HINDU and MUSLIM “FUNDAMENTALISM”

HINDU and MUSLIM
“FUNDAMENTALISM”

From A Liberal Indian Sub-continental Perspective

I am using the term fundamentalism not only as a convenient label, but as also used in current parlance-it wonderfully focuses the mind on a particular psyche, thought process or on a muddled theology if you will. Manifestly self-serving leaders use it to induce followers to accept distorted history, noxious beliefs, and deviant religious teaching. This inevitably leads to heightened emotional frenzy, loss of the capacity to discriminate right from wrong, a nebulous higher purpose, and resolute faith in the guide and philosopher. Passions are stoked to white heat. It enthralls people who are semiliterate, mentally immature, in straitened circumstances, not exposed to humane and liberal thought, introspective, perhaps affected by great personal tragedy, and indoctrinated in isolation. It conjures dream of ancient glory, its usurpation by the infidel and orgasmic ecstasy of revenge . Hindu zealots are given food, clothes and shelter, much like Muslim Madressahs do to a similar class of people. The alternative to accepting the largesse is usually deprivation, hunger, and exposure to elements. They are further deluded with visions of the specific religion’s idea of eternal bliss.
The leaders are generally educated men with a malicious agenda. They are clear headed, though of a warped mentality, who do not lose sight of personal gain and take no personal risks. True some of the higher cadre are zealots but they don’t reach the top and at times risk their life and limbs. The leadership does not hesitate in getting on the pay roll of vested interests. Valuable land occupied by slum dwellers coveted for building expensive housing estates or for extension of factories, lavish amusement parks, office/ business complexes, can be made available by the simple device of torching the area during a communal riot. The riot does not have to be communal, any kind will do, ethnic, sectarian, linguistic, class, or industrial. It saves the cost and bother of negotiations, compensation or court proceeding. Vast tracts of land in Bombay, Karachi, Colombo, Bangkok, Jakarta, and other cities of South Asia have been so acquired. (Building owners are attempting the technique in Manhattan NY too but not very successfully. They would be well advised to consult with Shiv sena, BJP, and Lal Masjid stalwarts. The first is a fanatical Hindu party, the second its moderate political face and the third are extremist Jihadists who took over a lot of highly expensive real estate in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, had amassed a huge inventory of automatic guns, rocket launchers and grenades and fought pitched battles with the army not too long ago. They continue to avenge the “martyrs with suicide bombings of military and civilian installations).
Besides this income, loot obtained from the victims, contribution of the followers and other claimants to religious exclusivity also help fill up the coffers of the leaders, who live in the style they feel entitled to. They rise, literally on the ashes and bones of the victims, to respectability, election to legislature, nomination to state and federal cabinets, where the scope for the higher cause, self included, gets even wider scope .
I must hasten to add that though an atheist by conviction, I have an indelible mark of inherited Sufism on me. My family abhorred extremism, fanaticism and chauvinism. We shunned Wahabis, Arya Samajis, Islamic Jamaats and Hindu Mahasabha in equal measure. We socialized with equal facility with mainstream Sunnis, Shias, Hindus, Rajputs and Kaisth (businessmen class, accountants, administrators, linguists, poets) a few liberal Englishmen and Brahmins, and an odd Anglo Indian .
We regarded our Shia friends as charming, cultured, sophisticated, though a shade waywardly. They prayed at shrines and made presentations (cash and kind) to saints (actually his disciples). We joined them in Muharram procession though as Sunnis we had our own section. Hindus would join our festivals too. In a very endearing fashion they would ask us what harm would come if they would pray Muslim style once in a while? The more sensitive amongst us were embarrassed that we did not join them in temples.
