Saturday, March 12, 2022

A01171 - Asiya

 Asiya bint Muzahim (Arabic: آسِيَة بِنْت مُزَاحِم) was, according to the Qur'an and Islamic tradition, the wife of the Pharaoh of the Exodus and adoptive mother of Moses. She is revered by Muslims as one of the four greatest women of all time, and according to a prophetic narration in Sahih al-Bukhari, the second ever.[2][3]

She is believed to have secretly accepted monotheism after witnessing the miracle of Moses. The tradition holds that Asiya worshipped God in secret and prayed in disguise fearing her husband. She adopted Moses and convinced her husband not to kill him. She died while being tortured by her husband, who had discovered her monotheism and retaliated to her rebellion against his tyranny.[4]

Asiya's marriage to the Pharaoh was arranged. Unlike her husband, she was humble and accepted the faith that Moses and Aaron were preaching. Although she had exceeding wealth, she was not arrogant like the Pharaoh. She realized that faith was far more important and was thus exalted by God amongst the women of her generation.

Asiya and her maids found a crate floating in the Nile river. Asiya ordered that the crate be brought out on shore. The maids thought there was a treasure in the crate, but instead found a baby boy, Moses. Asiya instantly felt motherly love towards him. She told the Pharaoh about the baby. The incident has been described in the Quran.

And Pharaoh's wife said: A refreshment of the eye to me and to thee – slay him not; maybe he will be useful to us, or we may take him for a son. And they perceived not.

— Quran: Sura Al-Qasas, verse 9[5]

Asiya offered Moses's mother to live in their household as his wet nurse and paid her for her services, unaware of their relationship.[6][7]

When she witnessed the death of a believing woman under her husband's torture, Asiya declared her faith before the Pharaoh. He tried to turn her away from the faith, but Asiya refused to reject the God and the teaching of Moses. On the Pharaoh's order, she was tortured to death.[8]

Asiya is one of the four most respected women of all time, and is highly honored by Muslims.[9] It is said that Asiya was a sincere believer and that she fully submitted herself to Allah, despite being the wife of Pharaoh. According to Hadith, she will be among the first women to enter Paradise because she accepted Moses's monotheism over Pharaoh's beliefs. The Qur'an mentions Asiya as an example to all Muslims:[7][10][11]

And God sets forth, as an example to those who believe the wife of Pharaoh: Behold she said: 'O my Lord! Build for me, in nearness to Thee, a house in the Garden, and save me from Pharaoh and his doings, and save me from those that do wrong'

— Qur'an, chapter 66 (At-Tahrim), verse 11[12]

Abu Musa Ashaari narrated that once the Islamic prophet, Muhammad stated:

Many men reached perfection but none among the women reached perfection except Mary, the daughter of Imran; and Asiya, Pharaoh's wife.

— Sahih Al-Bukhari Hadith 7.329[2]
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, March 10, 2022

A01170 - Evgeny Maslin, Russian General Who Removed Nuclear Weapons From Former Soviet States

 

Evgeny Maslin, Russian General Who Secured Nuclear Arsenal, Dies at 84

He persuaded Ukraine and other post-Soviet states to give up their weapons, then worked with the U.S. to safeguard and dismantle thousands of them.

Gen. Evgeny Maslin in an undated photo. On his watch, Russia, Ukraine and the United States worked together to reduce the looming threat to global security posed by nuclear arms.
Gen. Evgeny Maslin in an undated photo. On his watch, Russia, Ukraine and the United States worked together to reduce the looming threat to global security posed by nuclear arms.
Credit...National Security Archive

By Clay Risen

Evgeny Maslin, a Russian general who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, set Cold War-era enmities aside to work with the United States in securing his country’s nuclear arsenal, a process that included the withdrawal of thousands of warheads from Ukraine, died on Feb. 26 at a hospital in Moscow. He was 84.

His daughter Ekaterina Bankovskaya said the cause was cancer.

With Russia’s continuing war against Ukraine and the possibility that NATO could become involved, it may be hard to recall a time when Russia, Ukraine and the United States worked together to reduce a looming threat to global security.

