Author: Serge Trifkovic
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: November 18, 2002
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4649
Adapted from The Sword of the Prophet:
A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam by Dr. Serge Trifkovic.
The fundamental leftist and anti-American
claim about our ongoing conflict with political Islam is this: whatever
has happened or does happen, it's our fault. We provoked them into it by
being dirty Yankee imperialists and by unkindly refusing to allow them
to destroy Israel. But two things make crystal clear that this is not so:
1. The political arm of Islam has
been waging terroristic holy war on the rest of the world for centuries.
2. It has waged this war against
civilizations that have nothing to do with the West, let alone America.
This is why the case of Moslem aggression
against India proves so much. Let's look at the historical record.
India prior to the Moslem invasions
was one of the world's great civilizations. Tenth century Hindustan matched
its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy,
mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the
number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later
transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them.)
Medieval India, before the Moslem invasion, was a richly imaginative culture,
one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures
were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. And
these were indigenous achievements and not, as in the case of many of the
more celebrated high-points of Moslem culture, relics of pre-Moslem civilizations
that Moslems had overrun.
Moslem invaders began entering India
in the early 8th century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of what
is now Iraq. (Sound familiar?) Starting in 712 the raiders, commanded by
Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces,
killed vast numbers of men - it took three whole days to slaughter the
inhabitants of the city of Debal - and carried off their women and children
to slavery, some of it sexual. After the initial wave of violence, however,
Qasim tried to establish law and order in the newly-conquered lands, and
to that end he even allowed a degree of religious tolerance. but upon hearing
of such humane practices, his superior Hajjaj, objected:
"It appears from your letter that
all the rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are
strictly in accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon
prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you, for you
go on giving pardon to everybody, high or low, without any discretion between
a friend and a foe. The great God says in the Koran [47.4]: "0 True believers,
when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads." The above
command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed.
You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of
the act. Henceforth grant pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none
of them, or else all will consider you a weak-minded man."
In a subsequent communication, Hajjaj
reiterated that all able-bodied men were to be killed, and that their underage
sons and daughters were to be imprisoned and retained as hostages. Qasim
obeyed, and on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad massacred between
6,000 and 16,000 men.
The significance of these events
lies not just in the horrible numbers involved, but in the fact that the
perpetrators of these massacres were not military thugs disobeying the
ethical teachings of their religion, as the European crusaders in the Holy
Land were, but were actually doing precisely what their religion taught.
(And one may note that Christianity has grown up and no longer preaches
crusades. Islam has not. As has been well-documented, jihad has been preached
from the official centers of Islam, not just the lunatic fringe.)
Qasim's early exploits were continued
in the early eleventh century, when Mahmud of Ghazni, "passed through India
like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging, and massacring," zealously following
the Koranic injunction to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise
every year of his life.
In the course of seventeen invasions,
in the words of Alberuni, the scholar brought by Mahmud to India,
"Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity
of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus
became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale
of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of
course, the most inveterate aversion toward all Moslems."
Does one wonder why? To this day,
the citizens of Bombay and New Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore, live in fear
of a politically-unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan that unlike India
(but like every other Moslem country) has not managed to maintain democracy
since independence.
Mathura, holy city of the god Krishna,
was the next victim:
"In the middle of the city there
was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described
nor painted." The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would
have been required to build it. The idols included "five of red gold, each
five yards high," with eyes formed of priceless jewels. "The Sultan gave
orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and
leveled with the ground."
In the aftermath of the invasion,
in the ancient cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi,
and Dwarka, not one temple survived whole and intact. This is the equivalent
of an army marching into Paris and Rome, Florence and Oxford, and razing
their architectural treasures to the ground. It is an act beyond nihilism;
it is outright negativism, a hatred of what is cultured and civilized.
In his book The Story of Civilization,
famous historian Will Durant lamented the results of what he termed "probably
the bloodiest story in history." He called it "a discouraging tale, for
its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate
complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians
invading from without and multiplying from within."
Moslem invaders "broke and burned
everything beautiful they came across in Hindustan," displaying, as an
Indian commentator put it, the resentment of the less developed warriors
who felt intimidated in the encounter with "a more refined culture." The
Moslem Sultans built mosques at the sites of torn down temples, and many
Hindus were sold into slavery. As far as they were concerned, Hindus were
kafirs, heathens, par excellence. They, and to a lesser extent the peaceful
Buddhists, were, unlike Christians and Jews, not "of the book" but at the
receiving end of Muhammad's injunction against pagans: "Kill those who
join other gods with God wherever you may find them." (Not that being "of
the book" has much helped Jewish and Christian victims of other Moslem
aggressions, but that's another article.)
The mountainous northwestern approaches
to India are to this day called the Hindu Kush, "the Slaughter of the Hindu,"
a reminder of the days when Hindu slaves from Indian subcontinent died
in harsh Afghan mountains while being transported to Moslem courts of Central
Asia. The slaughter in Somnath, the site of a celebrated Hindu temple,
where 50,000 Hindus were slain on Mahmud's orders, set the tone for centuries.