India, from times unknown, has been coveted for its fertile land, lush forests, pristine rivers, moderate climate, gentle people, beautiful women and spices with pungent taste and smell. For little understood reasons population of the world exploded about four to five thousand years BC. India was relatively easy of access to central Asian people through the Khyber and Bolan passes in North west of India and other passes through the Himalayas. The regions geographically around it had harsh climate and could not support the burgeoning population. The destitute people along with invaders, adventurers, traders and economic refugees made a beeline for it. The original Indians, who had been settled on land which gave forth of its plenty with minimal effort had enjoyed an easy life and as a consequence had become physically less vigorous and mentally less war like. The new comers who later came to be known as Aryans were far stronger and aggressive than the gentle folk of India. They had had to face cruel elements, forage far and wide for food, confront carnivores and other groups of hunter-gatherers and managed to overcome, dominate and enslave the latter. The natives were eventually pushed to the South and North east of the country. (Aryans are believed to have spread, from central Asia, to India and Far East and to Asian Russia and Europe).
Aryans developed a religion based on worship of natural objects like the sun, moon, rain, fire, lightening, storms, flood and earthquakes. As society stabilized into tribes and people had time to think, ponder and meditate, gods/goddesses of wealth, education, love and fertility has to be invented. Hinduism is thus about the only religion which evolved through a process of observation of natural phenomenon and conclusion drawn there from. It is therefore the only “science” based concept.
An organized system was now taking shape with rites, rituals and prayers to propitiate the relevant deity. Articulate, shrewd and intelligent men had to be assigned to manage it and arrange affairs on auspicious days. They had to mediate with gods too. A preacher class, the Brahmins thus evolved. Other with better physical attributes defended the tribe and in due course, took over as tribal chiefs. They were initially chosen by consensus. With further social evolution and a number of tribes congregating into collectives, the office of rulers became hereditary. These people Kashtriya- warriors were to call themselves Rajputs (progeny of Raj). Another body of men mediated trade, bartering good and produce. They came to be called vaishya or business class. Manual workers physically strong, but not very ambitious or shrewd tilled the land, as peasants and became builders, masons, carpenters, weavers, tailors etc. The last were called Shudras. Natives were made to work on sanitation and do all the unclean dirty jobs as curing hides, collecting and disposing of dead animals and human/animal excreta. They were the untouchables. One national chauvinistic friends claims that since there were no jails, criminals were simply thrown out of towns/villages to fend for themselves and came to be called untouchables.
According to Hindu holy books, Brahmins and Rajputs used to eat meat including beef, in ancient times. Many of the latter still do surreptitiously. Sanctity of cows evolved later probably because the animals were necessary for farming which was the dominant mode of production and sustenance. Vegetarianism eventually became part of the dominant creed. Lord Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of the Jainism, further reinforced it
Women had been heads of households in hunter-gatherer era and managed the hearth, home and children. Men had to be away for days or weeks foraging for food. Only the old, infirm and the young were left behind along with a few men to protect the settlement. Women had, of necessity, to have multiple husbands, from among those who stayed home and the returning hunter. There was no concept of personal property- there was little to go by, so inheritance did not figure prominently in the affairs and legitimacy of children to qualify for a share was irrelevant.
With the advent of settled habitat and immovable property like houses, farms and land, which men had acquired by force of arms and which they wanted to pass on to the product of their seed, legitimacy became paramount. Monogamy was enforced, and all kinds of taboos, superstitions and punishment were prescribed for women venturing outside the sharp and narrow lines. Those who did were branded “fallen” women and most likely, became the earliest sex workers.
Tilling unturned land, carrying heavy stones, wood and produce was heavy work. Fighting with poachers and invaders also required physical strenght. Boys were more suited to it, so male issue came to be preferred. Girls were physically weaker and were periodically relatively disabled during pregnancy and parturition (though Chinese women were reputed to give birth, tie the umbilical cord and go on with harvesting). They however exceeded boys by far in endurance and performed all painstaking repetitive household jobs. Females were also valued for fertility and had to be protected and cherished. They could, however, not be trusted with affairs religious, so all priests had to be men. Education was also their exclusive right of the men of religion. The warrior class did not see any reason to acquire it. Lower classes were not entitled to it. The business class was content with knowledge of accounting.
