So I am reading this article from S. AKBAR ZAIDI in Dawn with heading
Demolishing foundational myths ... ..The fath heads of the past and present built so many myths around their faith and criminals in faiths used those myths for their personal loot and booty in the past as well as today., IT IS WORTH DEMOLISHING THEM...... WORTH DEMOLISHING THE MYTHS and THE SILLY STORIES AROUND MYTHS
well let us start reading his article., it has this good looking picture to start with
Every Pakistani, of every generation, educated or not, believes as a matter of faith Pakistan’s ‘sacred myth’: that a 17-year-old general, Bin Qasim, invaded what is now Pakistan in 712CE to rescue a group of Muslim women who had been abducted by pirates at Daybul. They appealed to Hajjaj bin Yusuf Thaqafi, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Or is it?
Asif, using sources from the ninth century historian Baladhuri, shows that actually, “Baladhuri places this account more than a decade before the campaign of Muhammad bin Qasim.” Asif writes that “yet this account of the ‘abduction of Muslim women’ dramatically reverberates in historiography and popular imagination to this day. It is an incredibly potent account ... The episode of the captured Muslim women is the totemic origins narrative framing Muslim arrival in India ... [yet] predates the expedition of Muhammad bin Qasim in 712”. The Arab communities present in Sindh and Gujarat, predating the conquest and flag-bearer of Islam, give “prima facie lie to an originary encounter which posits conquest as the first contact”. It was, in fact, “colonial epistemology [which] framed Chachnama as the story of the origins of Muslims in India”.
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While the conquest by Bin Qasim did actually take place and is represented in the 13th century text Chachnama (although not for the reasons taught in Pakistani textbooks, but on account of Umayyad expansionism), it is the intriguing story of the Chachnama itself that forms a major part of Asif’s book.
It is the Chachnama, written in 1226CE, that has for 200 years — importantly, from the time of British colonialism and not before — “been read as a book of conquest, providing a narrative of Islam’s arrival in India ... [and] is understood to be the primary account of the origins of Muslims in India which contains the history of their rise to dominance.” The Chachnama claims “to be a translation of an Arabic history and it calls itself a book of conquest”, a claim taken by colonialists at face value which helped them build their own notion of the history of the region (Sindh and Uch), and subsequently of the advent of Islam into what became India. Believing that the Chachnama is “a history of the early 8th century Arab conquest, written at the time of the events ... a text closest to the historical events of 712CE, with testimony from direct participants” made it the main text forming the “central evidence explaining the origins of Islam in India”. It is the particular colonial reading of the Chachnama which allows the colonialists to show Muslim despotism and loot and plunder, and Muslim fanaticism. Rereading the text (or, ‘unreading’ it, as he says), Asif argues that the Chachnama is “misread, mischaracterised, and misplaced”, and argues persuasively that this is a work of political theory, not the book of conquest as it is perceived to be, and “represents a politically heterogeneous world of 13th century Sindh”.
well there is lot more at that link also a book link
The reviewer teaches history at Columbia University in New York and at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.
A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia
(HISTORY)
Manan Ahmed Asif
Harvard University Press, US
ISBN: 978-0674660113
271pp.
that book appears to be worth reading.. but on
DEMOLISHING MYTHS OF FAITHS & FAITH HEADS and on those words of Ahmed Asif that book author
Asif argues that the Chachnama is “misread, mischaracterised, and misplaced”
indeed Chachnama is “misread, mischaracterized, and misplaced" not only that I say
Quran,as well as that stupid voluminous books hadith “misread, mischaracterized, and misplaced". the only way is DEMOLISHING MYTHS and extracting facts from them..but it is a hard work...
Topic: Demolishing foundational myths ...