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Francois
Gautier
Negationism and the Muslim Conquests
http://www.hinduunity.org
This article by Francois Gautier has been taken from the book
"Rewriting Indian History"
It is important to stop a moment and have a look at what the
Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst, has called "negationism in
India". In his foreword to the book of the same title,
Koenraad explains that negationism, which means in this context
"the denial of historical crimes against humanity", is
not a new phenomenon. In modern history, the massacre by the Turks
of 1,5 millions Armenians, or that of the 6 million Jews by the
Nazis, the several millions of Russians by Stalin, or again the 1
million Tibetans by the Chinese communists, are historical facts
which have all been denied by their perpetrators...
But deny is not the exact word. They have been NEGATED in a
thousand ways: gross, clever, outrageous, subtle, so that in the
end, the minds of people are so confused and muddled, that nobody
knows anymore where the truth is.
Sometimes, it is the numbers that are negated or passed under
silence: the Spanish conquest of South America has been one of the
bloodiest and most ruthless episodes in history. Elst estimates
that out of the population of native Continental South America of
1492, which stood at 90 million, only 32 million survived;
terrible figures indeed but who talks about them today ? "But
what of the conquest of India by Muslims", asks Elst?
In other parts of Asia and Europe, the conquered nations quickly
opted for conversion to Islam rather than death. But in India,
because of the staunch resistance of the 4000 year old Hindu
faith, the Muslim conquests were for the Hindus a pure struggle
between life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and their
populations massacred. Each successive campaign brought hundreds
of thousands of victims and similar numbers were deported as
slaves. Every new invader made often literally his hill of Hindu
skulls. Thus the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000, was
followed by the annihilation of the entire Hindu population there;
indeed, the region is still called Hindu Kush, 'Hindu slaughter'.
The Bahmani sultans in central India, made it a rule to kill
100.000 Hindus a year. In 1399, Teimur killed 100.000 Hindus IN A
SINGLE DAY, and many more on other occasions. Koenraad Elst quotes
Professor K.S. Lal's "Growth of Muslim population in
India", who writes that according to his calculations, the
Hindu population decreased by 8O MILLION between the year 1000 and
1525. INDEED PROBABLY THE BIGGEST HOLOCAUST IN THE WHOLE WORLD
HISTORY. (Negat.34)
But the "pagans" were far too numerous to kill them all;
and Hinduism too well entrenched in her people's soul, never
really gave up, but quietly retreated in the hearts of the pious
and was preserved by the Brahmins' amazing oral powers. Thus,
realising that they would never be able to annihilate the entire
Indian population and that they could not convert all the people,
the Muslims rulers, particularly under the Hanifite law, allowed
the pagans to become "zimmis" (protected ones) under 20
humiliating conditions, with the heavy "jizya", the
toleration tax, collected from them.
"It is because of Hanifite law, writes Mr Elst, that many
Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the
duty to continue the genocide of Hindus". The last
"jihad" against the Hindus was waged by the much
glorified Tipu Sultan, at the end of the 18th century. Thereafter,
particularly following the crushing of the 1857 rebellion by the
British, Indian Muslims fell into a state of depression and
increasing backwardness, due to their mollah's refusal of British
education (whereas the elite Hindus gradually went for it) and
their nostalgia for the "glorious past"'. It is only
much later, when the British started drawing them into the
political mainstream, so as to divide India, that they started
regaining some predominance.
Negationism means that this whole aspect of Indian history has
been totally erased, not only from history books, but also from
the memory, from the consciousness of Indian people. Whereas the
Jews have constantly tried, since the Nazi genocide, to keep alive
the remembrance of their six million martyrs, the Indian
leadership, political and intellectual, has made a wilful and
conscious attempt to deny the genocide perpetrated by the Muslims.
