Today is Saturday; 1st of the Iranian month of Aban 1395 solar hijri; corresponding to 20th of the Islamic month of Muharram 1438 lunar hijri; and October 22, 2016, of the Christian Gregorian Calendar.
1275 solar years ago, on this day in 741 AD, Charles Martel, the Frankish statesman and military leader who, as Duke of the Franks, was de facto ruler of Francia, died after 23 years in power. An illegitimate son of the German chief, Pepin, he was notorious for his barbaric nature as marauder of the frontiers of the Roman Empire. He took advantage of the infighting amongst the Muslims to lead the Christians to victory in the Battle of Tours, near Poitiers in France, southwest of Paris, where in 732 the Omayyad forces were defeated and their commander, Abdur-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, killed. In 737, he again crushed an Omayyad army at Arles in southern France. He then took the city by a direct and brutal frontal attack, and burned it to the ground. He then moved swiftly and defeated a mighty host outside of Narbonnea at the River Berre, but failed to take the city. Many historians, including Sir Edward Creasy, believe that had Martel failed at Tours, the Muslim would probably have overrun Gaul, and perhaps the remainder of Western Europe. The British historian, Edward Gibbon believed that the Muslim armies would have conquered from Japan to the Rhine, and even England, having the English Channel for protection, with ease, had Martel not prevailed.
522 solar years ago, on this day in 1494 AD, the second expedition of the Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, started from Spain with the assistance of Spanish Muslims, who very well knew the sea routes of the Atlantic Ocean including what the Europeans later called the American continent. Columbus landed on the Antilles islands in the Caribbean Sea. Two years earlier in 1492, he had made his first expedition to this new world, which he thought was India, and hence the Spanish called the indigenous American people, Red Indians.
496 lunar years ago, on this day in 942 AH, the Spanish Christians led by King Charles V seized the Islamic city of Tunis on the North African coast from the Ottoman Turks and perpetrated a heinous massacre of at least 30,000 Muslims. The stench of the corpses was such that Spanish king soon left Tunis by placing Molay Hassan as a client ruler. The Spanish also took thousands of women and children as slaves, and set on fire tens of thousands of books and rare manuscripts.
382 solar years ago, on this day in 1634 AD, in the Battle of Southern Fujian Sea, the Ming dynasty of China defeated the Dutch East India Company.
359 lunar years ago, on this day in 1079 AH (corresponding to 1669 AD), the Ottoman Empire defeated a coalition of European armies to take over Crete from the Republic of Venice. Crete, the 5th largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, was under Turkish rule for over two centuries till 1898, when it was seized by a joint British-French- Italian-Russian force, which in 1913 handed it to Greece at the end of the 2nd Balkans War with the Turks. Over half of Crete’s population was made up of local Cretan Muslims, many of whom were forcibly converted to Christianity and the rest expelled by the Greeks to Turkey, Syria, and Egypt by 1923. Among the Cretan Muslims, who spoke Greek as their mother tongue and not Turkish, there were many who followed the Bektashi Sufi order founded by Iranian mystic, Haji Bektash Vali of Nishapur, Khorasan, and were hence followers of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt. All the mosques and Tekiyes were either destroyed or turned into churches by the Greek Christians, who a century earlier had remove all traces of four centuries of Turkish Muslim rule from Greece. It is worth recalling that Islam was brought to Crete a thousand and two centuries ago by Spanish Muslims, who ruled this island as the Emirate of Ikritish for almost 150 years from their capital Rabdh al-Khandaq (modern Heraklion).
309 solar years ago, on this day in 1707 AD, the Scilly naval disaster occurred as four warships of a British fleet sank near the Isles of Scilly off the southwestern tip of the Cornish peninsula of Britain, in severe weather, resulting in the death of 1,550 sailors, along with Admiral Cloudesley Shovell. It was one of the worst maritime disasters. The main cause was the navigators' inability to accurately calculate their positions.
226 solar years ago, on this day in 1790 AD, Warriors of the Miami tribe under Chief Little Turtle defeated US troops under General Josiah Harmar at the site of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the Northwest Indian War. The next year, the Amerindian again defeated a US army at St. Clair, killing about 1,000 soldiers. After St. Clair's disaster, President George Washington ordered General "Mad" Anthony Wayne to attack the natives, and in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, he brutally massacred a large number of natives and forced the tribal leaders to cede extensive territory, including much of present-day Ohio, as per the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. The US has since carried genocide to eliminate the race and culture of the native Amerindian people.
