Jihad in India

The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of millions of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction and rape of Hindu women and children to slave markets and concubines and the destruction of thousands of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam by sword during this period.

—Historian Will Durant1

The Muslims could not rule [India] except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm – burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves.

—Historian Fernand Braudel2

The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, Tipu Sultan, Akbar, Aurangzeb …. all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed. Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster.

—Muslim historian Irfan Husain3

The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it reduce the geography and ethnography of the various people to the simple and convenient distinction of two nations and of two countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel is “harby,” i.e. the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever.

—Philosopher Karl Marx4

Somnath Temple offers a unique glimpse at the real consequences of Islamic jihad in India. Standing near the port city of Veraval, it has been a site of pilgrimage for more than 2,000 years. It is one of 12 sites on the Indian subcontinent where the Hindu god Shiva is believed to have revealed himself in different forms. For centuries prior to the arrival of Islam in India, the idol at Somnath had been especially venerated by the sailors and traders of Gujarat (the province where Somnath is located), who amassed enormous quantities of wealth and paid some of those riches into the temple out of gratitude. To illustrate the wealth that could be found at a major temple such as Somnath, consider that the secret, untouched coffers of the comparatively small and not particularly noteworthy Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala. Recently, this temple was discovered to hold more than $20 billion worth of gold and precious jewels.5

To invading Arab forces, temples such as Somnath offered two provocations. On the one hand, they were easy targets with a great deal of stored wealth. Such buildings were made for worship and communal religious life, not for defense. The subcontinent had very little internal experience of military assaults on religious structures. On the other hand, Hindu temples seemed to Muslims as the very essence of idolatry. Destroying them and raising mosques in their stead was regarded as religiously praiseworthy—after all, the Prophet Muhammad had done a similar thing himself at Mecca.

The first destruction came in 725, not long after the Arabs had made themselves masters of the province of Sindh (which lies a few hundred miles east of the Iranian plateau). After the invaders were turned back by the Hindu Rajputs, the temple was rebuilt in 815. In 1024, Mahmud of Ghazni made his own assault on Somnath. This destruction of the temple was remembered with particular bitterness, as Mahmud added the butchery of some 50,000 priests, soldiers, and local residents and broke the stone idol or lingam at the heart of the temple.6 Unbowed, the Hindus rebuilt Somnath as a great stone outwork (replacing the former wooden structures) over the next four decades.

This cycle of destruction and rebuilding would continue from the 13th through the 17th centuries. Again and again, Muslims would loot and demolish the temple, and again and again the Hindus would rebuild. The last destruction came at the hands of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, probably at the beginning of the 18th century.7 The partial ruins of Somnath stood for three centuries.

In 1922 Gujarati leader K.M. Munshi visited the ruins of Somnath and penned these reflections:

Desecrated, burnt, and battered, it still stood firm—a monument to our humiliation and ingratitude. I can scarcely describe the shame which I felt on that early morning as I walked the broken floor of the once hallowed sabhamandapa, littered with broken pillars and scattered stones.8

Less than three decades after these remarks were recorded, the government of the newly liberated nation of India would rebuild Somnath once more—for the seventh time. Today,the temple stands on its ancient site, a monument to the worst of jihad—the slaughter, the greed, and the intolerance—as well as the resilience of the people of India.

THE BEGINNINGS OF INDIAN JIHAD

Muslim invaders came to India looking for plunder and jihad. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad himself had promised that any Muslims who fought jihad against the idolaters of “al-Hind” would be absolved of their sins and go straight to Paradise.9 And when it came to plunder, India offered an abundance both of riches and of potential slaves. When later Muslim rulers began to build dynasties in India, a third mode of plunder became available through the collection of the jizya tax.

The first invasions began during the Umayyad Caliphate in the late 7th century. The Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, took exception to raids from a group of pirates based out of the port city of Debal. After two failed expeditions to punish the pirates, the governor sent Muhammad bin Qasim, an 18-year-old tribal chieftain, in command of a sizable army.10 Bin Qasim’s retribution upon Debal was severe—after a three-day orgy of blood and violence the town was razed, its temples looted, and most of its inhabitants killed or enslaved.