Differential treatment of women runs through all creeds. They are rather like constitutional monarchs . Muslims are taught that Paradise is at the feet of the mother that she should be taken care of before a father is. But she has only half the vote and one-sixteenth share of inheritance. In no creed are they given equal authority or privileges.
Huns and Mongols followed Aryans. Both brought an amorphous body of rites and rituals. They were, however, not strong enough to prevail or supplant the entrenched belief system. But there was no clash of beliefs yet.
Alexander of Macedonia and Persian kings also ventured into India but they were raiders and went back with the loot, leaving a few of their compatriots to die of hunger, exposure to element and hostile natives, or to seek shelter with the defeated warriors.
Some Jews did flee persecution in the holy land and migrated to India about a thousand years before Christ but they were too few and too destitute to have much impact. They were thoroughly Indianised, except in religion . Afghans are believed by some to be the lost tribe of Israel.
In the first century AC some Christian missionaries also landed in India. (Nestorians). They too were few in number, and not particularly successful in proselytizing. Remnants still live in South of India and except for weekly church attendance are indistinguishable from others.
Another group of refugees escaping religious repression, the Zoroastrians, came to India when Muslims took over Iran. They also were relatively small in number and do not permit conversion.
The immigrants mentioned above had one over-riding characteristic in common. Though possessed of structured religions, they were few in number, and were not backed by force of arms. Sword behind divinity does wonders for proselytization.
Hinduism held sway in India from the time of the advent of Aryans with standing all comers and spreading to Far East. Buddhism and Jainism, essentially reformist movements, flourished for a while, but only exist as vestigial remnants now. Buddhism was exported to China, Japan and parts of Far East. Lord Buddha’s teachings and to a lesser those of Mahavira, founder of Jains, did shake the establishment, for a while. The most famous Indian Emperor Ashoka did pledge allegiance to Buddhism after a particularly vicious carnage in a battle. A large number of his subjects followed suit. But the two creeds, proclaiming non-violence and equality of all (men only) humans fell victim to the machinations of the priestly and the warrior class, whose privileged status they had challenged.
About a hundred years after the advent of Islam, Muslims challenged the dominance of Hindu creed for the first time since its birth many millennia ago. The religion had energized Arabs, making them into a highly disciplined messianic proselytizing and formidably unstoppable force. Visions of plenty, delectable women, wine, food and water, all in short supply in Hedjaz, their native land, and therefore rationed of necessity, was an irresistible goad. Loot in the form of gold, jewelry, other goods, women, children and slaves was an added incentive and a pre-requisite for prosperity and a critical element to augment the treasury to underwrite further Jihads. Occupation of land and exploitations of resources of the subject people was initially the primary objective. Slavery and concubinage continued to be permitted (and still is). Proseletization was secondary. Conversion was a collateral by product, non-Arab Muslim being accorded an inferior status and requiring an Arab patron.
Natives seized some Arab seamen off the coast of Sindh. They were killed and their property was confiscated. This was a routine occurrence (and still is, India and Pakistan seize fishermen of the other side, confiscate the boats, and eat the fish. The only difference some fourteen hundred years have made, is that not all prisoners are killed, some are kept in jail for exchange of nationals).
Yousuf bin Hajjaj the Arab governor of Iraq, who had sponsored the sea merchants, protested to the local ruler Raja Dahir , and demanded reparations. Unaware of what would hit him, the ruler contemptuously rejected the demands and decapitated the emissaries too. Hajjaj, a particularly perverse and cruel ruler who relished torture and enjoyed victim’s scream as other would music, sent an expedition under the command of his nephew Muhammad Bin Qasim , a young man in his late teens.
He duly defeated the Rajah, plundered the land, established a viable beachhead and returned to Iraq laden with gold, silk, precious metals, slaves and women. His uncle had told him off to bring back the virgin daughter of the Rajah, a famed beauty, taking care to protect her maiden hood with his life .The lady to protect her honor, or out of spite, and with a truly remarkable insight into the Governor’s mind, told him that she had not been able to resist the victor’s charms and had seduced his nephew. Regretting the necessity of-but his word had to be shown to be paramount-he ordered his nephew to be put on the rack and the lady consigned to flames . At her last breath, she declared that she was still a virgin, and felt sorry for the hapless commander; but that was life.
