Accurate birth-data is the lifeblood of astrology - how else can we accurately predict and analyse without an ascendent and housecusps, or accurate planetary positions? However, getting the right data is often difficult - sometimes downright impossible.

Nowadays, astrologers are very interested in the charts of current Middle Eastern newsmakers. However, getting accurate data in this area is extremely problematical. The case of Yasser Arafat illustrates this; there are three dates and two places of birth of birth for him on record: 4th August 1929 in Jerusalem (Arafat's own claim), 4th August 1929, in Cairo (Arafat's university record, and various official biographies), August 24th 1929 in Cairo (his wife, and "a birth certificate") and August 27th 1929 in Cairo ( Arafat, The Man and The Myth [1976] by Thomas Kiernan, p.33)

The Keirnan biography also says (page 23): "There is no absolute information on his place of birth; a cousin says he once boasted of having office records in Cairo destroyed in order to underscore his born-in-Jerusalem image." According to the AstroDataBank website: "...in a newspaper interview, he (Arafat) explained that 'facts' or 'truth' as known to the western mind, has a more flexible interpretation in the mid-east."

Similar problems of truth afflict the data of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Although there is no dispute about Saddam's place of birth (Tikrit), there are at least four or five different birthdates for him. April 28th 1937 is is the one most widely used, but I'm not the only person who feels it is more than coincidence that this is also the foundation date of the Baathist party that he led. It appears that no birth records were kept in that region at that time, so that it's perfectly possible that Saddam himself didn't know his precise date of birth; his Stalinist propensities would easily have allowed him to create the myth - for himself as well as his people - that he and his party were one.

Up until recently, the practice of inventing your own birth date wasn't that uncommon in some Arabic countries. War is an efficient destroyer of records and recording births in a centralised register is a fairly recent practice in remote communities anyway. When officialdom required a 'proper' date, there was no extant record and the family could only remember the month of birth, the 15th of the month was often picked, or perhaps the birthdate of a powerful relative or a local hero that fell in that month.

As for Osama bin Laden, you can pick just about any date for him - apparently, even the CIA have no idea of his birthdate. In fact, the tangle surrounding OBL's data is a good illustration of many of the problems in gathering birth data from countries that use non-Western calenders.

Let's begin with the birthdate most often cited for OBL: 10th March 1957. Now, if it was ever recorded, his birthdate would have been written down as a date in the Islamic calender, which is not the same as our Western calender. The Islamic calender is Lunar - each month starts at the sighting of the first evening crescent Moon. One complication of this is that the crescent Moon cannot be seen at the same time from different world locations - evening moonrise in Kabul, for instance, would be lunchtime in Washington DC. For this reason, nearly all Muslim communities follow moon-calenders set for their own locality (with the exception of a few traditionalists who follow the calender set for Mecca whever they are in the world); a further complication is that they don't all agree on just what constitutes a 'sighting' - is it a sighting if the crescent Moon is visible before the Sun fully sets, or after? Often the decision is left to local committees, who can and do change their minds from year to year. Yet another complication of the Islamic calender for Westerners is that the Islamic 'day' begins and ends at sunset. So, in practice, it is possible to have an error of up to two days in converting Islamic dates to Western dates.

Another, very common, error in date conversion is that a Westerner may be told that so-and-so was born on "the tenth day of the third month" and assume that the speaker means the 10th of March, when they actually mean the 10th day of the third Islamic month. This is what may well have happened with Osama bin Laden and the "10th of March" date. OBL is on record as saying that he was born in the Islamic year 1377 AH. That covered July 29th 1957 to July 17th 1958 (give or take a day or two), so the 10th day of the 3rd month of that year would have been around the 4th October 1957 (give or take a day or two) in the Western calendar.

(Similarly, Michael Ridout tells the story of a Korean-born man who said that he had two birthdates - his "American birthday" of 14th February 1958 and his "Korean birthday" of the 14th day of the second month of the Year of the Dog. Koreans follow the Chinese lunar calender; like the Islamic calender, the month begins at the New Moon. In this case, a Western birthdate had been required for immigration puposes when his family moved to American when he was a child; unsure of the date conversion, his parents knew that the Year of the Dog had been in 1958, so they put down 14th February 1958. In fact, the year of the Dog began on 18th February 1958, so the man had actually been born around April 2nd.)

And finally, even when dealing with the Western calender only, there is always the possibility of of getting the date format mixed up. Americans use the mm/dd/yy format; Europeans use the dd/mm/yy format. So a birthdate simply noted as "10/03/57" could be read as either 10th March 1957 or 3rd October 1957. Who knows - perhaps Osama is a peace-loving Libran after all!