Alamgir Hussain
A major part of the history of India is characterized by two major
foreign rules: the Islamic invasion and the British occupation. The Islamic
invasion started with the assault of Muhammad bin Qassim in 712 on the order of
Hajjaj, the governor of what is now Iraq,
and it took until 1690 for the Muslim rulers to conquer India completely. The fall of
Islamic rule started with the British East India Company's capture of Bengal in
1757, during the days of Industrial Revolution in Europe.
The British rulers took almost 150 years to capture the entire sub-continent
from the hands of its Muslim rulers.
Since childhood, the people of the subcontinent
keep hearing stories of the British occupation of India and their 190 years of
exploitative imperial rule but the stories of the Islamic invasion and
centuries of Muslim domination are rarely being mentioned and discussed. This
amazing policy of silence regarding the Islamic invasion of the subcontinent is
interesting. And whatsoever is discussed about the Islamic rule in India
is all good and dandy and often glorious. Recently, a group of people from the
subcontinent have launched a call to celebrate "The Siraj-ud-Dowlah
Day" which will be an occasion to glorify the sacrifice of
Siraj-ud-Dowlah, the last Nawab of Bengal. He was defeated by the British
mercantile mercenaries in 1757 in the battlefield of Polashi (Plassey), which
marked the beginning of the British rule in India. The celebration of such an
event will definitely be another opportunity to vilify the British occupation
of India as well as to
glorify the rule of the last Muslim Nawab in Eastern India.
In recent years, some people from the
sub-continent have been daring to delve into the "other episode" of foreign
invasion of India,
i.e., the Islamic conquest, which hitherto has remained mostly shrouded in a
policy of silence or denial and a de-facto prohibition. While the liberals and
the rationalists of the subcontinent are adamant against critiquing the fallout
of the Islamic conquest, they have no problem criticizing the British
occupation and exploitation of India
with extreme vigor. They take refuge in the tradition of silence or negation
about the fallout of Islamic invasion and rule of India and yet, they are highly
vocal in condemning the fallout of the British occupation. Interestingly,
however, some people have recently started asking for putting the fallout of
Islamic invasion and rule of India
in the spotlight alongside that of the British occupation.
India, before the Islamic invasion, was one of the world's great
civilizations that matched its contemporaries, both in the East and the West,
in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian
mathematicians discovered the number zero and algebra (Bijganita in Sanskrit).
After the Islamic invasion, these texts were translated into Arabic and Persian
and were transmitted to the Islamic world and ultimately to Europe via Spain.
Muslims mistakenly and unfairly take credit of these contributions to
Mathematics and Science as their won. India's sculptures were magnificent
and sensual and her architectures were ornate and spellbinding. Following the
Islamic invasion, many of these indigenous achievements, became part of
so-called Islamic civilization.
There has been too much of talk about the
"divide and rule" policy of the British Raj where British
administrators had created division between Hindus and the Muslims during their
rule in India.
An overwhelming majority of the sub-continent people believe this policy to be
the root cause of communal troubles that we witness in India today. There is a deeply
entrenched belief that the concept of religious intolerance between the Hindus
and the Muslims was totally absent in India until the British devised
this malevolent scheme to keep the Hindus and Muslims engaged in fighting each
other. Many people in the sub-continent believe that this was a clever ploy so
that they (the British) could continue to rule India while the people remained
divided over religious disharmony. There cannot be any bigger untruth than the
assertion that religious intolerance never existed in Indian soil until the
British invented it. The truth is that religious tolerance and harmony hardly
ever existed in the sub-continent throughout the centuries of Islamic rule.