No one is crying for vengeance. Do the Jews of today want to
retaliate upon contemporary Germany? NO. It is only a matter of
making sure that history does not repeat its mistakes, as alas it
is able to do today: witness the persecution of Hindus in Kashmir,
whose 250.000 Pandits have fled their 5000 year old homeland; or
the 50.000 Hindus chased from Afghanistan; or the oppression of
Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan. And most of all, to remember,
is to BE ABLE TO LOOK AT TODAY WITH THE WISDOM OF YESTERDAY. No
collective memory should be erased for appeasing a particular
community.
Yet, what has happened in India, at the hand of Hindus themselves,
is a constant denial and even a perversion of the genocide
committed by Muslims in India. Hasn't the "radical
humanist" M.N. Roy, written "that Islam has fulfilled a
historic mission of equality and abolition of discrimination in
India, and that for this, Islam has been welcomed in India by the
lower castes". "If AT ALL any violence occurred, he goes
on to say, it was a matter of justified class struggle by the
progressive forces against the reactionary forces, meaning the
feudal Hindu upper classes.."
Want to listen to another such quote? This one deals with Mahmud
Ghaznavi, the destroyer of thousands of Hindu temples, who
according to his chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the Mathura
temple complex, sacred above all to all Hindus... and promptly
proceeded to raze it to the ground: "Building interested
Mahmud and he was much impressed by the city of Mathura, where
there are today a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the
faithful. Mahmud was not a religious man. He was a Mahomedan, but
that was just by the way. He was in the first place a soldier and
a brilliant soldier"... Amazing eulogy indeed of the man who
was proud of desecrating hundreds of temples and made it a duty to
terrorise and humiliate pagans. And guess from whom is that quote?
From Jawaharlal Nehru himself, the first Prime Minister of India
and one of the architects of independence!
M.N. Roy, and Nehru in a lesser degree, represent the foremost
current of negationism in India, which is Marxist inspired. For
strangely, it was the Russian communists who decided to cultivate
the Arabs after the First World War, in the hope that they
constituted a fertile ground for future indoctrination. One should
also never forget that Communism has affected whole generations of
ardent youth, who saw in Marxism a new ideology in a world
corrupted by capitalism and class exploitation. Nothing wrong in
that; but as far as indoctrination goes, the youth of the West,
particularly of the early sixties and seventies, were all groomed
in sympathising with the good Arabs and the bad Jews. And
similarly in India, two or three young generations since the early
twenties, were tutored on negating Muslim genocide on the Hindus.
In "Communalism and the writing of Indian history",
Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at the
JNU in New Delhi, the Mecca of secularism and negationism in
India, denied the Muslim genocide by replacing it instead with a
conflict of classes. The redoubtable Romila Thapar in her
"Penguin History of India", co-authored with Percival
Spear, writes: "Aurangzeb's supposed intolerance, is little
more than a hostile legend based on isolated acts such as the
erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares". How can
one be so dishonest, or so blind? But it shows how negationism is
perpetuated in India.
What are the facts? Aurangzeb (1658-1707) did not just build an
isolated mosque on a destroyed temple, he ordered ALL temples
destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred
places of Hinduism and had mosques built on a number of cleared
temples sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his reach
equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them. A few
examples: Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the rebuilt Somnath
temple on the coast of Gujurat, the Vishnu temple replaced with
the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares and the Treta-ka-Thakur
temple in Ayodhya. (Neg 60). The number of temples destroyed by
Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not 5 figures; according to his own
official court chronicles: "Aurangzeb ordered all provincial
governors to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to
make a complete end to all pagan teachings and practices".
