ALI IBN RABBAN AL-TABARI

This accomplished Hakim was the tutor of the unparalleled physician Zaksriya al-Razi. Luck favoured the disciple more than the teacher in terms of celebrity. As compared to Razi people know very little about his teacher Ali. Ali Bin Rabban's surname was Abu al-Hasan, the full name being Abu al-Hasan Ali Bin Sahl Rabban al-Tabari. Born in 838 C.E. his father Sahl hailed from a respectable Jew family. The nobility and sympathy inherent in his very nature soon endeared him to his countrymen so much so that they used to call him Rabban which implies "my leader".

Professionally Sahl was an extremely successful physician. He had command over the art of calligraphy too. Besides he had a deep insight into the disciplines of Astronomy, Philosophy, Mathematics and Literature. Some complicated articles of Batlemus's book al-Mijasti came to be resolved by way of Sahl's scholarly expertise, translators preceding him had failed to solve the mystery. Ali received his education in the disciplines of Medical science and calligraphy from his able father Sahl and attained perfection in these fields. He had also mastered Syriac and Greek languages to a high degree of proficiency. Ali hailed from a Israelite family. Since he had embraced Islam, he is classified amongst Muslim Scholars. This family belonged to Tabristan's famous city Marv.

The fame acquired by Ali Bin Rabban did not simply account for the reason that a physician of the stature of Zaksriya al-Razi was amongst his disciple. In fact the main cause behind his exalta- tion lies in his world-renowned treatise Firdous al-Hikmat.

Spread over seven parts, Firdous al-Hikmat is the first ever Medical encyclopaedia which incorporates all the branches of medical science in its folds. This work has been published in this century (20th century) only. Prior to this publication only five of his manuscripts were to be found scattered in libraries the world over. Dr. Mohammed Zubair Siddiqui compared and edited the manuscripts. In his preface he has provided extremely useful information regarding the book and the author and, wherever felt necessary, explanatory notes have been written to facilitate publication of this work on modern publishing standards.

Later on this unique work was published with the cooperation of English and German institutions. Following are the details of its all seven parts:

1. Part one: Kulliyat-e-Tibb. This part throws light on contemporary ideology of medical science. In that era these principles formed the basis of medical science.
2. Part two: Elucidation of the organs of the human body, rules for keeping good health and comprehensive account of certain muscular diseases.
3. Part three: Description of diet to be taken in conditions of health and disease.
4. Part four: All diseases right from head to toe. This part is of profound significance in the whole book and comprises twelve papers:

i) General causes relating to eruption of diseases. ii) Diseases of the head and the brain. iii) Diseases relating to the eye, nose, ear, mouth and the teeth. iv) Muscular diseases (paralysis and spasm). v) Diseases of the regions of the chest, throat and the lungs. vi) Diseases of the abdomen. vii) Diseases of the liver. viii) Diseases of gallbladder and spleen. ix) Intestinal diseases. x) Different kinds of fever. xi) Miscellaneous diseases- brief explanation of organs of the body. xii) Examination of pulse and urine. This part is the largest in the book and is almost half the size of the whole book.

5. Part five: Description of flavour, taste and colour.
6. Part six: Drugs and poison.
7. Part seven: Deals with diverse topics. Discusses climate and astronomy. Also contains a brief mention of Indian medicine.

Though he wrote Firdous al-Hikmat in Arabic but he simultaneously translated it into Syriac. He has two more compilations to his credit namely Deen-o-Doulat and Hifdh al-Sehhat. The latter is available in manuscript-form in the library of Oxford University. Besides Medical science, he was also a master of Philosophy, Mathematics and Astronomy. He breathed his last around 870 C.E.

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Master Physician: ABU MARWAN IBN ZUHR (Averroes)

Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik Ibn Zuhr was born at Seville in 1091/c. 1094 C.E. ABU MARWAN IBN ZUHR ABU MARWAN IBN ZoHR ABU MARWAN ZUHR ABU MARWAN MARWAN IBN ZUHRAfter completing his education and specializing in medicine, he entered the service of Almoravides (Al-Murabatun), but after their defeat by the Al-Mohades (Al-Muwahadun), he served under 'Abd al-Mu'min, the first Muwahid ruler. He died in Seville in 1161/c. 1162 C.E. As confirmed by George Sarton, he was not a Jew, but an orthodox Muslim.

Ibn Zuhr was one of the greatest physicians and clinicians of the Muslim golden era and has rather been held by some historians of science as the greatest of them. Contrary to the general practice of the Muslim scholars of that era, he confined his work to only one field medicine. This enabled him to produce works of everlasting fame.



As a physician, he made several discoveries and breakthroughs. He described correctly, for the first time, scabies, the itch mite and may thus be regarded as the first parasitologist. Likewise, he prescribed tracheotomy and direct feeding through the gullet and rectum in the cases where normal feeding was not possible. He also gave clinical descriptions of mediastinal tumors, intestinal phthisis, inflammation of the middle ear, pericarditis, etc.



His contribution was chiefly contained in the monumental works written by him; out of these, however, only three are extant. Kitab al-Taisir fi al-Mudawat wa al-Tadbir (Book of Simplification concerning Therapeutics and Diet), written at the request of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), is the most important work of Ibn Zuhr. It describes several of Ibn Zuhr's original contributions. The book gives in detail pathological conditions, followed by therapy. His Kitab al-Iqtisad fi Islah al-Anfus wa al-Ajsad (Book of the Middle Course concerning the Reformation of Souls and the Bodies) gives a summary of diseases, therapeutics and hygiene written specially for the benefit of the layman. Its initial part is a valuable discourse on psychology. Kitab al-Aghthiya (Book on Foodstuffs) describes different types of food and drugs and their effects on health.



Ibn Zuhr in his works lays stress on observation and experiment and his contribution greatly influenced the medical science for several centuries both in the East and the West. His books were translated into Latin and Hebrew and remained popular in Europe as late as the advent of the 18th century.

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ABU AL-NASR AL-FARABI

Abu Nasr Mohammad Ibn al-Farakh al-Farabi was born in a small village Wasij, near Farab in Turkistan in 259 A.H. (870 C.E.). His parents were originally of Persian descent, but his ancestors had migrated to Turkistan. Known as al-Phrarabius in Europe, Farabi was the son of a general. He completed his earlier education at Farab and Bukhara but, later on, he went to Baghdad for higher studies, where he studied and worked for a long time viz., from 901 C.E. to 942 C.E. During this period he acquired mastery over several languages as well as various branches of knowledge and technology. He lived through the reign of six Abbasid Caliphs. As a philosopher and scientist, he acquired great proficiency in various branches of learning and is reported to have been an expert in different languages.

Farabi travelled to many distant lands and studied for some time in Damascus and Egypt, but repeatedly came back to Baghdad, until he visited Saif al-Daula's court in Halab (Allepo). He became one of the constant companions of the King, and it was here at Halab that his fame spread far and wide. During his early years he was a Qadi (Judge), but later on the took up teaching as his profession. During the course of his career, he had suffered great hardships and at one time was the caretaker of a garden. He died a bachelor in Damascus in 339 A.H./950 C.E. at the age of 80 years.

Farabi contributed considerably to science, philosophy, logic, sociology, medicine, mathematics and music. His major contributions seem to be in philosophy, logic and sociology and, of course, stands out as an Encyclopedist. As a philosopher, he may be classed as a Neoplatonist who tried to synthesize Platonism and Aristotelism with theology and he wrote such rich commentaries on Aristotle's physics, meteorology, logic, etc., in addition to a large number of books on several other subjects embodying his original contribution, that he came to be known as the 'Second Teacher' (al-Mou'allim al-Thani) Aristotle being the First. One of the important contributions of Farabi was to make the study of logic more easy by dividing it into two categories viz., Takhayyul (idea) and Thubut (proof).

In sociology he wrote several books out of which Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila became famous. His books on psychology and metaphysics were largely based on his own work. He also wrote a book on music, captioned Kitab al-Musiqa. He was a great expert in the art and science of music and invented several musical instruments, besides contributing to the knowledge of musical notes. It has been reported that he could play his instrument so well as to make people laugh or weep at will. In physics he demonstrated the existence of void.

Although many of his books have been lost, 117 are known, out of which 43 are on logic, 11 on metaphysics, 7 on ethics, 7 on political science, 17 on music, medicine and sociology, while 11 are commentaries. Some of his more famous books include the book Fusus al-Hikam, which remained a text book of philosophy for several centuries at various centres of learning and is still taught at some of the institutions in the East. The book Kitab al-lhsa al 'Ulum discusses classification and fundamental principles of science in a unique and useful manner. The book Ara Ahl al-Madina al- Fadila 'The Model City' is a significant early contribution to sociology and political science.

Farabi exercised great influence on science and knowledge for several centuries. Unfortunately, the book Theology of Aristotle, as was available to him at that time was regarded by him as genuine, although later on it turned out to be the work of some Neoplatonic writer. Despite this, he was regarded the Second Teacher in philosophy for centuries and his work, aimed at synthesis of philosophy and Sufism, paved the way for ibn sina's work.

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Great Optician: ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL-HAITHAM

Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham was one of the most eminent physicists, ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL-HAITHAM ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL HAITHAM ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL-HAsam ABU ALI HASAN ALI HASAN whose contributions to optics and the scientific methods are outstanding. Known in the West as Alhazen, Ibn al-Haitham was born in 965 C.E. in Basrah, and was educated in Basrah and Baghdad. Thereafter, he went to Egypt, where he was asked to find ways of controlling the flood of the Nile. Being unsuccessful in this, he feigned madness until the death of Caliph al-Hakim. He also travelled to Spain and, during this period, he had ample time for his scientific pursuits, which included optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods on each of which he has left several outstanding books.

