Bitruji (Nur al-Din ibn Ishaq al-Bitruji) (Nur ad-Din al-Betrugi) (Abu Ishak ibn al-Bitrogi) (Alpetragius) (al-Bidrudschi) (d. 1204). Born in Morocco, he later migrated to Spain and lived in Seville (in Arabic, Isbiliah). He died at the beginning of the thirteenth century around 1204.
Al-Bitruji was a leading astronomer of his time. His Kitab al-Hay’ah was popular in Europe in the thirteenth century. It was first translated into Hebrew and then from Hebrew into Latin. The Latin edition of his book was printed in Vienna in 1531. He attempted to modify Ptolemy’s system of planetary motions, but was unsuccessful primarily because he followed Aristotle’s notion of perfect (circular) motion. However, other Spanish Arab astronomers have suggested an elliptical orbit for planetary motion. Beer and Madler in their famous work Der Mond named a surface feature of the Moon after al-Bitruji (Alpetragius). It is a crater twenty-six miles in diameter. It has a small conical peak at its center and its terraced perpendicular walls and surrounding plain shine with noticeable brightness.
Nur al-Din ibn Ishaq Al-Bitruji and Abu Ishâk ibn al-Bitrogi; another spelling is al Bidrudschi) (known in the West by the Latinized name of Alpetragius) (died ca. 1204 AD) was an Arab astronomer and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age (Middle Ages). Born in Morocco, he settled in Seville, in Andalusia. He became a disciple of Ibn Tufail (Abubacer) and was a contemporary of Averroës (Ibn Rushd).
Al Bitrugi wrote the Kitab-al-Hay’ah, in which he advanced a theory on planetary motion that avoided both epicycles and eccentrics, and attempted to account for the phenomena peculiar to the wandering stars, by compounding rotations of homocentric spheres. This was a modification of the system of planetary motion proposed by his predecessors, Ibn Bajjah (Avempace) and Ibn Tufail (Abubacer). His efforts were unsuccessful in replacing Ptolemy's planetary model, due to the numerical predictions of the planetary positions in his configuration being less accurate than that of the Ptolemaic model, mainly because he followed Aristotle's notion of perfect circular motion.
Nur al-Din ibn Ishaq al-Bitruji see Bitruji
Alpetragius see Bitruji
Nur ad-Din al-Betrugi see Bitruji
Abu Ishak ibn al-Bitrogi see Bitruji
al-Bidrudschi see Bitruji
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Biyouna بيونة | |
|---|---|
 Biyouna in 2011 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | Baya Bouzar 13 September 1952 |
| Died | 25 November 2025 (aged 73) Algiers, Algeria |
| Genres | |
| Occupations |
|
| Instruments |
|
| Years active | 1973–2025 |
| Labels | Warner |
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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]
Discography
- 2001: Raid Zone
- 2007: Blonde dans la Casbah
Singles
- "Pamela" (2001)
- "Les yeux noirs" (2002)
- "In her eyes" (2002)
- "Tu es ma vie" (2002)
- "Maoudlik" (2003)
- "Taali" (2006)
- "Une Blonde Platine dans la Casbah " (2007)
- "Demain tu te maries" (2007)
- "Merci pour tout (c'que j'n'ai pas)" (2007)
- "El Bareh" (2008)
- "Tsaabli ouetmili" (2008)
Filmography
Films
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Leila et les autres | ||
| 1979 | Le Chat | ||
| 1999 | Le Harem de madame Osmane | Meriem | |
| 2001 | La voisine | ||
| 2003 | Viva Laldjérie | Papicha | |
| 2004 | Beur blanc rouge | Mother of Wassila | |
| 2005 | Rue des figuiers | Fatima | |
| 2007 | Delice Paloma | Madame Aldjeria/Zineb Agha | |
| 2008 | Garçon manqué | Nana | |
| 2009 | Aïcha | Biyouna | |
| 2010 | Bacon on the Side | Houria | |
| 2010 | Holiday | Eva Lopez | |
| 2011 | Aïcha 2 | Biyouna | |
| 2011 | The Source | The Old Gun | |
| 2011 | Beur sur la ville | Khalid's mother | |
| 2011 | Aïcha 3 | Biyouna | |
| 2012 | Aïcha 4 | Biyouna | |
| 2013 | Cheba Louisa | ||
| 2013 | Mohamed Dubois | ||
| 2013 | Les Reines du ring | ||
| 2014 | Amour sur place ou à emporter : le film ! | ||
| 2018 | Le Flic de Belleville | Zohra |
Television
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | La Grande Maison | Fatma | |
| 2003 | Grand plongeoir, Le | Herself | |
| 2003 | Nass Mlah City | 32 episodes | |
| 2004 | Nass Mlah City 2 | 32 episodes | |
| 2006 | Nass Mlah City 3 | 55 episodes | |
| 2007 | La Commune | Hanifa Houbeyche | first season |
| 2007 | On n'est pas couché | 1 episode | |
| 2009 | Nessma TV (Zorroh) | Zohra | |
| 2010 | One person show | Biyouna | 30 episodes |
| 2012 | La Baie d'Alger |
Theater
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | La Celestina | Célestine | |
| 2012 | Biyouna ! | Biyouna | in Théâtre Marigny |
References
- "بيونة الجزائرية الحرّة". الأخبار (in Arabic). Retrieved 5 February 2018.
