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

Islamic Jihadand force the remaining inhabitants to embrace Islam. He used to place on the throne a converted prince, whomust run the affairs of the state according to Islamic laws and oversee the propagation of Islam and thesuppression of idol-worship. One such converted prince was Nawasa Shah. After Sultan Mahmud retired fromIndia, records al-Utbi, ‘Satan had got the better of Nawasa Shah, for he was again apostatizing towards thepit of plural worship… So the Sultan went swifter than the wind in that direction, and made the sword reekwith the blood of his enemies.’ 188 This means that Sultan Mahmud did not simply convert the Hindus by thesword in his campaigns in India, but he also made it sure that the converts did not revert to their ancestral faithafter his return to Ghazni. We will see in Chapter VI (Section: 1947 Riots and Massacres: Who isresponsible?) that, in the course of India’s Partition in 1947, a few million Hindus and Sikhs were convertedto Islam at the pain of death in East and West Pakistan.Conversion through enslavementIn the first successful encroachment into India, Muhammad bin Qasim put large numbers of men to death inDebal, Brahmanabad and Multan. It appears that the adult men of weapon-bearing age, who fell within thereach of the Muslim army in the course of the assaults, were ruthlessly slaughtered. Undoubtedly, many of thegrown-up men fled in all directions to escape the sword, leaving the vulnerable women and children behind,who were carried away as slaves. Chachnama records that Qasim’s assault on Rawar yielded 60,000 slaves.In the final stages of his conquest of Sindh, says Chachnama, about 100,000 women and children wereenslaved. 189The number of women and children enslaved by Muslim invaders has not been recordedsystematically for all the campaigns. It can be surmised that each of Qasim’s major assaults in Sehwan,Dhalila, Brahmanabad and Multan yielded similar numbers of captives. His brief exploit of three years in theSindh frontier of India (712–15) had likely yielded a few hundred thousand slaves. He always forwarded onefifthof the captives and other spoils—the share of the state, according to the Quran [8:41], prophetictraditions and Sharia—to the caliph in Damascus and distributed the rest amongst his soldiers. These slavewomen and children became the property of Muslims and entered the house of Islam by default. When thosechildren grew up to be adult Muslims in a few years, the males were drafted into the Muslim army for wagingnew holy wars against the Hindus, who had been their kinfolk and coreligionists a few years earlier. In otherwords, in the short time-span of a decade, these captured children had become the weapon for the Muslimstate to wage new Jihad expeditions for extending the domain of Islam, for converting the vanquishedinfidels, for enslaving their women and children, and for plundering their wealth. Even during the upheaval ofthe Partition of India (1946–47), some 100,000 Hindu and Sikh women were enslaved, carried away andmarried off to Muslims (Chapter VI).Enslaved women as reproduction toolsThe female captives, in compliance with Quranic sanctions and prophetic traditions, were used as sex-slavesby their Muslim masters (see Chapter VII on Slavery). Therefore, they did not only add to the growingMuslim population, but also became valuable tools for expanding the Muslim populace through procreation.When those women, especially the ones of childbearing age, were taken away, the Hindu men, who had fled,came back to find that their women and children gone. As a result, they did not have sufficient partners for theprocreation. That means, wherever Muslims made a successful assault, procreation in the Hindu communitydropped sharply. On the other hand, the few thousand Muslim soldiers who came to India with Muhammadbin Qasim had plenty of sex-partners for reproduction to the maximum capacity. Even Emperor Akbar hadamassed 5,000 beautiful women in his harem. Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco (r. 1672–1727) had sired188. Ibid, p. 33189. Lal (1994), p. 18–1975