Destruction of temples, oppression and forced conversion of the Hindus,
especially around the urban areas all over India, were common phenomenon
during the Islamic rule. The Bahmani sultans in central India made it a rule to kill
100,000 Hindus a year. In 1399, Teimur killed 100,000 Hindus IN A SINGLE DAY,
and many more on other occasions [Negationism in India]. Even during the late period
of the Islamic domination of India,
Emperor Aurangzeb (rule 1658-1707) re-imposed the "religion tax or
Jiziya" on the Hindus and other people of indigenous religions. Aurangzeb
was a champion destroyer of Hindu temples. Amongst the famous temples he
destroyed were: the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of
Hinduism, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the rebuilt Somnath temple on the
coast of Gujurat, the Vishnu temple, overlooking Benares that was replaced with
the Alamgir mosque (Alamgir is another name of Aurangzeb), and the
Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. Aurangzeb's own official chronicles have
recorded mind-blowing figures of temple destruction. Aurangzeb had ordered his
provincial governors to destroy all schools and temples of the pagans and to
make a complete end to all pagan teachings and practices. The Aurangzeb's
chronicle sums up the temple destructions as follows:
"Hasan Ali Khan came and said that 172
temples in the area had been destroyed... His majesty went to Chittor and 63
temples were destroyed. Abu Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of
Amber, reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground.." Aurangzeb
did not stop at destroying temples only, their users were also often wiped out;
even his own brother, Dara Shikoh, was executed for taking an interest in Hindu
religion. The Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur Singh was beheaded because he objected to
Aurangzeb's forced conversions. Even during the rule of Mohammad Shah after
Aurangzeb's death, Persian ruler Nadir Shah invaded of India (1738-39) and killed an estimated 200,000
people in Northern India alongside plundering
and looting.
The Islamic assault on India started in the early 8th century, on the
order of Hajjaj, the ruler of present-day Iraq. Starting in 712 the raiders,
commanded by Muhammad bin Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures,
plundered palaces and killed vast numbers of men. It took three whole days to
slaughter the inhabitants of the city of Debal
followed by taking their women and children to slavery, including the taking of
young women as sex slaves. After the initial wave of violence, however, bin
Qasim tried to establish law and order in the newly-conquered lands, and to
that end he even allowed some degree of religious tolerance. But upon hearing
of such humane practices (contrary to the Koranic doctrine), his superior,
Hajjaj from Baghdad objected, writing:
"It appears from your letter that all the
rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are strictly in
accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the
law is different from the one adopted by you, for you go on giving pardon to
everybody, high or low, without any discretion between a friend and a foe. The
great God says in the Koran [47.4]: "0 True believers, when you encounter
the unbelievers, strike off their heads." The above command of the Great
God is a great command and must be respected and followed. You should not be so
fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act. Henceforth grant
pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none of them, or else all will consider
you a weak-minded man."
In a subsequent communication, Hajjaj reiterated
that all able-bodied men were to be killed, and that their underage sons and
daughters were to be imprisoned and retained as hostages. Muhammad bin Qasim
obeyed, and on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad
massacred between 6,000 and 16,000 men.
Muhammad bin Qasim's early exploits of slaughter
and destruction were revived in the early eleventh century, when Sultan Mahmud
of Ghazni conquered Punjab in 17 attempts of
plundering expeditions between 997-1021. Alberuni, the great Islamic scholar
whom Mahmud brought to India, depicted Mahmud's invasion of India as:
"Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of
the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became
like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the
mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most
inveterate aversion toward all Moslems."
The acts of destruction of Hindu temples and Buddhist
monasteries etc. by the Muslim invaders in India have no parallel in the
history of any conquest. While blasting the British for their atrocities in India, French journalist and political author
Francios Gautier writes, "The British were certainly not the Muslims,
whose ruthlessness and atrocities have never been equaled in India's history. Nevertheless, they
did their fair share of harm to India,
which has not yet really recovered from two centuries of Raj. ["Facets of India:
Ancient and Modern"].
