Sita Ram Goel
Why did Islamic
invaders continue to destroy Hindu temples and desecrate the idols of Hindu
Gods and Goddesses throughout the period of their domination? Why did they
raise mosques on sites occupied earlier by Hindu places of worship?
These questions were asked by Hindu scholars in modern times after the
terror of Islam had ceased and could no more seal their lips.
In India - and
in India alone - two explanations have come forth. One is provided
by the theology of Islam based on the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet.
The other has been proposed by Marxist professors and lapped up by apologists
of Islam. We shall take up the second explanation first.
The credit for
pioneering the Marxist proposition about destruction of Hindu temples goes
to the late Professor Mohammed Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University.
In his book, Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznin, first published in 1924,
he presented the thesis that Mahmud’s destruction of Hindu temples was
actuated not by zeal for the faith but by “lust for plunder.” According
to him, India at that time was bursting with vast hoards of gold and silver
accumulated down the ages from rich mines and a prosperous export trade.
Most of the wealth, he said without providing any proof, was concentrated
in temple treasuries. “It was impossible,” wrote the professor, “that
the Indian temples should not sooner or later tempt some one strong and
unscrupulous enough for the impious deed. Nor was it expected that a man
of Mahmud’s character would allow the tolerance which Islam inculcates
to restrain him from taking possession of the gold… when the Indians themselves
had simplified his work by concentrating the wealth of the country at a
few places” (p. 82).
Professor Habib
did not hide any of the salient facts regarding destruction of Hindu temples
by Mahmud, though the descriptions Le gave were brief, sometimes only in
footnotes. He also narrated how Mahmud’s exploits were celebrated
at Baghdad by the Caliph and the populace and how the hero was compared
to the companions of the Prophet who had achieved similar victories in
Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Only the conclusion he drew was radically
different from that drawn by Mahmud’s contemporaries as well as latter-day
historians and theologians of Islam. “Islam,” he wrote, “sanctioned
neither the vandalism nor the plundering motives of the invader; no principle
of the Shariat justifies the uncalled for attack on Hindu princes
who had done Mahmud and his subjects no harm; the wanton destruction of
places of worship is condemned by the law of every creed. And yet
Islam, though it was not an inspiring motive could be utilised as an a
posteriors justification for what was done. So the precepts of
the Quran were misinterpreted or ignored and the tolerant policy of the
Second Caliph was cast aside in order that Mahmud and his myrmidons may
be able to plunder Hindu temples with a clear and untroubled conscience”
(Pp. 83-84, Emphasis in source).
This proposition
of Mahmud’s guilt and Islam’s innocence appealed to the architect of India’s
secularism, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In a letter dated June 1, 1932,
he wrote to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, that Mahmud “was hardly a religious
man”, that he was “a Mohammedan of course, but that was by the way” and
that Mahmud would have done what he did “to whatever religion he might
have belonged” (Glimpses of World History, 1982 Reprint, p. 155).
In fact, Pandit Nehru went much farther than Professor Habib. The
latter had written how Mahmud gave orders to burn down thousands of temples
at Mathura after he had admired their architectural excellence. Pandit
Nehru narrated how Mahmud admired the temples but omitted the fact that
they were destroyed by him (Ibid., Pp. 155-156). Thus a determined
destroyer of Hindu temples was transformed into an ardent admirer of Hindu
architecture! This portrayal of Mahmud remained unchanged in his
Discovery of India which was published in 1946 (1982 Reprint, p.
235).
In days to come,
Professor Habib’s thesis that lust for plunder and not the Islamic theology
of iconoclasm occasioned the destruction of Hindu temples, became the party
line for Marxist historians who, in due course, came to control all institutions
concerned with researching, writing and teaching of Indian history.
This was extended to cover all acts of Muslim iconoclasm in medieval Indian
history. It became a crime against secularism and national integration
even to mention Islam or its theology in this context. Any historian
who dared cite facts recorded by medieval Muslim historians was denounced
as a “Hindu communalist.” Three Marxist professors wrote a book attacking
Dr. R.C. Majumdar in particular, simply because the great historian was
not prepared to sacrifice truth at the altar of Communist politics.
The book was printed by a Communist publishing house and prescribed for
graduate and post-graduate courses in Indian universities.
What was more,
the Marxist professors discovered a political motive as well. Hindu
temples were seen as centres of political conspiracies which Muslim sultans
were forced to suppress. And if the temples got destroyed in the
process, no blame could be laid at the door of the sultans who were working
hard in the interest of public order and peace. In a letter published
in the Times of India on October 21, 1985, twelve Marxist professors
rallied in defence of Aurangzeb who had destroyed the Keshavdeva temple
at Mathura and raised an Idgah in its place. “The Dera Keshava Rai
temple,” they wrote, “was built by Raja Bir Singh Bundela in the reign
of Jahangir. This large temple soon became extremely popular and
acquired considerable wealth. Aurangzeb had this temple destroyed,
took its wealth as booty and built an Idgah on the site. His action
might have been politically motivated as well, for at the time when the
temple was destroyed he faced problems with the Bundelas as well as Jat
rebellion in the Mathura region.”
The climax was
reached when the same Marxist professors started explaining away Islamic
iconoclasm in terms of what they described as Hindu destruction of Buddhist
and Jain places of worship. They have never been able to cite more
than half-a-dozen cases of doubtful veracity. A few passages in Sanskrit
literature coupled with speculations about some archaeological sites have
sufficed for floating the story, sold ad nauseam in the popular
press, that Hindus destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples on a large scale.
