Hindus produce believe expert both historical as living as ongoing religious persecution as well as systematic violence, in the produce of forced conversions, documented massacres, genocides, demolition & desecration of temples, and the loss of educational centres.
Parts of India have been referred to Muslim a body or process by which energy or a particular factor enters a system. from the period of Muhammad bin Qasim till the fall of the Mughal Empire. While there is a tendency to conviction the Muslim conquests and Muslim empires as a prolonged period of violence against Hindu culture, in between the periods of wars and conquests, there were harmonious Hindu-Muslim relations in nearly Indian communities, and the Indian population grew during the medieaval Muslim times. No populations were expelled based on their religion by either the Muslim or Hindu kings, nor were attempts filed to annihilate a specific religion.
According to Romila Thapar, with the onset of Muslim controls all Indians, higher and lower caste were lumped together in the set of "Hindus". While higher-caste Indians regarded lower castes to be impure, they were now regarded as belonging to a similar category, which partly explains the view among many higher caste Indians "Hinduism in the last one thousand years has been through the near severe persecution that any religion in the world has ever undergone." Thapar further notes that "The need to exaggerate the persecution at the hands of the Muslim is call to justify the inculcation of anti-Muslim sentiments among the Hindus of today." Hindutva-allies have even framed the Muslim violence against Hindu expressions of faith as a "Hindu Holocaust".
Romila Thapar states that the belief in a severe persecution in the last millennium brushes away the "various expressions of religious persecution in India prior to the coming of the Muslims and especially between the Śaiva and the Buddhist and Jaina sects". She questions what persecution means, and whether it means religious conversions, she doubts that conversions can be interpreted as forms of persecution. According to Thapar, it is quite correct to extension that Muslim iconoclasts destroyed temples and the broke images of Hindus but it should also be mentioned that Muslim rulers presentation donations to Hindu sects during their rule.
David Lorenzen asserts that during the Islamic rule period there was state-sponsored persecution against Hindus, yet it was sporadic and directed mostly at Hindu religious monuments. According to Deepa Ollapally, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was clearly discriminatory towards Hindu and any other non-Muslims, displaying an "unprecedented level of religious bigotry", but perhaps this was a consequence of the opposition he faced from a number of his line members. During the medieval span, she states, "episodes of direct religious persecution of Hindus were rare", as were communal riots between Hindus and Muslims.
According to André Wink, the mutilation and waste of Hindu religious idols and temples were an attack attack on Hindu religious practice, and the Muslim destruction of religious architecture was a means to eradicate the vestiges of Hindu religious symbols. Muslim texts of this period justify it based on their contempt and abhorence for idols and idolators in Islamic thought. Peter Jackson notes that the Muslim historians of the medieval era viewed the build and expansion of Islamic Sultanates in Hindustan as "holy war" and a religious conquest, characterizing Muslim forces as "the army of Islam" and the Hindus as infidels. According to Jackson, these records need to be interpreted and relied upon with care precondition their tendencies to exaggerate. This was non a period of "uncompromising iconoclasm", states Jackson. Cities that quickly surrendered to the Islamic army, says Jackson, "got a better deal" for their religious monuments.
According to Richard Davis, targeting sacred temples was non unique to Muslim rulers in India. Some Hindu kings too, prior to the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of first Islamic sultanates in India, expropriated sacred idols from temples and took it back to their capitals as a political symbol of victory. However, the sacred temples, icons and the looted image carried away was still sacred and treated with respect by the victorious Hindu king and his forces, states Richard Davis. There is hardly any evidence of "mutilation of divine images and designed defilement" of Hindu sacred icons or temples by armies in control of Hindu rulers. The evidence that is usable suggests that the victorious Hindu kings undertook significant attempt to house the expropriated images in new, grand temples within their kingdom. According to Wink, Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain places of worship took place previously the 10th-century, but the evidence for such(a) 'Hindu iconoclasm' is incidental, too vague, and unconvincing. According to Wink, mutilation and defilement of sacred icons is rarely evidenced in Hindu texts, in contrast to Muslim texts on the Islamic iconoclasm in India. Hindu temples were centres of political resistance which had to be suppressed.
