Note: Following excerpts were taken from Khushwant Singh’s non-fiction work ‘India: An Introduction’.
Islam came to India before the Muslim conquerors. Arab traders brought Islam to the western coast within a few years of the death of the Prophet. Then in AD 712 the seventeen-year-old Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sindh. This incursion was, however, as the celebrated historian Lane Poole remarked, “an episode in the history of India and Islam, a triumph without results”. One might qualify that remark by saying that it did have one result, it showed the Muslims that India was rich and easy to conquer.
It took the Muslims another two centuries before they could mount a full-scale invasion of India. This was left to Mahmud of Ghazni. Between AD 1000 and AD 1027, i.e., in twenty seven years he invaded India seventeen times. He decimated Hindu opposition, destroyed Hindu temples and sacked Hindu cities along the Jumna and the Ganges. Ever since, the name Mahmud Ghazni has stunk in the nostrils of the Hindus – and the rebuilding of Somnath temple attained symbolic significance for them.
The real conqueror-founder of the Islamic empire in India was Mohammed Ghori. His first invasion in AD 1175 brought him as far as Multan. His second attempt was thwarted, but in his third and fourth invasions he overran most of the Punjab. Then he came up against united Indian opposition, led by the Rajput chief, Prithvi Raj Chauhan. In the battle of Tarain, fought in 1191, the Rajputs defeated the invaders. The next year Mohammed Ghori came back on the very same battlefield of Tarain, defeated and slew Prithvi Raj. Ghori’s viceroy, Qutubuddin Aibak, who later succeeded him as Sultan, captured Delhi and Mathura. A contemporary historian has recorded: Temples were converted to mosques and abodes of goodness… The very name of idolatry was annihilated. 50,000 men came under the collar of slavery.
The end of the fifteenth century is an appropriate time to make a balance sheet of the achievements and failures of the 500 years of Muslim presence in India.
Islam had certainly gained a firm foothold in the country. But it was not the massacres and the destruction of innumerable temples which gained its converts. Forcible conversions were, as they usually are, for a short duration. Moreover, violence was repaid by violence: as soon as Muslim power weakened, Hindus wreaked vengeance on the Muslims. The majority of the early Muslims were, in fact, Turks, Afghans, Persians and Arabs who came with the invading armies. With these Muslim communities as the nucleus, Islam spread amongst Hindu tribes – sometimes because of the political influence of the Muslims, more often through the proselytisation of Mullahs, especially the Sufi mystics. Most of the converts were Hindus of the lower castes. They could no longer turn to Buddhism: there was no Buddhists left to turn to; their only escape from persecution by the upper castes was Islam.
Kalampedia 