Re: What as the Religion in the Indian Subcontinent before Islam?
Reply #3 - March 13, 2010, 11:32 PM
This account of the Islamic conquest of India is written by world renowned historian Will Durant. I have also used Durant in my signature.
I might add, Durant was an atheist, having quit his ancestral faith of Christianity, & no convert to Hinduism either.
Durant was an atheist, having abandoned Christianity several years before.
- This passage was written before George Bush became President. This passage, written by a well-credentialed liberal, was not written for the purpose of helping Bush in any political battle.
- This passage predates the modern state of Israel and the mideast wars that followed Isreal's founding.
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhims and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India's boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited Conquest; and at last it came.
The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.). Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next
three centuries, with the result that the Moslems established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time that their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours (732 A.D.) for the mastery of Europe. But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till the turn of the first millenium after Christ.
In the year 997 a Turkish chieftan by the name of Mahmud became of Sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was
young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. . . . . Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of 200 years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naptha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its 50,000 inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.
Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi - - - an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind - fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, "were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands." [citation omitted.] In one victory of this warrior . . . . "50,000 men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus." [citation omitted]. Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw and hanging them from the gates of Delhi.
Will Durant, "Our Oriental Heritage," pp. 459-461, 1935
World renowned historian Will Durant"...the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown..."
Topic: What as the Religion in the Indian Subcontinent before Islam?