Even very late in the Mughal rule, ruler Haider
Ali [1722-1782] of Mysore
used to order destruction of Hindu temples. In most incidences, after a mosque
was destroyed, the remains and especially the remains of the destroyed idols
were used as materials for the construction of the mosque. There have been
descriptions of slaughtering the Hindu priests or the protectors of the temples
as a ritual for purification of the place of idol-worship with the blood of the
infidels. Such vivid descriptions of savagery mostly come from the works of the
Muslim historians and writers, one of them include even the highly liberal and
benevolent disciple of great Sufi dervish, Nizamuddin Awliya. A few examples of
barbaric atrocities of Muslim invaders and rulers of India,
recorded by the Muslim historians themselves, are listed below:
Shahab-ul-Din, King of Ghazni (1170-1206), put
Prithwi Raj, King of Ajmer and Delhi,
to death in cold blood. He massacred thousands of inhabitants of Ajmer who opposed him,
reserving the remaining for slavery [The Kamiu-t Tawarikh, by Ibn-Asir].
Historian Hasan Nizami in his Taj-ul-Ma'sir gives the following account of
Ghouri's Lieutenant Qutbuddin Aibak's activities:
....after the suppression of a Hindu revolt at
Kol (modern day Aligarh)
in 1193 AD, Aibak raised "three bastions as high as heaven with their
heads, and their carcasses became food for beasts of prey. The tract was freed
from idols and idol worship and the foundations of infidelism were
destroyed."
In 1194 AD Aibak destroyed 27 Hindu temples at Delhi and built the
Quwwat-ul-lslam mosque with their debris. According to Nizami, Aibak
"adorned it with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had
been demolished by elephants".
In 1195 AD the Mher tribe of Ajmer rose in revolt, and the Chaulukyas of
Gujarat came to their assistance. Aibak had to invite reinforcements from
Ghazni before he could meet the challenge. In 1196 AD he advanced against
Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat.
Nizami writes that after Raja Karan was defeated and forced to flee,
"fifty thousand infidels were dispatched to hell by the sword" and
"more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell
into the hands of the victors".
The city was sacked, its temples demolished, and
its palaces plundered. On his return to Ajmer,
Aibak destroyed the Sanskrit College of Visaladeva, and laid the foundations of
a mosque which came to be known as 'Adhai Din ka Jhompada'.
Conquest of Kalinjar in 1202 AD was Aibak's
crowning achievement. Nizami concludes: "The temples were converted into
mosques... Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain
became black as pitch with Hindus."
Amir Khusru, a disciple of the great Sufi
Nizamuddin Awliya and recognized to be a liberal Sufi Muslim himself, writes in
his Tarikh-i-Alai:
"Here he (Malik Kafur) heard that in
Bramastpuri (Chidambaram) there was a golden idol- He then determined on razing
the temple to the ground- It was the holy place of the Hindus which the Malik
dug up from its foundations with the greatest care, and the heads of brahmans
and idolaters danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, and
blood flowed in torrents. The stone idols called Ling Mahadeo, which had been
established a long time at the place and on which the women of the infidels
rubbed their vaginas for (sexual) satisfaction, these, up to this time, the
kick of the horse of Islam had not attempted to break. The Musulmans destroyed
in the lings and Deo Narain fell down, and other gods who had fixed their seats
there raised feet and jumped so high that at one leap they reached the fort of
Lanka, and in that affright the lings themselves would have fled had they had
any legs to stand on".
The world famous historian, Will Durant has
written in his 'Story of Civilization' that "the Mohammedan conquest of India
was probably the bloodiest story in history".
India, before the advent of Islamic imperialism, was not exactly a zone of
complete tranquility and peace like many other parts of the world. There were
plenty of wars fought by Hindu princes. Despite all these wars, the Hindus had
observed some time-honored conventions sanctioned by the Sastras. The Brahmins
and the Bhikshus were never molested. The cows were never killed. The temples
were never touched. The chastity of women was never violated. The
non-combatants were never killed or captured. A human habitation was never
attacked unless it was a fort. The civil population was never plundered. War
booty was an unknown item in the calculations of conquerors. The martial
classes, who clashed, mostly in open spaces, had a code of honor. Sacrifice of
honor for victory or material gain was deemed as worse than death.
Islamic imperialism came with a different code -
the Sunnah of the Prophet. It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless
civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It
required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had
died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited
their special attention in mass murders of non-combatants. The temples and
monasteries were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those
whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the
booty looted even from the bodies of the dead, was a measure of the success of
a military mission. And they did all this as mujahids (holy warriors) and
ghazls (kafir-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet.