It started in 1991, when the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union presented Russia, Ukraine and other successor states with an enormous challenge: how to make sure that an estimated 25,000 nuclear weapons, most of which were sitting in far-flung and often poorly secured sites, did not fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists.

It was up to General Maslin, who oversaw the 30,000 soldiers and engineers charged with maintaining Russia’s nuclear portfolio, to come up with an answer. He spent three years persuading Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to hand over their atomic inheritance, only to hit on another snag: Russia didn’t have the means to keep the weapons safe either.

The United States, led by Senators Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, and Dick Lugar, Republican of Indiana, had already offered resources and expertise to help under the Comprehensive Threat Reduction Program, an America effort. But the Russian political and military leadership was suspicious of working with its erstwhile enemies.

General Maslin was different. An engineer who had taken over as head of Russia’s nuclear arsenal just months after the Soviet Union collapsed, he was among the few who embraced the American offer — and he then lobbied his colleagues to go along.

  • Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers?
Share this article.

“He was not like others who were saying, ‘Why should we cooperate with Americans?’” said Vladimir Orlov, the director of the PIR Center, a Moscow think tank where General Maslin went to work after retiring in 1997. “He said, ‘We need it for our own security, not to please Americans but to guarantee the security of the nuclear arsenal around the country.’”

General Maslin was, to look at him, every bit the Russian general, as if pulled from central casting. Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and bushy-browed, his uniform bedecked with rows of shiny medals, he loved nothing more than belting out patriotic songs at the end of a long meal.

But he was also worldly, a lover of cognac and poetry. When he hosted Harold P. Smith Jr., an assistant secretary of defense who ran the assistance program, in Moscow, General Maslin took him to the ballet; in return, when he visited Washington, Mr. Smith arranged a private tour of the National Gallery, where General Maslin dived deep into conversation with a curator about French Impressionism. He prepared to meet his American counterparts by reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and greeted them by quoting Rudyard Kipling. “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he said, hoping for the opposite.

“He would make clever quips back and forth, saying, ‘Oh, you Americans, you know you’ve had your accidents and here you are trying to help us,’” William Moon, an American who helped carry out the threat-reduction program, said in a phone interview. “But while he was doing that, it was all about developing trust with us.”

And it worked. Step by step through the 1990s, nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia deepened. The Americans sent bulletproof blankets for transporting the warheads, then miles and miles of high-security fencing once they were safely back in Russia. Later still, they helped General Maslin and his team develop a real-time inventory management system to track the weapons.

General Maslin didn’t just secure the warheads; under bilateral agreements with the United States, he oversaw Russia’s partial nuclear disarmament, eliminating about 2,000 a year.

After the project began in the 1990s, skeptics, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush administration, pointed out that even a 99 percent success rate would leave hundreds of weapons unsecured. General Maslin did not lose a single one, despite the continuing political and economic chaos that racked Russia through the 1990s.

“It would not be an exaggeration,” he said in 2016, “if I say that in terms of its importance to peace and security, the collective work within the framework of the Nunn-Lugar program, especially in the early years of its implementation, is comparable to the military and economic cooperation between Moscow and Washington during World War II.”

Soldiers removing a ballistic SS-19 nuclear missile in the yard of a former Soviet rocket base in Vakulenchuk, Ukraine, west of Kyiv, in 1997, as part of a Russian project headed by General Maslin to dismantle nuclear arsenals in former Soviet countries.
Image
Soldiers removing a ballistic SS-19 nuclear missile in the yard of a former Soviet rocket base in Vakulenchuk, Ukraine, west of Kyiv, in 1997, as part of a Russian project headed by General Maslin to dismantle nuclear arsenals in former Soviet countries.
Credit...Associated Press

Evgeny Petrovich Maslin was born on May 20, 1937, in Novotomnikovo, a village about 250 miles southeast of Moscow, and raised in the nearby town of Algasovo. His parents were schoolteachers.