A letter sent to bin Qasim from governor al-Hajjaj illustrates the basic military strategy of his campaign:

Kill anyone belonging to the combatants, arrest their sons and daughters for hostages and imprison them. Whoever does not fight against us, grant them aman (safety) and settle their tribute (amwal) as dhimmah (protected person).11

Since the Muslims were outnumbered and their supply chains extended, bin Qasim’s policy was generally more lenient after Debal. Cities which surrendered without a fight were treated with comparative leniency. Nevertheless, bin Qasim killed more than 40,000 men between Debal and Multan and established a veneer of Islamic rule over Sindh. So long as the jizya was paid, bin Qasim’s policy was conciliatory. If the natives paid their money and accepted their new masters, he agreed not to interfere in their religious practice. By and large, Hindus and Buddhists administered the state while their Muslim masters reaped the profits.

In several respects bin Qasim’s invasion was unlike any the Indian subcontinent had seen before. The killing of civilians, the mass capture of slaves, execution of men-at-arms after combat, and the plunder and destruction of temples had all hardly been seen before. Jihad itself was a concept almost impossible to grasp for a people steeped in belief in the virtue of ahimsa (nonviolence). Fortunately for India, bin Qasim died young and the invaders were decisively defeated by the Hindu Rajputs at the Battle of Rajasthan in 738. The Muslims would get no further than Sindh for two centuries.

JIHAD RE-LAUNCHED: THE GHAZNAVIDS

The second major jihad on India was directed by a man known to history as Mahmud of Ghazni. Mahmud styled himself as a Sunni warrior, fighting heterodox Shias and Ismailis (a then-numerous sect within Shia Islam) as well as Indian idolaters. Between 1001 and the year of his death 1030, Mahmud invaded northern India 17 times, taking a great abundance of plunder and slaves. He seems to have seen it, as historian Andre Wink observes, as his historic mission “to raid and conquer ‘the infidels of al-Hind.’”12

Among Mahmud’s favorite targets was wealthy Hindu temples such as Somnath. A Muslim chronicler records the destruction of one such temple in Kanauj:

Many of the inhabitants of the place fled and were scattered abroad like so many wretched widows and orphans, from the fear which oppressed them, in consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols … many of them thus effected their escape, and those who did not fly were put to death.13

In plundering the temple at Thanesar, the same chronicler records, “the blood of the infidels flowed so copiously, that the stream was discolored … and people were unable to drink it.”14

Although Mahmud helped establish the Ghaznavid Empire, his multiple expeditions into India do not seem to have been concerned with adding those territories to it. For the most part, Mahmud contented himself with plundering and killing infidels and destroying their temples. His numerous expeditions included assaults on Muslims he regarded as heretics as well as on Hindus and Buddhists.

The lasting effects of Mahmud’s campaign were recorded by the scholar al-Biruni. As Biruni observed, “Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.”15 Although his personal reign of terror ended with his death in 1030, his multiple strikes into India acted like an illness that weakens the immune system allowing for later infection. In this way Mahmud prepared a path “for the final conflict, that—two centuries later—was to destroy the kingdoms of the Ganges plain.”16

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ISLAMIC EMPIRE IN INDIA

The Afghan conqueror Muhammad Ghori was the first to take advantage of a weakened northern India after the Ghaznavid Empire’s collapse. The key difference between Ghori’s invasion and earlier efforts is that Ghori came looking for empire in addition to plunder. His first effort was turned back by the Rajputs, but in 1192 he scored a pivotal victory over the Rajputs and his armies swept across northern India as far as Bengal in the east. Ghori chose Delhi to be the seat of his new Indian empire, and the Delhi Sultanate was born.

