THE%20SINDH%20STORY

eauty and thereby recognise His Grace unto them.” He was illiterate and was
never known to write anything himself, but he composed the most famous and
eloquent book in Arabic literature. He created in his followers a thirst for
knowledge. He declared: “He who leaves his home in search of knowledge,
walks in the path of god ... and the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of
the martyr.”
The Prophet neither preached, nor envisaged the bloody conflict of rival religious
creeds. He himself had not indulged in wars of aggression. Conscious Arab
expansion and military conquests for baser motives was a later development.
Partly, the causes were economic, as usual. A deficient irrigation system and a
poor soil, produced, in the growing population, hunger for fertile land. Political
causes too existed. Byzantium and Persia, exhausted by war and mutual
devastation, afflicted by abnormal taxation and corrupt administration, and
adjoining kingdom weakened by oppression, produced irresistible temptations
for conquest.
In 705 A.D., Walid-I became the King. His reign lasted for the next ten years. Al
Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf (Hajjaj for short) was his Viceroy and Governor of Arabia. Sindh
had even before attracted the attention of the Arabs during the reign of the
second Khalifa. In the next 60 to 70 years, ten attempts at conquest had aborted.
The aim of the final invasion, as the ‘Chachnama’ makes clear, was not the
propagation of the faith but, it was a commercial-imperial enterprise. To improve
the disastrous balance-sheet by show of huge profit, the conquered people must
pay tribute and taxes and yield treasure, slaves and women. Mr. Malkani has a
fascinating account of this encounter between the Sindhis and the Arabs. The
ruling King Dahir was the son of Chach. The father was a scheming Brahmin
who had managed to become the lover of the reigning Queen and after her
husband’s death, made himself the King. He ruled for 40 years and he repulsed
the first Arab attack on the part of Debal [Fort] which, in all likelihood, was near
Bhambhore, a little town 40 miles east of Karachi. Hajjaj in Dahir’s time,
appointed his 17-year old son-in-law, Mohammed Bin Kasim, General and gave
detailed instructions for the assault on Sindh. Malkani is right that Sindh would
not have fallen, but for the intrigues and betrayals of the Sindhis themselves.
King Dahir could have easily repulsed the attack, but he acted with incredible
foolishness.
In September 1979, on the Defence of Pakistan Day, a long article appeared in the
“Pakistan Times” on Mohammed Bin Kasim, as a military strategist. The
assessment was military, neutral and fair to the armies of both sides. Historical
truth, however, is anathema to regimes; such as, the one existing in Pakistan. The
Chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research,
condemned the writer of the said article, in terms which are extremely revealing
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