It is estimated that the Islamic conquest and
rule in India
may have resulted in killing of an estimated 50-80 million Hindus and other
indigenous religion people. Such savagery can only be compared to the one
committed by the Spaniards in the South American continent. Koenraad Elst
estimates that out of the population of native Continental South America of
1492, which stood at 90 million, only 32 million survived; terrible figures
indeed but who talks about them today [Negationism in India]? Such a towering
figure of destruction of human lives by the Muslim rulers of India may appear a suspect.
However, in the war of independence of Bangladesh, the Pakistanis killed
2-3 million people in just 9 month in the age of modern civilization and the
world hardly took a notice of it. Hence, it is hardly impossible that Islamic
rulers might have had condemned up to 80 million indigenous people to death in
a vast region in a long span of almost 1000 years in the medieval age of
barbarity.
The British rulers, on the other hand, ruled India mostly following a strategy of economic
exploitation, which was mainly aimed at producing revenues for funneling to Britain.
This was achieved by imposing high taxes on the farmers and often forcing the
latter into cultivating cash-crops (jute, cotton, tea, oil seeds) useful for
the Industries in Britain
but not for the Indian farmers. This had caused great hardship and suffering to
the Indian farmers including famines. Religious persecution, as unleashed by
the Portuguese (in Goa) and the Islamic
rulers, was never a part of the British rule. Although there was an clandestine
and unofficial complicity to Evangelical Missionary activities, including
clandestine effort to convert the Indian soldiers. Yet there is no record of
mass destruction of mosques, temples or monasteries by the British rulers or
mass killing of the native people for their religions or for not converting to
Christianity. Neither did the British rulers ever allowed the Hindus or the
Muslims to destroy either Muslim mosques or the Hindu temples throughout the
great part of their rule in India.
However, one prominent but ignored (and even
often condemned by the Muslims) aspect of the British rule was the long-due
empowerment of the Hindus over the Muslims after centuries of iron-handed
ruling and subjugation of the indigenous Indians by the Muslims. Although they
kept the critical power and positions in British hand, they did give the next
level of power to the hands of the Hindus, including allotment of the Zamindari
activities mostly to the Hindus. This again, was not so much unjust. Hindus got
those jobs because they were more educated and efficient and with their number
were more authoritative to do the job of tax collection. Muslims, on the other
hand, never conformed to modernity and never took interest in modern secular
education introduced by the British terming it un-Islamic and were left behind.
It should be recognized that the Hindus and
other indigenous people were the rightful owner of India both in terms of their number
and in being the indigenous people, and the power, if not shared, should have
been at the hands of the Hindus. The British Raj did a good deed towards the
empowerment of the Hindu over the Muslims after centuries of subjugation and
brutal suppression by the Muslim rulers.
The much hyped up "divide and rule"
policy of the British has been consumed voraciously by the Hindus and the
Muslims, the progressive and the obscurantist, and the liberals and the zealots
alike. Yes, in the Sepoy Mutiny (Shipahi Biplob) of 1857, the Hindus did not
participate as vigorously as did the Muslims. Why should they, anyway? Muslim
rulers were still ruling some good parts of India. Was it going to be a wise a
decision for the Hindus to join hand with the Muslims to drive away the British
and establish the Nawabi and Mughal rule once again? They were definitely more
privileged under the British Raj than they were under the Muslim rulers. The
slavery of the Muslims once again was not a better choice, and the Hindus did
just the right thing. The British rulers might have had exploited the huge
chasm that existed between the Hindus and Muslims as a result of immense
atrocities on the majority indigenous religion people and of massive
destruction of their religious institutions by the Muslim invaders all throughout
the Islamic domination of India.
