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

Islamic Imperialism in Indiaargues that the oppressive Muslim rule in India forced Hindus to abandon some of their well-evolvedtraditions. According to him, before reaching the age of maturity, girls were betrothed to young Hindu boys,so that they could be protected from Muslim predators. The Muslim rule, therefore, aggravated the institutionof child-marriage in India. The British rulers went to great lengths to suppress the institution.Even today, this is a reality for the Hindu minorities (and other non-Muslims) in Bangladesh andPakistan, where there are high rates of kidnapping and rape of Hindu women. The incidence of kidnappingand rape of Hindu women in Pakistan and Bangladesh has been discussed already. According to my contactswith secular-minded Muslims and Hindus from Bangladesh, Hindu girls, especially the beautiful ones, areoften married off at younger age or sent over to India to save them from being kidnapped or raped by thuggishMuslims. According to the Pakistan Minorities Concern network, nearly 50 Hindu and 20 Christian girls werekidnapped in 2005; the majority of them were forcibly converted to Islam. Similar abduction and forcedconversion of non-Muslim girls and their forced marriage to Muslims occur in Palestine and Egypt etc. on aregular basis. If not for the pressure on Muslim governments to protect the human rights of their citizens frominternational organizations (e.g., the E.U. and U.N.), foreign governments (the U.S. in particular) and humanrights bodies, the fates of non-Muslim women in Islamic countries would have been quite different from whatthey are today. Slavery and sexual exploitation of non-Muslim women are still alive and well in certainMuslim countries in Africa and the Middle East (see next chapter).Islam created the deadly thuggee cultThuggees were a religio-cultural cult of the Hindu goddess Kali, which the British crushed in the 1830s. Theyused to engage in night-time robbery and strangle their victims—often the wayfarers and travelers—to death.They filled the streets of India with lawlessness and terror at nightfall. They had murdered tens, possiblyhundreds, of thousands of people. The British eradicated the cult through a process of selective assassination,covert operation, infiltration, solid police work and a clemency for former thuggees who cooperated andsurrendered. 634The name thag (thuggee) first appears in Ziauddin Barani’s Tahrikh-I Firoz Shahi. In the reign ofSultan Jalaluddin Feroz Shah Khilji (1290–96), records Barani, the sultan had captured one thousands thagsby befriending a member of their community. He pardoned them and deported to Lakhnauti. 635 The thuggeecult seems to have originated very early after Islamic depredators started their devastating assaults on thepopulation of India. We have noted that hundreds of thousands of Hindus had taken refuge in jungles duringthe Muslim rule. The rowdy and daring ones amongst them had taken to the profession of night-time robberyof highway caravans and travelers. Almost all medieval Islamic chronicles make mention of rebels—havingtaken refuge in the jungle hideouts and fastness of mountains—taken into highway robbery. Their homes andproperties plundered and burned down and the women and children carried away, they took to the jungle.Others, failing to meet the demand of exorbitant taxes, joined them. For survival, these jungle-dwellers tookto robbery; Muslim chroniclers and rulers call them despicable highway robbers. In time, they likely mixedreligious inspirations to give their desperate profession a boost. They often assembled under a spiritual head, aHindu monk.Ibn Battutah records that their caravan, consisting of ‘twenty-two horsemen, partly Arabs and partlyPersian and Turks,’ was attacked by a band of Hindu rebels including two horsemen, coming down from theinaccessible mountains of Multan. ‘My companions were men of courage and ability and we fought stoutlywith them killing one of the horsemen and about twelve of the foot-soldiers. I was hit by an arrow… We634. Thugee, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thugee635. Elliot & Dowson, Vol. III, p. 141192