Recognise the repeating 6 tail as the result of dividing by 3 , so multiply by color blue 3 to find:. Notice that 2. Notice that 5. How do you convert 0. George C. Almost overnight, it became a household word. Seven-and-a-half thousand miles 12,km away, then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott summed up the breathtaking novelty of the horror.
It was, he said "medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology". IS had arrived, and the world was taking notice. But the men in black did not appear out of the blue. They had been a long time coming. The theology of murder. The ideological or religious roots of IS and like-minded groups go deep into history, almost to the beginning of Islam itself in the 7th Century AD.
Like Christianity six centuries before it, and Judaism some eight centuries before that, Islam was born into the harsh, tribal world of the Middle East. Neither early Judaism nor Islam allowed deviation. Both were authoritarian theocracies. As history moved on, Islam spread over a vast region, encountering and adjusting to numerous other societies, faiths and cultures. Inevitably in practice it mutated in different ways, often becoming more pragmatic and indulgent, often given second place to the demands of power and politics and temporal rulers.
For hardline Muslim traditionalists this amounted to deviationism, and from early on, there was a clash of ideas in which those arguing for a strict return to the "purity" of the early days of Islam often paid a price. The eminent scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal , who founded one of the main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, was jailed and once flogged unconscious in a dispute with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Nearly five centuries later, another supreme theologian of the same strict orthodox school, Ibn Taymiyya, died in prison in Damascus.
These two men are seen as the spiritual forefathers of later thinkers and movements which became known as "salafist", advocating a return to the ways of the first Muslim ancestors, the salaf al-salih righteous ancestors. They inspired a later figure whose thinking and writings were to have a huge and continuing impact on the region and on the salafist movement, one form of which, Wahhabism, took his name.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in in a small village in the Nejd region in the middle of the Arabian peninsula. A devout Islamic scholar, he espoused and developed the most puritanical and strict version of what he saw as the original faith, and sought to spread it by entering pacts with the holders of political and military power.
In an early foray in that direction, his first action was to destroy the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on the grounds that by the austere doctrine of salafist theology, the veneration of tombs constitutes shirk, the revering of something or someone other than Allah.
But it was in that Abd al-Wahhab made his crucial alliance with the local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. It was a pact whereby Wahhabism provided the spiritual or ideological dimension for Saudi political and military expansion, to the benefit of both. Passing through several mutations, that dual alliance took over most of the peninsula and has endured to this day, with the House of Saud ruling in sometimes uneasy concert with an ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment.
The entrenchment of Wahhabi salafism in Saudi Arabia - and the billions of petrodollars to which it gained access - provided one of the wellsprings for jihadist militancy in the region in modern times.
Jihad means struggle on the path of Allah, which can mean many kinds of personal struggle, but more often is taken to mean waging holy war. But the man most widely credited, or blamed, for bringing salafism into the 20th Century was the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb.
He provided a direct bridge from the thought and heritage of Abd al-Wahhab and his predecessors to a new generation of jihadist militants, leading up to al-Qaeda and all that was to follow. Born in a small village in Upper Egypt in , Sayyid Qutb found himself at odds with the way Islam was being taught and managed around him. Far from converting him to the ways of the West, a two-year study period in the US in the late s left him disgusted at what he judged unbridled godless materialism and debauchery, and his fundamentalist Islamic outlook was honed harder.
Back in Egypt, he developed the view that the West was imposing its control directly or indirectly over the region in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's collapse after World War One, with the collaboration of local rulers who might claim to be Muslims, but who had in fact deviated so far from the right path that they should no longer be considered such.
For Qutb, offensive jihad against both the West and its local agents was the only way for the Muslim world to redeem itself. In essence, this was a kind of takfir - branding another Muslim an apostate or kafir infidel , making it justified and even obligatory and meritorious to kill him. Although he was a theorist and intellectual rather than an active jihadist, Qutb was judged dangerously subversive by the Egyptian authorities.