Adventurers, marauders, plunderers and warlords looking for new territory followed. It is a curious fact of history that invaders were challenged only after crossing the Khyber Pass and what are now the Frontier province and the plains of the Punjab . Perhaps they practiced war of attrition, or were busy collecting credible force or patching up inter-ruler disputes in order to forge a common front. Perhaps they felt that the enemy was not worthy of notice unless he advanced far enough. It may have been for logistic reasons. But history does tell us that all major battles with intruders took place at the Punjab-Delhi border in Paniput town.
Warriors came to India for land and riches and founded dynasties. Carpetbaggers followed, for the ruler’s largesse and for the lure of easy life, with plenty of food, fruits and water. Some natives converted to curry favor with the masters, others to get out from under the yoke of upper classes and gain equal status with their erstwhile masters. Some married off their women to cement relations and enhance their status by an alliance with the ruling class.
But the main body of converts owe their change of faith to Muslim mystics, Sufis and Saints who preached and practiced brother hood, tolerance, love, and freedom of choice in faith. Resonate as it did with their centuries old cults, rituals and practices, mysticism especially appealed to the Indian psyche. One look at the religious demography of India will substantiate the point.
Over centuries invaders and natives settled into an amiable accommodation. They lived and socialized together, and participated in each other’s festivals, happy and sad times. Hindus served in the armies of Muslim Kings and Muslim generals led the forces of Hindu Rajas. The most well known myth, given wide currency by both Hindu and Muslim zealots, that Aurangzeb, the Moghal king and Shivaji the Hindu rebel, fought for their respective faiths, has no basis in fact. Shivaji’s second in command was a Muslim General and Auranzeb’s general staff was replete with Hindu officers. Aurangzeb spent the better part of his reign fighting fellow Muslim Sultans in the south of India. Following the decline of Moghal Empire Marathas had laid siege to Delhi. The Moghal emperor appealed to an Afghan warlord- Ahmad Shah Abdali to come to his rescue. In the ensuing battle, a Muslim general of Maratha army planned to break the flank of the Afghan army. A jealous senior general stopped him .
After the British East India Company had taken over the country, Hindu and Muslim grandees alike chafed under the bonds which were largely of their own creation. Much too late, they gathered under the banner of Bahadur Shah Zafar in one last compulsive and doomed attempt to throw out the foreigners.
Among upper class Hindus, deep beneath this accommodation and camaraderie, lurked the ancient feeling of outrage at being supplanted by the Muslims. They objected to Muslims in Bengal being given assembly seats in proportion to their numbers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, claming that the latter were largely a body of converts from lower classes, uncouth, illiterate and uncivilized. Brahmans had suffered the most and kept on reminding the populace of the ancient glory of India. They romanticized the Hindu Raj, demonized Aurangzeb and his like and attributed their depredations to the essential evil in their religion, (much as the Christian Right does now in the USA) and transformed Pirthivi Raj, Rana Sangha and Shiva Ji into Hindu demi-gods
Muslims not to be left behind also made icons out of marauders like Mahmud of Ghazni and adventurers like Ahmad and Nadir Shah and fratricidal bigots like Aurangzeb into high defenders of the faith. Fanatics among them pushed for holy war against Hindus and British alike. They railed against accommodation and Muslim adaptation of Hindu ways and were the fore runners of Wahabis.
The British having pitted brother against brother, by low cunning, subterfuge, lies and half truths, promises and pledges and by bluff and gall, elevated themselves from the status of supplicating traders to rulers of India. Having snatched the reins of power from Muslims, they initially patronized the Hindus who were already more educated and industrious. They had been running the empire, administration and business for centuries.
