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

_______________________________ 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

_____________________________ 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

___________________________ 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