Islam believes in dividing humanity into believers and infidels (Kafirs), the Muslim community (Ummah) is enjoined not to cooperate on the basis of equality or peaceful coexistence with Kafirs.
To them it offers some alternatives-conversion to Islam, or death, or
Slavery. At the most it allows survival on payment of a poll tax, Jiziyah, and acceptance of a second-class status, that of Zimmi.
As a matter of fact, Mohammedans invaded India to turn it into a land of Islam and spread their culture. It invaded Indian culture not to co-exist with it but to wipe it out. Its declared aim was Islamization through Jihad. But in spite of repeated endeavors through invasions and centuries of Muslim rule, India could not be turned into a Muslim country. Had India been completely converted to Islam, its people, like those of Iran or Libya, would have taken pride in organizing Islamic revolutions, spearheading pan-Islamic movements and espousing right-or-wrong Islamic causes.
Temples – Hindu, Jain and Buddhist were destroyed extensively not only during war, but in times of peace too. They destroyed temples and instead thereof raised mosques. They destroyed temples because their scriptures enjoin it. In the history of Islam, iconoclasm and razing other peoples’ temples are central to the faith. They derive their justification and validity from the Quranic Revelation and the Prophet’s Sunna or practice. Shrines and idols of unbelievers began to be destroyed during the Prophet’s own time and, indeed at his behest. Sirat-un-Nabi, the first pious biography of the Prophet, tells us how during the earliest days of Islam, young men at Medina influenced by Islamic teachings used to break idols. However, desecration and destruction began in earnest when Mecca was conquered. Umar was chosen for destroying the pictures on the walls of the shrine at Kabah.Tarikh-i-Tabari tells us that raiding parties were sent in all directions to destroy the images of deities held in special veneration by different tribes including the images of al-Manat, al-Lat and al-Uzza.12 Because of early successes at home, Islam developed a full-fledged theory of iconoclasm.13 India too suffered terribly.
Thousands of Hindu shrines and edifices and Buddhist and Jain temples disappeared in northern India during the rule of Islamists. There was reckless vandalism, breaking temples and utilizing their materials in constructing Muslim buildings, which lie scattered throughout the country.
Similar is the hurt felt about forcible conversions to Islam, another legacy of Muslim conquest and rule in Hindustan.
Impatient of delay, Muslim invaders, conquerors and kings openly and unscrupulously converted people to Islam by force. Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sind in C.E. 712. Whatever place he captured like Alor, Nirun, Debal, Sawandari, Kiraj, and Multan, therein he forcibly converted people to Islam. Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded Hindustan seventeen times, and every time he came he converted people from Peshawar to Mathura and Kashmir to Somnath. Such was the insistence on the conversion of the vanquished Hindu princes that many rulers just fled before Mahmud even without giving a battle. Al Qazwini writes in his Asar-ul-Bilad that when Mahmud went “to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath, in the hope that the Hindus would then become Muhammadans”. The exploits of Mahmud Ghaznavi in the field of forced proselytization were cherished for long. His example was presented as the model before all good Muslim rulers, as early as the fourteenth century by Ziyauddin Barani in his Fatawa-I Jahandari and as late as the close of the eighteenth century by Muhammad Aslam in his Farhat-un-Nazirin.16 There were forcible conversion both during the war and in peace. Sikandar Butshikan in Kashmir to Tipu Sultan in Mysore, Mahmud Beghara in Gujarat to Jalaluddin Muhammad in Bengal, all Muslim rulers carried on large-scale forcible conversions through jihad.
This jihad never ceased in India and forcible conversions continued to take place, not only in the time of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Timur or Aurangzeb, but throughout the medieval period. It is argued that the aim of Mohammedans is to spread Islam, and it is nowhere laid down that it should be propagated only through peaceful means. A choice was always there-Islam or death.
During the medieval period, forcible and hurried conversions to Islam left most of the neo-Muslims half-Hindus. With his conversion to Islam the average Muslim did not change his old Hindu environment and tenor of life.
