When I look at the population of Hindus in South Asia today, I sometimes wonder how they lived under the Mughal and the past empires for centuries.
I thought Muslims, Christians and Jews (People of the Book) were only accepted under Muslim rule and worshiping anything other than God were not tolerated. Yet, today there are one billion Hindus in South Asia.
How and were they accepted in their society?
Many Hindus did convert due to persecution by the Islamic invaders. There are 60 Millions Muslims in Subcontinent compared to 80 Million Hindus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Hindus
1) Persecution of non-Muslims using money as a weapon - Imposing jizya and higher duties on non-Muslims. This would have compelled non-Muslims to covert to Islam to avoid losing their hard earned money
2) Destruction of temples, looting the treasures from the temples and building Mosques in their places - This meant the priests and administrators of these temples would have lost their money & jobs unless they converted to Islam and start preaching Islam instead at the same location. The Hindu devotees who were emotionally attached to those priests and administration would have also covered to Islam to support their families and community at large. This may have given birth of Sufism in the subcontinent.
3) Every time a non-Islamic ruler lost, the royal women were married by the new Islamic rulers and their children became slaves, had the women and Children not already committed suicide (Jauhar). The non-Islamic generals and administration also would have got replaced by the Islamic ones. This again meant losing their jobs. So many would have converted to Islam to avoid losing their jobs.
Obviously not everyone gave up the fight against all these types of persecution. In fact many did not give up to these types of threats, pressures and persecutions and that is the reason why Hinduism still survives in India while the native religions just disappeared into thin air in regions like Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Indonesia etc.
Now the subcontinent Muslims have hard time accepting this fact as accepting this would mean that their forefathers were weaker and they did not stand & fight along side with the forefathers of current day Hindus. Hence, the easier route would be to
1) Malign Hinduism to show that the conversion of their forefathers was not due to their weakness but due to their persecution under Hinduism. Now this reasoning falls flat for few reasons
a) The people who got converted to Islam in the regions of Pakistan & Afghanistan were not Hindus but rather Buddhists. Buddhism completely did away with caste system.
b) Most of the Hindus who got converted were Kshatriya, Brahman and Viasyas which meant they did not convert due to any persecution in Hinduism. Only Sudras who converted to Islam could claim this. Are Pakistanis willing to accept that most of their forefathers were Sudras? Certainly not! if reading the posts on PDF where people keep claiming about their manly physique & fairness of their skin and how they are superior to the dark, black and short Indian Hindus.
2) The alternate route is to claim that they are decedents of Arabs or Turks.This would mean they can steer clear of anyone questioning why their forefathers had to convert to Islam and avoid giving any justification. Genetics and DNA results be damned..
proud to be a Turk !
you can say that Turks follow their religions zealously and they went little too hard on hindus at the time of Great Aurangzeb Alamgir but at most of time they were largely Tolerant to the all kind of people, Muslims and non muslims.
my great Grandfather yoused to tell me stories of how my Huna Turk ancestors were treated with Respect by Mughal military officers despite following different Religion.
There is nothing to be proud of being a Turk in Subcontinent.
Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the Delhi Sultanate, once a powerful state,
entered a period of decline. Following the death of Sultan F¯ır¯uz Sh¯ah Tughluq (1351–88),
the heirs of the house of Tughluq battled successively for the throne. In 1394 N¯asir al-D¯ın
Mahm¯ud was put on the throne by one of the noble factions, but his real power extended
no further than the district round the capital and some adjacent regions (see above, Chapter
14, Part Two).
Timur’s Indian campaign was heralded by the appearance under the walls of
Multan of the forces commanded by his grandson, P¯ır Muhammad, who overran and looted
this wealthy city. In September 1398 Timur himself crossed the Indus. Reducing towns and
fortresses to ‘heaps of ashes and debris’ as they went, his forces headed for the capital,
Delhi. Before the decisive battle on the banks of the Jumna (17 December 1398), Timur
ordered the execution of all prisoners held by his armies – the sources speak of 100,000
captives – fearing that they would side with the Sultan of Delhi during the fighting.
The battle for Delhi was bloody: ‘The battlefield was piled high with mountains of
dead and wounded . . . blood flowed in streams.’32 Sultan N¯asir al-D¯ın Mahm¯ud fled to
Gujarat. On 18 December the khutba was read out in the mosques of Delhi, mentioning P¯ır
Muhammad by name. The inhabitants of the city resisted the intruders, who were looting
and pillaging, seizing prisoners and killing: ‘Hindu heads were piled as high as they could
go and their bodies became food for wild animals and birds.’ It took several days to escort
the captives out of the city; among them were several thousand master craftsmen, including
stonemasons whom Timur intended to use for the construction of mosques in Samarkand.33
On 1 January 1399 the warriors began to leave the city. They overwhelmed and pillaged
several further provinces and towns in north-western India, including Mirath (Meerut) and
Kangra. Timur recrossed the Indus in March 1399 and had soon left India behind. As
his vicegerent over Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur he appointed Khidr Khan Sayyid, who
mounted the throne in ruined Delhi in 1414 and founded the short-lived Sayyid dynasty.
http://en.unesco.org/silkroad/sites...ol_IVa silk road_central asia under timur.pdf
Timur invasion of India (1398-1399 AD)[edit]
Main article:
Timur
The Turko-Mongol ruler
Timur's attack of India was marked by systematic slaughter and other atrocities on a truly massive scale inflicted mainly on the subcontinent's Hindu population.