Only at the fag-end of the British rule in India, the
Hindu-Muslim tension flared up in a dangerous way. There has been a lot of
talks and condemnations of the British role in creating Hindu-Muslim divide -
yet the contribution of the British rulers in this Hindu-Muslim tension and in
the resulting riots in the run-up to independence of India has not been clearly
established. What we know for sure is the fact that, as Britain was counting days to end her imperial
rule in India, the Muslims
started a vigorous campaign for a separate state fearing that they may have to
be under the majority Hindu rule in an independent and democratic India. They
could never really forsake their pride of subjugating and persecuting the Hindus
for centuries. That was why they needed a separate state. As this religious
zealotry of the Muslims got strength, there arose the nationalistic Hindu
zealotry, and that led to the much of the tension and blood-bath between the
Hindus and the Muslims.
And what else the Hindus could do? Muslims came
to India
as barbaric invaders and ruled for centuries. In the process, Muslim rulers
mercilessly oppressed and even killed the indigenous people in great numbers,
looted their properties, destroyed their religious institutions and symbols,
took them as slaves and raped their women. Now, when British are about to leave
they wanted to divide their country as well. That was the perfect ground for
giving rise to religious zealotry amongst the Hindus, and for the first time in
the history of the Indian subcontinent, the Hindus, as a religious identity,
raised their heads as a militant force to deter the instigatory Islamic zealots
from dividing their country. The world witnessed what happened as a result of
that. Let us point fingers to the right place instead of blaming the British
for everything that happened around the Hindu-Muslim tensions and riots in the
run to the independence. It is important to sort out the facts from the hypes
and lies. It is time that we bury the hypes and lies in which our intellectuals
and the commoners have indulged in for too long.
Yet, the British Raj had its own share of
cruelty, whatever may be the magnitude. The bulk of the cruelty, that the
British inflicted, was during the event of Sepoy Mutiny or the first war of
independence in 1857. Surely, the British atrocity in the Sepoy Mutiny was
gory. But atrocities were committed by both sides involved in that war. It
should be understood that in the 1857 war, the British became more vindictive
and cruel only after the Cawnpore (Kanpur)
episode when Nana Sahib betrayed and some 210 women and children in his custody
were butchered with knives and hatchets into pieces and thrown down a well.
This cold-blooded murder of the innocent women and children enraged the
British, including the public in Britain, so much so, that every captured rebel
soldier, guilty or not, was ordered to be hanged or blow them from the mouth of
cannons if facilities existed. The latter was a traditional practice used by
the Muslim rulers which the British rulers had banned considering barbaric but
they reintroduced it following the Cawnpore
incidence. Thus, although the British committed brutality in putting down the
Sepoy Mutiny, it never affected the non-combatants and the innocent women and
children as was the case with Islamic brutality in India.
It should also be understood that major cause of
discontent that lead to the Sepoy Mutiny, was all the good things the British
Raj did in India, including the abolition of child marriage, Sati Daha and
female infanticide and hunting down the deadly Thuggee cult (a cult of Kali who
used to do robbery and strangulation to death of their victims, mainly
travelers). Even the much-prided Indian Railway system, which started operating
in the early 1850s preceding the Sepoy mutiny, was also a cause of discontent,
since it was seen as a demon introduced by the British for keeping the Indians
subjugated.
Another salient point that must be understood
is: despite being largely an economically exploitative and often suppressive,
the British Raj instituted a system of educational and cultural intellectualism
that allowed the blooming of all the literary and scientific achievements,
which the people of the sub-continent are proud of today and would continue to
be proud of for a long time to come. Those Nobel laureates, the great literary
giants like Tagore, Nazrul and Allama Iqbal and the other famous scientists of
the subcontinents, including Professor Abdus Salam, were groomed by an educational
and intellectual culture which was instituted solely by the stewardship of the
British rulers. This glorious phase of intellectuality in India has
largely died off, since the British have left. The Dhaka
University, once known as the "Oxford of the East",
has now lost all its prestige as an eminent educational institution with
severely fallen standard in every discipline of studies. The Qaide-e-Azam University
of Pakistan,
which was a vibrant campus for intellectual exercise and science education, has
become nothing but a University of theological interest. So is the case with
the famous Muslim-administered Aligarh University
in India.