The chronicle sums up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali
Khan came and said that 172 temples in the area had been
destroyed... His majesty went to Chittor and 63 temples were
destroyed..Abu Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of
Amber, reported that 66 temples had been razed to the
ground".. Aurangzeb did not stop at destroying temples, their
users were also wiped-out; even his own brother, Dara Shikoh, was
executed for taking an interest in Hindu religion and the Sikh
Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because he objected to Aurangzeb's
forced conversions. As we can see Romila Thapar and Percival
Spear's statement of a benevolent Aurangzeb is a flagrant attempt
at negationism. Even the respectable Encyclopedia Brittannica in
its entry on India, does not mention in its chapter on the
Sultanate period any persecutions of Hindus by Muslims, except
"that Firuz Shah Tughlaq made largely unsuccessful attempts
at converting his Hindu subjects and sometime persecuted
them". The British, for their own selfish purpose, were of
course greatly responsible for whitewashing the Muslims, whom they
needed to counterbalance the influence of the Hindus and the
Congress. It is sad that Jawarlhal Nehru and the Congress
perpetuated that brand of negationism. But that is another story.
The happiest in this matter must be the Muslims themselves. What
fools these Hindus are, they must be telling themselves: We killed
them by the millions, we wrested a whole nation out of them, we
engineer riots against them, and they still defend us!... But
don't the Hindus know that many orthodox Indian Muslims still
cling to the Deoband school, which says that India was once
"Dar-ul-Islam", the house of Islam, and should return to
that status. Maulana Abul Kala Azad, several times Congress
President, and Education Minister in free India, was a spokesman
for this school. The Aligarh school on the contrary, led by
Mohammed Iqbal, propounded the creation of Pakistan. What
particularly interests us in the Aligarh school is the attempt by
Muslim historians, such as Mohamed Habiib, to rewrite the Chapter
of Muslim invasions in India. In 1920, Habib started writing his
magnum opus, which he based on four theories: 1) that the records
(written by the Muslims themselves) of slaughters of Hindus, the
enslaving of their women and children and razing of temples were
"mere exaggerations by court poets and zealous chroniclers to
please their rulers". 2) That they were indeed atrocities,
but mainly committed by Turks, the savage riders from the Steppe.
3) That the destruction of the temples took place because Hindus
stored their gold and jewels inside them and therefore Muslim
armies plundered these. 4) That the conversion of millions of
Hindus to Islam was not forced, "but what happened was there
was a shift of opinion in the population, who on its own free will
chose the Shariat against the Hindu law (smriti), as they were all
oppressed by the bad Brahmins"...!!! (Negationism p.42)
Unfortunately for Habib and his school, the Muslims invaders did
record with glee their genocide on Hindus, because they felt all
along that they were doing their duty; that killing, plundering,
enslaving and razing temples was the work of God, Mohammed.
Indeed, whether it was Mahmud of Ghazni (997-1030), who was no
barbarian, although a Turk, and patronised art and literature,
would recite a verse of the Koran every night after having razed
temples and killed his quota of unbelievers; or Firuz Shah Tughlak
(1351-1388) who personally confirms that the destruction of Pagan
temples was done out of piety and writes: "on the day of a
Hindu festival, I went there myself, ordered the executions of all
the leaders AND PRACTITIONERS of his abomination; I destroyed
their idols temples and built mosques in their places".
Finally, as Elst points out, "Muslim fanatics were merely
faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. It is not the Muslims
who are guilty but Islam". (Negationism in India, p. 44)
But ultimately, it is a miracle that Hinduism survived the
onslaught of Muslim savagery; it shows how deep was her faith, how
profound her karma, how deeply ingrained her soul in the hearts of
her faithfuls. We do not want to point a finger at Muslim
atrocities, yet they should not be denied and their mistakes
should not be repeated today. But the real question is: Can Islam
ever accept Hinduism? We shall turn towards the Sage, the yogi,
who fought for India's independence, accepting the Gita's message
of karma of violence when necessary, yet had a broad vision that
softened his words: "You can live with a religion whose
principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully
with a religion whose principle is "I will not tolerate you?
