6_Glorious_Epochs_of_Indian_History

5TH GLORIOUS EPOCH
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to keep these unwilling converts tied to the Islamic faith,
the Muslim armed soldiers had to keep a vigilant eye on
these foreign converts and to see every time if their faith in
Islam was shaken even a bit or whether they did not foment
any agitation to go back to their own religion**.
395-396. Gn the contrary in Spain, Greece, Serbia and
other countries where the Muslims in their turn were forced
to forsake Islam and court Christianity or on the pain of
death, the Christian rulers there had to keep a similar strict
watch on these Muslim converts. For the Muslims, too, never
thought that they were anyway defiled because of any food
they ate from the Christians or because they had marital or
extramarital relations with them. These forcibly converted
Muslims were on the alert to see if the ruling power became
weak at any place and immediately revolted, hoisting any
green cloth that they could catch hold of as their flag and
re-entered the Muslim fold*'. They would even compel, if
possible, the Christians themselves to accept Islam, and
thus avenge the wrong done to them. This experience
else where made the early Arabian and other Muslim invaders
of India fear at least for a century or two that they would
be obliged to use military force alone to keep the newly
converted Hindus tied down to the Islamic faith.
397-398. But when they invaded Sindh and forced
conversion to the Islamic faith on the people there, these
Muslim invaders came to realize soon enough that although
the Hindus' pride for their religion and their loyalty to it
was no less ardent than that of any other people, and at
times it was far more fervent and irrepressible than that of
all of them,—why, for this very reason,—it was very easy
for the Muslims and others to enforce physical conversion on
the Hindus, if, however, mental conversion was far too
difScult.
399. This did not merely pertain to the time when the
Muslims invaded India. Even before the rise of Islam, the
Syrian Christians, who were very generously—in other words
suicidally—given shelter by the Hindu kings in the Malabar*^