The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, ruled out the introduction of Western-style democracy and elections in his kingdom where laws are based on Islamic ideology. “Islam is our social, political and economic law. It has a complete constitution of social justice, economic justice and the system of governing and judicial justice,” he said. “The democratic system prevailing in the world does not suit us in this region. The nature of our people is different. We have our Islamic ideology. The system of free election is not part of Islamic ideology, and it does not suit us in Saudi Arabia.” He said the kingdom did not want to impose similar Islamic laws on other countries in the region and made clear he would not allow fundamentalism to spread in Saudi Arabia. “Democracies in the West might be good in those countries, but they do not suit all the people of the world. There is no harm in benefiting from some of what is good there as long as it does not oppose our religious teachings.”
Other important events:
1800 Act of Union with England passes in Ireland’s Parliament.
1854 Britain and France declare war on Russia during the Crimean War.
1871 The Paris Commune is formally established.
1927 Majestic Theatre opens at New York City.
1930 Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora change names to Istanbul and Ankara.
1938 Japan installs puppet government of Chinese Republic in Nanking.
1942 British naval forces raid the Nazi-occupied French port of St Nazaire during Second World War.
1945 United States invades Cebu in the heart of the Philippines.
1959 The State Council of the People’s Republic of China dissolves the Government of Tibet.
1969 Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, dies in Washington, at the age of 78.
1970 A 7.4 magnitude earthquake kills 1,086 people and destroys 254 villages in Gediz, Turkey.
1977 Morarji Desai forms his government in India.
1979 America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurs at Three Mile Island.
1989 UAE signs a deal with Britain to buy Hawk fighters to strengthen its armed forces.
1990 Three arrested in London in plot to smuggle US-made nuclear triggering devices to Iraq.
1992 Emergency rule is imposed in Moldova after weeks of fighting between Romanian loyalists and Slavic separatists.
1993 President Boris Yeltsin survives a determined bid to oust him from office when Russia’s supreme legislature fails to impeach him by just 72 votes.
1995 Mireille Durocher Bertin, an outspoken lawyer, is assassinated on a Port-au-Prince street in Haiti.
1996 An earthquake kills 50 people and injures about 100 in Ecuador.
1999 Nato aircraft widen their strikes against Yugoslavia, targeting ground forces in Kosovo.
2005 A powerful 8.7 magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia’s Sumatra island, killing around 300.
2006 The Palestinian parliament approves Hamas’ cabinet.
2008 Cuban President Raul Castro issues a decree allowing ordinary Cubans to have cell phone service, a luxury previously reserved for the select few.
2011 A blast at an ammunitions factory in Yemen kills more than 110 people.
2012 The newly-renovated Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Centre for Arabic Language and Islamic Studies opens in Beijing, China.
2014 Five armed forces personnel are killed when a C-130J transport aircraft crashes near Gwalior, India.
