Over the past 71 years, I have achieved some notable accomplishments. Below are the links to some of the biographical listings that set forth those accomplishments.
I feel very blessed to have been able to do as much as I have, but I feel that I have been "called" to do even more. The creation of this blog is my response to that "calling". I look forward to seeing what your response to that "calling" will be.
The main notoriety I have achieved in this life is based upon my writing. I have written six books (Pan-African Chronology [three volumes],The Muslim Diaspora [two volumes], andThe Creation [one volume]) which achieved some notoriety, and I have begun several blogs (Biographies, The 100 Greatest Muslims, The Muslim Compendium, Who's Who in Islam andWords of Wisdom) which have garnered additional notoriety. However, whatever notoriety I have achieved for my writing has always seemed a bit undeserved. Truth be told, I write not for notoriety, but for God. In the coming days, I hope to be able to elaborate on why I do this. However, suffice it to say that every book I write and every blog I begin, begins with a tribute to God. I can only pray that God will continue to find what I write to be an expression of God's will.
For over ten years now I have been a rather prolific blogger. For most of that time, I often wondered why I should pursue posting so many minor posts in so many varied areas instead of writing more reference books such as the six that I wrote from 1996 to 2003. After all, it seemed to me that my purpose in life was to write a Rainbow of Reference Books that would have been my lasting legacy. However, with each passing year, that purpose seemed to be a fading dream. And, as time went by, I began to question whether I was fulfilling the purpose that seemed to have been laid out for my life.
In September of 2024, I think I found the answer to my question. I found the answer by performing a search on the Microsoft Bing search engine for "everett jenkins blogspot". What the search engine revealed was page after page of some of the blog posts that I have written over the last ten years. Truth be told, I have written thousands of posts in that period of time. What the Microsoft Bing search engine did was to highlight the posts that seemed to me to be some of the most profound pieces that I have written.
In many ways, I was humbled and amazed. Since 1996, I have always attributed my writing to trying to do God's will. Through the Microsoft Bing search engine algorithm, it would appear that I have received God's response to what I have done.
After originally writing a post about "The Algorithm of God", it dawned on me that perhaps God was indeed helping me to comply with the words of Jesus that he spoke about in his "Sermon on the Mount" and to fulfill the motto of my college, "Terras Irradient". Below is a post that explains my connection to Matthew 5:16 and why I feel so humbled by what I am observing now.
For me, the highlight of the six-hour miniseries is not the birth of Jesus, nor the performance of the miracles, nor the Crucifixion, nor the Resurrection. The highlight of the six-hour miniseries comes midway when Jesus is at the height of his ministry and delivers the Sermon on the Mount
I do not know why, but every time I listen to this portion, a chill runs up my spine.
However, it is always afterwards that I become a little bit disappointed because I know that this portrayal of the Sermon on the Mount is not accurate. After all, the Sermon on the Mount portrayed in Jesus of Nazareth only covers verses 1 through 12 of the Fifth Chapter of the Book of Matthew. By doing so, it seems to me that perhaps the most important part of Jesus' message was left off. Thus, when I began the Black Alumni Weekend Memorial Service in 2011, I wanted to make sure that the most important part of the message for Amherst Alumni be said. And so, at each Memorial Service I have someone read the following:
5 And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. 2 Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying:
3 “Blessedare the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted. 5 Blessed are the meek, Forthey shall inherit theearth. 6 Blessed are those whohunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled. 7 Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy. 8 Blessed are the pure in heart, Forthey shall see God. 9 Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God. 10 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds ofevil against you falsely for My sake.
12 Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, forso they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
13 You are the salt of the earth;but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.
14 You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Nor do theylight a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.16 Let your light so shine before men,that they may see your good works andglorify your Father in heaven.
The Amherst College motto is "Terras Irradient" -- "Let Them Give Light To The World". In my own way, through my many blogs, I strive to let my "light so shine before men,that they may see" my "good works andglorify" God and that by doing so I am able to comply with the Sermon on the Mount and with my alma mater's motto of giving Light unto the Lands.
Amherst College educates students of exceptional potential from all backgrounds so that they may seek, value, and advance knowledge, engage the world around them, and lead principled lives of consequence.
Amherst brings together the most promising students, whatever their financial need, in order to promote diversity of experience and ideas within a purposefully small residential community. Working with faculty, staff, and administrators dedicated to intellectual freedom and the highest standards of instruction in the liberal arts, Amherst undergraduates assume substantial responsibility for undertaking inquiry and for shaping their education within and beyond the curriculum.