He was hanged in on charges of involvement in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate the nationalist President, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb was before his time, but his ideas lived on in the 24 books he wrote, which have been read by tens of millions, and in the personal contact he had with the circles of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian who is the current al-Qaeda leader.
Another intimate of the al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden said: "Qutb was the one who most affected our generation.
And his influence lingers on today. Summing up the roots of IS and its predecessors, the Iraqi expert on Islamist movements Hisham al-Hashemi said: "They are founded on two things: a takfiri faith based on the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and as methodology, the way of Sayyid Qutb.
The theology of militant jihadism was in place. But to flourish, it needed two things - a battlefield, and strategists to shape the battle. Rise of al-Qaeda.
The Soviet invasion in , and the 10 years of occupation that followed, provided a magnet for would-be jihadists from around the Arab world.
Some 35, of them flocked to Afghanistan during that period, to join the jihad and help the mainly Islamist Afghan mujahideen guerrillas turn the country into Russia's Vietnam. There is little evidence that the "Afghan Arabs", as they became known, played a pivotal combat role in driving the Soviets out. But they made a major contribution in setting up support networks in Pakistan, channelling funds from Saudi Arabia and other donors, and funding schools and militant training camps.
It was a fantastic opportunity for networking and forging enduring relationships as well as tasting jihad first hand. Ironically, they found themselves on the same team as the Americans. The CIA's Operation Cyclone channelled hundreds of millions of dollars through Pakistan to militant Afghan mujahedeen leaders such as Golbuddin Hekmatyar, who associated closely with the Arab jihadists. It was in Afghanistan that virtually all the major figures in the new jihadist world cut their teeth.
They helped shape events there in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in , a period that saw the emergence of al-Qaeda as a vehicle for a wider global jihad, and Afghanistan provided a base for it. The formative Afghan experience provided both the combat-hardened salafist jihadist leaders and the strategists who were to play an instrumental role in the emergence of the IS of today.
Most significant was the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who more than anybody else ended up being the direct parent of IS in almost every way. A high-school dropout whose prison career began with a sentence for drug and sexual offences, Zarqawi found religion after being sent to classes at a mosque in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He arrived in Pakistan to join jihad in Afghanistan just in time to see the Soviets withdraw in , but stayed on to work with jihadists.
After a stint back in Jordan where he received a year jail sentence on terrorist charges but was later released in a general amnesty, Zarqawi finally met Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in By all accounts the two al-Qaeda leaders did not take to him. They found him brash and headstrong, and they did not like the many tattoos from his previous life that he had not been able to erase. But he was charismatic and dynamic, and although he did not join al-Qaeda, they eventually put him in charge of a training camp in Herat, western Afghanistan.
It was here that he worked with an ideologue whose radical writings became the scriptures governing subsequent salafist blood-letting: Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir.
His writings provided religious cover for the most brutal excesses, and also for the killing of Shia as infidels, and their Sunni collaborators as apostates. The other book that has been seen as the virtual manual - even the Mein Kampf - for IS and its forebears is The Management of Savagery, by Abu Bakr Naji, which appeared on the internet in He was referring to a Jewish tribe in seventh-century Arabia which reportedly met the same fate at the hands of early Muslims as the Yazidis of Sinjar did nearly 14 centuries later: the men were slaughtered, the women and children enslaved.
Naji's sanctioning of exemplary brutality was part of a much wider strategy to prepare the way for an Islamic caliphate. Based partly on the lessons of Afghanistan, his book is a detailed blueprint for provoking the West into interventions which would further rally the Muslims to jihad, leading to the ultimate collapse of the enemy. The scenario is not so fanciful if you consider that the Soviet Union went to pieces barely two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Naji is reported to have been killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan's Waziristan province in Iraq fiasco.
Bin Laden went underground, and Zarqawi and others fled. The dispersing militants, fired up, badly needed another battlefield on which to provoke and confront their Western enemies.