How are you going to have unity with these people?...The Hindu is
ready to tolerate; he is open to new ideas and his culture and has
got a wonderful capacity for assimilation, but always provided
India's central truth is recognised.. (Sri Aurobindo India's
Rebirth 161,173) Or behold this, written on September 1909:
"Every action for instance which may be objectionable to a
number of Mahomedans, is now liable to be forbidden because it is
likely to lead to a breach of peace. And one is dimly beginning to
wonder whether worship in Hindu temples may be forbidden on that
valid ground (India's Rebirth p. 55). How prophetic! Sri Aurobindo
could not have foreseen that so many Muslim countries would ban
Rushdie's book and that Hindu processions would often be forbidden
in cities, for fear of offending the Muslims. Sri Aurobindo felt
that sooner or later Hindus would have to assert again the
greatness of Hinduism.
And here we must say a word about monotheism, for it is the key to
the understanding of Islam. Christians and Muslims have always
harped on the fact that their religions sprang-up as a reaction
against the pagan polytheist creeds, which adored many Gods.
" There is only one real God they said (ours), all the rest
are just worthless idols ". This " monotheism versus
polytheism business " has fuelled since then the deep,
fanatic, violent and murderous zeal of Islam against polytheist
religions, particularly against Hinduism, which is the most
comprehensive, most widely practiced of all them. It even cemented
an alliance of sorts between the two great monotheist religions of
the world, Christianity and Islam, witness the Britishers'
attitude in India, who favoured Indian Muslims and Sikhs against
the Hindus; or the King of Morocco who, even though he is one of
the most moderate Muslim leaders in the world, recently said in an
interview: " we have no fight with Christianity, our battle
is against the Infidel who adores many gods ".
But the truth is that Hinduism is without any doubt the most
monotheist religion in the World, for it recognises divine unity
in multiplicity. It does not say: " there is only one God,
which is Mohammed. If you do not believe in Him I will kill you
". It says instead: " Yes Mohammed is a manifestation of
God, but so is Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna, or Confucius ".
This philosophy, this way of seeing, which the Christians and
Muslims call " impious ", is actually the foundation for
a true monotheist understanding of the world. It is because of
this " If you do not recognize Allah (or Christ), I will kill
you ", that tens of millions of Hindus were slaughtered by
Arabs and other millions of South Americans annihilated by the
Christians. And ultimately the question is: Are the Muslims of
today ready to accept Hinduism ? Unfortunately no. For Muslims all
over the world, Hinduism is still the Infidel religion " par
excellence ". This what their religion tell them, at every
moment, at every verse, at the beginning of each prayer : "
Only Allah is great ". And their mollahs still enjoin them to
go on fight " jihad " to deliver the world of the
infidels. And if the armies of Babar are not there any longer; and
if it is not done any more to kill a 100.000 Hindus in a day,
there is still the possibility of planting a few bombs in Bombay,
of fuelling separatisms in the hated land and eventually to drop a
nuclear device, which will settle the problem once and for all. As
to the Indian Muslim, he might relate to his Hindu brother, for
whatever he says, he remains an Indian, nay a Indu; but his
religion will make sure that he does not forget that his duty is
to hate the Infidel. This is the crux of the problem today and the
riddle if Islam has to solved, if it wants to survive in the long
run.
We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to
India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate
the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India. But once
again, the question is not of vengeance, or of reawakening old
ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, the
harm done by the Muslims conquest is not over. The seeds planted
by the Moghols, by Babar, Mahmud, or Aurangzeb, have matured: the
125 million Indian Muslims of today have forgotten that they were
once peaceful, loving Hindus, forcibly converted to a religion
they hated. And they sometimes take-up as theirs a cry of
fanaticism which is totally alien to their culture. Indeed, as Sri
Aurobindo once said: "More than 90% of the Indian Muslims are
descendants of converted Hindus and belong as much to the Indian
nation as the Hindu themselves"...(Rebirth of India, p.237)
The embryo of secession planted by the Mahomedans, has also
matured into a poisonous tree which has been called Pakistan and
comes back to haunt India through three wars and the shadow of a
nuclear conflict embracing South Asia. And in India, Kashmir and
Ayodhya are reminders that the Moghol cry for the house of Islam
in India is not yet over.
Francois Gautier
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