October 15 in Middle East History
533: Roman general Belisarius enters Carthage, near present-day Tunis in Tunisia, after conquering it from Vandals. He’d been battling Geilimer, king of the Vandals, for three months. The great British poet and novelist Robert Graves, in Count Belisarius (1938), re-imagined Geilimer’s, or Gelimer’s “pitiful and strange” surrender. “For, as he came toward Belisarius, he smiled, and the smile changed to hysterical laughter, and the laughter to weeping.
There were tears in Belisarius’s eyes, too, as he took the former monarch by the hand and led him into a neighboring house for a drink of water. He laid him down on a bed and comforted him as a woman comforts a sick child.” Belisarius died in 565, five years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.
1894: Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, is arrested on charges of treason. What becomes known as the Dreyfus Affair centers on bogus charges that expose deep strains of anti-Semitism in France. Dreyfus is found guilty and sentenced to exile on Devil’s Island. He’s exonerated after a long campaign on his behalf by friends and the likes of Emile Zola, the novelist whose “J’Accuse” article on the affair laid bare the state’s mendacity and bigotry. The affair is notable in Middle Eastern history because it illustrates where the Middle East stood at the time regarding Jews. As historian Bernard Lewis wrote in What Went Wrong, “Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors.” Where anti-Semitism was evident in the Middle East, it usually revealed itself among Christian communities.
1894: Moshe Sharett, who served as Israel’s second prime minister (1953-1955), is born. His unremarkable term stretched between David Ben Gurion’s two terms. Sharett died in 1965.
1898: Algerian athlete Ahmed Boughèra El Ouafi is born near Setif. He wins a gold medal in the marathon at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, representing France, which colonized Algeria at the time. El Ouafi is assassinated in 1959 in Paris by members of the Algerian Liberation Movement.
1915: Yitzhak Shamir, who was part of the Irgun terrorist organization before Israel’s founding and who would serve two terms as Israeli prime minister (1983-84 and 1986-92) is born in Ruzhany, in what was then Russia and what’s now Belarus.
1944: Haim Saban is born in Alexandria, Egypt. He is a media magnate who made his name selling the kids’ show “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” and who, in 2008, was worth $3.6 billion as Fortune’s 102nd richest person in the world. In 2007, with partners, he bought Univision, the Spanish-language network, for $13.7 billion.
1970: Anwar Sadat, a little-known military officer who’d risen in ranks in the shadow of Gamal Abdel Nasser, becomes president of Egypt, then briefly known—following one of Nasser’s less successful schemes—as the United Arab Republic. Sadat garnets 90 percent of the vote in a plebiscite on his accession to the presidency. Nasser had died of a heart attack after 18 years of despotic rule. In Nasser’s last plebiscite, in 1965, he reportedly had garnered 99.999 percent of the “yes” vote. Sadat was assassinated 11 years later.
2005: Iraqi voters approve the country’s first post-war constitution in large numbers. But the constitution is not implemented, and Iraq continues to edge toward full-scale civil war as its insurgency against American occupation gains strength.
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