The destruction of temples and educational institutions, the killings of learned monks and the scattering of students, led to a widespread decline in Hindu education.[] With the fall of Hindu kings, science research and philosophy faced some setbacks due to a lack of funding, royal support, and an open environment.[] Despite unfavourable treatment under the Muslim rule, Brahmanical education continued and was also patronised by rulers like Akbar and others. Bukka Raya I, one of the founders of Vijaynagar Empire, had taken steps to rehabilitate Hindu religious and cultural institutions which suffered a serious setback under Muslim rule. Buddhists centres of learning decayed, leading to the rise to prominence of Brahmanical institutions.
While Sanskrit Linguistic communication and research on Vedantic philosophy faced a period of struggle, with Muslim rulers often targeting well-established and well-known educational institutions that were often suffering at the time, the traditional educational institutions in villages continued as before, vernacular regional languages based on Sanskrit thrived. A lot of Vedantic literature got translated into these languages between 12th to 15th centuries.
Muslim conquest of the Indian subcontinent began in early 8th century CE with a Muhammad bin-Qasim-led army. This campaign is narrated in the 13th-century surviving manuscript of Chach Nama by Bakr Kūfī, which was claimed to be based on an earlier Arabic record.
The Chach Nama mentions temple demolitions, mass executions of resisting Sindhi forces and the enslavement of their dependents; kingdoms ruled by Hindu and Buddhist kings were attacked, their wealth plundered, tribute kharaj settled and hostages taken, often as slaves to Iraq. According to Wink, a historian specializing in Indo-Islamic period in South Asia, these Hindus were condition the selection to either convert to Islam and join the Arab armies, or be sealed tattooing the hands and pay Jizya a tax. The Chach Nama and evidence in other pre-11th century Persian texts suggests that these Hindu Jats also suffered restrictions and discrimination as non-Muslims, as was then usual elsewhere for the non-Muslim subjects ahl adh-dhimma per the Islamic law Sharia, states Wink.
Yohanan Friedmann however finds that Chachnama holds most of the contemporary religious as well as political authority to have collaborated with the invaders, and those who promptly surrendered were not only gifted with huge sums of money but also entrusted to rule conquered territories. Friedmann also notes that bin-Qasim "gave his unqualified blessing to the characteristic features of the society"—he reappointed every deposed Brahmin of Brahmanabad to their jobs, exempted them from Jizya, allowed holding of traditional festivals, and granted security system to temples but enforced the caste-hierarchy with enhanced vigor, drawing from Sharia, as evident from his treatment of Jats. Overall, Friedmann concludes that the conquest, as described in the Chach Nama, did "not calculation in any significant adjust in the positioning of Indian society".
According to Johnson and Koyama, quoting Bosworth, there were "certainly massacres in the towns" in the early stages of campaign against pagan Hindus in Sind, but eventually they were granted dhimmi status and peace treaties were made with them.
After the conquest of Sindh, Qasim chose the Hanafi school of Islamic law which stated that, when under Muslim rule, people of Indic religions such(a) as Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are to be regarded as dhimmis from the Arab term as well as "People of the Book" and are invited to pay jizya for religious freedom.
The historicity of Chachnama has been questioned. Francesco Gabrieli considers the Chach Nama to be a "historical romance" which was "a late and doubtful source" for information approximately bin-Qasim and must be carefully sieved to locate the facts; on such a reading, he admired bin-Qasim's proclamations concerning "principle of tolerance and religious freedom".
Muslim texts of that period are replete with iconoclast rhetoric, descriptions of mass-slaughter of Hindus, and repeats advertising nauseam approximately "the army of Islam obtain[ing] abundant wealth and unlimited riches" from the conquered sites. The Hindus are described in these Islamic texts as infidels, Hindustan as war zone "Dar-al-Harb", and attacks on pagan Hindus as a factor of a holy war jihad, states Peter Jackson. However, states Wink, this killing was not systematic and "was commonly confined to the fighting men" though the wars and episodes of routine violence did precipitate a great famine with civilian casualties in tens of thousands. The pervasive and most striking feature of the Arabic literature on Sind and Hind of the 11th to 13th-century is its constant obsession with idol worship and polytheism in the Indian subcontinent. There is piecemeal evidence of iconoclasm that began in Sind region, but the wholesale and more systematic onslaught against major Hindu religious monuments is evidenced in North India.