The neo-Muslims’ love of Hinduism was because of their attachment to their old faith and culture.18 High class converted Hindus sometimes went back to Hinduism and their old privileges.19 At others the various classes of which the new Muslim community was composed began to live in separate quarters in the same city as described by Mukundram in the case of Bengal. Their isolation gave them some sort of security against external interference. On the other hand “Indian Islam slowly began to assimilate the broad features of Hinduism”. 20 Such a scenario obtained throughout the country. A few examples would suffice to bring out the picture dearly.
What had destroyed the secular tradition of Ladakh was the systematic attempt at conversion of Buddhists to Islam. But above all was the fear of the proselytizing drive which threatened to ‘eliminate the 84 per cent Buddhists as a religious group’. In Assam and other regions of the east, Bangladeshis are being brought in large numbers to raise Muslim numbers. In Kerala and Tamilnadu, Gulf money is being openly utilized for proselytization work. The 1980 conversions in Meenakshipuram provide a classic example.
There are stages of conversion and exploitation. First, non-Muslims are converted to Islam through means, which are neither mysterious nor edifying. Then, after conversion, they are treated as inferior Muslims or riff-raff. No effort is made to improve their economic condition. The sole concentration is on increasing Muslim numbers through more and more conversions and unrestricted procreation. Lastly, their leaders inculcate in them a spirit of alienation towards their ancestral society, culture and religion as well as their native land.
It would be worthwhile to note that a substantial number of Muslim students start their education in madrasas attached to mosques. Most of those in other schools do not proceed beyond the IInd or IIIrd class. And the remaining drops out after matriculation.
Iconoclasm, proselytization, tabligh and Islamization in general have been due to Muslim fundamentalism. Muslim fundamentalism finds no virtue in any non-Muslim culture, it only believes in destroying every other culture and superimposing Muslim culture.
For the Muslim sticks to the traditional orthodox belief” that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet. No Muslim can question this belief. As Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi says: “The Quran is believed by every Muslim to be the Word of God revealed to his Prophet Muhammad.” This Word of God cannot be amended; it cannot be changed, because “Not even the Prophet could change the revelation”. “There are no local variations of the Muslim Law.” It is this, which is fundamentalism.
In short, the policy of Muslim rulers was to keep the Muslim minority in a privileged position and see to it that there was no integration between the two communities.
During the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire fell on bad days; in the nineteenth it rapidly declined. But the Muslims could not forget the privileged position they had enjoyed in the medieval period. With the decline of the Muslim political power at the Center and in Muslim ruled provinces, a dilemma stared them in the face. They had to live on terms of equality with the Hindus. Worse still, these Hindus were in a majority. They could not think of living under the “dominance” of the Hindu majority. Three examples of this attitude, one each from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century will suffice to illustrate the point.
In an Islamic state, no consideration is given to people of other faiths. Non-Muslims cannot construct a Christian church or a Hindu temple in Saudi Arabia or Iran, or say their prayers in public. During the month of Ramzan no food is available to non-Muslims in hotels or restaurants, although fasting is compulsory only for the Muslims. After the conquest of Mecca, “a perpetual law was enacted (by Muhammad himself) that no unbeliever should dare to set his foot on the territory of the holy city.” Where Muslims rule, they may declare the state secular or Islamic, they may treat the minorities with dignity or as Zimmis, follow the Islamic laws or prohibit polygamy. No non-Muslim can demand anything from them. They consider it entirely their own business to do what they like to do in their own country. But elsewhere their demands know no limits.
Muslim minority community in India and Sri Lanka, misguided by its leaders, thinks and works only for its own narrow interests. The interest of the country is not its concern because it is not an Islamic country. That is why there is needed to appeal to the Muslims to join the national “mainstream”.
Conversion to Islam wrenched them away from it because Islam and Islamic theology enjoin upon Muslims to keep separated and segregated from non-Muslims. To integrate is not their obligation. To strive for national integration is the duty of the Government and the Hindus.