By Ghori’s time, most schools of Islamic thought favored extermination for all idolaters, which Hindus and Buddhists were both held to be. Luckily, as a practical matter, the Muslims of Delhi were still far outnumbered by the idolaters they ruled over. Therefore, the Sultanate did not follow an entirely consistent policy with regard to their non-Muslim subjects. Mostly, non-Muslims were oppressed severely or left alone.17

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate radically changed the economic basis of society. Before, the economy was based on the agricultural production of many independent and self-sufficient villages. The Sultanate was based on conquest, and acquired its wealth by plundering petty Hindu kingdoms and acquiring slaves.18 At least a third of the Sultanate’s total population was enslaved.19 It was political policy to enslave non-Muslims who couldn’t afford to pay their taxes—a policy which was maintained through the Mughal era—and the Sultanate ran a brisk business in Indian slaves.20

It was during this Ghorid period that many of the universities of Hindu and Buddhist learning were destroyed. As described in the previous chapter, Nalanda was one of these schools. For centuries, it had been a center for Buddhist thought which nevertheless accepted students of all sects and religions.21 Muslim invaders “destroyed the university, butchered the monks, and burnt its priceless collection of books.”22 It was only after archaeological investigation in later centuries that the former glories of Nalanda were rediscovered.

Some scholars claim the Delhi Sultanate was “tolerant” of Hindus because it agreed to leave them unmolested if they paid the jizya tax. Note that this tax could run as high as 50 percent or more of a man’s yearly income. We have the words of one of the Sultan himself as to the nature of this tolerance:

These people now erected new idol-temples in the city and the environs in opposition to the law of the Prophet which declares that such temples are not to be tolerated. Under divine guidance I destroyed these edifices and I killed those leaders of infidelity who seduced others into error, and the lower orders I subjected to stripes and chastisement until this abuse was entirely abolished.23

One of the bloodiest of the Delhi sultans was Ala-ud-din Khijli. By the time of his reign in the late 13th and early 14th century, the sultanate was governed largely by Muslim Turks. The Turks brought with them to India a burning Islamic faith and a doctrine of their own racial supremacy. Feeling themselves more powerful, the leaders of the Sultanate took a heavier hand over the people they ruled.24

Ala-ud-din himself came to the throne by murdering his predecessor, and soon proved willing to engage in far bloodier acts. In 1297 and 1298 he sent his armies to plunder and slaughter their way across the Gujarat plains. In just one day at Rajasthan, he oversaw a massacre:

Even after the surrender, Alauddin carried out a frightful massacre of the Rajputs. According to the great poet and scholar, Amir Khursau, who was present on the occasion, 30,000 people were killed in one day under orders from the Sultan.25

Ala-ud-din’s example was followed by 14th century sultans of Delhi such as Muhammad bin Tulghaq. A contemporary chronicler describes the sultan as “not slack in Jihad,” assuring his readers:[He has] achieved victory, supremacy, conquest of countries, destruction of the infidels, and exposure of magicians. He has destroyed idols by which the people of Hindustan were deceived in vain.26

Tulghaq’s cousin and successor, Firuz Shah earned similar accolades. In fact, Firuz exceeded his predecessor’s oppression by extending the jihad to Shiites and imposing the jizya tax on Brahmins who had previously been exempted from this official mark of submission and humiliation.27

Firuz is noteworthy for his efforts in recording for posterity his exercises in anti- Hindu destruction. He boasts of destroying temples and killing the “leaders of infidelity.” Particularly revealing is the record of an incident in the city of Gohana:

Some Hindus had erected a new idol-temple in the village of Kohana and the idolators used to assemble there and perform their idolatrous rites. These people were seized and brought before me. I ordered that the perverse conduct of the leaders of this wickedness should be publicly proclaimed, and that they should be put to death before the gate of the palace. I also ordered that the infidel books, the idols and the vessels used in their worship, which had been taken with idols, should all be publicly burnt. The others were restrained by threats and punishments, as a warning to all men, that no [dhimmi] could follow such wicked practices in a [Muslim] country.28

Firuz was also notable for his promotion of slavery. Since Islamic law forbade the enslavement of Muslims, Islamic rulers like Firuz would set up slave markets in Indian territories under their control for the buying and selling of Hindus and other infidels. Firuz himself owned as many as 180,000 slaves obtained from across the subcontinent.29