Half-a-dozen have become thousands and then hundreds of thousands in the
frenzied imagination suffering from a deep-seated anti-Hindu animus.
Lately, they have added to the list the destruction of “animist shrines”
from pre-Hindu India, whatever that means. And these “facts” have
been presented with a large dose of suppressio veri suggestio falsi.
A few instances will illustrate the point.
A very late Buddhist
book from Sri Lanka accuses Pushyamitra Sunga, a second century B.C. king,
of offering prizes to those who brought to him heads of Buddhist monks.
This single reference has sufficed for presenting Pushyamitra as the harbinger
of a “Brahmanical reaction” which “culminated in the age of the Guptas.”
The fact that the famous Buddhist stupas and monasteries at Bharhut and
Sanchi were built and thrived under the very nose of Pushyamitra is never
mentioned. Nor is the fact that the Gupta kings and queens built
and endowed many Buddhist monasteries at Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Sarnath
among many other places.
A Pandyan king
of Madura is reported to have been a persecutor of Jains. This is
mentioned in a book of the Saiva faith to which he belonged. But
the source also says that before becoming a convert to Saivism, the king
was a devout Jain and had persecuted the Saivites. This part of the
story is never mentioned by the Marxist professors while they bewail the
persecution of Jains.
According to the
Rajatarirgini of Kalhana, King Harsha of Kashmir plundered Hindu
and Buddhist temples in his lust for the gold and silver which went into
the making of idols. This fact is played up by the Marxist professors
with great fanfare. But they never mention Kalhan’s comment that
in doing what he did Harsha “acted like a Turushka (Muslim)” and was “prompted
by the Turushkas in his employ.”
This placing of
Hindu kings on par with Muslim invaders in the context of iconoclasm suffers
from serious shortcomings. Firstly, it lacks all sense of proportion
when it tries to explain away the destruction of hundreds of thousands
of Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain temples by Islamic invaders in terms
of the doubtful destruction of a few Buddhist and Jain shrines by Hindu
kings. Secondly, it has yet to produce evidence that Hindus ever
had a theology of iconoclasm which made this practice a permanent part
of Hinduism. Isolated acts by a few fanatics
whom no Hindu historian or pandit has ever admired, cannot explain away
a full-fledged theology which inspired Islamic iconoclasm. Lastly,
it speaks rather poorly of Marxist ethics which seems to say that one wrong
can be explained away in terms of another.1
Coming to the
economic and political motives for the destruction of Hindu temples, it
does not need an extraordinary imagination to see that the Marxist thesis
is contrived and farfetched, if not downright ridiculous. It does
not explain even a fraction of the facts relating to the destruction of
Hindu temples as known from literary and archaeological sources.
Even if we grant that Hindu temples in India continued to be rich and centres
of political unrest for more than a thousand years, it defies understanding
why they alone were singled out for plunder and destruction. There
was no dearth of Muslim places of worship which were far richer and greater
centres of conspiracy. The desecration of Hindu idols and raising
of mosques on temple sites is impossible to explain in terms of any economic
or political motive whatsoever. Small wonder that the Marxist thesis
ends by inventing facts instead of explaining them.
Professor Habib
cannot be accused of ignorance about the theology or history of Islam.
The most that can be said in his defence is that he was trying to salvage
Islam by sacrificing Mahmud of Ghaznin who had become the greatest symbol
of Islamic intolerance in the Indian context. One wonders whether
he anticipated the consequences of extending his logic to subsequent sultans
of medieval India. The result has been disastrous for Islam.
In the process, it has been reduced to a convenient cover for plunder and
brigandage. The heroes of Islam in India have been converted into
bandits and vandals.
It is amazing
that apologists of Islam in India have plumped for Professor Habib’s thesis
as elaborated by succeeding Marxist scribes. They would have rendered
service to Islam if they had continued admitting honestly that iconoclasm
has been an integral part of the theology of Islam. Their predecessors
in medieval India made no bones about such an admission. Nor do the
scholars of Islam outside India, particularly in Pakistan.
What we need most
in this country is an inter-religious dialogue in which all religions are
honest and frank about their drawbacks and limitations. Such a dialogue
is impossible if we hide or supress or invent facts and offer dishonest
interpretations. Mahatma Gandhi had said that Islam was born only
yesterday and is still in the process of interpretation. Hiding facts
and floating fictions is hardly the way for promoting that process.
Indian Express, April 16, 1989
Footnotes:
1
It is intriguing that the Marxist professors never mention the destruction
of Buddhist and Jain establishments in Transoxiana, Sinkiang, Seistan and
India which on the eve of the Islamic invasion included present-day Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Bangladesh. Every historian and archaeologist of that
period knows that the vast Buddhist and Jain establishments at Bukhara,
Samarkand, Khotan, Balkh, Bamian, Begram, Jalalabad, Peshawar, Takshasila,
Mirpur-Khas, Nagar-Parkar, Sringar, Sialkot, Agroha, Mathura, Hastinapur,
Kanauj, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Sarnath, Nalanda, Vikramsila, Vaishali, Rajgir,
Odantpuri, Bharhut, Paharpur, Jagaddala, Jajnagar, Nagarjunikonda, Amaravati,
Kanchi, Dwarasamudra, Bharuch Valabhi, Palitana, Girnar, Patan, Jalor,
Chandrawati, Bhinmal, Didwana, Nagaur, Osian, Bairat, Gwalior and Mandu
were destroyed by the swordsmen of Islam. Smaller establishments of these
faiths, which met the same fate, add up to several hundred.
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