Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism, and Slavery by Khan M.A

Author:Khan, M.A. [Khan, M.A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2009-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter VI

Islamic Imperialism in India

‘Swords flashed like lightning amid the blackness of clouds, and fountains of blood flowed like the fall of setting star. The friends of God defeated their opponents… the Musalmans wreaked their vengeance on the infidel enemies of God, killing 15,000 of them… making them food of the beasts and birds of prey… God also bestowed upon his friends such an amount of booty as was beyond all bounds and calculations, including five hundred thousand slaves, beautiful men and women.’ [Sultan Mahmud’s minister al-Utbi on his campaign to India]

‘(Sultan) 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 direction… This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hands cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benaras, and other places.’ [ Alberuni, Great Muslim scholar and scientist, d. 1050]

‘The Hindu women and children went out begging at the doors of the Musalmans.’ [Egyptian Sufi saint Shamsuddin Turk on Sultan Alauddin’s crushing exploitation of Hindus]

The history of the Indian subcontinent since early eighth to the mid-twentieth century was characterized by two consecutive foreign rules: Islamic and British. The Islamic invasion and rule started with Muhammad bin Qasim’s capture of Sindh in 712 and officially ended after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. The British colonial occupation, in effect, started in 1757 and ended in 1947.i

Directed by governor of Baghdad Hajjaj bin Yusuf and blessed by Caliph al-Walid of Damascus, Qasim inaugurated the Islamic conquest and rule of India in 712. Muslim rulers finally achieved near-total control of India in the 1590s under Mughal Emperor Akbar. The Muslim control of India expanded a bit further under Aurangzeb (1658–1707). The defeat of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah of Bengal by British mercenaries of the East India Company in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 signaled the beginning of the end of the Islamic rule. When Tipu Sultan of Mysore—the last independent Muslim ruler—was defeated in 1799, Muslim rule in India effectively ended. Most parts of India came under de facto British control with the incorporation of Punjab in 1850. The British mercenaries retained Muslim rulers as the ‘puppet head of state’ until the Sepoy Mutiny uprisings of 1857. The direct British imperial rule was introduced in 1858.

Following a long campaign for independence by Indian nationalists, the British rulers finally relinquished their sovereignty over India on 26 January 1947 and India became independent on August 14–15 of the same year. After many centuries of foreign domination, an independent subcontinent—albeit partitioned into two states: India and Pakistan—eventually emerged for the first time, free to determine her own future.

Curiously, of the two foreign rules in India, only one—the British rule—is termed colonial and singled out for condemnation by historians, scholars and citizens of the subcontinent and elsewhere. A conscious and deliberate effort has been made to whitewash the no-less dark and disastrous and much longer period of Islamic rule.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.