Although the Delhi sultans spread fear and extended their power far and wide, their brutality also bred inevitable opposition. As Daniélou reflects, “The sultan was an absolute autocrat, using religious pretexts to justify his conquests, massacres, and violence.” Their methods of imposing Islam by the sword met with “profound bitterness” among the people. Furthermore, their approach was economically draining since the conquerors simply lived off of the wealth that had been accumulated before their arrival and established no long- term foundations for later prosperity. Previously affluent regions of India were bled dry and left impoverished—a poverty which persists even into the 21st century.30

Also, as Shiite Muslims had already learned on many occasions, the Islamic drive to attack and despoil non-Muslims did not preclude violence against rival Muslim powers. So, in the late 14th century the sultans of Delhi found themselves targeted by other ambitious Islamic powers who wanted a piece of the pie. The fiercest of these rivals was the legendary warlord Tamerlane.

TAMERLANE’S WHIRLWIND JIHAD

Tamerlane’s own account of his invasion of India places Islam as the primary motivation and justification for a spectacularly brutal campaign of mass murder. He utilized Islamic doctrine to portray his atrocities as not only necessary but even glorious, pious, and commendable. With reference to a passage from the Qur’an, Tamerlane records the idea that “the slayer of infidels is a Champion and… if he is slain, he becomes a martyr” as the foundation of his plan to attack India.31

His armies began their attack in 1398, first surmounting the Hindu Kush mountains and crossing the Ganges River. In order to subjugate a particularly resistant force early on, he records his orders “to kill the men, imprison the women and children, and plunder and lay waste their property.” This done, he “directed towers of the skulls of those obstinate unbelievers to be built on the mountain.”32 The early degradations imposed upon the Hindus pale in comparison with what happened on the eve of Tamerlane’s attack on Delhi. As was typical of Muslim invaders, the army accumulated large numbers of slaves as it cut its way through India. There were 100,000 Hindu captives among the soldiers in their encampment outside Delhi. After concerns were raised about security, Tamerlane gave the order, “that every man who had infidel prisoners was to put them to death, and that whoever neglected to do so, should himself be executed and his property given to the informer.” All 100,000 of the “impious idolaters” were slain.33

Delhi fell to Tamerlane’s assault, but the warlord was little interested in its administration. After two weeks of feasting on the riches of the city while his Muslim troops murdered and pillaged the city’s Hindu population, Tamerlane felt himself called forward to further killings:

I had put to death hundreds of thousands of infidels and idolaters, I had dyed my proselyting sword with the blood of the enemies of the Faith, and now that I had gained this crowning victory, I felt that I ought not to indulge in ease, but rather to exert myself still further in warring against the infidels of Hindustan.34

The remainder of his memoir of Indian conquest reveals that he did exactly that, taking the city of Mirat by storm and slaughtering its inhabitants, doing the same in Hardwar, and continuing to devastate the territory along the Ganges.

After this whirlwind jihad, Tamerlane returned to his base in Samarkand in central Asia. His primary interest had been killing infidels and snatching up booty. He didn’t even establish political control over the territories he had taken; instead, he moved through and laid waste to whatever he could.35

THE MUGHAL EMPIRE

The founder of the Mughal Empire was not a conventionally pious man. But there was one area of Islamic practice in which Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur excelled, and that was jihad. From his base in Kabul, Babur’s armies swept across northern India between 1526 and 1530. By the time of his death in 1530, he had established an empire stretching from Kandahar in the west to the edge of Bengal in the east.36 Like Tamerlane, he left behind a prideful record of the devastation and slaughter he wreaked upon the Hindus of India. He also shared a penchant for stacking the skulls of its victims into trophy piles.37

Apologists for Islam often point to the rule of Babur’s grandson Akbar as a kind of benevolent or enlightened despot. But it is easily shown that Akbar is much more the exception than the rule when it came to Islamic governance of India. For one, the politically astute Akbar kept Hindu Rajput elites on his side by inter-marrying, giving them a stake in his rule.38 More significantly, Akbar was notoriously unorthodox and at times even heretical in his adherence to the Islamic religion. Historians dispute whether the religious innovations he introduced constitute a new religion or merely a series of heretical practices within Islam. There is much less dispute over the shift during his reign whereby “Islam lost its privileged position” and the practices of the Mughals began to vary widely from normal Islamic practices.39