Luck was on their side. The Americans and their allies were not long in providing it. Their invasion of Iraq in the spring of was, it turned out, entirely unjustified on its own chosen grounds - Saddam Hussein's alleged production of weapons of mass destruction, and his supposed support for international terrorists, neither of which was true. By breaking up every state and security structure and sending thousands of disgruntled Sunni soldiers and officials home, they created precisely the state of "savagery", or violent chaos, that Abu Bakr Naji envisaged for the jihadists to thrive in.
Iraq was on the way to becoming what US officials came to call the "parent tumour" of the IS presence in the region. Under Saddam's tightly-controlled Baath Party regime, the Sunnis enjoyed pride of place over the majority Shia, who have strong ties with their co-religionists across the border in Iran. The US-led intervention disempowered the Sunnis, creating massive resentment and providing fertile ground for the outside salafist jihadists to take root in.
They were not long in spotting their constituency. Abu Musab Zarqawi moved in, and within a matter of months was organising deadly, brutal and provocative attacks aimed both at Western targets and at the majority Shia community.
Doctrinal differences between the two sects go back to disputes over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad in the early decades of Islam, but conflict between them is generally based on community, history and sectarian politics rather than religion as such.
Setting himself up with a new group called Tawhid wa al-Jihad Tawhid means declaring the uniqueness of Allah , Zarqawi immediately forged a pragmatic operational alliance with underground cells of the remnants of Saddam's regime, providing the two main intertwined strands of the Sunni-based insurgency: militant Jihadism, and Iraqi Sunni nationalism with Baathist organisation at its core.
His group claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks in August that set the pattern for much of what was to come: a suicide truck bomb explosion at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 of his staff, and a suicide car bomb blast in Najaf which killed the influential Shia ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and 80 of his followers.
The bombers were salafist jihadists, but logistics were reportedly provided by underground Baathists. The following year, Zarqawi himself was believed by the CIA to be the masked killer shown in a video beheading an American hostage, Nicholas Berg, in revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of Iraqi detainees by members of the US military.
As the battle with the Americans and the new Shia-dominated Iraqi government intensified, Zarqawi finally took the oath of loyalty to Bin Laden, and his group became the official al-Qaeda branch in Iraq. But they were never really on the same page. Zarqawi's provocative attacks on Shia mosques and markets, triggering sectarian carnage, and his penchant for publicising graphic brutality, were all in line with the radical teachings he had imbibed.
But they drew rebukes from the al-Qaeda leadership, concerned at the impact on Muslim opinion. Zarqawi paid little heed. His strain of harsh radicalism passed to his successors after he was killed by a US air strike in June on his hideout north of Baghdad. He was easily identified by the tattoos he had never managed to get rid of. The direct predecessor of IS emerged just a few months later, with the announcement of the Islamic State in Iraq ISI as an umbrella bringing the al-Qaeda branch together with other insurgent factions.
But tough times lay ahead. In January , the Americans began "surging" their own troops in Iraq from , to a peak of ,, adopting a much more hands-on approach in mentoring the rebuilt Iraqi army.
At the same time, they enticed Sunni tribes in western al-Anbar province to stop supporting the jihadists and join the US-led Coalition-Iraqi government drive to quell the insurgency, which many did, on promises that they would be given jobs and control over their own security.
By the time both the new ISI and al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a US-Iraqi army raid on their hideout in April , the insurgency was at its lowest ebb, pushed back into remote corners of Sunni Iraq. They were both replaced by one man, about whom very little was publicly known at the time, and not much more since: Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Six eventful years later, he would be proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, Commander of the Faithful and leader of the newly declared "Islamic State". Territorial takeover. Baghdadi's career is so shrouded in mist that there are very few elements of it that can be regarded as fact. By all accounts he was born near Samarra, north of Baghdad, so the epithet "Baghdadi" seems to have been adopted to give him a more national image, while "Abu Bakr" evokes the first successor to and father-in-law of Prophet Muhammad.