He made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours. His book Kitab-al-Manadhir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as also his book dealing with the colours of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena like shadows, eclipses, the rainbow, and speculated on the physical nature of light. He is the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the camera obscura. He contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. Through these extensive researches on optics, he has been considered as the father of modern Optics.

The Latin translation of his main work, Kitab-al-Manadhir, exerted a great influence upon Western science e.g. on the work of Roger Bacon and Kepler. It brought about a great progress in experimental methods. His research in catoptrics centered on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contain the important problem known as Alhazen's problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree.

In his book Mizan al-Hikmah Ibn al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. He discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19° below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it seems that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.

His contribution to mathematics and physics was extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. He studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to maintain that a body moves perpetually unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This would seem equivalent to the first law of motion.

The list of his books runs to 200 or so, very few of which have survived. Even his monumental treatise on optics survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other languages. He has also written on the subject of evolution a book that deserves serious attention even today.

In his writing, one can see a clear development of the scientific methods as developed and applied by the Muslims and comprising the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their linking together into a scientific theory. This was a major breakthrough in scientific methodology, as distinct from guess and gesture, and placed scientific pursuits on a sound foundation comprising systematic relationship between observation, hypothesis and verification.

Ibn al-Haitham's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and, in fact, it ushered in a new era in optical research, both in theory and practice.

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ABU ABDULLAH AL-BATTANI

bdallah Muhammad Ibn Jabir Ibn Sinan al-Battani al-Harrani was born around 858 C.E. in Harran, and according to one account, in Battan, a State of Harran. Battani was first educated by his father Jabir Ibn San'an al-Battani, who was also a well-known scientist. He then moved to Raqqa, situated on the bank of the Euphrates, where he received advanced education and later on flourished as a scholar. At the beginning of the 9th century, he migrated to Samarra, where he worked till the end of his life in 929 C.E. He was of Sabian origin, but was himself a Muslim.

Battani was a famous astronomer, mathematician and astrologer. He has been held as one of the greatest astronomic of Islam. He is responsible for a number of important discoveries in astronomy, which was the result of a long career of 42 years of research beginning at Raqqa when he was young. His well-known discovery is the remarkably accurate determination of the solar year as being 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds, which is very close to the latest estimates. He found that the longitude of the sun's apogee had increased by 16° , 47' since Ptolemy. This implied the important discovery of the motion of the solar apsides and of a slow variation in the equation of time. He did not believe in the trapidation of the equinoxes, although Copernicus held it.

Al-Battani determined with remarkable accuracy the obliquity of the ecliptic, the length of the seasons and the true and mean orbit of the sun. He proved, in sharp contrast to Ptolemy, the variation of the apparent angular diameter of the sun and the possibility of annular eclipses. He rectified several orbits of the moon and the planets and propounded a new and very ingenious theory to determine the conditions of visibility of the new moon. His excellent observations of lunar and solar eclipses were used by Dunthorne in 1749 to determine the secular acceleration of motion of the moon. He also provided very neat solutions by means of orthographic projection for some problems of spherical trigonometry.

In mathematics, he was the first to replace the use of Greek chords by sines, with a clear understanding of their superiority. He also developed the concept of cotangent and furnished their table in degrees.

He wrote a number of books on astronomy and trigonometry. His most famous book was his astronomical treatise with tables, which was translated into Latin in the 12th century and flourished as De scienta stellerum — De numeris stellerum et motibus. An old translation of this is available of the Vatican. His Zij was, in fact, more accurate than all others written by that time.

His treatise on astronomy was extremely influential in Europe till the Renaissance, with translations available in several languages. His original discoveries both in astronomy and trigonometry were of great consequence in the development of these sciences

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Iranian Revolutionary: Ayatollah Khomeini

O Westerners, his hooded eyes and severe demeanor, his unkempt gray beard and his black turban and robes conveyed an avenger's wrath. The image is the man.

Ruhollah Khomeini, the dour cleric who led an Islamic revolution in Iran, perceived himself above all as an avenger of the humiliations that Mohammad Khatami - 10KBthe West had for more than a century inflicted on the Muslims of the Middle East.

He was among many Muslim autocrats in this century to embrace a mission designed as a corrective to the West. Kemal Ataturk, the most daring of them, introduced Turkey, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, to Western-style secularism in order to toughen his society against Europe's imperial designs. In the 1950s, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, more intemperately, initiated a fierce campaign of Arab nationalism aimed at eradicating the vestiges of Western colonialism from the Arab world.

Khomeini took a different course. All three, at their apogee, were rulers of once great empires that had fallen into political and social disarray. But Ataturk and Nasser were committed to resurrection by beating the West at its own game of building strong secular states. Khomeini's strategy was to reject Western ways, keeping Iran close to its Islamic roots.

Some ask, focusing on this strategy, whether Khomeini was riding a popular wave in global affairs. In the late 20th century, Muslims were not alone in organizing to restore religious belief to government. Christians in America, Jews in Israel, even Hindus in India were promoting the same end. As a revolutionary, Khomeini sought to bring down not just the Shah's Western-oriented state but also the secular Weltanschauung that stood behind it. Did Khomeini's triumph augur an intellectual shift of global magnitude?

While historians ponder this question, it is enough to say that Khomeini presided brilliantly over the overthrow of a wounded regime. He was merciless and cunning. His well-advertised piety complemented a prodigious skill in grasping and shaping Iran's complex politics. Most important, he knew how to exploit the feelings of nationalist resentment that characterized his time.

Ruhollah Khomeini — his given name means "inspired of God" — was born to a family of Shi'ite scholars in a village near Tehran in 1902. Shi'ism, a minority sect in Islam, is Iran's official religion. Like his father, he moved from theological studies to a career as an Islamic jurist. Throughout his life, he was acclaimed for the depth of his religious learning.

As a young seminary teacher, Khomeini was no activist. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he watched passively as Reza Shah, a monarch who took Ataturk as his model, promoted secularization and narrowed clerical powers. Similarly, Khomeini was detached from the great crisis of the 1950s in which Reza Shah's son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi turned to America to save himself from demonstrators on Tehran's streets who were clamoring for democratic reform



Khomeini was then the disciple of Iran's pre-eminent cleric, Ayatullah Mohammed Boroujerdi, a defender of the tradition of clerical deference to established power. But in 1962, after Boroujerdi's death, Khomeini revealed his long-hidden wrath and acquired a substantial following as a sharp-tongued antagonist of the Shah's.

Khomeini was clearly at home with populist demagogy. He taunted the Shah for his ties with Israel, warning that the Jews were seeking to take over Iran. He denounced as non-Islamic a bill to grant the vote to women. He called a proposal to permit American servicemen based in Iran to be tried in U.S. military courts "a document for Iran's enslavement." In 1964 he was banished by the Shah to Turkey, then was permitted to relocate in the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf in Iraq. But the Shah erred in thinking Khomeini would be forgotten. In An Najaf, he received Iranians of every station and sent home tape cassettes of sermons to be peddled in the bazaars. In exile, Khomeini became the acknowledged leader of the opposition.

In An Najaf, Khomeini also shaped a revolutionary doctrine. Shi'ism, historically, demanded of the state only that it keep itself open to clerical guidance. Though relations between clergy and state were often tense, they were rarely belligerent. Khomeini, condemning the Shah's servility to America and his secularism, deviated from accepted tenets to attack the regime's legitimacy, calling for a clerical state, which had no Islamic precedent.

In late 1978 huge street demonstrations calling for the Shah's abdication ignited the government's implosion. Students, the middle class, bazaar merchants, workers, the army — the pillars of society — successively abandoned the regime. The Shah had nowhere to turn for help but to Washington. Yet the more he did, the more isolated he became. In January 1979 he fled to the West. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned home in triumph.

Popularly acclaimed as leader, Khomeini set out to confirm his authority and lay the groundwork for a clerical state. With revolutionary fervor riding high, armed vigilante bands and kangaroo courts made bloody work of the Shah's last partisans. Khomeini canceled an experiment with parliamentarism and ordered an Assembly of Experts to draft an Islamic constitution. Overriding reservations from the Shi'ite hierarchy, the delegates designed a state that Khomeini would command and the clergy would run, enforcing religious law. In November, Khomeini partisans, with anti-American passions still rising, seized the U.S. embassy and held 52 hostages.



Over the remaining decade of his life, Khomeini consolidated his rule. He had thousands killed while stamping out a rebellion of the secular left. He stacked the state bureaucracies with faithful clerics and drenched the schools and the media with his personal doctrines. After purging the military and security services, he rebuilt them to ensure their loyalty to the clerical state.

Khomeini also launched a campaign to "export" — the term was his — the revolution to surrounding Muslim countries. His provocations of Iraq in 1980 helped start a war that lasted eight years, at the cost of a million lives, and that ended only after America intervened to sink several Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf. Iranians asked whether God had revoked his blessing of the revolution. Khomeini described the defeat as "more deadly than taking poison."

To rally his demoralized supporters, he issued the celebrated fatwa condemning to death the writer Salman Rushdie for heresies contained in his novel The Satanic Verses. Though born a Muslim, Rushdie was not a Shi'ite; a British subject, he had no ties to Iran. The fatwa, an audacious claim of authority over Muslims everywhere, was the revolution's ultimate export. Khomeini died a few months later. But the fatwa lived on, a source of bitterness — as he intended it to be — between Iran and the West.