After 1857 war of independence the British realized, that Hindu Muslim unity was a lethal for their paramountcy. Hindus were encouraged to dwell on the mischief Muslims had done to their religion, languages, cultures and psyche. They also realized that some power would have to be devolved on the natives. As a part of a larger scheme an Englishman founded Indian national congress (INC) in 1885. He had reckoned with out Indian nationalism, which came into its own shortly afterwards. The national movement was led by British trained University graduates. Most were progeny of the landed gentry and followed the legal profession. There was no Hindu-Muslim divide as such, but being the majority in the population and having had a head start, Hindus dominated the political process. Apprehensive of the campaign gathering momentum, the British started patronizing the Muslims.
Muslims had been going into intellectual and political decline since the failure of the siege of Vienna in late fifteenth century. They had attained such a height that it took a long time to slide to the bottom. About the same time, Mullahs had ruled that prinking press was an invention of the Satan. The Quran could not be printed in a machine, and by inference all printed works were branded un-Islamic. Though continuing the conquests in Asia, they had lost the edge in science, technology and research. About the same time Europeans “discovered” the sea route to the East. They were able to bypass the overland passage dominated by the Arabs who were under a rather benign rule of the Turks. They and the Turkish sultan lost a valuable source of revenue. Muslims in India paralleled the decline of their brothers in faith in Mid-East. They finally lost out to the British in 1757 and suffered from profound communal depression as well.
A few Muslim reformers, especially Sir Syed Ahmed Khan tried valiantly to reverse the trend, and given the material to work on, were remarkably successful, but could not quite bridge the gap. To evade victimization by rulers, they shunned the political process, pledging unquestioning loyalty to the crown.
The British encouraged the Muslim upper classes to form their own political organization. Their leader was the Agha Khan, in the current incarnation a product, pure and simple of the British imperial policy . Muslim League was formed in 1906. Its charter loudly proclaimed its upper class base “ we the Muslim rulers etc” and pledged undying devotion to the Crown. The Agha Khan was its first president.
In the early decades of the twentieth century fanatics among both creeds incited Hindu and Muslim riots especially over cow slaughter and the proclivity of the Hindus to ring loud temple bells at the time of sunset prayers by the Muslims. INC and other secular nationalists did try to control the developing animosity and subsequent conflagration. They had to contend not only with British policy, which now openly favored Muslim in their demand for safe guards under the pretext of protecting minority rights, but also with the scheme of awarding separate electorate to lower class Hindus . If Gandhi had not overwhelmed them with fast unto death on the question, INC would have been rendered totally ineffective. INC also had to deal with Hindu right wing, which were vying with Muslim communalists in currying British favor.
Politics, before Gandhi appeared on the scene, were upper class, elitist and secular. He was no doubt able to energize and unleash the vast mass of peasants of India, but in the process also released the genie of communal friction, though he tried hard to fight it by full-blooded support to Khilafat and belated explanations that by Ram Raj he meant “Insaaf” Raj
It must be remembered that Jinnah shunned the Khilafat movement. Tagore and Jinnah both are on record in opposing introduction of religious imagery into politics.
The British took full advantage of the situation and brought forth questions of reserved seats, electoral safeguards, and constitutional guarantees and effectively put the ever-dwindling number of nationalist Muslims on the defensive. Some courageous souls, however, stayed the course, the most notable being Maulana Azad.
INC made a few fatal strategic and tactical mistakes. To mention two, in 1928 they reneged on the 1917 Congress-League pact engineered by Jinnah for safeguarding Muslim rights, and in 1936, they rebuffed the advances of, at the time, the only credible provincial Muslim League body- that in the United Provinces. It is a curious quirk of fate that a father and son, Moti Lal and Jawahar Lal were involved in both events, the father in 1928 and the son in 1936. The son, as we shall see later, would drive the last nail in the coffin of a united India in 1946.
By the late nineteen thirties, the tide had turned the communalist way. Jinnah once hailed as ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, now the undisputed leader of a Muslim reactionary party went from strength to strength. Communal frenzy increased.