In the end, Akbar’s more enlightened rule was not a harbinger of things to come. The fundamental dogmas of Islam, and the attitudes of supremacy over and antipathy towards non-Muslims which they inculcate, do not lie dormant for long. An empire founded on the basis of jihad, as the Mughal Empire was, will stand or fall by the application of that principle. After Akbar had reigned for half a century, he was succeeded by his dissolute son Jahangir, who soon turned to oppressing the Sikhs.40

Even Akbar himself was not as enlightened as his reputation suggests. He collected three hundred wives and a harem of 5,000—including many slaves who lived to serve his whims.41 And although he released his non-Muslim subjects from the burden of paying the jizya (a reform his great-grandson would reverse), he showed conventional disregard for the lives of Hindus defeated in battle. After a 1567 victory in Rajasthan, he ordered the massacre of the defeated army, resulting in the murder of 30,000 men. Like his predecessors, he extended Mughal dominion by the sword, conquering Bengal and parts of southern India.42

Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan also enjoys an undeservedly romantic reputation. He is best known for the magnificent mausoleum he created for his favorite wife—the building known in the west as the Taj Mahal. Yet Shah Jahan ascended to the throne after a series of machinations that included the deaths of two his brothers and a rebellion against his own father. The Taj Mahal, as journalist William McWhirter rightly notes, serves as “a chill reminder to millions of Indians of an age of vanity and repression.”43 The Taj Mahal is certainly a testimony to Shah Jahan’s opulence, but it pairs jarringly with the famine- stricken poverty of many of Jahan’s subjects.44 It is telling that the most noteworthy monument left behind by the Mughal Empire in India is a mausoleum.

Shah Jahan also launched devastating wars against independent sultanates in Bihapur and Golkonda in southern India and against the rebellious province of Bendelkhand. This historic heartland of Indian culture had already suffered greatly at the hands of Muslim invaders, and in 1635 Shah Jahan sent his son Aurangzeb for a repeat. After the victory, the Mughal victors plundered the riches of the Bundelkhand province, enslaved the women of its ruling family, forcibly converted two of its Prince’s sons to Islam, and killed a third who resisted. As a coup-de-grace, Aurangzeb’s forces destroyed the temple of Orchha and replaced it with a mosque.45 Shah Jahan himself ended his life as the captive of his own son Aurangzeb, who, like his father, murdered his own siblings to secure sovereignty.

The Mughals were notoriously extravagant and dissolute. This is most evident in their tendency toward drunkenness and drug addiction. In spite of bans on the public sale of alcohol, rulers and nobles in the Mughal Empire frequently indulged in bouts of excessive drinking. The memoirs of Babur are replete with stories of the Mughal founder drinking and taking drugs until he was completely incapacitated. Two of his sons were notorious opium users. A third son, his successor Jahangir, seems to have had an attendant whose only role was keeping him supplied with opium. The historian Lisa Balabanlilar records Jahangir in 1621 appointing “a new steward for opium and another for wine.”46 In keeping with the sexual indulgences of Mughal elites, “several of the drugs and stimulants used in Mughal times derived their popularity… from their supposed aphrodisiac potency.”47 Such was the moral hypocrisy of Mughal rule: public oppression and private debauchery.

SHAH JAHAN AND MUGHAL INDULGENCES

Shah Jahan had the world-famous Taj Mahal built in memory of his third wife. Yet this romantic gesture often overshadows a very dark and twisted history. The enormous structure was built in part with the Hindu slave labor of 20,000 workers. And although Shah Jahan was supposedly broken up about his third wife, he somehow managed to have many adulterous relationships. His eldest daughter, who took on many of her mother’s responsibilities, even helped procure his new mistresses.48

A contemporary of Shah Jahan, the European physician and traveler Francois Bernier reports that the Mughal emperor enjoyed more than ordinary family relations with this same daughter:

It is painful to allude to the rumor of his unnatural attachment, the justification of which he rested on the decision of the moollahs, or doctors of the law. According to them, it would have been unjust to deny the king the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he had himself planted.49

Less famous than the Taj Mahal—but arguably an even grander extravagance—was the so-called Peacock Throne. Shah Jahan commissioned this work when he first became emperor. It took seven years to build, but once it was done it was a magnificent sight to behold:

[It was] more a miniature gazebo than any conventional western throne: eight feet deep, seven wide and fourteen feet to the crest of its golden canopy. It was created of more than two thousand six hundred pounds of solid gold—worth more than two million rupees—beaten and molded into shape. Into it were fitted nearly nine

million rupees worth of gems.50
The emperor wanted the throne to show off the numerous precious jewels in the imperial treasury—all of them stolen from the former Hindu rulers of India. It was inlaid with diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, and all manner of other precious stones. The Peacock Throne in fact cost twice as much to make as the entire Taj Mahal.51 This extravagant display of stolen Mughal wealth was itself stolen by the Persian ruler Nader Shah when his forces sacked Delhi. It has been lost to time ever since.

AURANGZEB’S REIGN OF TERROR

Of the Mughal emperors, however, Aurangzeb might be the greatest monster of them all. Even his path to the throne was covered in infamy. The elder son and rightful heir of Shah Jahan was Dara Sikoh. Prince Dara was a religious mystic who embraced the varied and ecumenical religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Of course, this made him a heretic in the eyes of his younger brother, Aurangzeb, who was a staunch Islamist. Despite Shah Jahan’s preference, Aurangzeb engaged in a bitter struggle with his elder brother for the control of the Mughal throne.

In 1658, Aurangzeb’s armies defeated Prince Dara at the Battle of Samugarh. In a week, Shah Jahan was deposed and Aurangzeb’s reign as emperor had begun. But the new emperor was not yet finished with Prince Dara, who enjoyed considerable popularity among the common people and therefore posed a threat to his rule. In 1659, an Afghan chieftain whom Prince Dara had sought refuge with betrayed him and turned him over to Aurangzeb’s army. The prince was brought back to Delhi, mounted on an elephant in a degrading fashion, then paraded through the streets to emphasize Aurangzeb’s victory.52 Following this episode, Aurangzeb had the prince killed, then arranged for his severed head to be delivered to their father, whom Aurangzeb held in prison.53

The new emperor quickly proved himself eager to oppress non-Muslims living in his domains. He established moral censors, banned non-Islamic festivals, and re-established the jizya tax.54 He also launched a new campaign of religious desecration and destruction. In the course of a single year in northwest India his forces destroyed 252 Hindu temples.55 In Hyderabad, the emperor “plundered and desecrated the temples, and killed the Brahmins, he destroyed all newly built or rebuilt Hindu temples and replaced them with mosques.”56 He even changed the name of the city of Mathura to Islamabad (not the same city as the current capital of Pakistan) to emphasize the cultural appropriation that had taken place.

Aurangzeb’s entire reign was marked by nearly continual warfare. His armies were continually engaged in attempting to expand the Mughal Empire’s borders. At the same time, there was also a long list of rebellions within the empire. The fact was, despite his efforts Aurangzeb was unable to force the conformity or conversion to Islam that he desired. In the end, Aurangzeb devoted 26 years of his life to battling for the Deccan.Although successful in the field, the Mughal Empire itself was on its last legs. In the words of historian Stanley Wolpert:

The conquest of the Deccan … was in many ways a Pyrrhic victory, costing an estimated hundred thousand lives a year during its decade of futile chess game warfare. The expense in gold and rupees can hardly be accurately estimated.57

His efforts made the Mughals highly unpopular among the people. Even the aged Aurangzeb would confess to his son, “I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.”58

THE MASSIVE USE OF SLAVERY

From the very beginning, slavery was a key source of profit for Muslims in India. The first successful invasions under Muhammad bin Qasim were reportedly very lucrative in terms of human chattel. We know that when one large batch of prisoners was tallied up so that a fifth could be sent back to the Caliph as per Islamic law, bin Qasim’s forces sent back thousands of Hindus taken in the conquest of Sindh.59 Mahmud of Ghazni reportedly netted 500,000 slaves during one of his 17 invasions of the subcontinent—a number so enormous some later historians have been tempted to deny it. Again, we know that when Mahmud attacked the Punjab in 1010, “slaves were so plentiful that they became very cheap; and men of respectability in their native land [India] were degraded by becoming slaves of common shop-keepers in Ghazni.”60

