Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (c. 646 – 705) was the fifth Umayyad
caliph, ruling from April 685 until his death. At his accession,
Umayyad authority in the Caliphate had been restricted to Syria and
Egypt as a result of the second Muslim civil war. Abd al-Malik reunited
the Caliphate after defeating the Zubayrids at the Battle of Maskin in
Iraq in 691 and the siege of Mecca in 692. The wars with Byzantium
recommenced, resulting in Umayyad advances into Anatolia and Armenia and
the recapture of Kairouan, which led to the conquests of Northwest
Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula during the reign of his son and
successor, al-Walid I. Abd al-Malik founded the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem, the earliest archaeologically attested religious monument
built by a Muslim ruler. He introduced a single Islamic currency and
established Arabic as the language of the bureaucracy, replacing Greek
in Syria and Persian in Iraq. His centralized government became the
prototype of later medieval Muslim states.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Malik_ibn_Marwan>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1839:
First Opium War: British vessels opened fire on Chinese war
junks enforcing a food sales embargo on the British community on the
Kowloon Peninsula.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kowloon>
1912:
The Albanian revolt ended when the Ottoman government agreed to
meet most of the rebels' demands.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_revolt_of_1912>
1957:
Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to
prevent nine African-American students from attending Little Rock
Central High School.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine>
2010:
A 7.1 Mw earthquake struck New Zealand's South Island (damage
pictured), causing up to NZ$40 billion in damages.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Canterbury_earthquake>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
bread and circuses:
1. Food and entertainment provided by the state, particularly if
intended to placate the people.
2. (by extension) Grand spectacles staged or statements made to distract
and pacify people.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bread_and_circuses>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower,
a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live
from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So
they are spared the guilt and anxiety that so torment human beings and
they are full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in
persons or things as in life itself. As long as your happiness is caused
or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in
the land of the dead. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever,
the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing,
you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the
kingdom.
--Anthony de Mello
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_de_Mello>