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The world famous historian, Will Durant has written in his Story of
Civilisation that "the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the
bloodiest story in history".
India before the advent of Islamic imperialism was not exactly a zone
of peace. There were plenty of wars fought by Hindu princes. But in all
their wars, the Hindus had observed some time-honoured conventions sanctioned
by the Sastras. The Brahmins and the Bhikshus were never molested. The
cows were never killed. The temples were never touched. The chastity of
women was never violated. The non-combatants were never killed or captured.
A human habitation was never attacked unless it was a fort. The civil population
was never plundered. War booty was an unknown item in the calculations
of conquerors. The martial classes who clashed, mostly in open spaces,
had a code of honor. Sacrifice of honor for victory or material gain was
deemed as worse than death.
Islamic imperialism came with a different code--the Sunnah of the Prophet.
It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civil population after
a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It required them to
sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting
or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special
attention in mass murders of non-combatants. The temples and monasteries
were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those whom
they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the
booty looted even from the bodies of the dead, was a measure of the success
of a military mission. And they did all this as mujahids (holy warriors)
and ghazls (kafir-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet.
Hindus found it very hard to understand the psychology of this new invader.
For the first time in their history, Hindus were witnessing a scene which
was described by Kanhadade Prabandha (1456 AD) in the following words:
"The conquering army burnt villages, devastated the land, plundered
people's wealth, took Brahmins and children and women of all classes captive,
flogged with thongs of raw hide, carried a moving prison with it, and converted
the prisoners into obsequious Turks."
That was written in remembrance of Alauddin Khalji's invasion of Gujarat
in the year l298 AD. But the gruesome game had started three centuries
earlier when Mahmud Ghaznavi had vowed to invade India every year in order
to destroy idolatry, kill the kafirs, capture prisoners of war, and plunder
vast wealth for which India was well-known.
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