That, and his youth - born in - may have been factors in his selection as leader. All accounts of his early life agree that he was a quiet, scholarly and devout student of Islam, taking a doctorate at the Islamic University of Baghdad.
Some even say he was shy, and a bit of a loner, living for 10 years in a room beside a small Sunni mosque in western Baghdad. The word "charismatic" has never been attached to him.
As a youth, Baghdadi had a passion for Koranic recitation and was meticulous in his observance of religious law. His family nicknamed him The Believer because he would chastise his relatives for failing to live up to his stringent standards. What has happened to Baghdadi? But by the time of the US-led invasion in , he appears to have become involved with a militant Sunni group, heading its Sharia Islamic law committee.
American troops detained him, and he was reportedly held in the detention centre at Camp Bucca in the south for most of It gave them an unrivalled opportunity to imbibe and spread radical ideologies and sabotage skills and develop important contacts and networks, all in complete safety, under the noses and protection of their enemies.
Baghdadi would also certainly have met in Camp Bucca many of the ex-Baathist military commanders with whom he was to form such a deadly partnership. The low-profile, self-effacing Baghdadi rang no alarm bells with the Americans. They released him, having decided he was low-risk. But he went on to work his way steadily up through the insurgent hierarchy, virtually unknown to the Iraqi public.
By the time Baghdadi took over in , the curtains seemed to be coming down for the jihadists in the Iraqi field of "savagery". But another one miraculously opened up for them across the border in neighbouring Syria at just the right moment. In the spring of , the outbreak of civil war there offered a promising new arena of struggle and expansion. The majority Sunnis were in revolt against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad, dominated by his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Baghdadi sent his men in. By December , deadly car bombs were exploding in Damascus which turned out to be the work of the then shadowy al-Nusra Front. It announced itself as an al-Qaeda affiliate the following month. It was headed by a Syrian jihadist, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani. He had been sent by Baghdadi, but had his own ideas. Jostling with a huge array of competing rebel groups in Syria, al-Nusra won considerable support on the ground because of its fearless and effective fighting skills, and the flow of funds and foreign fighters that support from al-Qaeda stimulated.
It was relatively moderate in its salafist approach, and cultivated local relationships. Al-Nusra was slipping out of Baghdadi's control, and he didn't like it. In April , he tried to rein it back, announcing that al-Nusra was under his command in a new Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham Syria or the Levant.
Isis, or Isil, was born. During the short and turbulent period over which it has imposed itself as a major news brand, so-called Islamic State has confused the world with a series of name changes reflecting its mutations and changing aspirations, leaving a situation where there is no universal agreement on how to refer to it.
But Jawlani rebelled, and renewed his oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda's global leadership, now under Ayman al-Zawahiri following Bin Laden's death in It was Baghdadi's turn to ignore orders from head office. Before was out, Isis and al-Nusra were at each other's throats. Hundreds were killed in vicious internecine clashes which ended with Isis being driven out of most of north-west Syria by al-Nusra and allied Syrian rebel factions.
But Isis took over Raqqa, a provincial capital in the north-east, and made it its capital. Many of the foreign jihadists who had joined al-Nusra also went over to Isis, seeing it as tougher and more radical. In early , al-Qaeda formally disowned Isis. Isis had shaken off the parental shackles. But it had lost a lot of ground, and was bottled up. One of its main slogans, Remaining and Expanding, risked becoming empty. So where next? Fortune smiled once more. Back in Iraq, conditions had again become ripe for the jihadists.
The Americans had gone, since the end of Sunni areas were again aflame and in revolt, enraged by the sectarian policies of the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki.
Sunnis felt marginalised, oppressed and angry. When Isis decided to move, it was pushing at an open door. In fact, it had never really left Iraq, just gone into the woodwork.
As it swept through Sunni towns, cities and villages with bewildering speed in June , sleeper cells of salafist jihadists and ex-Saddamist militants and other sympathisers broke cover and joined the takeover. With the capture of Mosul, Isis morphed swiftly into a new mode of being, like a rocket jettisoning its carrier. No longer just a shadowy terrorist group, it was suddenly a jihadist army holding large stretches of territory, ruling millions of people, and not only threatening the Iraqi state, but challenging the entire world.