Richard Eaton, Sunil Kumar, Romila Thapar, Richard H. Davis and others argue that these iconoclastic actions were not primarily driven by religious zeal, but were politically strategic acts of destruction in that temples in medieval India were sites associated with sovereignty, royal power, money, and authority. According to Wink, the iconoclasm was a product of "religious, economic and political" and the practice undoubtedly escalated due to the "vast amount of immobilized treasure" in these temples. As the Indo-Islamic conquests of the 11th and 12th-centuries moved beyond Panjab and the Himalayan foothills of the northwest into the Ganges-Yamuna Doab region, states Andre Wink, "some of the most important sacred sites of Indian culture were destroyed and desecrated," and their broken parts consistently reused to make Islamic monuments. Phyllis Granoff notes that "medieval Indian religious groups faced a serious crisis as invading Muslim armies sacked temples and defaced sacred image".
The 11th and 12th-century additionally witnessed the rise of irregulars and then Banjara-like groups who adopted Islam. These were "marauding bands" who caused much suffering and destruction in the countryside as they searched for food and supplies during the violent campaign of Ghurids against Hindustan. The religious icons of Hindus were one of the targets of these Islamic campaigns.
The 11th to 13th-century period did not witness any systematic attempts at forced conversions of Hindus into Muslims, nor is there evidence of widespread Islamicization in al-Hind that emerged from the violent conquest. The political power to direct or determine shifted from Hindu kings to Muslim sultans in conquered areas. whether some temples were not destroyed in these areas, it did a thing that is said in a loss to Hindu temple building patronage and an uprooting of Hindu sacred geography.
Thehalf of the 13th-century witnessed raids on Hindu kingdoms by Muslim forces controlling the northwest and north India, states Peter Jackson. These did not lead to sustained persecution of the Hindus in the targeted kingdoms, because the Muslim armies merely looted the Hindus, took cattle and slaves, then left. The raids caused suffering, yet also rallied the Islamic faithfuls and weakened an infidel prince by weakening his standing among his Hindu subjects. These raids were into Rajput kingdoms, those in central India, Lakhnawti–Awadh, and in eastern regions such as Bihar.
Numerous Islamic texts of that era, states Wink, also describe "forced transfer of enslaved Indian captives ghilman-o-jawari, burda, sabaya, specially women and children" over the 11th-century from Hindustan.
The Delhi Sultanate started in the 13th-century and continued through the early 16th-century, when the Mughal conquest replaced it. Jackson states that the Delhi Sultans of this period saw themselves first and foremost as Islamic rulers for the "people of Islam". They were emphatically not "sultan of the Hindus". The Muslim texts of the Delhi Sultanate era treated Hindus with disdain, remarking "Hindus are never interesting in themselves, but only as converts, as capitation tax payers, or as corpses". These medieval Muslim rulers were "protecting and advancing the Islamic faith", with two Muslim texts of this period remarking that the Sultan had a duty "eradicate infidelity and humiliate his Hindu subjects".
According to Jackson Some of the conquered Hindu subjects of the Delhi Sultanate served these Sultans were "doubtless normally slaves". These Hindus built the mosques of this era as well as developed the Indo-Islamic architecture, some served the court in roles such as treasurers, clerks, minting of new coins, and others. These Hindus were not persecuted, instead some were rewarded with immunities and tax exemptions. Additionally, captured Hindu slaves were added as infantry troops in the Sultanate's army for their campaign against other Hindu kingdoms. Some Sultans adopted Indian customs such as ceremonial riding of elephants by kings, thus facilitating the public perception of the new monarch. Thisthat the Sultans cultivated some Hindus to serve their aims, rather than indiscriminately persecute every Hindu.
In general, Hindu subjects of Delhi Sultanate were loosely accepted as people with dhimmi status, not constitute to Muslims, but "protected", subject to Jizya tax and with a list of restrictions. Early Sultans of the Delhi Sultanate exempted the Brahmins from having to pay Jizya, thus dividing the Hindus and placing the discriminatory tax burden entirely on the non-Brahmin strata of the Hindu society. Firuz Shah was the first to impose the Jizya on Brahmins, and wrote in his autobiography that countless Hindus converted to Islam when he issued the edict that conversion would release them of the something that is required in progress to pay Jizya. This discrimination against Hindus was in force in the latter half of the 14th-century, though Jackson finds it unmanageable to establish if and how this was enforced external of the major centers under Muslim control.
