Contemporary Famous Persons in the Islamic World

Compiled by: Syed Ali Shahbaz

Malcolm X, al-Haj Malik ash-Shabazz
On May 19 in 1925 AD, US civil rights activist, Malcolm X was born. After conversion to Islam he became known as al-Haj Malik ash-Shabazz. He was a courageous advocate for the rights of Afro-Americans and indicted the US in the strongest terms for its crimes against black citizens. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential Afro-Americans in history. In 1952, he became a member of the Nation of Islam and quickly rose to become one of its leaders. For a dozen years he was the public face of this controversial group, but disillusionment with its chief, Elijah Muhammad, led him to leave the group in March 1964. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, where he performed the Hajj pilgrimage to holy Mecca, he returned to the US, and founded "Muslim Mosque, Inc." and the "Organization of Afro-American Unity." On 21st February 1965, he was assassinated as he prepared to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom. According to the autopsy report, his body had 21 gunshot wounds to his chest, left shoulder, and both arms and legs, many of them fatal.

General Mohammad Suharto
On May 21 in 1998, General Mohammad Suharto, after ruling Indonesia with an iron fist for 33 years, was forced to resign. He had seized power in a coup against the pioneer of Indonesia’s independence and elected president of the country, Ahmed Sukarno. During Suharto’s autocratic rule, political freedoms were intensely curtailed, although in the 1980s and 1990s the country made headways in economy. In the wake of the grinding economic crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997, student unrests were fueled and the economic demands of people turned political, with calls for the dismissal of Suharto. Finally the economic corruption of Suharto and his family brought him down.

Syrian President Hafez al-Assad
On June 10, 2000 AD, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, passed away at the age of 70 years. He was instated as air force commander of Syria in 1964 and was appointed as defence minister in 1967 in the aftermath of the 6-day war imposed by Israel. Following a coup in 1970, he was elected as leader of the Ba'th Party and was subsequently elected as president in a referendum. During his 30 years as president, he developed Syria and brought stability to a country where governments used to last not more than a year because of coups and counter-coups. He carried out reforms and played a major role in the 1973 war along with Egypt against the illegal Zionist entity, but because of massive US and western support for Israel, Syria was defeated and the Golan Heights continued to be occupied. The main feature of his foreign policy was refusal to compromise with Israel. He was a member of the Alawite Muslim sect and a firm supporter of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, a factor that made the West and Arab reactionary regimes despise him.

Iraq’s first president of the repressive Ba’th minority regime, General Hasan Ahmad al-Bakr
On July 16, 1979 AD, Iraq’s first president of the repressive Ba’th minority regime, General Hasan Ahmad al-Bakr, was ordered by his masters in London and Washington to resign and hand over power to his more brutal vice-president, Saddam, five months after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Saddam instantly launched a reign of terror by imprisoning and murdering prominent religious and political leaders of the long-suppressed Arab Shi’ite majority, including the reputed scholar, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Baqer as-Sadr. He also suppressed the ethnic Sunni Kurds of the north and expelled tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens on the pretext of being of Iranian origin. In September 1980, at the behest of the US, he launched a brutal war on the Islamic Republic of Iran which raged for 8 years. In 1990, he occupied Kuwait and was driven out by an international coalition seven months later. Finally, with his downfall in 2003 at the hands of his own backers, the Americans, 34 years of brutal Ba’th minority rule came to its end.

King Abdullah I of Jordan
On July 20, 1951 AD, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian in Bayt al-Moqaddas, for the Arab defeat in the 1948 Israeli war, after a reign of 30 years over a country created by the British out of Greater Syria as a reward for the treason of his father, Sherif Hussain of Hejaz against the Ottoman Turks. Born in Mecca in 1882 into a family claiming Hashemite descent and ruling the two holy cities for several centuries, before its ouster by Wahhabi brigands of Najd, he was succeeded by his son Talal, who was forced to abdicate a year later by his British masters in favour of his own teenaged son, Hussein (died 1999), the father of the present king, Abdullah II.

Noor Mohammad Hassan-Ali, the former president of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago
On August 25, 2006 AD, Noor Mohammad Hassan-Ali, the former president of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean Sea died, nine years after serving two five-year terms. A retired High Court judge, he was the first Indo-Trinidadian to hold the office of President and was the first Muslim head of state in the Americas. As a Muslim, Hassan-Ali chose not to serve alcoholic beverages at the President's House.

Omar Mokhtar of Libya
On September 16, 1931 AD, the leader of the Libyan people's struggle against Italian occupation, Omar Mokhtar, was executed at the age of 72. He was an Islamic scholar and freedom fighter with active duty against imperialism, having taken part in the uprising of the Mahdi in Sudan in 1895 against the British.
In 1911 when Italy seized Libya from the Ottoman Empire, Omar Mokhtar launched his uprising against the Italian occupiers and inflicted major defeats upon them. Finally, the Italian troops, who were well-equipped, besieged and arrested Omar Mokhtar, and hanged him.

The Egyptian president, Jamal Abdun-Nasser
On September 28, 1970 AD, the Egyptian president, Jamal Abdun-Nasser passed away at the age of 54. He participated in the first war imposed by the illegal Zionist entity on Arab states in 1948. In 1952, along with General Mohammad Najib, he staged a coup against King Farouq to end the monarchy and two years later after ousting Najib, he became president. He was a staunch anti-colonialist and in 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal – a measure that prompted France, Britain and the Zionist entity to attack Egypt. In the 1967 war against the usurper state of Israel, he suffered a shattering defeat and lost the Sinai Peninsula, mainly because of his miscalculation in committing as many as 70,000 Egyptian troops to the civil war in Yemen, when the greatest enemies of Arabs and Muslims were the Zionists and their godfathers in the West.

Amir Abdur-Rahman Khan, the Pashto ruler of Afghanistan
On October 1, 1901 AD, with the death of Amir Abdur-Rahman Khan, the Pashto ruler of Afghanistan, the plight of the Hazara people neared its end. Although he is credited with what is called the unification of Afghanistan, his principal aim was to make the rule of the Pakhtoun ethnicity paramount by cruelly suppressing all other ethnic and lingual groups such as the Tajik, Uzbek, Balouch and Hazara.
He used to treat the Persian-speaking Hazara Muslims as slaves, because of their adherence to the path of Holy Prophet Mohammad’s (SAWA) Ahl al-Bayt. In 1880, the Hazara people rose in revolt but were savagely crushed and many of them were forced to seek refuge across the borders in British India as well as in Khorasan and the city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran. The Hazaras remained de facto slaves with no rights, until King Amanullah Khan declared Afghanistan's independence in 1919.