Along with his daughter Ekaterina, he is survived by his wife, Nina; another daughter, Elena; a brother, Nikolai; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

He joined the Soviet Army in 1954, with plans to become an infantry officer. But his father, who had fought on the front lines during World War II, objected; as a compromise, they agreed that he should become an engineer. He graduated in 1959 from the Military Academy of Communications in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he excelled in mathematics and physics.

He had an offer to join a physics research institute as a fellow. But as he was preparing to leave school, he was handed new orders: He was to report to the 12th Main Directorate, the top-secret branch of the Soviet Ministry of Defense that managed the country’s ever-growing nuclear arsenal.

He rose steadily in the directorate, combining technical proficiency with a keen political sensibility. General Maslin was named its deputy director in 1989, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and took over the top job in 1992, a few months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Though he reached the military’s mandatory retirement age, 60, in 1997, General Maslin continued to work on nuclear security and dismantlement at the PIR Center, advising both the Russian government and its many technical contractors.

“He was not an ideologue in any way,” Rose Gottemoeller, a former Defense Department official who worked with him, said in a phone interview. “He was just a really solid military professional, totally devoted to the mission.”

As the dismantlement project wound down in the 2000s, General Maslin became convinced that only total nuclear disarmament would prevent nuclear war. He sat on the Global Zero Commission, a blue-ribbon panel that pushed for an end to nuclear arms, and kept in contact with like-minded advocates in Europe and the United States.

“In the case of the nuclear war, will the penguins in Antarctica suffer?” he said in a 2017 speech. “Of course they will. Therefore, if we think of the world in terms of the whole planet, then it is high time for humankind to stop threatening each other.”

And he watched with dismay as the spirit of friendly cooperation that he helped foster in the 1990s grew chilly in the 2010s. President Vladimir V. Putin said in 2015 that Russia would no longer accept American nuclear assistance, bringing an end to more than 20 years of cooperation.

But General Maslin did not give up hope that one day the two countries could come back together, even if it meant waiting for a new generation of leaders. In January, weeks before his death and about a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, he wrote, “If young people on both sides of the Bering Strait are thinking about how we can improve Russian-American relations, all is not lost.”

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

A01169 - Bill Fitch, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach

 

Bill Fitch, Who Coached Celtics to the ’81 Title, Is Dead at 89

Hailed for reviving sagging teams, he was voted one of the top 10 coaches in the N.B.A.’s first half century and was twice named coach of the year.

Bill Fitch, center, during practice with the Boston Celtics in May 1981 as they prepared to meet the Houston Rockets for the N.B.A. championship series. Boston went on to beat Houston in six games. Kevin McHale was at right.
Bill Fitch, center, during practice with the Boston Celtics in May 1981 as they prepared to meet the Houston Rockets for the N.B.A. championship series. Boston went on to beat Houston in six games. Kevin McHale was at right.
Credit...Associated Press

By Richard Goldstein

Bill Fitch, who gained a reputation for reviving the fortunes of dismal N.B.A. teams and took the Boston Celtics to the 1981 league championship in a pro coaching career spanning 25 seasons, died on Wednesday in Lake Conroe, Texas, north of Houston. He was 89.

His death was announced by Rick Carlisle, the coach of the Indiana Pacers and president of the N.B.A. Coaches Association, who said he had been contacted by Fitch’s daughter Marcy Ann Coville. No other details were provided.

A strong-willed figure who preached unselfish play, Fitch ran demanding workouts and did not spare the feelings of even his best players.

“I believe in discipline and I think it’s the cornerstone of world championship teams,” Fitch once said.

He was an innovator in taping games and practices to analyze his players and their opponents, shrugging off a nickname circulating around the league in its pre-high-tech years: Captain Video.

Fitch was a two-time N.B.A. coach of the year and chosen as one of the top 10 coaches in league history in 1996-97 balloting that marked the N.B.A.’s 50th anniversary.

He received in 2013 the National Basketball Coaches Association’s Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the coach who won two league championships with the Detroit Pistons.