Beside the fatwa, what is Khomeini's legacy? The revolution, no longer at risk, still revels in having repeatedly, with impunity, defied the American Satan. The Islamic state was proof to the faithful — as the Soviet Union was to generations of communists — that the Western system need not be a universal model.

Yet Khomeini rejected a parallel between his doctrines and the fundamentalism propounded by other Muslim dissidents. He never described himself as fundamentalist. He often said that Islam is not for 14 centuries ago in Arabia but for all time.

Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state — and of fundamentalism — has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders, and no one like Khomeini has since appeared.

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Yasser Arafat

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s date and place of birth are disputed; while he claims to have been born August 4, 1929, in Jerusalem, some allege that a birth certificate gives the date as August 24, 1929, in Cairo, Egypt. One of seven children of a wealthy merchant, Arafat is related on his mother’s side to the Husseini family, a prominent Sunni Muslim family in Jerusalem. His mother died when Yasir, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, then under British rule. Palestinians then were fighting against the occupying force “Britain”. He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.

But by 1946 aged only 16, he had become a Palestinian nationalist and was procuring weapons in Egypt to be smuggled into Palestine for the Arab cause.

In November 1947, the United Nations voted to end the British Mandate over Palestine by May 15, 1948, but also took a immoral step of dividing the land into two states one for the majority Palestinians and other for the minority Jews who had taken shelter from the forces of Hitler who had killed 6 million Jews out of 9.5 million, and also declared Palestinians capital Jerusalem as international city. The Palestinians were outraged as there Muslim home land for centuries was being divided by a border. The Jews were hilarious. As a result war between Arab nations and Israel broke out, during the war Arafat left his studies at the University of Faud I(later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area. The defeat of the Arabs and the establishment of the state of Israel left him in such despair that he applied for a visa to study at the University of Texas. Recovering his spirits and retaining his dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he returned to Cairo University to major in engineering, the young Arafat studied at Cairo University from 1952 to 1956, graduating with a degree in civil engineering. While attending college, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and was president of the Union of Palestinian Students. Commissioned into the Egyptian army, Arafat served in the Suez campaign of 1956. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Kuwait to work as an engineer and then later successfully running his own contracting firm.. He spent all his spare time in political activities, to which he contributed most of the earned profits. In 1958 he and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells, which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. At the end of 1964 Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing successful Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan. It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established, under the sponsorship of the Arab League, bringing together a number of groups all working to free Palestine for the Palestinians

In 1967, Israel defeated the Arab states in a conflict known as the Six-Day War, and confiscated two major sections of Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the wake of the Arab defeat, Fatah emerged from the underground as the most powerful and best organised of the groups making up the PLO, took over that organisation in 1969 when Arafat became the chairman of the PLO executive committee. The PLO was no longer to be something of a puppet organisation of the Arab states, wanting to keep the Palestinians quiet, but an independent nationalist organisation, based in Jordan.

The early years of Arafat’s career at the head of the PLO were marked by violence, beginning in “Black September” of 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein, then at odds with the PLO, ordered his army to act against Palestinian guerrilla camps positioned along the border between Jordan and Israel, killing many Palestinians. Arafat sought to build a similar organisation in Lebanon, but this time was driven out by an Israeli military invasion of Lebannon. He kept the organization alive, however, by moving its headquarters to Tunis. He was a survivor himself, escaping death in an airplane crash, surviving any assassination attempts by Israeli intelligence agencies, and recovering from a serious stroke.

During this time Arafat’s life was one of constant travel, moving from country to country to promote the Palestinian cause, always keeping his movements secret, as he did any details about his private life. Even his marriage to Suha Tawil, a Palestinian half his age, was kept secret for some fifteen months. She had already begun significant humanitarian activities at home, especially for disabled children, but the prominent part she took in the public events in Oslo was a surprise for many Arafat-watchers. Since then, their daughter, Zahwa, named after Arafat's mother, has been born.

Arafat directed his efforts with the PLO towards political rather than military persuasion and diplomacy. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, during which Egypt and Syria attempted to regain land from Israel, the United States began intervention efforts to negotiate a settlement in the area. The Palestine National Council (PNC), the governing body of the PLO, sought inclusion in the settlement, calling for the creation of a Palestinian national authority in the West Bank and Gaza. In November 1974, with the support of the Arab states, Arafat became the first representative of a non-governmental agency to address a plenary session of the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly.

For most of the 1970s, Arafat was based in Beirut, Lebanon, from which his guerrillas attacked Israel and where he oversaw an enormous bureaucracy that provided social welfare services to Palestinian refugees. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to stop the PLO’s attacks. Arafat was forced to flee again, this time to Tunis, Tunisia. Following this defeat his power was deeply diminished, and many observers believed his leadership was in danger. Arafat, however, remained in power and shocked all Palestinians when in 1988 renounced military opposition to Israel and recognized Israel as a legitimate state. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and prompted the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Arafat publicly endorsed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, in part because Hussein likened Iraq’s “liberation” of Kuwait to the Palestinian goal of “liberating” Israel. Arafat’s endorsement enraged many of his financial backers, most of whom were Arabs from oil-rich countries who opposed Hussein’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait.

Arafat regained international credibility when he moved toward peace with Israel shortly after the end of the Gulf War. After several months of negotiations, Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin witnessed the signing of a historic Oslo agreement. The Oslo Accord laid out the implementation of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a period of five years. Under the signed Declaration of Principles, Israel would begin its withdrawal from the disputed areas immediately; in exchange, the PLO agreed to accept the U.N. resolutions acknowledging the nation of Israel and to promote security and peace between Arabs and Israelis living in the conflicted areas.However a considerable number of Palestinians rejected it as it was promising a very small percentage of land for the Palestinians. For his participation in the peace efforts, Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres, then Israel's foreign minister. He was later elected president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) which governed Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza.

But the tables again turned With Israel Prime minister “Yitzhak Rabin” assassination by a Jewish extremist in 1996, same year Arafat was elected through voting as the head of Palestine, he continued the process of negotiating Palestinian self-rule with his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, elected that year. But During this period, relations between Israel and the PLO worsened, as Netanyahu favored a slower transition to Palestinian self-rule and was sluggish about carrying out the conditions of the Oslo Accord, for its part, the PLO neglected to fulfill the proper measures to ensure peace, which included combating freedom fighters, confiscating illegal firearms, preventing hostile anti-Jewish propaganda, and limiting the number of Palestinian police. In early 1997, Arafat and Netanyahu signed the Hebron agreement, by which Israel would remove its troops from Hebron, the last occupied city in the West Bank. In return, Arafat promised again to carry out the peacemaking pledges made in Oslo.

But due to unwillingness of sides the agreement failed to be implemenyed. In the fall of 1998, after a 19-month deadlock, U.S. President Bill Clinton intervened, arranging a summit meeting at the Wye Plantation in Maryland. By the terms of the resulting Wye River Memorandum, Israel agreed to withdraw from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. As part of their side of the Wye agreement, members of the PLO finally voted in December 1998 to amend the section of the organization’s national charter that called for the destruction of Israel. This action was seen as a major step on the way to achieving peace. However weeks after in 1999 Netanyahu was ousted in Israeli elections and was replaced by Ehad Barak.

On September 5, 1999, Arafat and Barak signed a broad agreement for peace, overseen by U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright. The agreement set the date for the beginning of the transition of the West Bank to Palestinian self-rule as of September 13, 2000. The success of this transition, of course, will rest on whether or not the sensitive issues of boundaries and the status of Jerusalem can be resolved.

In the months leading up to that deadline, however, peace talks have stalled repeatedly, reflecting the highly charged nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The main issues at stake continue to be the border of the future Palestinian state, the status of refugees, and, most emotionally, the status of Jerusalem, a holy city for both Muslims and Jews. Fearful of making too many concessions to Israel and being seen as a traitor to his cause, Arafat has held fast to the Palestinian demand for the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including all of the mostly Arab-populated East Jerusalem and areas that now encompass the homes of 175,000 Israeli-Jewish settlers.

The PLO originally pledged to declare statehood on September 13, even if no final peace agreement with Israel had been reached. In return, Israel said it will formally annex parts of the West Bank. Under the watchful eyes of President Clinton and the world,a series of peace talks at Camp David deadlocked in late July 2000, leaving the issue of peace in the Middle East in a precarious position. As September 13 came and went, with the talks in a stalemate, the PLO bowed to international pressure and vowed to continue negotiations for a few more months.

The situation remained same and in 2001 Barak was removed from the Premiership and Arial Sharon became New prime minister of Israel .Arial Sharon is the the famous notorious Defence Minister who directed the 1982 Massacare of hundred of Palestinians in , in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut which was carried out by the Phalanges, a Lebanese-Christian militia headed by Sharon,he is a most wanted person in Belguim courts for the massacare . In 1987, Time Magazine published a story implying Sharon's direct responsibility for the massacres. Sharon responded by suing Time for libel in an American court but lost the case.

From that time till now due Sharons policy of Targeted assassination ,executions of small children,Destruction of Palestenean infrastucture belonging both to Palestinian Authority (including police and security buildings) and private civillians

Continued house demolitions ,Israeli Army incursions into Palestinian territory ,The confinement of Yasser Arafat in his headquarters that essentially amounts to a house arrest and Advocacy of settlement building in West Bank and Gaza strip has lead the situation to worsen. Sharon’s aims and targets can be summed up by his own famous words “Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that's grabbed, will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands." — Ariel Sharon, as Israeli Foreign Minister, in comments broadcast on Israeli radio, November 15, 1998.