The Muslims used an interesting little rule to determine how they would handle slaves and converts. If a soldier on the battlefield embraced Islam his life would be spared and he would be a free man. Anyone who was made a captive, however, was counted as a slave. Even if they later embraced Islam, this change in creed would not lead to a change in status. Because women and children were invariably made prisoners outside the battlefield, they never even had the option—they were slaves from the start.61

Under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, fewer Indians were exported as slaves in favor of keeping them in-country. The sheer scale of slavery under the Islamic empires is difficult to convey. To illustrate, Ala-ud-din had 50,000 slaves just in his personal service and an additional 70,000 who served as laborers on his buildings. Just about anyone who held any kind of status in the Islamic empires typically owned slaves. Furthermore, since it was a matter of political opinion that wealth bred insurrection, Muslim rulers typically took steps to impoverish their Hindu populace. Peasants were often forced to sell their own children into slavery to match their rulers’ demands for payment.62

It was also common for Muslims to debauch and mutilate their slaves. One means of doing so was the practice of keeping ghilman—which means effeminate boys used for sexual favors. Although religion frowned upon it, the practice was so widespread among Muslim nobility as to constitute a fashionable practice. Traces of the practice can still be found in the use of dancing boys in Afghanistan, in fact. The keeping of such slaves at times produced political disaster.

Although Islam was not technically in favor of eunuchs (regarding it as mutilation), the making of eunuchs was widespread—particularly in India. “A Muslim king was unthinkable without his harem; a harem was inconceivable without eunuchs.”63 They were so much needed that even though Aurangzeb tried to forbid the practice for religious reasons, 22,000 men were emasculated in Hyderabad in 1659 to satisfy the demand. It was not unheard of for fathers to turn their own sons into eunuchs and hand them over to Muslim governors in order to get out of paying their taxes.64

The fate of female slaves was to be used as sex objects. Islam limited men to only four wives, but there was no limit on the number of sex slaves a man could own. Consequently, it became a measure of opulence and power for rulers to maintain extensive harems. Akbar himself was said to have 5,000 women in his harem.65

The capture and enslavement of women throughout India for sexual slavery was systematic and extensive. “The special interest of Muslims in sex slavery was universal and widespread and a plethora of evidence is available in contemporary Persian chronicles.”66 In times of prosperity the harem would continue normally, but as soon as misfortune struck it was common for slave girls to flee the premises without remorse. Hindu women who had been taken from their families or husbands were known to take their own lives— sometimes doing so en masse—when given the change.67

As Muslim rule entered its final decline in the early 18th century, the old system broke down with tragic results. The harems were no longer supportable financially. Slave girls would leave and take up as dancing girls or prostitutes in the nearest cities to fend for themselves. Eunuch guards likewise took to the streets as petty criminals or male prostitutes.68 The consequences of Islamic rule are never so disastrous as when its victims are left to fend for themselves—with little left in terms of skills or dignity.

RESISTANCE

The story of Indian civilization in the face of Islamic invasion is not merely a tale of victimhood. It is important to highlight the atrocities committed in the name of jihad over more than a millennium because we live in a climate where such things are often whitewashed. Yet it would be a mistake to forget that many of the thrusts of jihad met with heroic resistance. In the face of a brutal and unscrupulous enemy which baffled Hindus by providing religious sanction to some of the worst in human behavior, many Indians deserve recognition for their resistance to oppression.

The Sikh Martyrs are an example of such resistance. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion that began in the 16th century in the Indian Punjab, led by a series of ten gurus and a holy scripture compiled by its fifth guru, Guru Arjan. That same Guru Arjan became the first of the Sikh Martyrs and a key turning point in their religious history in 1606 when the Muslim emperor Jahangir had him tortured to death for stirring up religious “trouble” (many Muslims were converting to Sikhism at this time).

Later, during the reign of Aurangzeb, the ninth guru Tegh Bahadur made public opposition to efforts to convert all the people of Kashmir to Islam by force. The guru and three of his followers were seized and put in chains. The Sikhs were tortured to induce conversion, but when they refused they were executed. All four are still seen as martyrs to the religious freedom of Sikhs, Hindus, and all other non-Muslims in India.