Amherst College is committed to learning through close colloquy and to expanding the realm of knowledge through scholarly research and artistic creation at the highest level. Its graduates link learning with leadership—in service to the College, to their communities, and to the world beyond.
Baya Bouzar (Arabic: باية بوزار; 13 September 1952 – 25 November 2025), known by the stage name Biyouna (بيونة), was an Algerian singer, dancer and actress.[1]
Early life
Biyouna was born on 13 September 1952 in the Belcourt neighbourhood of Algiers.[2] Having a very early passion for singing, she was a member of several groups: first in Fadhéla Dziria's group where she played tambourine, another that she directed with her partner Flifla, and finally her own where she was the main vocalist and became sought after for wedding receptions.
At the age of 17, she began performing in some of the biggest cabarets in the city and at 19 started dancing at the Copacabana.[citation needed]
Acting career
That same year, the director Mustapha Badie gave her a singing part in his first soap opera, La Grande Maison (1973), where she played Fatma. This show was adapted from a novel by Mohamed Dib. She became well-known thanks to this role.
She appeared in two Algerian films: Leila and the others, by Sid Ali Mazif in 1978, and The Neighbor, by Ghaouti Bendedouche in 2000. She also performed some one-woman shows. In 1999, Nadir Moknèche offered her the role of Meriem in Madame Osmane's Harem which she produced in France. This film was followed by Viva Laldjéri in 2003.
Between 2002 and 2005, Biyouna had success with a trilogy based on the theme of Ramadan called Nass Mlah City.
She appeared in the last film of Nadir Moknèche, Délice Paloma (2007), where she played the main character, a mafiosa named Madame Aldjeria. In 2006 she performed the role of Coryphée in Sophocles' Elektra beside Jane Birkin in an opera directed by Philippe Calvaio. In 2007 she had a small role in the Algerian film Rendez-vous avec le destin.
In 2009, she played La Celestina at the Vingtième Théâtre in Paris. For Ramadan, 2010, Biyouna was one of the stars in a sitcom broadcast on Nessma TV, Nsibti Laaziza.
Musical career
Meanwhile, she continued her singing career, and in 2001 issued the album Raid Zone, produced with the composer John Bagnolett. After the success of this album and her participation in Jérome Savary's Opéra de Casbah she brought out another album called Blonde dans la casbah. She had been planning this album for some time. Biyouna took her time, carefully choosing a Franco-Algerian repertoire which explored both cultures.
Personal life and death
Biyouna lived with her husband and four children in a suburb of Algiers.[citation needed] She died on 25 November 2025, at the age of 73.[3]
Biyouna in 2015. She was a hero in the working-class Algiers neighborhoods from which she had sprung.Credit...Eric Fougere/VIP Images, via Getty Images
Baya Bouzar, an actress and singer known as Biyouna whose guttural voice, sharp tongue and fierce independence — onscreen and off — incarnated, for generations of Algerians, their struggles in a country torn by civil war and repression, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Algiers. She was 73.
Her death from lung cancer was announced by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria, who said she “left behind a legacy of sincerity and spontaneity in acting and successful cinematic works, earning her widespread appreciation.”
Official recognition came to her from the seat of Algeria’s autocratic power, but there were also hundreds of fans at her funeral. Ms. Bouzar, with her instantly recognizable physiognomy — prominent nose, black eyes and jet-black hair — was a hero in the working-class Algiers neighborhoods from which she had sprung.
Such fervent public mourning was due as much to her caustic free spirit in dozens of television and film roles as for her widely acknowledged courage during what Algerians call the “Black Decade” of civil war in the 1990s. Artists, writers, actors and journalists fled the country; some were killed, mostly by Islamist insurgents who had taken up arms against the military government that seized power in a 1992 coup.
Biyouna stayed. But from 1994 to 1996, she ceased singing and acting, under the threats of Islamists who took a harsh view of women in nontraditional roles outside the home.
“When the threats became too much, I went to Oran to stay with my mother-in-law,” she recalled to Le Monde. “I lasted two months. I prefer the terrorists.”
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In other interviews, she liked to revel in her reputation for bothering “highly placed people” among the civilian authorities and mocking her dubious standing among “the religious ones.”
The actress explained that she did not want to “abandon” her neighbors and her admirers. “Oh sure, I went into the areas threatened by the GIA,” using the French initials for the fundamentalist Armed Islamic Group, anti-government insurgents, she said in a 2012 interview with the France Culture radio station. “But I wasn’t the only one. And I overcame my fear.”