When Kevin McHale coached the Houston Rockets in 2012, he recalled the lessons he had absorbed as a Celtic rookie during Fitch’s sometimes intimidating reign.

“Coming out of college, I had never been around a coach that talked the way Bill did to you,’’ McHale told The Houston Chronicle, “but he really pushed you hard, and I thought Bill did a great job.”

Fitch on the Celtics bench during a game in Philadelphia in December 1982. From left were the forward Larry Bird and the center Rick Robey. Fitch resigned after four seasons with Boston.
Image
Fitch on the Celtics bench during a game in Philadelphia in December 1982. From left were the forward Larry Bird and the center Rick Robey. Fitch resigned after four seasons with Boston.
Credit...Peter Morgan/Associated Press

Larry Bird, who joined with McHale and Robert Parish on Fitch’s championship Celtic team, told Sports Illustrated in 1997 that Fitch “was the best in terms of motivation, getting you to really lay it on the line for each other.”

Bird thought, however, that Fitch, who resigned as the Celtic coach after four seasons, moved on to other teams so often because “he really got under the skin of some guys after a while.”

Fitch made his N.B.A. coaching debut in Cleveland, watching his 1970 expansion-team Cavaliers lose their first 15 games.

But in his sixth season, the Cavaliers won the Central Division title, going 49-33, and made it to the second round of the playoffs, bringing Fitch his first Coach of the Year Award.

Fitch was hired as the Celtics’ coach in 1979 after they had missed the playoffs for two consecutive seasons. He received his second Coach of the Year Award in 1980, when the Celtics, in Bird’s rookie season, went 61-21 and reached the playoffs’ second round.

Fitch’s Celtics won the N.B.A. title the following season, defeating the Houston Rockets in a six-game playoff final, the deciding victory coming in Houston. It was Boston’s 14th National Basketball Association championship and their first since 1976.

Taking the Rockets’ coaching post in 1983 after they had fallen on hard times, Fitch developed the Twin Towers, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson, as the core of a team that he coached to the 1986 N.B.A. finals, where the Rockets lost to the Celtics in six games.

Fitch got the New Jersey Nets’ coaching post in August 1989, succeeding Willis Reed, who became a team vice president after a 26-56 season.

The Nets won only 43 games in Fitch’s first two seasons in New Jersey, but he coached them to the 1992 playoffs, their first postseason appearance in six years, though they were eliminated in the first round.

Fitch had nearly failed to survive that season. A Nets minority owner wanted to hire Jim Valvano, the former North Carolina State coach, in December 1991. Though it didn’t happen, Fitch had other problems, having clashed with several of his players.

He resigned after that season, then became coach of the floundering Los Angeles Clippers in 1994. He never produced a winning team with the Clippers but got them to the playoffs in his third season with them.

Fitch was born on May 19, 1932, in Davenport, Iowa, and grew up in Cedar Rapids. His father, a former Marine drill sergeant, was a disciplinarian, shaping a trait his son would bring to the basketball court.

“I was 14 years old before I found out I wasn’t in the Marine Corps because I lived like a Marine,” Fitch told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “I had nobody to share that razor strap with. I was an only child.”

Fitch played basketball at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and got his first head-coaching post there in 1958. He later coached at North Dakota, where Phil Jackson was one of his players, and then at Bowling Green and Minnesota before getting the Cavaliers’ head-coaching post.

He retired from pro coaching after the 1997-98 season with 944 victories and 1,106 losses. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2019.

In addition to his daughter Marcy Ann, his survivors include two other daughters, Tammy Fitch and Lisa Fitch.

Fitch retained his zest for basketball gamesmanship long after he retired from coaching.

“I never really thought being known as Captain Video was a bad deal,” he told the N.B.A.’s website in 2013. “Other people could laugh and tease all they wanted. The truth is I was glad that nobody else was doing it because I thought it always gave our teams a big advantage.”

“If you could see my closet today,” he said, “it’s crammed full from floor to ceiling with old tapes and now with DVDs, and I’m still doing film for different people. I still love the competition and the strategy.”


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)