq’s first president of the repressive Ba’th minority regime, General Hasan Ahmad al-Bakr, was ordered by his masters in London and Washington to resign and hand over power to his more brutal vice-president, Saddam, five months after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Saddam instantly launched a reign of terror by imprisoning and murdering prominent religious and political leaders of the long-suppressed Arab Shi’ite majority, including the reputed scholar, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Baqer as-Sadr. He also suppressed the ethnic Sunni Kurds of the north and expelled tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens on the pretext of being of Iranian origin. In September 1980, at the behest of the US, he launched a brutal war on the Islamic Republic of Iran which raged for 8 years. In 1990, he occupied Kuwait and was driven out seven months later by an international coalition. With his downfall in 2003 at the hands of his own backers, the Americans, 34 years of brutal Ba’th minority rule came to its end.
7 solar years ago, on this day in 2008 AD, Lebanon’s legendry anti-terrorist movement, the Hezbollah, in another victory, in return for the handover of the bodies of two Zionist soldiers, forced Israel to release five Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of nearly 200 martyrs. The exchange took place following indirect negotiations with the mediation of Germany. Among the freed Lebanese, were individuals from other groups, such as Samir Qantar, jailed for 30 years.
(Courtesy: IRIB English Radio – http://english.irib.ir)