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

Islamic Imperialism in IndiaNehru’s assertion that Islam brought a civilization-changing vitality to India is quite hyperbolic, ifnot unfounded. We do not see anything worth noting. Alberuni, an eyewitness of Sultan Mahmud’s invasions,has left a totally opposite opinion on the issue as already noted. Nehru himself says that it was the Indianmaster-builders who used their brains and labor to build what the Muslim invaders wanted reflecting theirreligious symbols; and many aspects of this, too, were usurped by Muslims from the pre-Islamic Persian,Egyptian and Byzantine civilizations. Nehru himself says that Mahmud took large numbers of Indianarchitects and builders with him to Ghazni for building a magnificent mosque there. 644 Obviously, Musliminvaders even did not know how to build what they wanted. No doubt, it was the Indian brain, Indian labor (inthe form of wretched slaves), and Indian wealth (obtained through reinless plunder and exorbitant taxes) weremost liberally poured into these useless follies of no values to India’s natives. These institutions, instead,became the strong fortress from where horrible persecution and exploitation of the common masses wereunleashed over the centuries.Nehru is probably correct that Indian civilization was stagnating. This may give one an impressionthat Indian civilization had become obscurantist, which so easily turned to darkness and gave way tonumerous social ills with the coming of Muslim invaders. It did not know how to rejuvenate and progress.There is, however, no ground for such an assumption. On the basis of what Muslim invaders wanted, Indianbuilders, craftsmen and artisans created magnificent buildings and monuments, the so-called Indo-Muslimarchitecture. And as soon as the British came with progressive ideas—freedom, secular education, rule of law,democracy and human rights—non-Muslim Indians quickly embraced them with open arms, a hallmark ofIndian civilization since ancient times. ‘The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning ofEurope and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims… out of old religious scruples stood aside,’notes Naipaul. 645 Historically speaking, Muslims took very little interest in secular education and learning.During the British rule, Muslims staunchly resisted modernity and did not avail themselves of the Britishinstitutedmodern education and learning. They considered secular learning un-Islamic and assiduouslyavoided it. Consequently, they were left behind, while the Hindus, availing of the new learning opportunities,progressed and prospered. In East Bengal for example, Hindus were the minority prior to the Partition, but the‘educational institutions of East Bengal were almost entirely built by the Hindus… 90 percent of the teacherswere Hindus.’ 646The British Raj, having gained control of most of India in about 1850, albeit with the disturbances ofSepoy Mutiny of 1857–58 in some areas, started reorganizing India’s education system by founding threeuniversities in 1857: in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. In the new environment of educational, scientific andcultural intellectualism, India’s literary and scientific geniuses, mostly Hindus, bloomed within a short time.In about half a century, Indian poets and scientists were vying for the Nobel Prize. India’s greatest minds—forexample the Nobel laureates, namely Rabindranath Tagore, the Chandra Shekhars, Hargobind Khorana andAbdus Salam, and other literary and scientific luminaries, namely Jagadish Chandra Bosu, Satyan Bose,Prafulla Chandra Roy, Nazrul Islam, and Allama Iqbal et al.—all bloomed in the new intellectualenvironment, many within a very short time. The great reformers of religion, tradition and culture of Indiansociety, namely Raja Ram Mohan Roy (d. 1833), Swami Vivekananda (d. 1902) and Ishwar ChandraBidyasagar (d. 1891) et al., also bloomed very quickly under the British-fostered socio-political atmosphere,creative intellectualism and culture of freedom. These factors clearly suggest that the vigorous and creativecivilization of India, brutally suppressed and deprived of opportunities by Muslim invaders and rulers, waseagerly waiting to flourish at the earliest opportunity.644. Ibid, p. 155645. Naipaul (1998), p. 247646. Kamra, p. 3194