No Muslim gives any other religion a status of equality with Islam. Such an assumption is against the tenets of his creed.
To them it offers some alternatives-conversion to Islam, or death, or
Slavery. At the most it allows survival on payment of a poll tax, Jiziyah, and acceptance of a second-class status, that of Zimmi.
As a matter of fact, Mohammedans invaded India to turn it into a land of Islam and spread their culture. It invaded Indian culture not to co-exist with it but to wipe it out. Its declared aim was Islamization through Jihad. But in spite of repeated endeavors through invasions and centuries of Muslim rule, India could not be turned into a Muslim country. Had India been completely converted to Islam, its people, like those of Iran or Libya, would have taken pride in organizing Islamic revolutions, spearheading pan-Islamic movements and espousing right-or-wrong Islamic causes.
Temples – Hindu, Jain and Buddhist were destroyed extensively not only during war, but in times of peace too. They destroyed temples and instead thereof raised mosques. They destroyed temples because their scriptures enjoin it. In the history of Islam, iconoclasm and razing other peoples’ temples are central to the faith. They derive their justification and validity from the Quranic Revelation and the Prophet’s Sunna or practice. Shrines and idols of unbelievers began to be destroyed during the Prophet’s own time and, indeed at his behest. Sirat-un-Nabi, the first pious biography of the Prophet, tells us how during the earliest days of Islam, young men at Medina influenced by Islamic teachings used to break idols. However, desecration and destruction began in earnest when Mecca was conquered. Umar was chosen for destroying the pictures on the walls of the shrine at Kabah.Tarikh-i-Tabari tells us that raiding parties were sent in all directions to destroy the images of deities held in special veneration by different tribes including the images of al-Manat, al-Lat and al-Uzza.12 Because of early successes at home, Islam developed a full-fledged theory of iconoclasm.13 India too suffered terribly.
Thousands of Hindu shrines and edifices and Buddhist and Jain temples disappeared in northern India during the rule of Islamists. There was reckless vandalism, breaking temples and utilizing their materials in constructing Muslim buildings, which lie scattered throughout the country.
Similar is the hurt felt about forcible conversions to Islam, another legacy of Muslim conquest and rule in Hindustan.
Impatient of delay, Muslim invaders, conquerors and kings openly and unscrupulously converted people to Islam by force. Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sind in C.E. 712. Whatever place he captured like Alor, Nirun, Debal, Sawandari, Kiraj, and Multan, therein he forcibly converted people to Islam. Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded Hindustan seventeen times, and every time he came he converted people from Peshawar to Mathura and Kashmir to Somnath. Such was the insistence on the conversion of the vanquished Hindu princes that many rulers just fled before Mahmud even without giving a battle. Al Qazwini writes in his Asar-ul-Bilad that when Mahmud went “to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath, in the hope that the Hindus would then become Muhammadans”. The exploits of Mahmud Ghaznavi in the field of forced proselytization were cherished for long. His example was presented as the model before all good Muslim rulers, as early as the fourteenth century by Ziyauddin Barani in his Fatawa-I Jahandari and as late as the close of the eighteenth century by Muhammad Aslam in his Farhat-un-Nazirin.16 There were forcible conversion both during the war and in peace. Sikandar Butshikan in Kashmir to Tipu Sultan in Mysore, Mahmud Beghara in Gujarat to Jalaluddin Muhammad in Bengal, all Muslim rulers carried on large-scale forcible conversions through jihad.
This jihad never ceased in India and forcible conversions continued to take place, not only in the time of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Timur or Aurangzeb, but throughout the medieval period. It is argued that the aim of Mohammedans is to spread Islam, and it is nowhere laid down that it should be propagated only through peaceful means. A choice was always there-Islam or death.
During the medieval period, forcible and hurried conversions to Islam left most of the neo-Muslims half-Hindus. With his conversion to Islam the average Muslim did not change his old Hindu environment and tenor of life.