Mean While Yasser Arafat’s popularity has also fallen considerably due to his soft approach towards Israel and America, and according to some polls Hamas has surpassed PLO’s voter bank.

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Suleyman The Magnificent

Suleyman 1, was born on November 6, 1494, in Trabzon (Trebizond), the son of Selim I. Suleyman 1 ,in his time was regarded as the most significant ruler in the world, by both Muslims and Europeans. His military empire expanded greatly both to the east and west, and he threatened to overrun the heart of Europe itself. In Constantinople, he embarked on vast cultural and architectural projects. Istanbul in the middle of the sixteenth century was architecturally the most energetic and innovative city in the world. While he was a brilliant military strategist and canny politician, he was also a cultivator of the arts. Suleyman's poetry is among the best poetry in Islam, and he sponsored an army of artists, religious thinkers, and philosophers that outshone the most educated courts of Europe.

In Islamic history, Suleyman is regarded successful Islamic ruler in history. He is asserted as embodying all the necessary characteristics of an Islamic ruler, the most important of which is justice ('adale ). The reign of Suleyman in Ottoman and Islamic history is generally regarded as the period of greatest justice and harmony in any Islamic state.
Conqueror

Western historians know Suleyman primarily as a conqueror, for he made Europe know fear like it had never known of any other Islamic state. Conquest, like every other aspect of the Ottoman state and culture, was a multicultural heritage, with origins as far back as Mesopotamia and Persia, and as far a field as the original Mongol and Turkish peoples in eastern and central Asia.

Suleyman had many titles; in inscriptions he calls himself: Slave of God, powerful with the power of God, obeying the commands of the Qur'an and enforcing them throughout the world, master of all lands, the shadow of God over all nations, Sultan of Sultans in all the lands of Persians and Arabs, the propagator of Sultanic laws (Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye ), the tenth Sultan of the Ottoman Khans, Sultan, son of Sultan, Suleyman Khan.

In 1521, at the beginning of his reign, Süleyman captured the Hungarian city of Belgrade (now in Serbia). The following year he repelled the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, a military and religious order, from the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. In 1526 he again invaded Hungary, killing Louis II, king of Hungary, and incapacitating the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohács. He returned to Hungary in 1529 as the supporter of John I Zápolya, who had been elected king by the Hungarian nobility, but whose claim was contested by Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I). Ferdinand was driven back into Vienna, which Süleyman then attempted to besiege. He was unsuccessful, thus limiting the extent of his invasion into central Europe.

Süleyman next directed his arms against Iran. In 1534 he conquered the cities of Tabrīz and Baghdād. In 1535 he concluded an alliance with Francis I, king of France, against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The treaty opened the commerce of the Levant to the French flag alone, and as a result of the agreement, diplomatic relations between France and the Ottoman Empire lasted for centuries.

In 1541 Süleyman again invaded Hungary, capturing Buda and incorporating all of central Hungary in his empire. Two years later the combined French and Ottoman fleets ravaged the Italian coasts and pillaged Nice. The Ottomans were now supreme in the Mediterranean; in 1551 Tripoli fell into their hands. A second and third war with Iran, now in a state of semisubjugation, an unsuccessful siege of Malta in 1565, and still another expedition to Hungary in 1566 were the principal events of the later years of Süleyman's reign. He died besieging Szigetvár in Hungary on September 7, 1566

Suleyman was responding to an aggressively expanding Europe. Like most other non-Europeans, Suleyman fully understood the consequences of European expansion and saw Europe as the principle threat to Islam. The Islamic world was beginning to shrink under this expansion. Portugal had invaded several Muslim cities in eastern Africa in order to dominate trade with India, and Russians, which the Ottomans regarded as European, were pushing central Asians south when the Russian expansion began in the sixteenth century. So in addition to invading and destabilizing Europe, Suleyman pursued a policy of helping any Muslim country threatened by European expansion. It was this role that gave Suleyman the right, in the eyes of the Ottomans, to declare himself as Caliph of Islam. He was the one who was successfully protecting Islam from the unbelievers and, as the protector of Islam, deserved to be the ruler of Islam.

Architecture

sultan Suleyman,Suleyman 1

Suleyman undertook to make Istanbul the center of Islamic civilization. He began a series of building projects, including bridges, mosques, and palaces, that rivalled the greatest building projects of the world in that century. The greatest and most brilliant architect of human history was in his employ: Sinan. The mosques built by Sinan are considered the greatest architectural triumphs of Islam and possibly the world. They are more than just awe-inspiring; they represent a unique genius in dealing with nearly insurmountable engineering problems.

Suleyman was a great cultivator of the arts and is considered one of the great poets of Islam. Under Suleyman, Istanbul became the center of visual art, music, writing, and philosophy in the Islamic world. This cultural flowering during the reign of Suleyman represents the most creative period in Ottoman history; almost all the cultural forms that we associate with the Ottomans date from this time.

Suleyman is considered the greatest of Ottoman sultans. He excelled as an administrator, earning the title Kanuni (“lawgiver”), and was an influential patron of the arts and sciences. At his death the Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Balkans, northern Africa, and the Middle East, and was the ruling power on the Mediterranean Sea.

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Gentle Hearted Warrior: Saladin al-Din aka Salahuddin Ayyubi

Gentle hearted Saladin Ayyubi became one of the world's greatest warriors by defeating crusaders and capturing the holy city of Jerusalem.

Born in Tikrit, Iraq, Saladin, his Arabic name is Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. At the age of 14 he joined other members of his family (the Ayyubids) in the service of the Syrian ruler Nur ad-Din. . He was brought up by his noble father and talented uncle, Asad-ud-din Shirkhu. Saladin was a very intelligent and noble person. He loved peace and never enjoyed fighting battles but he and his uncle were ordered to travel and fight in three expeditions. And when the young boy who didn’t like fighting in battles fought, he fought with great bravery and strength.

Between 1164 and 1169 he distinguished himself in the three expeditions sent by Nur ad-Din to aid the decadent Fatimid rulers of Egypt against attacks by the Christian Crusaders based in Palestine. In 1169 he was made commander in chief of the Syrian army and vizier of Egypt. Having revitalized Egypt's economy and reorganized its land and naval forces, Saladin repelled the Crusaders and took the offensive against them.

After Nur ad-Din's death in 1174, Saladin became head of state, Saladin expanded his power in Syria and northern Mesopotamia.Following the submission of Damascus (1174), Halab (Aleppo) (1183), and Mosul (1186), numerous Muslim armies, allied under Saladin's command were looking immortal, The Crusaders were not happy by Saladin’s increasing power and success. Uniting their forces, they planned a decisive attack on Muslim area. Battle of Hittin took place. Muslims won under the leadership of Saladin. Thousands of Crusaders were arrested. Saladin treated the prisoners with tolerance.

In 1187 CE, Saladin conquered Jerusalem. Thousands of Crusaders were arrested. However, when their mothers, sisters, and wives appealed to Saladin, he released them. Many crusaders were ransomed. However, he paid for many of them. In addition, he provided them transport, etc. He allowed neither massacre nor looting. He gave free pardon to all citizens. He even arranged for their traveling. He granted freedom to Christians to leave the city if they paid a small tribute. Saladin paid it, himself, for about ten thousand poor people. His brother paid it for seven thousand people. Saladin also allocated one of the gates of the city for people who were too poor to pay anything that they leave from there.

On Friday 27th Rajab 583 AH, Saladin entered Jerusalem. After entering the city they went straight to the Mosque and cleaned it. Then for the first time in more then 80 years, the people of Jerusalem heard the Azan (call of prayer) from Al Aqsa Mosque.

In 1189 the nations of western Europe launched the Third Crusade to win back the holy city. But they failed. On March 4, 1193, Saladin died in Damascus. He died with no possession of Gold coins, Palaces, Slaves, but The Holy Land Of Jerusalem.

He is remembered by Muslims as well as Non-Muslims as a kind hearted un-selfish Warrior. He was a religious person and followed the teachings of Quran (Book of God) and Prophet Muhammad’s teachings regarding War, he treated all of his Prisoners with Respect and dignity, no torture, massacre, mass killing, took place during his time. And unlike all other Sultan’s he did not build a single Palace or any building for himself yet he erected mosques, palaces, hospitals, and universities in for his Muslim brothers in Cairo.This is why he is a favourite topic to write on by even Westerners.

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Dr. Bilal Philips

“There is no time for holidays”, says Bilal Philips, “when you realise how little time there is, and how much work has to be done for Islam.”Bilal Philips, once a Christian, is now an Renowned Islamic scholar. He received his B.A. degree from the Islamic University of Madina and his M.A. in Aqeedah (Islamic Philosophy) from the King Saud University in Riyadh. His deep study and understanding of Islam has won him the respect of ordinary Muslims as well as many learned scholars of Islam.

Born in Jamaica in 1947, he comes from a family of educationists. Both his parents are teachers, and one of his grandfathers was a church minister and Bible scholar.Bilal came from a broad-minded family, and though he went to church regularly every Sunday with his mother, he was never forced to go. He says: “Going to church was a social event, more than a religious one. What was being taught went right over my head.” When Bilal was eleven, his family migrated to Canada and for the first time the sensitive boy began to feel that all was not right with the world.

“Most of the Canadians at that time were Euro-Canadians”, he says, “and the Europeans, of course, had an idea of their own superiority. They had gone around and smashed up everybody else's society, so they had to justify the destruction of human civilisation by promoting their own superiority over others. Those feelings are expressed in much of their literature, in films, on television and so forth.” Growing up in an environment where one is different from everyone else and trying to rationalise it was hard for a little boy. Little discrimination hurt more as he became a teenager. “Later on”, he says, “my parents told me about the struggle they had to go through; they had to face much more in society than I had to as a child at school.”

