October 28

Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), the Irish-born educator and disciple of Swami Vivekananda who opened a girls' school in Calcutta, was born on this day in 1867.

Friedrich Max Müller, the philologist who edited the Rig Veda and the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East, died at Oxford on this day in 1900.

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, later Grand Imam of al-Azhar and author of a large Qur'an commentary, was born in the Egyptian village of Selim al-Sharqiyah.

Erich Ebeling, the German Assyriologist who published cuneiform texts from Ashur and founded the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, died in Berlin on this day in 1955.

The conclave elected Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, patriarch of Venice, who took the name John XXIII and would later convoke Vatican II.

Taha Hussein, the Egyptian writer and critic known as the 'Dean of Arabic Literature,' died in Cairo.