India, on the other hand, since the British have left, although has
maintained some good standard in education and science, yet has failed to keep
up with the pace of progress and advancement in the international stage. It may
be long wait before we will see another Nobel laureate emerges from the Land of Tagore, the Chandra Shekhars, Hargobind
Khorana and Abdus Salam. Nor will we see very often the likes of genius
scientists like Jagadish Chandra Bosu, Satyan Bose and Prafulla Chandra Roy et
al. to emerge from India.
Even the latest Nobel laureate from the subcontinent, Prof. Amartya Sen, was
groomed in the educational environment left by the British Raj in the forties
and early fifties. The great reformers of tradition and culture of the Indian
society, namely Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Bidyasagar, were also the
product of intellectual and educational culture created by the British.
Furthermore, the British should be credited for
the admirable railway and road communication systems in India. They
instituted the modern legal and judicial systems in India. And of course, the much
prided democracy - the largest democracy in the world - is also what the
British left behind. One must ask the question: what would have been the
situation in India if the
British did not come and Islamic rulers had continued to rule India?
Witnessing what is going on in the world vis--vis Islamic world, one thing that
can be said for sure is that the Muslims would still be ruling India
with an iron-hand. Satis would probably have still been burned and child
marriage would have been widespread, since it is compatible with Islam.
Education system would be characterized by the madrasas. Indeed, India had a very high standard in education and
science in pre-Islamic India.
But the Muslim invaders and rulers destroyed all schools and educational
institutions and converted them into madrasas. As a result, India did not
make any notable contribution in these areas throughout the centuries of
Islamic rule. And given how the minorities are being treated in the Muslim
countries and what happened to the Hindus in Bangladesh (~33% in 1947 to ~10%
now) and Pakistan (~15% upon 1947 independence to ~1% now), one can be certain
that Hindus would still have been doing the slavery and experiencing
subjugation under the Muslims if the British never stepped onto India.
One may rise objections that such brutal and
potentially explosive facts should not be spoken about lest it causes religious
tensions. For this particular reason the modern historians of India, mostly from the leftist background, are
probably indulging in the policy of silence, avoidance or cover-up about the
Islamic atrocity in India.
Yet, those who agree to the atrocities of the Muslim conquerors attempt to
lighten the air by offering lame excuses such as temple destruction by the
Muslim rulers were not because of hatred against the Hindus but for plundering
the valuables and wealth kept there. But it is a fact that the Hindus hardly
ever used to keep their valuable assets in temples. Neither does that explain
as to why tens of thousands of Hindus were slaughtered on many occasions. Yet
those Islamic historians, who chronicled the Islamic atrocities often under the
patronage of many rulers and sometimes by the rulers themselves, never cited
any such reason for the destruction of temples. Plundering the wealth kept in a
temple does not require razing down the temples either. Such apologetic excuses
also do not explain why mosques had to be build at the sites of many famous
temples after their destruction. In fact, Indian Geological Survey has
identified hundreds of mosques across India that used materials for
construction from destroyed temples. A Geological Investigation team has
recently confirmed the presence of structures of temple beneath the very
controversial Babri mosque of Ayodhya.
Yet, it could the preferable for some people to
negate the Islamic atrocities in India or maintain silence about
them hoping that such a policy would maintain a semblance of harmony and peace
between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Although this appears a sensible
idea, yet at the same time such policy negates the recognition of such a
gigantic sacrifice by our forefathers of the Indian subcontinent. If we fail to
recognize this gravest of tragedy in the recorded history of India, it will
be a terrible injustice to those who had to sacrifice their lives in such a
tragic manner. Yet, recognition of a tragedy has always borne fruit, whilst
failure to do so has resulted in repetition of the same. For the same reason,
the secular patriotic Bangladeshis and freedom fighters are so eager to have
the tragedy and sacrifice of Bengalis in 1971 war of independence recognized by
the perpetrators (Pakistan)
and by the world. For the same reason, we have the Holocaust/WWII museums in Israel, New York
and Germany.
