Fourth Fitna

The Fourth Fitna or Great Abbasid Civil War involved conflict between the brothers al-Amin and al-Ma'mun over the succession to the throne of the Abbasid Caliphate. Their father, Harun al-Rashid, had named al-Amin as the first successor, but had also named al-Ma'mun as the second, with Khurasan granted to him as an appanage, while a third son, al-Qasim, had been designated as third successor. After Harun died in 809, al-Amin succeeded in Baghdad. Encouraged by the Baghdad court, al-Amin began trying to subvert the autonomous status of Khurasan; Qasim was quickly sidelined. In response, al-Ma'mun sought the support of the provincial élites of Khurasan and made moves to assert his own autonomy. As the rift between the two brothers and their respective camps widened, al-Amin declared his own son Musa as his heir and assembled a large army. Al-Amin's troops marched towards Khurasan, but al-Ma'mun's general Tahir ibn Husayn defeated them in the Battle of Rayy, and then invaded Iraq and besieged Baghdad itself. The city fell after a year, al-Amin was executed, and al-Ma'mun became Caliph, but he remained in Khurasan and did not come to Baghdad.

Fourth

Fourth or 4th may refer to:

In music

See also

Fourth (Soft Machine album)

Fourth is the fourth studio album by the Canterbury band Soft Machine, released in 1971. The album is also titled Four or 4 in the USA.

Overview

The numeral "4" is the title as shown on the cover in all countries, but a written-out title appears on the spine and label. This was the group's first all-instrumental album, although their previous album Third had almost completed the band's move in this direction toward instrumental jazz, and a complete abandonment of their original self-presentation as a psychedelic pop group, or progressive rock group. It was also the last of their albums to include drummer and founding member Robert Wyatt who afterwards left to record a solo album, The End of an Ear (in which he described himself on the cover as an "out of work pop singer"), and then founded a new group, Matching Mole, whose name was a pun on "Soft Machine" as pronounced in French: "Machine Molle".

Like the previous Soft Machine album, this one uses session musicians who were not regarded as full group members, but toured with the band for live performances.

Degree (angle)

A degree (in full, a degree of arc, arc degree, or arcdegree), usually denoted by ° (the degree symbol), is a measurement of plane angle, representing ¹⁄₃₆₀ of a full rotation. It is not an SI unit, as the SI unit for angles is radian, but it is mentioned in the SI brochure as an accepted unit. Because a full rotation equals 2π radians, one degree is equivalent to π/180 radians.

History

The original motivation for choosing the degree as a unit of rotations and angles is unknown. One theory states that it is related to the fact that 360 is approximately the number of days in a year. Ancient astronomers noticed that the sun, which follows through the ecliptic path over the course of the year, seems to advance in its path by approximately one degree each day. Some ancient calendars, such as the Persian calendar, used 360 days for a year. The use of a calendar with 360 days may be related to the use of sexagesimal numbers.

Another theory is that the Babylonians subdivided the circle using the angle of an equilateral triangle as the basic unit and further subdivided the latter into 60 parts following their sexagesimal numeric system. The earliest trigonometry, used by the Babylonian astronomers and their Greek successors, was based on chords of a circle. A chord of length equal to the radius made a natural base quantity. One sixtieth of this, using their standard sexagesimal divisions, was a degree.

Fitna

Fitna may refer to:

Fitna (word)

Fitna (or fitnah, pl. fitan; Arabic: فتنة , فتن‎: "temptation, trial; sedition, civil strife") is an Arabic word with extensive connotations of trial, affliction, or distress. A word freighted with important historical implications, it is also widely used in modern Arabic. As with any word in Arabic, one should distinguish between the meanings of fitna as used in Classical Arabic and the meanings of fitna as used in Modern Standard Arabic and various colloquial dialects. Furthermore, because of the conceptual importance of fitna in the Qur'an, its use in that work will be considered separately, though in addition to, the word's general lexical meaning in Classical Arabic.

Root and forms

Arabic, in common with other Semitic languages like Hebrew, deploys a system of root letters combined with vowel patterns to constitute its whole range of vocabulary; it is, therefore, essential to identify the root letters of any word, in order to better understand the word's full semantic range.

Fitna (film)

Fitna (Arabic: فِتْنَة‎) is a 2008 short film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. Approximately 17 minutes in length, the film attempts to demonstrate that the Qur'an motivates its followers to hate all who violate Islamic teachings. The movie shows selected excerpts from Suras of the Qur'an, interspersed with media clips and newspaper cuttings showing or describing acts of violence and/or hatred by Muslims.

The film argues that Islam encourages – among other things – acts of terrorism, antisemitism, violence against women, violence and subjugation of infidels and against homosexuals and Islamic universalism. A large part of the film details the influence of Islam on the Netherlands. The film was published on the Internet in 2008. Shortly before its release, its announcement was suspended from its website by the American provider because of the perceived controversy. It stirred a still continuing debate in the Netherlands as well as abroad, and a criminal prosecution for hate speech.