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motivated by the word of God and disciplined by communal prayer, bands of nomadic raiders were transformed into an organized fighting force, whose hunger was now projected outward beyond the desert’s rim into a world sharply divided by faith into two distinct zones. On the one side lay the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam; on the other, the realms still to be converted, the Dar al-Harb, the House of War.... They besieged cities and learned how to take them. Damascus fell, then Jerusalem itself; Egypt surrendered in 641, Armenia in 653; within twenty years the Persian Empire had collapsed and
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From 1206 to 1526, it comprised a total of five dynasties, with only one powerful sultan emerging from each dynasty. Sequentially, these were the Mamluk, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi dynasties.
The conquests so exultantly referred to by the court chroniclers of the Sultanate had an Indian side of the picture. It was one of ceaseless resistance offered with relentless heroism; of men, from boys in teens to men with one foot in the grave, flinging away their lives for freedom [emphasis added]; of warriors defying the invaders from fortresses for months, sometimes for years, in one case, with intermission, for a century; of women in thousands courting fire to save their honour; of children whose bodies were flung into the wells by their parents so that they might escape slavery; of
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History, if it should serve its purpose of stirring emotion, instigating inquiry and directing thought, must first of all be exciting. Is it impossible to be both truthful and warm-hearted, both factual and moving? Are imagination and conscience necessarily enemies to each other? In reconciling them is the art of the true historian. The flow of the story must be swift, vivid, vibrant.
With her action, she had also inaugurated what later became a recurrent feature among Hindu women whose kingdom had been defeated by Muslim armies: Jauhar.
Jaisimha is separated from us and Muhammad Qasim is at the gates. God forbid that we should owe our liberty to these outcast cow-eaters! Our honour would be lost! Our respite is at an end, and there is nowhere any hope of escape; let us collect wood, cotton, and oil, for I think that we should burn ourselves and go to meet our husbands. If any wish to save herself she may.
Mulastana—the original name of the Islamicised ‘Multan’—is a great city hailing from untold antiquity.
According to Hindu lore, Mulastana was founded by Rishi Kashyapa and was the capital of the Trigarta kingdom when the Great Kurukshetra War occurred.
At a more profound level, Mulastana was one of the most sacred pilgrimage centres for Hindus, on par with Kashi, Prayagraj, Mathura and Kanchipuram.
Once again, Hindu betrayal favoured him. An unnamed citizen of Mulastana revealed a vital secret to Qasim in exchange for pecuniary and other benefits.
Jalam bin Shayban, the leader of the Ismaili Shia Qarmatians broke it, slaughtered the Brahmin purohits en masse and converted the grand Aditya Temple into a Jami Masjid in the mid-10th century.
The first was a Dharmavijayi51, which refers to a conqueror who after defeating his enemy, allows him to rule the territory as before but exerts administrative control over him. The second was a Lobhavijayi52—a conqueror who, after defeating his enemy, snatches both his territory and his treasury but spares the defeated king’s life. And the third was an Asuravijayi53—a conqueror who not only grabs his vanquished enemy’s territory and treasury but puts him to death and takes his entire family, including women and children, as slaves.
In Central Asia, the idolaters had been rooted out. But this experiment failed in Sind as Islam was confronted with a faith which, though idolatrous, defied death and looked at life in this world as one link in the eternal chain of births and deaths.
If ancient India vanished forever with the invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni, the sputtering vestiges of the Arab Muslims in India also disappeared around the same time. From this point onwards, large parts of India would witness and suffer the prolonged, ruthless and oppressive domination of Turkish Muslim rule for more than four hundred years. To the native Indian tongue, the word ‘Turushka’ evoked repellent connotations of barbarism, Hindu genocide, forcible conversions, wholesale gangrape of their women, repeated and large-scale temple destructions, mindless cow slaughter and industrial-scale
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Hindu kings had largely forgotten what K.M. Munshi calls the ‘Aryavarta Consciousness’ which ‘threw up values and institutions of great vigour and tenacity’3 and for centuries, had enabled them to easily ward off and drive away alien invasions from the time of Alexander, the Bactrian Greeks, the Kushanas, the Sakas and the Huns.
Aryavarata was the sacred land of Dharma, the elevated path to Heaven and to Moksha; where men were nobler than the Devatas themselves; where all knowledge, thought and worship were rooted in the Vedas, revealed by the Devatas themselves.
Peshawar was the first city that Mahmud selected for the maiden expedition of his holy war against Hind in 1001. This ancient city originally named Purushapura (City of Men),
‘The conquest of India is the conquest of culture by those who lacked it [emphasis added].’
The contrast with the great Hindu dynasties from the ancient times cannot be more pronounced. Barring a handful of exceptions, dynastic succession was generally smooth and vetted and accepted by everyone in accordance with the tenets of both Raja Dharma3 and Kshatriya Dharma. Hindu political philosophy lays great emphasis on the personal character and conduct of the ruler who was, most of all, anxious about the acceptance of his suzerainty by the majority of, if not the entire, citizenry. This in turn emerges from the same political philosophy which ordains that the king should always strive
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Prithviraja III was still a minor when he was coronated to the throne of Ajayameru or Ajmer.
Happy Hindustan, the splendour of Religion, where the Law finds perfect honour and security. The whole country, by means of the sword of our holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. Islam is triumphant, idolatry is subdued. Had not the Law granted exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax, the very name of Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished [emphasis added].
Qutub-ud-din then marched towards Kol (modern Aligarh)
When he returned to Delhi, he decided to commemorate this great victory by building the first-ever mosque in the city. But it was not enough to simply build the Quwwat-ul-Islam, the ‘glory of Islam’. It necessitated an emphatic spectacle of what this glory meant in actual practice. Accordingly, he demolished26 twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples and used their debris as construction material. The Quwwat-ul-Islam is noted27 for the Qutub Minar, the ‘tower of victory’, celebrating and stamping the first-ever Muslim conquest in the heart of Delhi. The same applies to the ‘construction’ of the
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Changiz Khan, who was probably not desirous of violating a neutral state, returned from Afghanistan. Delhi was thus saved. Had he chosen a different course, the Sultanate of Delhi would have been finished in its infancy [emphasis added]. But the country, in all likelihood, would have gained, for the Mongols, unlike the Turks, would gradually have merged in Hindu society as they were Shamanists and had much in common with the Indian people [emphasis added].
The infidels simply wouldn’t stop fighting back.
Mahakala Temple complete with the evening Nada-Aradhana, the performance of music and dance before Shiva. Quite naturally, it was one of the great hubs of idolatry. With a savage stroke, Iltutmish demolished54 this exquisite temple—a majestic, living proof and a profoundly dignified symbol of the possibilities of what innate devotion and stainless piety could accomplish when it finds unsullied expression in architecture and refined sculpture. A work of three hundred painstaking years and countless generations of dedicated, joyous, backbreaking work, an awe-inspiring system of transmitting
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Ruling from Lakhnavati,