Japan
have recognized and apologized for the atrocities they committed in the World
War II recently after 60 years of negation. Germany
and Italy
has recognized and apologized for their atrocities during the WWII time and
again. And this recognition is not only meant for justice and recognition of
those who had fallen in the said tragedies but also for preventing such
tragedies from repeating in future.
Recognition of the fallout of Islamic invasion
of India
may be argued against fearing that it may ignite explosive violence. Yet for
the sake of justice and recognition of the tragic sacrifice of our forefathers,
the modern world must be able to recognize and apologize for what happened in
the aftermath of Islamic occupation of India. So should the world
recognize the victims of any other tragedy, be it the fallout of British
occupation of India or of
the barbaric Spanish crusade in the South America or of the barbaric Christian
atrocities in the so-called Holy Land! If the
recognition and condemnation of the British atrocities in India is not a
problem, there should not be problem in recognizing and condemning fallout
about of Islamic invasion. In stead, recognition of the latter tragedy becomes
a moral responsibility for the sake of fairness and justice. One may argue that
recognition of the tragedies of WWII and the construction of WWII and Holocaust Museums may cause tension and violence
between the Neo-Nazis/White Supremacists and the Jews and for that reason, we
should keep away from doing such things and maintain silence about those
tragedies. Same could be said about the Bangladesh independence struggles
of 1971 fearing that it would cause trouble and tension between Bangladeshi and
Pakistanis. Yet, WWII memorials and Holocaust museums are being created not
only as recognition of sacrifices of the fallen but also in the hope that they
will act as reminders as well as deterrents for such tragedies from repeating
in the future. By this parity of reasons, whether it is the tragedies of
burning of millions of Satis in India, or burning millions of so-called witches
by the Clergy in Europe, or the massacre of millions by Genghis Khan or the
tragic fallout of the Islamic conquest in India - they should be recognized as
wrongs, they should be recognized and memorials should be built not only as a
symbol and gesture of honoring the sacrifice of the fallen but also as a
reminder to the current and future generations so that such terrible tragedies
never happen again.
There is a strong argument that talking about
such forgotten tragedies may ignite the victims, namely the Hindus in India, into
violent actions. Yet, these are the fact recorded proudly by the Islamic
historians and rulers of India and available in original form in libraries
around the world and a section of the Hindus in India are becoming aware of
these tragic facts and a section of those informed Hindus are forming those
radical Hindu organizations such as RSS, Kar Sevaks and VHP etc. who are
seeking revenge by trying to rebuild their destroyed temples at the site of
now-standing mosques. Why these people are turning violent once they get to
learn about those hushed-up tragedies? It should also be recognized that highly
educated and rich Hindus, such as members of the VHP, are funding these
militant Hindu organizations. But why? The answer is simple. Those atrocities
were terrible and heart-rending and when Hindus suddenly get to find out what
has happened to their ancestors centuries ago, they feel shocked, they feel
indignation against Muslims and they want revenge in whatsoever way that might
be.
However, recognition of those terrible tragedies
that fell on the Hindus of India after Islamic invasion and during the Islamic
rule is likely to go a long way in pacifying indignant section of Hindus. An
apology would advance that cause immensely. Being grown up as a Muslim, I know
there is a good deal of angst amongst Muslims against the Hindus because of the
Hindu Zamindars' oppressive and harsh activities in the days of the British
rule. But the harshness caused by the Hindu Zamindars to Muslims is ignorable
if compared to what happened to the Hindus in the days of Islamic invasion and
rule of India.
The Zamindars were harsh on the Hindu subjects as well - thanks to the British.
However if Muslims can recognize the atrocities caused by the Islamic invaders
and rulers on the Hindus, their own indignation against the Hindus vis--vis the
Zamindari activities would surely be reduced, which can help strengthen
relationship between both communities. Yet the facts about the Islamic
atrocities, unrivalled in the history of India, are coming out into the
public domain anyway - thanks to the historical details left by the Muslims
historians and rulers themselves. The sooner the people of India and the
Muslims in particular take steps to recognize those terrible atrocities to
honor the victims, the better it is for harmonious relationship between the
Hindus and Muslims living there.
