pert wrote:Islamic apologetics claim Islam spread in India because lower caste Hindus converted to it to escape the caste system, can this be refuted?
manfred wrote:Well, that is not entirely accurate. Islam spread through India through conquest, violence and deception. Anything that could be used, such as the existing cast system, was of course used. Any means were quite acceptable.
It is an insult to the many thousands of victims of Islam in India to pretend that the foul ideology was spread with poetry. Muslim rulers and conquerors in India behaved with violence comparable to the fascists of later days.
here and also here
The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-dDin 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.”
Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty.
1.1367 Muhammad I launched a successful attack on Vijayanagara and slaughters 400,000 Hindu civilians, including 10,000 Brahmins amongst them, within a span of a week.
7.1423 Ahmad decides to erase the Kaffrs along the Tungabhadra river. He starts systematic destruction of all temples in the region along with large scale cow-slaughter to drive home his message to the Hindus. Upto 500,000 Hindus were killed in two months.
Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus
pr126 wrote:In any case, it was still a forced conversion. There was a choice of remaining the oppressed (and killed) or becoming the oppressor.
We know that polytheist only had two choices. Convert or die.
The third choice was only given to people of the book, Jews or Christians. Quran 9:29
The Indologist Stanley Wolpert, emeritus professor at UCLA,[63] says that:
the conquest of the Deccan, to which, Aurangzeb devoted the last 26 years of his life, was in many ways a Pyrrhic victory, costing an estimated hundred thousand lives a year during its last decade of futile chess game warfare. The expense in gold and rupees can hardly be accurately estimated. Aurangzeb's encampment was like a moving capital – a city of tents 30 miles in circumference, with some 250 bazaars, with a 1⁄2 million camp followers, 50,000 camels and 30,000 elephants, all of whom had to be fed, stripped the Deccan of any and all of its surplus grain and wealth ... Not only famine but bubonic plague arose ... Even Aurangzeb, had ceased to understand the purpose of it all by the time he was nearing 90 ... "I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing," the dying old man confessed to his son in February 1707.[
As to Muhammad, Firishtah glories in the statement that he had slaughtered 500,000 Hindus, and so wasted the districts of the Carnatic that for several decades they did not recover their natural population.
pr126 wrote:In any case, it was still a forced conversion. There was a choice of remaining the oppressed (and killed) or becoming the oppressor.
We know that polytheist only had two choices. Convert or die.
The third choice was only given to people of the book, Jews or Christians. Quran 9:29
Initially the godless Umayyads, allowed Hindus dhimmi status – possibly because of their large numbers, resistance to Islam and their value as a source of tax income. This violates Islamic text and law which demands death or conversion for idolaters and polytheists. When Sultan Iltutmish (d 1236) was asked why Hindus weren’t given the choice between death and Islam, he replied:
“but at the moment in India...the Muslims are so few that they are like salt (in a large dish) ...however after a few years when in the capital and the regions and all the small towns, when the Muslims are well established and the troops are larger....it would be possible to give Hindus the choice of death or Islam” (cited in Lal [c] p 538)
The Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi,11 an autobiographical memoir of Jahangir, mentions that on one occasion he inquired from his father why all inhabitants of India could not be made Musalmans, and Akbar is reported to have said: �My dear child� with all of God�s creatures, I am at peace; why should I permit myself, under any consideration, to be the cause of molestation or aggression to any one? Besides, are not five parts in six of mankind either Hindus or aliens to the faith; and were I to be governed by motives of the kind suggested in your inquiry, what alternative can I have but to put them all to death? I have thought it therefore my wisest plan to let these men alone.�12
Jahangir is supposed to have repeated this ratio at another place. �Of the whole population of Hindustan it is notorious that five parts in six are composed of Hindus, the adorers of images, and the whole concerns of trade and manufacture� are entirely under the management of these classes. Were it, therefore, ever so much my desire to convert them to the true faith, it would be impossible, otherwise than through excision of millions of men� but the massacre of a whole people can never be any business of mine.�13
pr126 wrote:In any case, it was still a forced conversion. There was a choice of remaining the oppressed (and killed) or becoming the oppressor.
We know that polytheist only had two choices. Convert or die.
The third choice was only given to people of the book, Jews or Christians. Quran 9:29
When an Islamic state was established over parts of northern India, the Ulama raised a great controversy. By now the interpreters of Islamic law had become divided into four schools - Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafii. The Hanafi school alone was in favour of extending the status of zimmîs to the Hindus. The other three schools were insistent that the only choice the Hindus had was between Islam and death. Ziyauddin Barani voiced his opinion against the Hanafi school when he wrote as follows in his Fatwa-i-Jahãndãri: “If Mahmud… had gone to India once more, he would have brought under his sword all the Brahmans of Hind who, in that vast land, are the cause of the continuance of the laws of infidelity and of the strength of idolators; he would have cut off the heads of two or three hundred thousand Hindu chiefs. He would not have returned his Hindu-slaughtering sword to its scabbard until the whole of Hind had accepted Islam. For Mahmud was a Shafiite, and according to Imam Shafii the decree for Hindus is Islam or death, that is to say, they should either be put to death or accept Islam. It is not lawful to accept jiziya from Hindus who have neither a prophet nor a revealed book.”
