September 26

Prior to the Second Vatican Council and other freewheeling reforms of the 1960s, observant Catholics used to set aside a few moments on September 27 to acknowledge the martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian, who were beheaded during the Diocletian Persecution, somewhere in the vicinity of A.D. 303. The traditional calendar of saints listed September 27 as a festum semiduplex, one of the lesser feasts that mark the undulations of the year. For the past four decades, however, the Feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian have been downgraded to the category of “optional feasts,” and the headless twins have seen their feast day moved up to September 26.

Despite their relative obscurity in the canon of saints, Cosmas and Damian died spectacularly. Born in Arabia and educated in Syria, the brothers lived as healers in Aegea (in modern Celicia in eastern Turkey), where which they accepted no payment and thus became known as the “silverless” (anargyroi). According to legend, they performed the first limb transplant in medical history, grafting the black leg of a dead Ethiop onto the white body of a diseased Moor -- a miraculous scene commemorated in numerous paintings of the brothers. Denounced as Christians by two fellow doctors, Cosmas and Damian were rendered into the custody of Lysias, governor of Aegea, who ordered their torture on the expectation that they would either deny or recant their faith. After several unsuccessful rounds of brutalization -- during which the brothers survived drowning, roasting, flaying, and crucifixion -- Lysias at last ordered their heads to be severed from their bodies. Over the next few centuries, Cosmas and Damian emerged as the patron saints of physicians and surgeons as well as (in later years) hairdressers, barbers, midwives and apothecaries. Sometime before the tenth century, their skulls appeared in Rome and became the objects of the usual forms of reliquary veneration. In 1581, the skulls were moved to the Convent of the Clares in Madrid, where they currently reside.

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On 26 September 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar, returning from a family vacation to Tunisia with his wife and two small children, was detained at JFK airport by US immigration officials acting on false information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Two weeks later, the INS sent Arar to Jordan and then to his birthplace in Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year by interrogators determined to persuade Arar that he had ties to al-Qaeda. In November 2003, shortly after his release, Arar described his ordeal:

I thought first it was a dream. I was crying all the time. I was disoriented. I wished I had something in my hand to kill myself, because I knew I was going to be tortured, and this was my preoccupation….

And the second day, that's when the beatings started, because, you know, on the first day they did not find anything strange about what I told them. And they started beating me with a cable, electrical threaded cable, and they would beat me for three, four times. They would stop again, and they would ask questions again, and they always kept telling me, “You are a liar,” and things like that. So, the beating continued for the first two weeks. The most -- the most intensive -- the intensive beating was really the first week, and then after that it was mostly slapping, punching on the face and kicking.

In mid-September last year -- four years after his ordeal began -- a Canadian judge released a three-volume, 1200-page finding that cleared Arar of any connection to terrorism and chastised the United States for refusing to tell Canadian officials that Arar had been rendered to Syria.

Following the report's release, both Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the UNited States' then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez refused to apologize to Arar for the year he spent in Syrian custody.

August 28

As the Portugese set down roots for the first European empires in Africa and Asia, the importance of the da Gama family was unrivaled. Vasco da Gama, the family patriarch, first navigated his way around the coast of Africa in 1497, bringing such enduring fame to Portugal that -- among other honorifics -- a crater on the Moon would one day bear his name. The next year, he reached India, setting into motion four and a half centuries of European colonialism in the Asian subcontinent; India would avenge itself in 1524 by transmitting to the great explorer a fatal case of malaria.

Christovao da Gama, Vasco’s lesser-known son, came to an even more gruesome end on the continent of Africa two decades later. During an expedition to East Africa in 1542, da Gama set out against Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghaza, the Muslim conqueror of Ethiopia. After a series of battles in which the Portugese prevailed, the captain and his men were defeated at the Battle of Wofla. Weary and staggering with pain from a bullet that had shattered his right arm, da Gama escaped with fourteen of his men. After dressing their leader’s wounds with the fat from his own slaughtered mule, the Portugese hid in a thicket, where they were soon captured. Miguel de Castanhoso, the official chronicler of da Gama’s expedition, described the subsequent ordeal. Al-Ghaza ordered him to be stripped,

with his hands tied behind him, and then cruelly scourged, and his face buffeted with his negro’s shoes; of his beard he made wicks, and covering them with wax lighted them . . . . After this, he sent [da Gama] to all his tents and his Captains for his refreshment, where many insults were heaped on him, all of which he bore with much patience: giving many thanks to God for bringing him to this, after allowing him to reconquer one hundred leagues of Christian country. After they had diverted themselves with him they returned to the King’s tend, who with his own hand cut off his head, it not satisfying him to order it to be cut off. After it had been cut off, in that very place where his blood was spilt, there started a spring of water which gave health to the sick, who bathed in it . . . .

As for Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghaza, he lived another six months until the Portugese tracked him down and killed him.