[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
[quote]xydharth wrote:
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well the problem is that they did not. Maybe they wanted to, but in the muslim empire christians and jews where majority. It was not practical to force all non-muslims to become muslims. Actually when the arabs got to India, they started to label hindus “people of the book”. because if they had tried to force the hindus to become muslim, the hindu majority would have rebelled.
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This is true. As conquerors irrespective of their faith try to coerce the conquered as a political ploy and to further their chances of ruling over an empire. There’s a primary difference between conquering and ruling. While the conquest initiates and incites all forms of bigotry available culturally ,an excuse for violence is chosen because its the shortest and most abused path to unite people against another population which is not the perpetrator but the defender. Bloodshed is easy, however the greatest challenge lies in how they fare after the conquest has been done and a kingdom is being established. When the period of rule begins and the conquered people need to be assimilated and made part of the administration there lies the true test of a ruler.
So initially all accounts of Islamic conquest in India are barbaric and destructive where they see the Hindu symbols including places of worship as the enemy and destroy it. But once they started settling in after a century or so the Islamic rulers gathered themselves and started learning about the Hindu faith appreciated it , translated their works into Arabic and started to see them as collaborators in running a system. In fact this opened them up so much they started marrying out of their own faith as a gesture of friendship with the locals and much to the chagrin of the hard-liners and bigots of their own faith. These medieval Islamic rulers started realising the importance of co-existence amongst all faiths. Most economic policies treated people of both faith equally (like both the HIndu and Islamic pilgrims enjoyed the same tax benefits ) , so was true with administration & public works as well as education. WIth this even the priest class and Islam underwent a substantial transformation where Hinduism was studied by them.Temples were reconstructed by them. So in retrospect there was a time when Islam’ists’ started respecting another religion when the political situation was convenient and at other times of ‘crisis’ chose not to.
There were always different strains of Islam , if people knew a bit about SUfism they wouldn’t make blanket statements about the whole faith of Islam.
Radical Islam emerged from Wahabism in Saudi Arabia and emerged only as late as the 18th century. Consider the modern post WW-2 Islamic terror phenomenon as a political (another ‘crisis’ for them, in reality an excuse) piggy backing on the Wahabist Islam which doesn’t even recognise any other cult of Islam as legitimate practitioners other than their own (leave alone any other religion). Violent Islam being an offshoot of SAudi , the finances (only after they became rich from oil recently in the last century) , the weapons control all other poor foot soldiering Islamic states. Now you can do your math as to why the Islamic situation is how it is as perceived by the ‘radical’ unemployed , poor and brainwashed Muslim youth and also as perceived by people who tend to think of Islam as purely violent and only coercive.
Its wholly political and none of the stakeholders are helping the situation , because its best in some people’s interest to let this cycle continue. Of course those people on both sides are damn powerful.
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epic fail . . . you people really need to study the actual history of Islam rather than the watered down pablum the apologists have been spoon feeding you . . .[/quote]
well he is not wrong.
read D.R. SarDesai: India
sardesai is a indian author, why should he apologis for the muslim rulers in india. one of the muslim mogul sultans created his own religion. it was based on islam, christianity, hinduisme and buddhisme.