Bilal's first contact with a Muslim society came when his parents moved to Malaysia in the capacity of teachers and advisors to the ministry of education under the Canadian Colombo Plan.Though much happier there, Bilal hardly noticed that he was in a Muslim country. The British had been in Malaysia and had left their traces behind. His friends were either Euro-Asians or anglicised Muslim Malaysians. Bilal formed a rock group and began to play the guitar professionally. He had a motorbike and was quite popular and consequently his A-level studies suffered. While in Malaysia Bilal's parents adopted an Indonesian boy who happened to be a Muslim. Mrs. Philips was quite aware of Islam and made it easy for him to fast and pray. Bilal understood that this boy was different once when opening the door to his new brother's room and he bumped his brother on the head as he prostrated himself in prayer. Not being interested in religion at that time, he did not pursue the issue.

Bilal's parents felt there were too many distractions in Malaysia for him, so they decided to send him back to Canada to the Simon-Frazer University in Vancouver.Back in Canada, Bilal stepped right into the volatile student movements of the late sixties and early seventies. The drug culture and hippy movement was being propagated by such prestigious persons as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. In certain classes the lecturers would pass marijuana cigarettes to the students. They would smoke together and then start the classes.At this time Bilal's goal was to become a medical artist and thus combine his love for science and art. To this end, he had taken up biochemistry and had also received a scholarship from an art university. Before he could fully pursue his goals, he found himself getting deeply entrenched in student politics. The seed sown during his childhood, the idea that something was amiss with Western society and things needed to be changed, bore fruit now. He began to get involved with student movements. There were sit-ins and strikes, sometimes there were more violent protests and the police would be called in.Professors were introducing socialism into their classes. Impressed by this, Bilal began a detailed study of the work of Marx, and soon considered himself to be a Marxist-Leninist. “Socialism was presented as a programme for change of society”, he says “rectifying injustices and making sure there are equal rights for all. This change was to be brought about by revolution.” His search for a political solution led him to California. Here he worked with black activist movements like the Black Panthers. “These movements were all black movements, the figures in the forefront were mostly blacks. Since the blacks were the most oppressed group at that time, naturally their voice was the loudest. However, they were widely supported by white college kids. Eventually everybody got on the bandwagon. There was a women's liberation.Soon disillusion set in. “Many of these people were deep into drugs. They collected money for what they called defence committees and used much of the money to pay for their parties, their rents and their drugs. They were like leeches living off the people's donations.” During this period there also existed a “black movement known as the Nation of Islam” or, more popularly, the Black Muslims, founded by Elijah Muhammad, who concocted a religion called Islam but which was totally different from the real thing. He taught that all black men were gods and all white men were devils. There was one major god who had come and taught Elijah, and Elijah was his prophet. At that time the autobiography of a former follower of Elijah, Malcolm X, was very popular. Malcolm X had left the Black Muslims after being its leading spokesman and had found real Islam. He was assassinated within six months of his conversion and had little time to use his rhetorical skills to promote the real Islam. Thus only a few who read his autobiography grasped the significance of his journey. Bilal, who had read Malcolm X's autobiography, visited one of the temples of the Black Muslims. Though impressed by their organization and the fact that their women dressed modestly, he found their ideology useless.After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, many fundamental changes were brought about by his son Imam Warith Deen Muhammad. These gradual changes transferred the organization from a nationalistic cult into an Islamic movement close to the mainstream Islam.Finding the movements in the States not relevant to the goals which he had in mind, Bilal returned to Canada.

By now he had dropped out after completing only two years of university and had linked up with a socialist-oriented group in Toronto. In the early seventies there was an influx of blacks from the States and from the West Indies into Canada. Bilal and his group were trying to educate the blacks as to their position in society and motivate them to make efforts to change the laws on discrimination. Bilal taught African history and social movements in the community centre organised by the group. He used his musical abilities to collect donations for the center. His art too followed the direction in which he was heading; he drew political cartoons for movement newspapers and posters for rallies. In accordance with his desire to help society, he took up a job as a councellor for delinquent children. At the same time, the young idealist was getting deeper into communism. The prevailing political theory at that time was that in an industrialised country like North America the revolution would have to take a different form from that of China and Russia. In these countries the impetus has come from the countryside and was composed mainly of peasants. But in North America the struggle would have to come from within the city and take the form of urban guerrilla warfare. To be successful as an urban guerrilla warfare, one had to develop cells within the city and be mobile. In this kind of warfare the car was an essential instrument, and thorough knowledge of its working was a must. To this end, Bilal went back to a technical college to learn car mechanics.

Bilal's parents were opposed to the political direction in which their son was going and he and his father had many heated discussions about politics while his mother tried to keep the peace. Bilal, who had been staying temporarily with his parents, moved out and started living in a commune with like-minded youths.After sometime he began to see a difference between himself and the people he was working with, and these differences were mostly in moral concepts. They wanted to build a new society but were not willing to change themselves.Certain questions about socialism were beginning to trouble him, especially its ability to build a new society. “There seemed to be no moral foundation for communism and socialism”, says Bilal. “If the masses of the people consider alcoholism, homosexuality, child abuse or whatever to be moral, then it is okay. In New York, it is now legal to possess marijuana, although its sale is still prohibited. In England homosexuals can now marry, this bothered me.”

At this point Bilal contemplated going to China to learn guerilla warfare. But he learned that one of the ladies in the central committee of the group to which he belonged, who had been a very hardcore Communist, had accepted Islam. As Bilal had been an admirer of her previous Marxist-Leninist convictions, he decided to study some books on Islam to see what had swayed her. The first was ‘Islam, The Misunderstood Religion’ by Muhammad Qutub. Muhammad Qutub was the brother of Syed Qutub, one of the leaders of the Ikhwan movement of Egypt. This movement had come in conflict with Gamal Abdul Nasser and his Socialism. Nasser hanged Syed Qutub and other Ikhwan leaders for their Islamic beliefs. Many other Ikhwan leaders fled to Saudi Arabia and settled in Makkah and Madina. “In fact”, says Bilal, “many of the Islamic scholars in the universities of Saudi Arabia today come from that era.” Muhammad Qutub is at present teaching in the University of Umm-Al-Qura in Makkah.

Muhammad Qutub's book was a comparison of Islam, Socialism, Communism and Capitalism from a social, economic and moral point of view. For a more spiritually-minded person it might seem a bit dry, but since Bilal was politically oriented it was right for him.

He became convinced that Islam was the best way to bring about an economic and social revolution in Western society. As he avidly read all that was available on Islam in English, another point began to impress him the revolution began not with the toppling of the existing socio-economic order but with the change of the individual himself. Bilal had decided that if he became a Muslim he would do so totally; there would be no half measures for him. “My life at this time was already quite restrained, and the discipline of Islam did not present a major problem. However, it is standard that before one converts, Satan makes a great effort to dissuade one. By this time I smoked and drank only on rare occasions; however a voice inside me would say, ‘are you ready to give up all these pleasures, you mean to say you'll never touch them again?’ This put doubts in my mind and made me hesitate to declare my conversion.”

From a political point of view Bilal was convinced, but from a spiritual point of view he found the idea of God, jinns and angels difficult to accept.

“In my heart a vague idea of God was still there”, he says, “though it had been crushed by Communist philosophy, which demands total denial of God's existence. My scientific background also tended to hold me back from really accepting the concept of God.” Then Bilal had what may be termed as a spiritual experience. “I was lying down in my room and some friends were sitting at my desk reading. I was half awake, half asleep and then I began to dream. I dreamt I was riding my bicycle into a warehouse. The further I went inside, the darker it got. I began to get worried. I felt I had gone as far as I could. When I turned around I couldn't see the exit. I was in total darkness. At that time real fear came over me, a feeling of fear I had never experienced before. When I look back at it, I realise that it was the fear of dying. The feeling was that if I didn't get out of here, I would never get out. It was the end.”

“I began to scream, help! Help me! I tried to shout at the top of my lungs, but the words would not come out, they just gurgled in my throat. My mind was screaming, there were people sitting in the room, yet nobody heard me.”

“I continued to try for a while, until I realised that there was no hope. There was no one to help me. At that moment I gave up and resigned myself to death. When I gave up I immediately woke up.”

This dream left a heavy impression on Bilal's mind. “Nobody could have taken me out of that situation, it was only God who took me out of that state of absolute despair, and brought me back.”

Later he found confirmation of his belief when he read the following verse in the Noble Quran: “He is the one who takes your life in sleep. To some of you he gives it back when you awake, to some of you he does not.” The dream left a strong impression on Bilal that God was real, and he consequently accepted Islam in February 1972.He stopped playing music and gave up art, and went full-time into the study of Islam. He began the study of Arabic and soon learned to recite the Quran.Bilal now began a study of Arabic and Fiqh (Islamic Law) with an Egyptian whose father had been a scholar and a follower of the Ikhwan Muslimoon movement.Bilal had picked up so much information about Islam from different directions that he was confused and in order to resolve this conflict of information he decided he must go to the East, to the actual source of Islam, and immerse himself in Arabic and Islamic studies.So he applied for a scholarship from the Islamic University of Madina. He was accepted and left for Saudi Arabia.Living conditions in the University of Madina were quite primitive at the time. The students lived in abandoned army barracks. There was no hot water in the freezing winter and no air conditioning in the blistering summer. Twice Bilal was bitten by scorpions. He put his trust in God and went on with his studies.