[55] Leaving the Muslim populated areas aside, his army looted rest of the habits. The Hindu population was massacred or enslaved.
[56] One hundred thousand Hindus prisoners were killed before he attacked Delhi and many more were killed afterwards.
[57][58]
During the
Timurid conquests of India,
Haryana was the site of countless of appalling massacres,
Timur's force of 90,000 soldiers each killed 50 to 100 Hindu men, women and children in Haryana, such atrocities include the be-headings of most of the enslaved Indian women after they were used for grinding, cooking and raping by Timur's soldiers before marching onward, causing a massive depopulation of the region.[59]
According to Habib and Raychaudhuri, when "Timur invaded India in 1398-99, collection of slaves formed an important object for his army; 100,000 Hindu slaves had been seized by his soldiers and camp followers".[60]
(Timur's) soldiers grew more eager for plunder and destruction. On that Friday night there were about 15,000 men in the city who were engaged from early eve till morning in plundering and burning the houses. In many places the impure infidel
gabrs (of Delhi) made resistance. (...) Every soldier obtained more than twenty persons as slaves, and some brought as many as fifty or a hundred men, women and children as slaves of the city. The other plunder and spoils were immense, gems and jewels of all sorts, rubies, diamonds, stuffs and fabrics, vases and vessels of gold and silver. (...) On the 19th of the month Old Delhi was thought of, for many Hindus had fled thither. Amir Shah Malik and Ali Sultan Tawachi, with 500 trusty men, proceeded against them, and falling upon them with the sword despatched them to hell.
– Sharafuddin Yazdi,
Zafarnama (ظفرنامه)
[61]
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-tamerlane
Tamerlane, or Timur, one of history's most brutal butchers, died on February 18th, 1405.
Tamerlane's tomb
In January the Scourge of God caught a cold. One of history’s most brutal butchers, now perhaps in his seventies, had set out with an army 200,000 strong from Samarqand, his capital, to try conclusions with the Chinese Empire, 3,000 miles away. It was a freezing cold winter, with the country deep in snow and the rivers frozen solid, and the army halted at Otrar in what is now Kazakhstan. The doctors’ efforts to cure their master, which included packing him in ice as the cold turned to fever, failed and it became clear that he was dying. Eventually, surrounded by his women and senior commanders, in a weak, almost inaudible voice he made an eloquent speech, telling them not to weep or run about madly tearing their clothes but to pray to God to have mercy on him.
He died at about eight o’clock in the evening, while icy winds howled round the palace and the tents of his army outside. The Chinese expedition was abandoned and the body was taken back to Samarqand to be interred beneath the dome of the Gur Amir mausoleum in a steel coffin under a slab of black jade six feet long, which was then the largest piece of the stone in the world. An inscription records: ‘This is the resting place of the illustrious and merciful monarch, the most great Sultan, the most mighty warrior, Lord Timur, Conqueror of the World.’
In Europe the name Timur iLeng, Timur the Lame, became Tamerlane or Tamburlaine. Lame he was, mighty he was, merciful he was not. As his latest biographer Justin Marozzi says, the millions he slaughtered – ‘buried alive, cemented into walls, massacred on the battlefield, sliced in two at the waist, trampled to death by horses, beheaded, hanged’ – would have had a different opinion. Of Mongol ancestry from what is now Uzbekistan, he began as a sheep-rustler and bandit, and was injured in a skirmish which left him lame in his right leg and unable to raise his right arm. In 1941 his tomb was opened by a Soviet archaeologist, Mikhail Gerasimov, who confirmed the injuries.
Building up a force of several hundred horsemen, Timur took service under an invading Mongol chieftain, seized Samarqand, took a wife descended from Genghis Khan and went on to an astonishing career of conquest until he ruled from Damascus to Delhi. Efficiently organised armies under his horse-tail standard covered immense distances. He destroyed the Golden Horde, conquered Persia and Mesopotamia, invaded Russia, Georgia, India, Syria and Turkey. Thousands of women were carried off as slaves. At Baghdad he had 90,000 of the inhabitants beheaded so that he could build towers with their skulls. At Sivas in Turkey, where he promised no bloodshed in return for surrender, he had 3,000 prisoners buried alive and pointed out that he had kept to the letter of his oath. His atrocities were intended to strike terror into the hearts of opponents, and cities which surrendered promptly were sometimes spared a sack. He was a Muslim and he justified his campaigns against Christians and Hindus as spreading the true faith, while when he attacked and slaughtered fellow-Muslims, as he very frequently did, they were always described as ‘bad Muslims’. Timur was a patron of art and learning and he turned Samarqand into an exquisitely beautiful city. His empire, which was never more than the expression of his personal dominance, did not survive his death.
.