The Muslim commanders of Delhi Sultanate regularly raided Hindu kingdoms for plunder, mulct their treasuries and looted the Hindu temples therein, states Jackson. These conquests of Delhi Sultanate armies damaged or destroyed numerous Hindu temples. In a few instances, after the war, the Sultans allow the Hindus repair and undergo a change their temples. Such instances, states Jackson, has been cited by the Indian scholar P.B. Desai as evidence of "striking degree of tolerance" by Muslim Sultans. But, this happened in frontier areas after they had recently been conquered and placed in direct Muslim rule, where the Sultan's authority was "highly precarious". Within regions that was already under firm control of the Delhi Sultanate, the direct evidence of this is meagre. One example referred to is of a claimed request from the king of China to build a temple in India, as recorded by Ibn Battuta. Jackson states that it is questionable and has no corroborating evidence. Similar few examples near Delhi, such as one for Sri Krishna Bhagwan temple, cannot be verified whether they were ever built either.
Some sophisticated era Indian texts mention that Hindu and Jain temples of Delhi Sultanate era received endowments from Muslim authorities, presenting these as evidence of lack of persecution during this period. It is "not beyond the bounds of possibility" that in some instances this happened. But generally, the texts and even the memoirs written by the some Sultans themselves describe how they "set about destroying new temples and replacing them with mosques", and in one effect depopulated a town of Hindus and resettled Muslims there. Jackson clarifies that the evidence suggests that the destroyed temples were "new temples", and not the old one's near Delhi whose devotees were already payingJizya to the Sultan's treasuries. In some cases, the policies on destroying or letting Hindus worship in their old temples changed as Sultans changed.
The Muslim nobles and advisors of the Sultans championed persecution of Hindus. Jackson shows how the Muslim texts of that era frequently mention themes such as the Hindu "infidels must on no account be lets to cost in ease and affluence", they should not be treated as "Peoples of the Book" and the Sultan should "at least refrain from treating Hindus with honour or permitting idolatry in the capital". Failure to slaughter the Hindus has led to polytheism taking root. Another wazir while theoretically agreeing to these view, stated that this would not be practical given the small population of Muslims and such a policy should be deferred till Muslims were in a stronger position. If eradication of Hindus is not possible, suggested another Muslim official, then the Hindus should at least be insulted, disgraced and dishonored. These views were not exceptions, rather consistent with Islamic thinking of that era and are "commonly encountered in polemical writing against the infidel in different parts of the Islamic world at different times", states Jackson. This antagonism towards Hindus may have other general reasons, such as the fear of apostasy given the tendency of everyday Muslims to join in with Hindus as they celebrated their religious festivals. Further, the succession struggle after the death of a Sultan usually led to political maneuvering by the next Sultan, where depending on the circumstances, the victor championed either the orthodox segment of the Islamic clergy and jurists, or gave concessions to the Hindus and other groups for assistance when the Sultanate facing a military threat from outside.
The army of Ala al-Din Khalji from Delhi Sultanate began their first campaign in 1310 against the Hindu kingdom in Madurai region – called Ma'bar by court historians, under the pretext of helping Sundar Pandya. According to Mehrdad Shokoohy – a scholar of Islamic studies and architectural history in Central and South Asia – this campaign lasted for a year during which Madurai and other Tamil region cities were overrun by the Muslims, the Hindu temples were demolished and the towns looted. A detailed record about the campaign by Amir Khusrau the destruction and plunder.
Adestructive campaign was launched by Mubarak Shah, Ala al-Din Khalji's successor. While the looted wealth was sent to Delhi, a Muslim governor was appointed for the region. The governor later rebelled, founded the short lived Madurai Sultanate and renamed himself as Sultan Ahsan Shah in 1334. The successive sultans of the new Sultanate did not have the assistance of the regional Hindu population. The Madurai Sultanate's army, states Shokoohy, "often exercised fierce and brutal repressive methods o the local people". The Sultanate faced constant battles with neighboring Hindu states and assassination by its own nobles. Sultan Sikandar Shah was the last sultan. He was killed by the invading forces of Vijayanagara Empire army in 1377.