The gentle Buddhists were the next
to be subjected to mass slaughter in 1193, when Muhammad Khilji also burned
their famous library. By the end of the 12th century, following the Moslem
conquest of their stronghold in Bihar, they were no longer a significant
presence in India. The survivors retreated into Nepal and Tibet, or escaped
to the south of the Subcontinent. The remnants of their culture lingered
on even as far west as Turkestan. Left to the tender mercies of Moslem
conquerors and their heirs they were systematically destroyed, sometimes-as
was the case with the four giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in March
2001 -up to the present day.
That cultivated disposition and
developed sensibility can go hand in hand with bigotry and cruelty is evidenced
by the example of Firuz Shah, who became the ruler of northern India in
1351. This educated yet tyrannical Moslem ruler of northern India once
surprised a village where a Hindu religious festival was celebrated, and
ordered all present to be slain. He proudly related that, upon completing
the slaughter, he destroyed the temples and in their place built mosques.
The Mogul emperor Akbar is remembered
as tolerant, at least by the standards of Moslems in India: only one major
massacre was recorded during his long reign (1542-1605), when he ordered
that about 30,000 captured Rajput Hindus be slain on February 24, 1568,
after the battle for Chitod. But Akbar's acceptance of other religions
and toleration of their public worship, his abolition of poll-tax on non-
Moslems, and his interest in other faiths were not a reflection of his
Moslem spirit of tolerance. Quite the contrary, they indicated a propensity
for free-thinking in the realm of religion that finally led him to complete
apostasy. Its high points were the formal declaration of his own infallibility
in all matters of religious doctrine, his promulgation of a new creed,
and his adoption of Hindu and Zoroastrian festivals and practices. This
is a pattern one sees again and again in Moslem history, down to the present
day: whenever one finds a reasonable, enlightened, tolerant Moslem, upon
closer examination this turns out to be someone who started out as a Moslem
but then progressively wandered away from the orthodox faith. That is to
say: the best Moslems are generally the least Moslem (a pattern which does
not seem to be the case with other religions.)
Things were back to normal under
Shah Jahan (1593-1666), the fifth Mogul Emperor and a grandson of Akbar
the Great. Most Westerners remember him as the builder of the Taj Mahal
and have no idea that he was a cruel warmonger who initiated forty-eight
military campaigns against non-Moslems in less than thirty years. Taking
his cue from his Ottoman co-religionists, on coming to the throne in 1628
he killed all his male relations except one who escaped to Persia. Shah
Jahan had 5,000 concubines in his harem, but nevertheless indulged in incestuous
sex with his daughters Chamani and Jahanara. During his reign in Benares
alone 76 Hindu temples were destroyed, as well as Christian churches at
Agra and Lahore. At the end of the siege of Hugh, a Portuguese enclave
near Calcutta, that lasted three months, he had ten thousand inhabitants
"blown up with powder, drowned in water or burnt by fire." Four thousand
were taken captive to Agra where they were offered Islam or death. Most
refused and were killed, except for the younger women, who went into harems.
These massacres perpetrated by Moslems
in India are unparalleled in history. In sheer numbers, they are bigger
than the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Terror, the Japanese massacres of
the Chinese during WWII, Mao's devastations of the Chinese peasantry, the
massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, or any of the other famous crimes
against humanity of the 20th Century. But sadly, they are almost unknown
outside India.
There are several reasons for this.
In the days when they ruled India, the British, pursuing a policy of divide-and-rule,
whitewashed the record of the Moslems so that they could set them up as
a counterbalance to the more numerous Hindus. During the struggle for independence,
Gandhi and Nehru downplayed historic Moslem atrocities so that they could
pretend a facade of Hindu-Moslem unity against the British. (Naturally,
this façade dissolved immediately after independence and several
million people were killed in the religious violence attendant on splitting
British India into India and Pakistan.) After independence, Marxist Indian
writers, blinkered by ideology, suppressed the truth about the Moslem record
because it did not fit into the Marxist theory of history. Nowadays, the
Indian equivalent of political correctness downplays Moslem misdeeds because
Moslems are an "oppressed minority" in majority-Hindu India. And Indian
leftist intellectuals always blame India first and hate their own Hindu
civilization, just their equivalents at Berkeley blame America and the
West.
Unlike Germany, which has apologized
to its Jewish and Eastern European victims, and Japan, which has at least
behaved itself since WWII, and even America, which has gone into paroxysms
of guilt over what it did to the infinitely smaller numbers of Red Indians,
the Moslem aggressors against India and their successors have not even
stopped trying to finish the job they started. To this day, militant Islam
sees India as "unfinished business" and it remains high on the agenda of
oil-rich Moslem countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions
every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam.
One may take some small satisfaction
in the fact that they find it rather slow going.
(Serge Trifkovic received his PhD
from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral
research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets
have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International,
MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia
Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign
affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. This article
was adapted for Front Page Magazine by Robert Locke.)