From the point of view of learning all aspects of Islam, Bilal had come to the right place. “In terms of Islamic knowledge, the education in Madina University is more extensive than at any university in the West”, he says. “In the west the method of education emphasises understanding, research and interpretation, whereas in the East emphasis is placed on memorisation and verbatim quotation.”

For six years Bilal studied in Madina. The first two years were spent learning Arabic. He also gave lessons in English and in karate to Arab students.In his final year he saw an advertisement for teachers at the Minarat-ul-Riyadh International School and sent a cutting to his parents, who had recently returned to Canada after teaching in South Yemen. They applied and were immediately accepted.After completing his B.A. Bilal applied to the King Saud University in Riyadh for his Master's program and was accepted. As most of his classes were in the evening, he began to teach Islamic education at the Minarat-ul-Riyadh school's English section.It was suggested that he translate the curriculum used in the Arabic section, but mere translation was not suitable as it was based on learning by rote. Most of Bilal's students were from a Western background and they questioned everything. He wanted to provide material based on reasoning and investigation in order to attract the students to Islam. With this in mind over the following years he wrote five textbooks.This was the first attempt to make a curriculum for Islamic education in English. The need for it was urgent because of the large number of Muslim expatriate children in the Kingdom who could only be reached through the medium.Though the basic syllabus consists of Quran, Fiqh, Hadith, Tafseer and Tawheed. Sometimes Bilal spends three-quarters of his class discussing questions, which are of great importance to a young Muslim generation caught up in the mores of the West. The young students want to know why dating, drinking and dancing are okay for their counterparts in the West but not for them. Bilal then uses a relevant Quranic verse, Hadith, statistics and logic to explain the Islamic stand.“About 15 to 20 percent of my students graduate seriously committed to Islam. They go back to Pakistan, England or the States and do serious work for Islam.” Some of the boys he has taught were confirmed atheists, although from Muslim homes. It is gratifying to Bilal when these boys later, through teaching, become very active Muslims. “This makes all the headaches and trials of teaching worth it”, he says.Bilal has translated three books on Shiism from Arabic to English because he feels that there are not enough books on the subject in English from a Sunni point of view.He has co-authored a book ‘Polygamy In Islam’ because he says, “This is an area in which non-Muslims often like to criticise Islam. Also many Muslim modernists, due to the influence of colonialism, deny this aspect of Islam. In fact, in some Muslim countries there is legislation against it.”He has also written a ‘Tafseer on Soorah-ul-Hujuraat (No. 49)’. Among his works under publication is ‘The Evolution of Fiqh’ about the historical development of the different schools of law in Islam, the reason for their differences and how may they be resolved. Another is ‘Usool At-Tafseer’. He is also pondering another refuting the theory of Rashad Khalifa that 19 is the miraculous numerical code of the Quran. Under revision is a book on Tawheed (Islamic unitarianism).His interest in art has again surfaced and he has begun to explore the world of Arabic calligraphy.Bilal feels there is still a lot of work to be done for Islam, especially in the West. His summers are spent teaching Islam and Arabic in the U.S.A. and Canada. He has also travelled extensively in Central and South America and the West Indies to teach Islam in the many Muslim communities scattered throughtout the region.

Bilal feels that Muslims can safeguard themselves and their religion in the West by setting up their own Islamic schools within Islamic communities. These days most Muslims in the States are busy chasing the American dream, their children are going to public schools where indirectly the principles of Islam are constantly under attack. Very few children, probably less than 10 percent, who go through the American school system remain practising Muslims.

Hijra (immigration to a Muslim environment), he believes is compulsory for Muslims if they cannot live like Muslims, and to stress this point he quotes from the Quran: “Those who died in a state of self-oppresion, the angels asked them, ‘well, couldn't you migrate? Allah's earth is expansive’, and these people will go to the hell.”

“The priority of every Muslim”, he says, “should be not where can I best find work, but where can I best practise Islam and find work.”

Bilal's goal is still to change society for the better but the revolution must come through the spread and practise of Islam by each individual, and to this end he has devoted his life.

Source: Saudi Gazette

Personal website: http://www.bilalphilips.com

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Sir Syed Ahmed Khan

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, born at Delhi, India on 17th October, 1817, Muslim educator, jurist and author, founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh, UP, India, and principal sir syed ahmad khan,sir syed khanmotivating force behind the revival of Indian Islam in the late 19th century. His works, in Urdu, include Essays on the Life of Muhammad (PBUH) (187) and commentaries on the Bible and on the Quran. In 1888 he was made a Knight Commander of the Star of India.

Syed’s family, though progressive, was highly regarded by the dying Mughal dynasty. His father, who received an allowance from the Mughal administration, became something of a religious recluse; his maternal grand father had twice served as prime minister of the Mughal emperor of his time and had also held positions of trust under the East India Company. Syed’s brother established one of the first printing press at Delhi and started one of the earlier newspapers in Urdu, the principal language of the Muslims of northern India.

The death of Syed’s father left the family in financial difficulties, and after a limited education Syed had to work for his livelihood. Starting as a clerk with the East India Company in 1938, he qualified three years later as a sub-judge and served in the judicial department at various places.

Syed Ahmed had a versatile personality, and his position in the judicial department left him time to be active in many fields. His career as an author (in Urdu) started at the age of 23 with religious tracts. In 1847 he brought out a noteworthy book, Athar Assandid ("Monuments of the Great"), on the antiquities of Delhi. Even more important was his pamphlet "The Causes of the Indian Revolt". During the Indian Mutiny of 1857 he had taken the side of the British, but the weakness and errors of the British administration that had led to dissatisfaction and countrywide explosion. Widely read by British officials, it had considerable influence on British Policy.

His interest in religion was also active and lifelong. He began a sympathetic interpretation of the Bible, wrote Essay on the Life of Muhammad (PBUH) (translated into English by his son), and founded time to write several volumes of a modernist commentary on the Quran. In these works he sought to harmonise the Islamic faith with scientific and politically progressive ideas of his time.

The supreme interest of Syed’s life was, however, education – in its widest sense, He began establishing schools, at Muradabad (1858) and Ghazipur (1863). A more ambitious undertaking was the foundation of the Scientific Society, which published translations of many educational texts and issued a bilingual journal – in Urdu and English

These institutions were for the use of all citizens and were jointly operated by the Hindus and Muslims. In the late 1860s there occurred developments that were alert the course of his activities. In 1867 he has transferred to Benares, a city on the Ganges with great religious significance for Hindus. At about the same time a movement started at Benares to replace Urdu, the language cultivated ,.by the Muslims, with Hindi. This movement and the attempts to substitute Hind for Urdu publications of the Scientific Society convinced Syed that the paths of the Hindus and the Muslims must diverge. Thus, when during a visit to England (1869-70) he prepared plans for a great educational institution, they were "a Muslim Cambridge." On his return he set up a committee for the purpose and also started an influential journal, Tahdhib al-Akhlaq "Social Reform"), for the "uplift and reform the Muslim". A Muslim school was established at Aligarh in May 1875, and after his retirement in 1876, Syed devoted himself to enlarging it into a college. In January 1977 the Viceroy laid the foundation stone of the college. In spite of conservation opposition to Syed’s projects, the college made rapid progress. In 1886 Syed organised the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference, which met annually at different places to promote education and to provide the Muslims with a common platform. Until the founding of the Muslim League in 1906, it was the principal national centre of Indian Islam.

Syed advised the Muslims against joining active politics and to concentrate instead on education. Later, when some Muslims joined the Indian National Congress, he came out strongly against that organisation and its objectives, which included the establishment of parliamentary democracy in India. He argued that, in a country where communal divisions were all-important and education and political organisations were confined to a few classes, parliamentary democracy would work only inequitably. Muslims, generally, followed his advice and abstained from politics until several years later when they had established their own political organisation i.e. Muslim League.

This great scholar and leader died on 27th March, 1898, at Aligarh, India

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The Story of Adnan Oktar's Life

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Adnan Oktar, who writes his books under the pen-name "Harun Yahya", is an idealist person who devoted his entire life to share his views on the existence and unity of God and the graces of the Quranic morals with other people. Starting from his university years, he has spent every moment of his life, serving to this cause and never dreaded facing difficulties. There has been several campaigns of persecution against Mr. Oktar because of his faith and ministry. He has been arrested many times, kept in custody, tortured by Turkish authorities for many months,harun yahya biography but always found innocent at the end. Today, he still stands firmly against all the pressure and slanders that he confronts by displaying the same patience and fortitude.

Below, you will find the brief biography of Adnan Oktar, whose works you will find on website listed at the end of the page.

Adnan Oktar was born in 1956 in Ankara and spent his life in Ankara until the end of high school. His commitment to Islam got even more steadfast during high school years. Reading various religious books during this period, he gained profound knowledge about Islam. Moreover, he himself grasped important facts and decided to share these with the people surrounding him. In 1979, Adnan Oktar moved to Istanbul to attend Mimar Sinan University. It was by this time that he undertook the mission to call people to the faith and morals of Islam.

Years in Mimar Sinan University

By the time Adnan Oktar entered Istanbul Mimar Sinan University, the school was already under the influence of various illegal Marxist organizations and militantly atheistic views were prevalent in the university. Everyone, be him a faculty member or a student, was a materialist adhering to the atheist way of thinking. Indeed, instructors took every opportunity to propagate the materialistic philosophy and Darwinism in their lectures albeit irrelevant with their topic.