The British exhausted by WW11, bowed to the inevitable. They agreed to negotiate the terms of transfer of power to Indian hands. It is a tribute to the pragmatism of the British people that they ditched Churchill, the acclaimed architect of victory in WWII and elected the pedestrian Attlee, as they perceived correctly that the latter would be able to give them a fair social deal.
The Labor Government, perhaps to placate Churchill and his Tory party implacably opposed to Indian independence, chose Mountbatten, a member of the Royal family, to preside over the transition from British rule and hand over reins of the government to the successor states India and Pakistan .If the choice of an inept, arrogant and rather dim member of the family was a deliberate decision to play havoc with India is difficult to say. But the result was devastating.
Mountbatten, mindful of nothing but his place in history, hastened to an ill conceived, ill planned and premature partition. Final boundary awards were not announced till three days after the fateful day. Millions did not know if their homes would be in India or Pakistan. Panic broke out, agent provocateurs had a field day, looters and all kinds of anti social element ran amuck. With out leadership of British officers had shamelessly abdicated all responsibility, native police were supine and helpless. All hell broke loose. Normally rational people behaved like raving maniacs, a million were butchered, ten million uprooted. The deep-seated scar on Hindu-Muslim psyche has not healed after six decades. In stead psychotic trends continue, giving a new lease of life to bigotry, intolerance, obscurantism and fanaticism. Pakistan bereft of non-Muslims indulges in ethnic sectarian, and linguistic orgy of massacres. It is currently in the grip of a Neanderthal, male chauvinistic, supremacist, fratricidal, paradise seeking descendents of Taliban. Lest they be accused of discrimination, they bomb the odd church, and abduct a few dalit women.
India has had communal riots with vicious regularity. Major eruption occurred in Jabalpur in 1961 and Gujarat three years into the twenty first century. Reactionaries and unscrupulous politicians do not allow the fire of hatred to die down. Ever keeping the flame alive, their greatest glory so far, demolition of Babri mosque, which had been locked up since 1933. Riots rivaling the ones in 1947 followed with corresponding loss of life .The government frightened of Hindu revivalists dare not control the hoodlums.
Hindu fanaticism, a reaction to ancient injury kept in conscious thought by revivalist dreamers hallucinating under charas (a derivative of opium) aided and abetted by an alien ruler and goaded by the extreme right wing and the lunatic fringe among the Muslims, could have been controlled with a little bit of give and take. Statesman like behavior of leaders in accepting one India with three federating autonomous units would have pulled the rug from under the lunatics. But it was not to be.
Muslim fanaticism also carrying a historical baggage of ancient glory is however much more deep rooted in dogma and nourished by five hundred years of humiliation. It has further been under written by feudals, mid-eastern Emirs and kings and other agents of corporate capitalism and neo-imperialism and is, therefore, is much more difficult to eradicate.

Strictly speaking it does not apply to Hindu religion at all, it being a conglomeration of a set of charming traditions, quaint beliefs, intriguing mythology, historical baggage, profound philosophy, humanism contrasted with abhorrent caste system, adulation of motherhood co-existing with subjugation of women and any number of other characteristics, but no rigid body of dogma or fundamentals.
Rape is a common occurrence in riots.
So this essay should be captioned reactionary, economic, capitalistic, pseudo religious fanaticism. That is too unwieldy so I will stay with fundamentalism.
People of mixed parentage and looked down upon by the British and despised by Indians, they in turn regarded themselves a cut above Indians and fawned upon the British. They monopolized railway services and lower echelon of police officer ranks. In 1947 nearly all of them migrated to the UK and moaned of their luxurious life in India to any one who listened. In 1967, I was accosted by a woman in London who, with tears in her eyes, dwelt on the number of servant (eleven if I recall correctly) in her Bungalow. Here she had to clean her own bathroom. Pure British breeds also missed the lavish life style they got used to in India. In 1965 another woman told me with a straight face that no one, but absolutely no one, was left in Delhi in the summer. We all went to Simla-a hill resort, summer seat of British Indian government.
