islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

The Arab–Islamic ImperialismThe pre-Muslim past of India was just a caboodle of decay, superstition, inequality, and oppression.Nothing credible or worthy ever took place within her boundaries. It was Islam that brought all thatIndians could boast of with pride as the positives of their civilization: the Sufis, kebab, ghazals, 344religious devotion, human brotherhood, and of course Amir Khasrau. Did Arabia not wallow in thedarkness of incompetent ignorance till the light of Islam brought her to the threshold of culture? 345When the same historians write about the British rule in India, they find it to be the darkest period in India’shistory—a period of tyranny, oppression and extreme exploitation—with the sole aim of plunder andeconomic extraction for swelling the British coffer.This Islam the benefactor view of history writing is widespread globally, as notes Ibn Warraq: ‘Openany modern introductory book on Islam and the chances are you will find that it begins by singing the praiseof a people who conquered, in an incredibly short period, half the civilized world—of a people whoestablished an empire that stretched from the banks of the Indus in the East to the shores of the Atlantic in theWest. The volume will recount in positively glowing terms a time when Muslims ruled over a vast populationof diverse peoples and cultures.’ 346 Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, writes on the spread of Islam: ‘TheArabs… in a fine frenzy of enthusiasm and with a dynamic energy, had spread out and conquered from Spainto the borders of Mongolia, carrying with them a brilliant culture…’ 347 No historian can get away with sucheffusive eulogy of the vast empires of Cyrus and Alexander the Great of the ancient world, much less so ofthe European empires of the more recent past.When modern historians cover the history of European colonial empires, the British and the Frenchones for example, they are invariably described in extremely negative, indeed derogatory, terms. Those arenarrated as a period of terrible exploitation, injustice, and misery brought upon the colonized people by theirforeign masters. European rules overseas are invariably labeled as colonialist or imperialist, which carries ashameful, degrading and negative connotation. If a British historian were to paint the picture of the Britishcolonial rule in a positive light with beneficial consequences, he/she would be pilloried, ridiculed andcastigated to the extreme.Intriguingly, the great majority of people of the world, including those on whom the Islamic rule wasbrutally imposed by foreign Muslim invaders, have rarely heard of anything called Islamic imperialism orcolonialism. Muslims, and even a large majority of the non-Muslims of the subcontinent, will neither believenor agree that the long period of Islamic hegemony over a vast area of the world, including their own country,can be rightly called imperialism or colonialism. The Arab, Persian, Turk and Berber Muslim invadersconquered many nations and imposed Islamic rule permanently in most instances. Muslims never considerthese Muslim rules in foreign lands to be imperial or colonial in nature. The PBS documentary on Islamichistory, widely used as teaching materials in American schools, calls the vast empire that Islam had foundedto be an empire of faith, not a colonial empire.As discussed in the previous chapter, Muslims believe that Islamic conquests were meant for humaneand charitable reasons. Islamic conquerors came, they hold, never to exploit but with the purpose of liberatingthe masses from the tyranny and oppression of incumbent rulers; they came for integrating with the nativesand for enriching and nourishing the conquered nations in the fields of economics, culture, arts, education andscience. In India, the Muslim rulers imported the one true faith—a religion of "social equality and justice" asits core value and things that apparently had never existed. The founding father of Pakistan, Muhammad AliJinnah, demanded this in a speech addressed to the American people in February 1948: ‘‘It (Islam) has taught344. ghazals are a kind of song345. Sharma, p. 111346. Ibn Warraq, p. 198347. Nehru (1946), p. 222116