Thursday, June 25, 2009

Occidental Soapbox: Islamic Crusades Episode 6: India's Millennial Burden

  • Occidental Soapbox: Islamic Crusades Episode 6: India's Millennial Burden

  • http://www.diigo.com/06dhe

    tags: no_tag


    • The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.
    • Before the Islamic juggernaut burst in from the west, the native religions of these lands were Hinduism, Buddhism
    • The Jihad against India was extraordinarily brutal even by Islamic standards. This is because unlike the so-called people of the book, Christians and Jews, who enjoyed some basic rights as subjected Dhimmis… Hindus and Buddhists were considered idolaters; the lowest of the low, worthy only of death.
    • The first permanent Muslim foothold on the subcontinent was achieved with Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of Sindh in 711 A.D.
    • By the end of the tenth century however, newly Islamized Turkic tribes began to expand the Ummah into what is now Northwest India proper. Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), who was also known as the "Sword of Islam," mounted seventeen plundering expeditions between 997 and 1027 into North India.
    • A subsequent conqueror, Muhammad Khilji had the distinction of single-handedly wiping out Buddhist culture on the subcontinent by the end of the 12th century.
    • Khiliji’s brutality also incited the first case of Jauhar in India.

    • Another Turkic Muslim warlord, Timur, known as Tamerlane in the West, crossed the Indus River in 1398 and eventually captured the capital of Delhi.
    • Timur explains the motivation for his conquest in his personal memoirs:
    • but I was undetermined in my mind whether I should direct my expedition against the infidels of China or against the infidels and polytheists of India. In this matter I sought an omen from the Kuran, and the verse I opened upon was this, “O Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers and treat them with severity” [Quran 66:9]. My great officers told me that the inhabitants of Hindustan were infidels and unbelievers. In obedience to the order of Almighty Allah I determined on an expedition against them.
    • I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death.
    • One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain...on the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty...no other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword.
    • By the early 1500’s the mantle of Islamic power in India had passed to the first Mughal Emperor, Babar.
    • Based on Muslim chronicles and demographic calculations Indian historian K.S. Lal has estimated that the Hindu population of India decreased by 80 million during the millennium of Islamic rule.
    • Yet despite a deliberate policy of genocide and conversion over the 1,000 years of partial or complete Muslim rule, the majority of the population miraculously retained their Hindu religion as modernity dawned on the subcontinent.
    • * CORRECTION - Sikhism was not present at the time of the Islamic conquest. Sikhism evolved in the early 16th Century as a militaristic response to Muslim tyranny.