The Muslim monarchs, however, knew better. They did not live in a fool’s paradise like the mullahs and the sufis. The exponents of the “law” of Islam lived amidst leisure and luxury in towns protected by Islamic armies. They could very well afford to blow any amount of hot air about the “beauties” of their “religion”. The Muslim monarchs, on the other hand, had to live mostly on the battlefields, and could feel in their guts the power equations of a situation in which they had to wage a constant war against stiff Hindu resistance and repeated reassertion of Hindu independence. They had discovered very soon that Hindus hated Islam as a system of black barbarism, and would fight rather than submit to this criminal creed.
The mullahs and the sufis howled at this “sacrilege”. Barani mourned: “Should the king consider the payment of a few tankas by way of jiziya as sufficient justification for their allowing all possible freedom to the infidels to observe and demonstrate all orders and detail of infidelity, to read the misleading literature of their faith, and to propagate their teachings, how could the true religion get the upper hand over other religions, and how could the emblems of Islam be held high? How will the true faith prevail if rulers allow the infidels to keep their temples, adorn their idols, and to make merry during their festivals with beating of drums and dhols, singing and dancing?”
Balban became the sultan in 1265 assuming the title of Ghiyasuddin Balban. As the commander of the previous sultan, Balban showed great military prowess, leading numerous expeditions against the infidels. After assuming power, his first job was, as noted already, to exterminate hundreds of thousands of recalcitrant Hindu rebels, the Muwattis etc. He ordered to ‘destroy the villages of the marauders, to slay the men, to make prisoners of the women and children.’[7]
Afghani, Ahmad Shah Abdali attacked 3 times (1757, 1760, 1761) around Mattra, Delhi, Luni, winning the Third Battle of the Panipat against the resistant Marathas in 1761. He slaughtered hundreds of thousands, beheaded and burnt people alive and looted,
Nehru notes Islam: [color=#FF0000]“made its caste system, which still had an element of flexibility in it, more rigid and fixed’ [/color](Khan p 250)
Under Islam the lower castes increased as people were stripped of their wealth and position right down to farmers whose property was taken while people were subjected to crushing taxes –hence many were pushed to the lowest level.
Even Nehru who gives a rosy picture of Islam noted:
“The Moslems who came to India from outside brought no new technique or political or economic structure. In spite of a religious belief in the brotherhood of Islam, they were class bound and feudal in outlook. In technique and in the methods of production and industrial organisation, they were inferior to what prevailed in India..” (cited in Khan p 185)
Jahangir, in his autobiography "Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi" wrote that under Akbar and Jahangir "five to six hundred thousand (500,000 to 600,000) Hindus were killed." (Tarikh-i-Salim: Trans. By Price, pp. 225-6)
Abbas Khan Sherwani in his chronicle Tarikh-i-Farishtah recorded: "The Hindoos were pursued and slain by (Muslim) allies with such success, that the river was dyed red with their blood. It is computed by the best authorities, that above one hundred thousand (100,000) infidels were slain during the action and in pursuit.
grooveguru wrote:Secondly, rulers like Alu-ud-din Khilji, had a set number of Kafirs to be killed every year - the modes being trampling under elephants, pouring hot oil, etc. Of course, Jaziya was also an option. So was conversion. The Slave dynasty was also known to be particularly inhumane.
The Mughal dynasty, well they were so paranoid about Hindus, they did everything in their bit to control that. Jaziya was introduced. Atleast 10,000, if not more, temples were destroyed. Even major ones like those at Kashi and Mathura.
When we can raise your voice for 2,000 Muslims (the official figures are much less) killed in Gujarat and we should, we must cry from the roof tops for [b]2.4 million Hindus killed in 1971[/b]
The king of Benares was the greatest king in India, and possessed the largest territory, extending lengthwise from the borders of China to the province of Malawa (Malwa), and in breadth from the sea to within ten days' journey to Lahore. When he was informed of this inroad, he collected his forces, and in the year 590 (1194 A.D.), he entered the territories of the Muhammadans, [p.108] Shahabu-d din Ghori marched forth to oppose him, and the two armies met on the river Jumna, which is a river about as large as the Tigris at Musal. The Hindu prince had seven hundred elephants, and his men were said to amount to a million. There were many nobles in his army. There were Mussulmans in that country since the days of Mahmud bin Subuktigin, who continued faithful to the law of Islam, and constant in prayer and good works. When the two armies met there was great carnage; the infidels were sustained by their numbers, the Musulmans by their courage, but in the end the infidels fled, and the faithful were victorious. The slaughter of the Hindus was immense; none were spared except women and children, and the carnage of the men went on until the earth was weary
Even Nehru who gives a rosy picture of Islam noted:
“The Moslems who came to India from outside brought no new technique or political or economic structure. In spite of a religious belief in the brotherhood of Islam, they were class bound and feudal in outlook. In technique and in the methods of production and industrial organisation, they were inferior to what prevailed in India..” (cited in Khan p 185)
This is in line with classifications that were clearly defined in the Qur’an <<Qur’an 43:32 Is it they who apportion thy Lord's mercy ? We have apportioned among them their livelihood in the life of the world, and raised some of them above others in rank that some of them may take labour from others;
In 1398, Timur the Lame, known more familiarly to us as Tamberlaine, a devout Muslim, the "scourge of God", roared in from the north-west and laid north India to waste. In the space of six months he is believed to have been responsible for 5 million deaths.
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