170 lunar years ago, on this day in 1268 AH, the highly efficient Prime Minister of Iran, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, was dismissed from his post by Naser od-Din Shah Qajar, following court intrigues by local agents of foreign powers, on loss of their illegal interests, because of his political and administrative reforms. Rising from the lower rungs of the society through hard work, honesty, and voracious appetite for knowledge and new techniques, his achievements include the vaccination of Iranians against smallpox, economic development of the fertile Khuzestan Province, foundation in Tehran of the Dar ol-Fonoun Academy which taught medicine, surgery, pharmacology, natural history, mathematics, geology, and natural science to train the civilian and military staff, cancellation of the one-sided treaties with the Russians and the British, promotion of education, launching of a newspaper, and above all the timely crackdown on the seditious Babi-Bahai plot against Islam and the country, resulting in the execution of the heretic Mohammad Ali Bab. In the end, Amir Kabir was martyred in Kashan and with him died the prospects of an independent Iran led by meritocracy.
120 solar years ago, on this day in 1896 AD, American biochemist, Charles Glen King, who discovered vitamin C, was born. After five years of painstaking research extracting components from lemon juice, in 1932, he isolated vitamin C. Its structure was quickly determined and it was synthesized by scientists such as Haworth and Reichstein in 1933. Also known as ascorbic acid, (a- = not, without; scorbus = scurvy), vitamin C is a colourless crystalline water-soluble vitamin found especially in citrus fruits and green vegetables. Most organisms synthesize it from glucose but man and other primates and various other species must obtain it from their diet. It is required for the maintenance of healthy connective tissue; deficiency leads to scurvy. Vitamin C is readily destroyed by heat and light.
105 solar years ago, on this day in 191l AD, in a blatant act of violation of Iran’s sovereignty, the British set up a joint force of English and Indian troops to police the southern parts of Iran and provide to security to colonial trade, at the expense of the weak Qajarid government of Iran, which had already succumbed to the pressure of Tsarist Russia to set up a similar force of Qazzaqs in the northern parts. Even the parliament voted against the British measures, it was powerless in the face of the domineering colonialist powers.   
97 solar years ago, on this day in 1918 AD, the last phase of World War I started with the attacks of the allied forces in northwestern Europe. The German forces initially strongly resisted the offensive, but the Allied forces eventually prevailed, thus ending World War I in November 1918 after four years of war.
59 solar years ago, on this day in 1956 AD, the premiers of France, Britain, and the Zionist regime of Israel, in a meeting behind closed doors in France, hatched the plot to attack Egypt. After the Egyptian President, Jamal Abdun-Nasser, announced the nationalization of Suez Canal in the year 1956, France and Britain were intent on occupying this Canal due to losing their illegitimate interests in the region. Moreover, the illegal Zionist entity called Israel, which considered Egypt as its main enemy, intended to use this opportunity to deal a major blow against this leading Arab country. A week after the secret meeting of French, British, and Israeli regime premiers, the armies of these states attacked Egypt. But, during this offensive, the invaders failed to reach their goals.
41 solar years ago, on this day in 1975 AD, British historian, Arnold Toynbee, died at the age of 86. His 12-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, titled A Study of History, took 27 years to complete, and is a synthesis of world history, based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective. After initially supporting the Zionist movement at the turn of the 20th century, he gradually changed his outlook and by 1950, two years after the illegitimate birth of Israel, was a strong opponent of the Zionist entity, and supported the Arab cause.
39 solar years ago, on this day in 1977 AD, Ayatollah Seyyed Mostafa Khomeini, the elder son of the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), was martyred in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq by agents of Iran's Pahlavi regime, at the age of 47. He was born in the holy city of Qom, where he mastered Islamic sciences and reached the level of Ijtehad at the young age of 27. For ten years he lectured at the Najaf Islamic Seminary, and was always alongside his father in the struggle against the despotic Shah’s regime. His martyrdom accelerated the pace of struggles of the Iranian people and led to the victory of the Islamic Revolution a year and four months later.
36 solar years ago, on this day in 1979 AD, the US regime, despite warnings from the provisional revolutionary government of Iran, allowed the deposed Shah to come to New York – on the excuse of medical treatment – a provocative move by the Americans that led revolutionary students to take over the US embassy in Tehran, which was violating diplomatic norm by serving as an espionage den for Washington in the region.
(Courtesy: IRIB English Radio – http://parstoday.com/en)