The change was signalled on 29 June by the proclamation of the "Islamic State", replacing all previous incarnations, and the establishment of the "caliphate". A few days later, the newly anointed Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made a surprise appearance in Mosul in the pulpit of the historic Grand Mosque of al-Nuri, heavily laden with anti-Crusader associations. He called on the world's Muslims to rally behind him.
By declaring a caliphate and adopting the generic "Islamic State" title, the organisation was clearly setting its sights far beyond Syria and Iraq. It was going global. Announcing a caliphate has huge significance and resonance within Islam. While it remains the ideal, Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had always shied away from it, for fear of failure. Now Baghdadi was trumping the parent organisation, setting IS up in direct competition with it for the leadership of global jihadism.
A caliphate khilafa is the rule or rein of a caliph khalifa , a word which simply means a successor - primarily of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the first four caliphs who followed after he died in , the Islamic Caliphate burst out of Arabia and extended through modern-day Iran to the east, into Libya to the west, and to the Caucasus in the north. The Umayyad caliphate which followed, based in Damascus, took over almost all of the lands that IS would like to control, including Spain.
The Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate took over in and saw a flowering of science and culture, but found it hard to hold it all together, and Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in Emerging from that, the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople Istanbul , stretched almost to Vienna at its peak, and was also a caliphate, though the distinction with empire was often blurred.
Its not THAT noticeable, but a scar is a scar. His sister may not be that bad. She may have been coerced into turning her back on him for all we know. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Cookie more details in Privacy Policy. Fantasy World's Ruler. World's Ruler Fantasy. Martial arts, revenge and secrets combined What you stole from me, I will take it all back, one be one!
Petersburg, Idem, Shanga. Sandabi, Cairo, Smith and H. The earliest Bantu-speaking communities entered eastern Africa during the last five centuries B. Swahili is a member of the Bantu subgroup known as Sabaki. Proto-Sabaki was likely spoken on or near the East African coast during the first half of the first millennium C.
Based on archeological and linguistic data, the earliest Swahili settlements along the coast from southern Somalia to Mozambique are usually assigned to C. The paucity of lexical material at this stage as well as the total absence of nonlexical material suggest very light Persian influence. By about , when the first recorded documents in Swahili appeared, Swahili vocabulary was much as it is today, containing several hundred items from Persian Krumm; Knappert and many more from Arabic. Thus, most of these entered Swahili between and The recentness of their arrival is corroborated by their having undergone only recent and local sound shifts affecting Swahili.
They cluster in certain categories—tools, ornaments, spices, plants, household items, and maritime and kinship terms—and contain few general items. This pattern derives from trading contact rather than sustained political intertwining. As with the small, earlier set, it is possible that many entered Swahili indirectly via Arabic or Indic languages.
Many are also attested in Comorian and Mwani, a Swahili-like language on the Mozambique coast. Nurse and T. Hinnebusch, Swahili and Sabaki. A Linguistic History , Berkeley, Members of the Baluchi and Parsi communities, both of which have had historical links with Persia, began settling in East Africa in the 19th century.
They became traders over the years Gregory, p. On the other hand, the Parsis q. These features were recreated in Zanzibar and later elsewhere in East Africa , where, beginning in about , the Parsis settled. In East Africa, as elsewhere in their diaspora, the Parsis have distinguished themselves as a dynamic community which places a high premium on education. Although a community of relatively small numbers, their contribution has been significant, particularly as traders—the firm of Cowasjee Dinshaw was one of the pioneer firms in Zanzibar—and as members of the professions lawyers, doctors, account-ants, etc.
Today, however, the Parsis are faced with an issue that is far-reaching in its implications for the continuity of their identity: whether a child born of a non-Zoroastrian parent should be accepted as a Zoroastrian Parsi.
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