10th of the month of Muharram of Muslim calendar is commemorated for the martyrdom of the grandson of prophet of Islam who gave his life but not his hand into obescience of a corrupt usurper. The procession has borrowed heavily from Ram Lila; there are ceremonial exhibitions of stick word etc. This commemoration is very different in Iran and Iraq, the two countries with Shia majority.
So essential to overpower the odor of rotting meat, poultry and fish Europeans had to eat when fresh supplies ran out, as they did every year).
Encarta English Dictionary defines the term as people thought to be descended from Indo-Europeans especially a speaker of Iranian or Indic language. Late scholarship challenges the given wisdom and claims that Aryans were indigenous to India, lived in harmony with Dravidians and shared gods and goddesses with them and spread to central Asia and Europe from India.
Though partially so, the other half of science-replication of results through experimentation was missing.
The queen of England has the theoretical right to sell all the ships of the British Navy, but in practice may not take a step in public realm with out the approval of the parliament acting through the Prime Minister. A king had to abdicate, as the parliament would not give him permission to marry a divorced woman. Things have changed though for British royalty and women. Charles married a divorced woman and women are much more empowered.
Jews don’t allow conversion; one has to be born out of Jewish mother, unless you are Elizabeth Taylor or Sammy Davis junior. But conservatives Jews don’t accept even the rich and the famous. Senator, later defense secretary Cohen had a non-Jewish mother. He was not quite kosher among orthodox Jewry.
One of my patients in Karachi was named Rachel. Out of curiosity, I made a remark that it was an interesting name. Demurely she said that she was Yehudi (Jewish). I asked her why she had not immigrated to Israel. She said she did go there, but could not stay for long as the women there were shameless and went around nearly naked.
The vestiges of this practice survive to this day. One needs an Arab “wali” protector to conduct business affairs in Arab countries.
He became more famous in Hindu, Muslim and Sindhi folklore than his stature would otherwise merit.
He was later to acquire Icon status among Indian Muslims. In Pakistan revisionist historians under the aegis of “fundamentalist” officialdom call him the first Pakistani.
The Governor, inconsolable, lamented loudly, tore his hair out, and scratched his face with his own nails. It is not known what he grieved for more, the unjustified torture of his blameless nephew or deprivation from carnal pleasure.
Only Raja Porus confronted Alexander near modern Lahore, still allowing free passage over two thirds of the province.
Muslims constituted the majority of population in the North-West where Sufis arrived first, were a small minority in the main body of India for a thousand miles, and then in majority again in North-East, in Bengal, where mass conversion to Islam is attributed to a great Sufi, Bayazid Bustami. The faith spread to far east specially Indonesia, in a similar manner.
Another view is that Buddhists were concentrated in the North West and East of India. The creed was highly structured and based on monasteries, stupas and monks. Muslims destroyed the physical structure, and killed the monks. With little to fall back on people converted to Islam. Hinduism concentrated in central India was dominated by Brahmins who at the time worked in the grass roots and escaped the depredations of Muslims.
It is one of history’s might have beens. If Marhatas had won largely through the brilliant tactics of a Muslim general, Indians may have emerged out of the sloth of Moghal dissipation. A vigorous dynasty may have been born, which could have repulsed Europeans. India would be a dynamic first world country now.
Please refer to the book “the Agha Khans’ by Sirit Bose for a complete account of how A British administrator posted in Baluchistan imported the Khan into India and how they were patronized by the colonists, ensconced in a palace in Poona, and given titles. They dutifully served as a fifth column.
Upper cast Hindus are only about 25% of Hindu population.
There was no evidence of its being the birth place of Lord Rama the legendary Hindu king. Some fanatics claim that the Taj Mahal was built at the site of a Hindu place of worship. They lay claim to many mosques. There actually may be some substance in the claims. In Pakistan Mullahs frequently build a mosque on private or public property and incite a riot if the private owner or the state tries to demolish the structure. In times long gone Muslims may have used this technique of acquiring real estate