- Nossiter, Adam (30 November 2025). "Biyouna, Algerian Star With Tart Tongue Onscreen and Off, Dies at 73". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 December 2025.
- حمدي, رشال (25 November 2025). "La star de la comédie algérienne Biyouna tire sa révérence".
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Biyouna, Algerian Star With Tart Tongue Onscreen and Off, Dies at 73
For generations of Algerians, the fierce independence of her persona reflected their struggles in a country torn by civil war and repression.
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.
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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.”
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
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.
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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.
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.
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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 of post-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.”
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.”
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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.”
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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.
Black Muslims (The Nation of Islam) (American Muslim Mission). The Nation of Islam -- the Black Muslims -- began in Detroit during the Depression. Its founder, W. D. Fard, gathered followers from among the poverty stricken African Americans of Detroit and organized the Detroit Temple. Fard’s teachings included “the deceptive character of the white man and the glorious history of the black race.” Illiterate followers were taught to read so that they could read for themselves the history of their great race. Fard wrote two manuals which are now the basic documents for the movement: The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam and Teaching for the Lost Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way. Fard established the ritual and worship of the temple and founded the University of Islam to provide elementary and secondary education. The Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary organization for men, was established to deal with unbelievers. Members were taught military tactics, including the use of weapons.
As the movement developed, Fard established a hierarchy under a minister of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. Upon Fard’s disappearance in June 1934, Elijah Muhammad ran into difficulty with the moderate element of the movement which gained control of the Detroit Temple. He moved to Chicago and took charge of Temple No. 2. There he began to reshape the movement and to make it more militant. Through the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, Fard was identified with Allah, which made it possible for prayer and sacrifice to be made to him. Muhammad assumed the titles “Prophet” and “Messenger of Allah.”
Under Elijah Muhammad, the movement gained international prominence. Mosques were started in most major cities of the United States. Schools, apartment complexes, stores, and farms owned by the Nation of Islam came to be commonplace. The publication Muhammad Speaks (now Bilalian News) came to be read by Americans of all races.
The Black Muslims have had phenomenal success with converting convicts, criminals, and dope users. An excellent example of this transformation is the life of Malcolm Little -- Malcolm X. There is a strict morality among the Black Muslims. A devout member prays five times daily. Before prayer, the proper ablution must be made. Cleanliness of body and spirit is essential. Dietary laws are rigidly enforced, fasting is encouraged, and tobacco and alcohol are forbidden. There is a strict sexual code.
Traditionally, the Nation of Islam has taught that Christianity is a European religion and that it is a disgrace for persons of African descent to call themselves Christians. Central to the traditional teachings are: (a) the black man has a manifest destiny; (b) whites are the personification of evil -- a hindrance to black freedom and moral development; (c) the original man was black; (d) there is a divinity in blackness; and (e) the white race was created by a black scientist (Yakub) who had rebelled against Allah.
Upon the death of Elijah Muhammad in February 1975, his son Wallace D. Muhammad (b. 1934) assumed the spiritual leadership of the movement and took the title of Imam. The most significant of the changes he introduced involved a shift in the Black Muslims' attitude towards whites. Under Wallace Muhammad, whites -- Europeans and European Americans -- were permitted to become members. Additionally, under Wallace Muhammad, the movement adopted more orthodox (Sunni) Muslim beliefs and practices, and assumed the title “The World Community of al-Islam in the West.” Today, the Wallace Muhammad group is known as the American Muslim Mission.
In the late 1970s, however, a dissident faction, led by Louis Farrakhan, assumed the original name Nation of Islam and reasserted the principles of black separatism. Since 1978, Louis Farrakhan has been the leader of a reconstituted Nation of Islam, the original organization having been renamed and dissolved by Warith Deen Muhammad. The Nation of Islam's National Center and headquarters is located in Chicago, Illinois, and is also home to its flagship Mosque No. 2, Mosque Maryam.
As of 2005, the Nation of Islam was included in the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of active hate groups in the United States. It is estimated that there are about 20,000 members of the sect.
Noted current and former members and associates of Nation of Islam
* Elijah Muhammad
* Louis Farrakhan
* Khadijah Farrakhan
* Malcolm X - Later converted to Sunni Islam
* Betty Shabazz - Later converted to Sunni Islam
* Muhammad Ali - Later converted to Sunni Islam
* Warith Deen Mohammed - Later converted to Sunni Islam
* Ice Cube - Was associated with the Nation of Islam, but never a regular member and became a Sunni Muslim.
* John Allen Muhammad - The Beltway Sniper, Gulf war veteran, former NOI member
* MC Ren - Later converted to Sunni Islam
* Mohamed-rashid Abdulle - Spokesperson of the Nation of Islam until 1993
* Snoop Dogg
* Benjamin Chavis Muhammad
The Nation of Islam see Black Muslims
American Muslim Mission see Black Muslims
Black Sheep Turcomen. Shi‘a Turkish dynasty ruling in Iran (1378-1469).
Kara Koyunlu see Black Sheep Turcomen.
Qara Qoyunlu see Black Sheep Turcomen.