The neo-Muslims’ love of Hinduism was because of their attachment to their old faith and culture.18 High class converted Hindus sometimes went back to Hinduism and their old privileges.19 At others the various classes of which the new Muslim community was composed began to live in separate quarters in the same city as described by Mukundram in the case of Bengal. Their isolation gave them some sort of security against external interference. On the other hand “Indian Islam slowly began to assimilate the broad features of Hinduism”. 20 Such a scenario obtained throughout the country. A few examples would suffice to bring out the picture dearly.
What had destroyed the secular tradition of Ladakh was the systematic attempt at conversion of Buddhists to Islam. But above all was the fear of the proselytizing drive which threatened to ‘eliminate the 84 per cent Buddhists as a religious group’. In Assam and other regions of the east, Bangladeshis are being brought in large numbers to raise Muslim numbers. In Kerala and Tamilnadu, Gulf money is being openly utilized for proselytization work. The 1980 conversions in Meenakshipuram provide a classic example.
There are stages of conversion and exploitation. First, non-Muslims are converted to Islam through means, which are neither mysterious nor edifying. Then, after conversion, they are treated as inferior Muslims or riff-raff. No effort is made to improve their economic condition. The sole concentration is on increasing Muslim numbers through more and more conversions and unrestricted procreation. Lastly, their leaders inculcate in them a spirit of alienation towards their ancestral society, culture and religion as well as their native land.
It would be worthwhile to note that a substantial number of Muslim students start their education in madrasas attached to mosques. Most of those in other schools do not proceed beyond the IInd or IIIrd class. And the remaining drops out after matriculation.
Iconoclasm, proselytization, tabligh and Islamization in general have been due to Muslim fundamentalism. Muslim fundamentalism finds no virtue in any non-Muslim culture, it only believes in destroying every other culture and superimposing Muslim culture.
For the Muslim sticks to the traditional orthodox belief” that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet. No Muslim can question this belief. As Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi says: “The Quran is believed by every Muslim to be the Word of God revealed to his Prophet Muhammad.” This Word of God cannot be amended; it cannot be changed, because “Not even the Prophet could change the revelation”. “There are no local variations of the Muslim Law.” It is this, which is fundamentalism.
In short, the policy of Muslim rulers was to keep the Muslim minority in a privileged position and see to it that there was no integration between the two communities.
During the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire fell on bad days; in the nineteenth it rapidly declined. But the Muslims could not forget the privileged position they had enjoyed in the medieval period. With the decline of the Muslim political power at the Center and in Muslim ruled provinces, a dilemma stared them in the face. They had to live on terms of equality with the Hindus. Worse still, these Hindus were in a majority. They could not think of living under the “dominance” of the Hindu majority. Three examples of this attitude, one each from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century will suffice to illustrate the point.
In an Islamic state, no consideration is given to people of other faiths. Non-Muslims cannot construct a Christian church or a Hindu temple in Saudi Arabia or Iran, or say their prayers in public. During the month of Ramzan no food is available to non-Muslims in hotels or restaurants, although fasting is compulsory only for the Muslims. After the conquest of Mecca, “a perpetual law was enacted (by Muhammad himself) that no unbeliever should dare to set his foot on the territory of the holy city.” Where Muslims rule, they may declare the state secular or Islamic, they may treat the minorities with dignity or as Zimmis, follow the Islamic laws or prohibit polygamy. No non-Muslim can demand anything from them. They consider it entirely their own business to do what they like to do in their own country. But elsewhere their demands know no limits.
Muslim minority community in India and Sri Lanka, misguided by its leaders, thinks and works only for its own narrow interests. The interest of the country is not its concern because it is not an Islamic country. That is why there is needed to appeal to the Muslims to join the national “mainstream”.
Conversion to Islam wrenched them away from it because Islam and Islamic theology enjoin upon Muslims to keep separated and segregated from non-Muslims. To integrate is not their obligation. To strive for national integration is the duty of the Government and the Hindus.
No Muslim gives any other religion a status of equality with Islam. Such an assumption is against the tenets of his creed.