“I would go out to do the marketing with my children, and people would say, ‘Biyouna, you’re not leaving, are you?’” Ms. Bouzar told the French radio station France Inter in 2018.
Ms. Bouzar had become a star on both sides of the Mediterranean largely thanks to the films of the Franco-Algerian director Nadir Moknèche. Of “Le Harem de Mme Osmane” (2000), about a group of women bursting out of traditional roles in Algiers just as the civil war commences, she later said she was “the only one of the actresses to have lived the story from the inside.”
In “Viva Laldjérie” (2004), she played an ex-cabaret dancer fighting alongside other women against Islamist strictures near the end of the Black Decade.
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Ms. Bouzar became a star on both sides of the Mediterranean largely thanks to the films of Nadir Moknèche, at right.Credit...Frederic Souloy/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
In her 2011 appearance on the French television series “Aïcha,” about the struggles of immigrant families in the suburbs, she was immortalized for many French viewers when she yelled “pouffiasse” (tart) at the character played by the actress Isabelle Adjani. “I’m more of an Algerian woman than you!” Ms. Bouzar screamed at the younger woman. For her fans, there was nobody more Algerian than she.
That status was consecrated in the early 1970s when at barely 20, she was given a prominent role as Fatma, a tough, enduring Algerian woman in a 12-part series on the nascent national television station.
It had been little over a decade since the French had been kicked out of Algeria, after a bloody uprising that lasted nearly a decade; the series, “The Fire” (Al Hariq), an adaptation of a 1950s nationalist trilogy by the novelist Mohammed Dib, became a cult hit in a country that saw itself at the vanguard ofpost-colonial revolution. “The Fire” captured, in a kind of socialist-realism style, the sufferings of a hungry people struggling under French rule in the late 1930s.
“I was in the role of a shrew, completely untamed,” Ms. Bouzar told France Culture in 2012. “A pain in the ass for all the neighbors. And everybody saw themselves in me.”
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In “Viva Laldjérie” (2004), Ms Bouzar played an ex-cabaret dancer fighting with other women against Islamist strictures near the end of the country’s civil war.Credit...Alamy
Because of “The Fire,” Ms. Bouzar became “THE ‘Fatma’ of the little people of Algiers, the most atypical and yet credible of anybody on the country’s single television channel,” the Franco-Algerian journalist Tewfik Hakem wrote of her in 2002.
At that point, “Biyouna was her countrymen’s longtime accomplice,” Mr. Hakem wrote, “a little crazy but always getting it right as the shrewish big sister or the indignant mother.”
Baya Bouzar was born in Algiers on Sept. 13, 1952, in Belcourt (now Belouizdad), a working-class neighborhood that had also once been home to the Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Her mother, Djamila Bouzar, was a cashier at a movie theater showing Egyptian movies, and Ms. Bouzar attributed her love of acting to sneaking into her mother’s place of work. Her father, Bouzar Saidi, was a nightclub employee, according to Rahim Bounemri of Algeria’s Ennahar television.
“I had barely emerged from the weeds, and I was already dancing in the living room, causing a scandal,” Ms. Bouzar said of her childhood in a 2018 interview with the French radio station France Inter. “My grandmother said I had a genie in my soul.”
As a teenager, she danced with Fadhéla Dziria, a pioneer of the working-class Hawzi style of singing and who also led a women’s orchestra. Ms. Bouzar was not yet 20 when the Algerian director Mustapha Badie spotted her, giving her the role in “The Fire” that launched her career.
According to Le Monde, devastating flooding in the Bab el-Oued neighborhood of Algiers forced Ms. Bouzar and her four children to evacuate their apartment, and a subsequent suicide attempt was reported by tabloid newspapers. “Me and the shrinks, I don’t go to ’em too much. If I go to the shrink, he’ll wind up on the couch,” she told France Inter in 2018.
After her recovery, she brought her one-woman shows to theaters in Paris and released an album “Blonde dans la Casbah.”
Ms. Bouzar is survived by two daughters, Louisa and Amel; two sons, Salim and Adel; and her fourth husband, Mokhtar Bouchaala. Previous marriages ended in divorce.
“You brought joy where it was lacking, and light to an environment that you called sad and hypocritical,” the Algerian director Bachir Derraïs said in a tribute to Ms. Bouzar this week.