In an environment where each and every religious and moral value was disrespected and outright rejected, Adnan Oktar started to call the people around him to the unity and existence of God. As may be understood, under such circumstances, any theistic idea was not given an opportunity to gain ground. As Mediha Oktar, his mother, relates, during that period he only had a few hours sleep each night, spending his time reading, taking notes and keeping files. He read hundreds of books, including the basic works on Marxism, communism and materialistic philosophy and thoroughly studied the books on secular ideologies, both classical works and rarely-read ones. He worked on them, marking the significant sections and taking notes at the back. He became highly knowledgeable about these philosophies and ideologies, far better than their own advocates. He also made extensive research on the evolutionary theory, the allegedly scientific basis of these ideologies, and gathered documents and information about it.

Having gathered ample information on deadlocks, contradictions and lies inherent in these philosophies and ideologies based on the rejection of God, Mr. Oktar used this accumulation to tell the facts. He told the existence and unity of God and the truth of the Qur'an in the light of rational and scientific evidence almost to everyone, including the students and instructors in the university. In the course of a conversation in the school cafeteria, on the corridors or during breaks, one could see him refuting the materialist philosophy and Marxism, quoting from these ideologies' own reference books.

He particularly gave emphasis to the theory of evolution, i.e. Darwinism. This theory, advanced against the fact of creation, was widely adopted by university students.

His First Booklet on Darwinism

With this purpose in mind, Adnan Oktar primarily concentrated his efforts on proving the invalidity of this deception. As Darwinism was advanced in the name of science, he thought science would serve as the best means to disclose its fallacy. He wrote a booklet titled The Evolutionary Theory, which was a summary of his extensive researches and studies. He, himself, paid all costs of this booklet by selling some of the estates he inherited from his family. Then, he started distributing free copies of this booklet to university students and discussed it with anyone he met. This booklet was indeed a comprehensive work revealing that the evolution theory was a fraud which had no scientific and rational value whatsoever. Furthermore, some militant students at the university were straightforwardly threatening Oktar stating that he would put his life to risk if he did not stop his activities. Yet, all these pressures and threats made Oktar even more committed and resolute.

In a university under the Marxists' domination where terror was reigning, the religious people were harassed because of their beliefs. At that time in Turkey, many young people were murdered because of the ideological tension. Under such circumstances, Adnan Oktar was openly preaching the existence and the unity of God, and the righteousness of the Qur'an. In a school where people never dared to disclose their faith, he regularly went to the Molla Mosque and fulfilled his prayers, never being intimidated the reactions and threats he encountered.

The Anxiety of the Atheist Instructors

Adnan Oktar always entered the lectures with scientific documents and research files he always kept with him and had discussions with the instructors about the materialist philosophy and the evolutionary theory. At that time, there were two well-known faculty members who were continuously talking about evolution and making atheist propaganda. Thus, they were popular among Marxist students and earned their respect. However, their desperate efforts to defend their ideas throughout the discussions they had with Adnan Oktar, and the illogical answers they provided revealed the futile and unrealistic nature of their ideologies.

One day after the lecture, one of these instructors made a brief, yet efficient discussion about the deadlocks of the evolutionary theory with Adnan Oktar. This person could bring no reasonable explanation and answer to the scientific and rational arguments provided by Adnan Oktar. All he could do was to leave that place immediately.

However, that he met such a defeat before the very eyes of the students was what most distressed him. From that time on, this person, who used to wander around the corridors and hold serious lengthy philosophical conversations with his students after the lectures, started to hastily run to his room all alone to avoid Adnan Oktar.

Alone for Three Years

Adnan Oktar was alone when he started communicating Islam at Mimar Sinan University. For more than three years, there was no one supporting his views. However this lack of support did not change his commitment. He knew that God was his sole Companion and he did all this to earn the good pleasure of God.
Adnan Oktar made a remarkable exam score in the entrance exams of the Mimar Sinan University. He had an exceptional ability in drawing. If it was what his goal, he could easily have a degree in fine arts and make a brilliant career. He could normally think, "First let me make my career and then I can start communicating Islam"; but he didn't. He devoted all his time, energy and means to only one purpose.

Having no support throughout these years, Adnan Oktar could simply think his efforts to be vain and simply give up. But he did not. With determination and commitment, he continued to convey the words of God to people around him. Keeping in mind the words of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, "The skill is not to have many listeners but to earn the good pleasure of God", he went on.

In 1982, for the first time, a few young people who were new at Mimar Sinan University, decided to support Mr. Oktar in his ideological struggle. As months and years passed by, the number of young people embracing the same views increased. The evidence for creation, the invalidity of Marxism and materialist philosophy, which was then a dominant ideology, were the major subjects of Adnan Oktar's conversations with these young people. His main ambition was to guide them in being honorable people. From 1982 to 1984, a group of 20-30 young people was formed.

During the two years following 1984, conversations held with young people, who were then attending private high schools in Istanbul, were about moral values. During these years, Oktar did not attend Mimar Sinan University. He enrolled to a new faculty, Istanbul University, Philosophy Department.

His name appeared in Nokta (The Point) magazine for the first time in 1986 and this was the first time he became to be known by the general public.

First impression in the press

The news about Adnan Oktar appeared as the cover story of Nokta (The Point) magazine after the visit of Rusen Cakir, a correspondent for the Nokta (The Point) magazine, to the mosque where Adnan Oktar gathered with his friends and held conversations. The story published under the headline "Disciples from Colleges" covered basically Adnan Oktar and the way he communicated the message of Islam to the young people who shared his ideas. During this period, many university students, mostly from Bosphorus University, one of the most prestigious universities of Turkey, started to participate in the conversations of Adnan Oktar.

Until the beginning of the summer of the same year, press organs made a full coverage of Adnan Oktar almost everyday. Many newspapers carried his name to the headlines. Adnan Oktar, who spread the message of Islam into the section of society which seemed to be the most secularized, was understandably startling for the media.

The First Persecution

The powers in the Turkish society who are at odds with Islam, which are traditionally organized under the banner of Freemasonry, were greatly disturbed by the ministry led by Adnan Oktar. On the other hand, some distinguished families of Istanbul were concerned about their children who changed their way of living and started to observe their religious duties. Essentially these two factors initiated a campaign of persecution to halt the activities of Adnan Oktar.

In the summer of 1986, Adnan Oktar was arrested for a crime he never had the chance to know. As was related later, he was arrested because of his words "I am from the nation of Abraham and Turkish ethnicity." This statement appeared in an interview which was published in a newspaper. This was also the time when false reports, unfounded information and slanders started to appear in the media.

Torture in the Mental Hospital

Adnan Oktar was first arrested and imprisoned. Then, he was transferred to Bakirkoy Mental Hospital and placed under observation on the pretext that he was mentally unwell. In the hospital, he was placed in the "14A" ward, a special section where only very dangerous patients who were immune to punishment were kept. Since murders were very ordinary incidents among these mentally sick people, Oktar was expected to be murdered. For a certain period of time, he was chained to bed by his ankles and exposed to cruel treatments. By force, he was given drugs blurring consciousness. Meanwhile, his young friends who had the chance to secretly visit and see him witnessed that he never lost his commitment and enthusiasm in the meanwhile. Moreover, all the things he went through added more to his commitment.

Oktar was held in prison and mental hospital for a total of 19 months and then acquitted and released by the court since his statements were found to be inoffensive. After his release, he saw that during the time he was in the mental hospital, the number of his young supporters increased dramatically. Since visiting him was prohibited they could only see him behind the hospital bars. A few minutes talk they had with Adnan Oktar behind these bars -one could only go to this place by jumping over the hospital fences- made these young people have a profound and everlasting love and respect for him.

Darwinism

Since 1979, the year he started to communicate his views about religion, disclosing the real face of the Darwinism had been the major goal of Adnan Oktar. This subject never lost its importance throughout the years however. The theory of evolution always had priority for Oktar. With resoluteness, he carried out his studies on Darwinism. In 1986, he compiled all his valuable researches on Darwinism in his book Living Beings and Evolution. In the light of scientific sources, this book showed the impasse of the theory of evolution and revealed the fact of creation.

During those years, the friends of Adnan Oktar also concentrated their efforts on the evolutionary theory. They put forth a great effort to tell people the groundless nature of the theory. In colleges and high schools, scientific arguments were carried out among students. This was a total surprise to some instructors blindly attached to Darwinism. In their lifetime, this was the first time they met such students, who were very knowledgeable about the theory. To their surprise, they actually knew more than themselves and defended creation eloquently.

These were actually the preliminary works of the campaign which would be launched in 1998. The goal of the campaign was already set: to eradicate the evolution theory and materialism from the Turkish society.

By the time Adnan Oktar was released in 1988, most of his friends were in the university. Mr. Oktar's efforts to spread the message of Islam and moral values were no longer limited to schools. It was the time when different sections of society were informed about these views. Adnan Oktar and his friends took upon themselves the responsibility to remind young people, who aimed nothing but to make the most of their life, that they will be hold responsible for their acts and thoughts and that they will be ultimately judged in the presence of God. Accordingly, they recommended them to reorient their lives and submit to the Will of God. Indeed, some of those who were indulged in extremes as a way of life abandoned this degenerate life style and became conscientious and responsible people.

The Science Research Foundation

During the two years following his release in 1988, Adnan Oktar laid the ideological basis of the Science Research Foundation which was founded in 1990. He held conversations over moral values with his friends who shared his views. It was during this period that the intellectual groundwork of the Science Research Foundation was shaped by the contribution of Adnan Oktar.