Another force of resistance was the Hindu Marathas, led by their great warrior Shivaji. Using guerilla tactics and great daring, Shivaji made things miserable for the Mughals in the Deccan. In 1672, Shivaji achieved one of the great Hindu military victories over a Muslim army at the Battle of Salher. Aided by a magnificent cavalry charge, Shivaji’s army routed Mughal forces in the open field.69

Shivaji was famous as a resourceful figure. Once, he was treacherously seized by the emperor while under a flag of truce and held in the Mughals’ great fort at Agra. Shivaji feigned sickness and began to send large baskets with gifts to the Brahmins as if made by a man hoping for a recovery of health. After many days of this, his guards became accustomed to seeing the large baskets leaving the home where he was staying and stopped examining them closely. Shivaji and his son then stowed away in two of the baskets and so made their escape.

After a millennium of fighting against the gradual encroachment of Islam, Shivaji demonstrates that the religious and cultural pride of the Indian people still prospered and could inspire great victories against the usurpers.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND MUGHAL DECLINE

Through the East India Company the British Empire had held economic interests in India since the early 1600s. In 1757, the company found itself exercising political authority over part of India after a British military force protecting company interests defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal in battle. By this point, the old Mughal Empire was well in decline and from this one key shift many more would soon come. In 1765, the company received the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal emperor in three provinces.70

The India the British were dealing with by this point had been suffering from 1000 years of Islamic invasion and poor governance. All the British knew was that the Islamic rulers they dealt with were little better than despots with almost no concern for the welfare of their inhabitants. When the British began to see it as their duty to introduce civilized monarchy and notions of fair play to India, they didn’t realize they were reintroducing the concepts.71

By the 19th century the Mughal Empire was alive in name only. As the governance of various territories grew corrupt, inept, or indifferent, the East India Company acquired the true exercise of power. An unusual situation developed where portions of the country were administered by a private company while troops representing the British crown were on hand to ensure good order. By mid-century the British military was relying heavily on companies of native troops (called sepoys) in its Indian administration. A series of cultural misunderstandings and loose rumors led to an armed rebellion among select sepoy units in 1857—a complex event known as the Sepoy Mutiny.

The Sepoy Mutiny marked the official end of the Mughal Empire. The Mughals had long since declined to practical irrelevance, with little influence beyond ceremonial functions in Delhi. But some leaders of the rebellion turned to emperor Bahadur Shah as a symbolic figurehead. For his part, Bahadur Shah went along with it. After the British military restored order in 1858, Bahadur Shah was arrested, tried, and found guilty of sedition for his connection to the Mutiny. The last Mughal emperor spent his final years in exile, and India officially became a crown colony of the British Empire.

This political shift led to greater Indian—particularly Hindu—involvement in government affairs. Eventually, in the early 20th century this involvement produced nationalist agitation toward independence. As described in the chapter on Pakistan, Indian independence came with a deadly and destructive partition. Even today, in the 21st century, the jihad against India and Hindu civilization marches on with renewed vigor and fanaticism, while prospects for a lasting peace diminish.

The full measure of the Islamic destruction of India has not yet been taken. By one estimate, the period saw the destruction and death of some 80 million people. A land once famous for its natural bounty and enormous wealth was reduced by slavery, conquest and spoliation, and ruinous taxation into a backwards land which is still coping with modernization in the 21st century. Many of its greatest treasures have been defaced or destroyed by invaders filled with a mad hatred for its civilization.

What has Islam added to India? Prior to the Islamic invasions there were some 20 large centers of learning in India. Almost every one of them was destroyed, and the invaders did not establish a single one to take their place. Islam attempted to ban dancing, music, and wine—though many sultans enjoyed such pleasures, along with their opium. The greatest works of art Islam left behind in India are all mausoleums, mosques, or fortresses. The most famous of them all is the Taj Mahal. Islam did not enrich India—it plundered and denuded it of the wealth it already enjoyed.

Although India became independent of British control in 1947, it has yet to become free from jihad.