Finally, in January 1990, Adnan Oktar and his young friends founded the Science Research Foundation to carry out their services under the name of an institution and to address to larger masses. Adnan Oktar was declared the Honorary President of the foundation. The Foundation carried out several activities; the members of the foundation published books and conducted cultural studies, held panels, discussions and conferences to cherish and revive moral values.

After the establishment of the foundation, a great police raid was made to a regular meeting in which more than 100 members participated. More than a hundred members were taken into custody and were interrogated by the police. The following day, some newspapers covered the story of this operation as if a big crime ring was caught. Majority of the members were released in 3-4 hours. However the slander campaign launched by the press continued for days. The press wrote incredible scenarios about Adnan Oktar and the members of the foundation. The main purpose of the subjective news was to mislead the security and judicial institutions by these imaginary accusations. Yet all these efforts were in vain. Adnan Oktar who was kept in custody and interrogated for a week was released, as there was no element of crime in the incident. It was evident that the same circles were trying to give a message in their own way.

Cocaine Plot

During 1990, activities of the Science Research Foundation continued with an even stronger determination. In the midst of 1991, two foundation members officially married. However, the families of these young people filed complaints against this marriage. What is more, Adnan Oktar was surprisingly blamed for this ordinary marriage, which had by no means any illegitimate aspect. Accordingly, Adnan Oktar was once again arrested. However, this time, the existence of a more inclusive plot was evident. Officers who broke into the house of Mr. Oktar in Ortakoy where he lived with his mother found a packet of cocaine in a book. There were some thousand books over the bookshelves covering two walls, and the officers found the cocaine in a few minutes as if they had just left it there.

Just after this event Adnan Oktar, who was then in Izmir with a couple of his friends, was arrested. He was then transferred to Istanbul Security Headquarters, where he was detained for 62 hours. After 62 hours, he was sent to Forensic Medicine Institution for a cocaine test. The result was very interesting indeed! Very high doses of a by-product of cocaine were detected in Adnan Oktar's blood!

Yet subsequent evidences proved that this was merely a plot. Firstly, it was found out that the cocaine alleged to be found in Mr. Oktar's house was part of the plot. A short while before this plot, Adnan Oktar felt that a stealthy plan was being hatched against him and left his house in Ortakoy, Istanbul. Then, he called his mother and said that it was likely that a plot was being hatched against him and he wanted his mother to clean and check the house thoroughly with a couple of other people so that they could be witnesses. Upon this, Mr. Oktar's mother Mediha Oktar called one of her neighbors and the doorkeeper and they all together thoroughly cleaned the house, dusted one by one all the books over the bookshelves. Despite the fact that Adnan Oktar had never been at home after this cleaning, 16 police officers raided the flat and suddenly found a "a packet of cocaine" in one of the books. The neighbor of Mediha Oktar and the doorkeeper gave their individual testimonies before the notary public stating "We cleaned Adnan Oktar's books thoroughly one by one; and there was not such a packet there."

The second part of the cocaine plot was the cocaine by-product detected in Adnan Oktar's blood. Scientific and judicial evidences disproved this allegation. Adnan Oktar had been in the Security Headquarters for 62 hours and the test was conducted after 62 hours. Normally, by looking at the amount of the by-product of cocaine detected in the blood, one can scientifically calculate the exact amount of cocaine taken. This calculation can also indicate how many hours ago the cocaine was taken. The dose of the cocaine detected in Adnan Oktar's blood was, however, at a fatal level, had it been taken 62 hours ago. In other words, such a high dose of cocaine would kill him if he had taken it 62 hours ago. This result clearly revealed that the cocaine detected in Adnan Oktar's blood was given to his body during those 62 hours. In other words, he was given cocaine during the time he was detained in the security headquarters. The cocaine was actually mixed to his food when he was under police detainment.

This fact was also confirmed by 30 international forensic medicine institutions, including Scotland Yard. They all examined the file sent to them about the case. Their conclusive view was the following: "Cocaine was mixed to his food when he was under police detainment. The event is a plot. "

The Secluded life of Adnan Oktar

After Mr. Oktar shaped the mission of the Science Research Foundation, he closely monitored the activities of the foundation for an uninterrupted two years and then by 1991, he devoted all his time to work on his books. Especially after the cocaine plot made against him, he retreated into a secluded life in order both to prevent similar plots and assaults and to have time for his books. He spent all his time in his house. He occasionally visited his friends and participated in discussions. He constantly refused to give interviews to newspapers and TV channels despite their insistent requests.

During this time, Adnan Oktar's involvement in the activities of the Science Research Foundation was limited to giving ideas at the stage of laying down the general principles of the foundation. Meanwhile, he was only giving some recommendations to the members of the foundation about the principles of the Qur'an and good manners. This period lasted until November 12, 1999, the day a police operation was conducted against the SRF community.

Communicating Islam to the Prominent People

One of the major goals of Adnan Oktar was to make a radical change in society's firm conviction about religion that "religion is a phenomenon that addresses merely to elderly people or a particular section of society." This conviction utterly hampered the penetration of the Qur'anic truth to a considerable part of society. Those who were to set examples for the young people were homosexuals, forgers, indecent people etc. Degenerate masses, totally bereft of their religious and moral values, were committing themselves to more destruction each day. However, there might be a hope to save majority of these people if they were told the truth.

In order to eliminate this prejudice prevalent in society, Adnan Oktar took the initiative to contact people who could make a "symbolic" impact over society and inform them about moral values. This was why some SRF members contacted celebrities like models, singers and movie stars. This is explained in the press release of the SRF as follows:

Gulay Pinarbasi is a notable example of this spiritual awakening. She was a model before she met the SRF community; but then she decided to change her entire life. Soon she abandoned her old way of living and started a decent life. She devoted all her time to scientific and religious studies and after a while she started her career as a columnist in a conservative newspaper. Meanwhile, some male models who were also impressed by the truths told by the SRF members quit their career and started to reorient all their lives in a totally different way.

Unrelenting Struggle against Darwinism

In early 1998, Adnan Oktar and his friends launched a great intellectual campaign against Darwinism. To start with, thousands of free copies of Adnan Oktar's book, The Evolution Deceit and the booklets based on this book were distributed in every corner of Turkey. The Science Research Foundation started to hold a series of conferences "The Collapse of the Evolution Theory and the Fact of Creation" all around Turkey. The first three of these conferences which were held in Istanbul and Ankara hosted world renowned American scientists as lecturers.

Then similar conferences were held in 120 different cities and towns of Turkey. In these conferences, the SRF members, each an expert in his own field, delivered lectures. The purpose was to scientifically disprove Darwinism, a fallacy propagated under the guise of science, and thus to bring the materialist thought and moral understanding to ruin.

These activities carried out by the Science Research Foundation in the leadership of Adnan Oktar proved to be a great success. People, who were not knowledgeable about the theory of evolution until then, had the opportunity to learn the real truth about the evolutionary theory and the dimensions of the scientific forgery it committed worldwide. Turkish people acknowledged the fact that the education system, based on the indoctrination of the evolutionary theory to the young brains, was a part of the stealthy plan against the social and moral values and our future generations.

Publication of books, organization of conferences, production of videotapes and CDs were the basic activities carried out by the contribution of the Science Research Foundation. These productions were essentially about the scientific invalidity of the evolutionary theory, the ideological background of the theory and the fact of creation.

The books written under the pen name "Harun Yahya" and the productions made by the contribution of the Science Research Foundation include more than 190 books on political, scientific and religious issues, 14 documentaries, dozens of tape-cassettes and interactive CD on the collapse of the theory of evolution and the fact of creation. This collection of high quality works with aesthetic appeal and well-founded content is an important source.

And Pressure Again...

All these committed activities highly annoyed and disquieted some particular centers. With the provocation of materialist centers and Mason circles, they launched a campaign against these activities. The circles in question made declarations like "Conferences held by the Science Research Foundation must absolutely be stopped." The aim was to prevent any scientific study refuting evolution. They were enraged by the deathblow these activities gave to their philosophy they could hardly sustain. Unable to provide any scientific response, they only claimed that these activities had to be stopped as soon as possible. They could not stand the total rebuttal of the theory they were blindly attached to before the very eyes of the Turkish Public. These efforts of Adnan Oktar and his young friends to prove the scientific invalidity of the theory of evolution continued until the fall of 1999. This was exactly the time when the news about the Global Freemasonry, a great book by Harun Yahya in three volumes, spread. All these laid the ground for the greatest police operation of the Turkish Republic.

Surely Adnan Oktar was not openly accused of "inviting people to the true path of God, reminding them God, religion and the good morals of Islam, and standing against materialism, disbelief and immorality."

By November 12, 1999, some media organs, which had enmity against Adnan Oktar, employed their usual methods to produce groundless slanders, scenarios and lies. Inconceivable lies and slanders appeared in the press every day, all of which, interestingly, contradicted with one another.However, as Adnan Oktar always states, they, too, have inevitably submitted themselves to the Will of God and, albeit unknowingly, they perform the duty assigned to them in the best manner possible since this is what is predestined for them by God.

They are not aware but they actually served to the purposes of Muslims in the sense that Muslims were tested and they earned the good pleasure of God by means of these incidents. Furthermore, by this way, those who tell the truth became apparent so that everyone could recognize them.

In accordance with the verse, "Repel (Evil) with what is better" (Surah Fussilat: 34), Adnan Oktar always has a peaceful and tolerant approach to those who bear enmity against him. He underlines the fact that "The fate God creates is always perfect and there is goodness in all".

Adnan Oktar's website- www.harunyahya.com

Email- info@harunyahya.com

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