Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity) by BS Murthy (epub read online books .TXT) 📖

left for them for some gainful occupation, so essential ‘here’ for tending their families? Surely it wouldn’t have occurred to Muhammad, as anyway, he was providing his followers their fair share of the ‘spoils of war’ to take care of themselves but how the All-Wise Allah Ta’ala failed to realize that His faithful wouldn’t be able to subsist for long on a daily diet of fifty prayers is the question. They should contrast this with the Hindu path to their gods; the Brahmans shoulder the burden of worship on behalf of their co-religionists to free them from their own religious chores, thereby letting them pursue their temporal endeavors for public good. Whether Brahmans were wise or vainglorious, and / or both may not the point ‘here’.

Be that as it may, it was Moses’ concern for the Musalmans – “the congregational prayer is a weighty thing, and thy people are weak” - and his advice to Muhammad to bring some sense into that abnormal order of their God that saved the day for them all for all times to come. Viewed in this context, the umma should be indebted to Moses, not only for the reduced namāzi burden on them but also for the well-being of Islam itself. Shouldn’t that make a case for the ‘indebted’ believers to concede a little more of His Promised Land to the Jews, Moses’ people!

Well, it’s as if to sustain the ‘five prayers a day’ regimen that Muhammad had continued his campaigns of plunder that satiated the need as well as the greed of his followers, and the Caliphs and the despots, who succeeded him, kept up the precedent set by their God’s own messenger, that is till all that could be plundered from the subdued nations was plundered. Just to cite one example, as a case study, the royal palaces in Hyderabad Deccan and the chest of the Nizam’s family jewels stand in stark contrast to the social backwardness and the abject poverty even of his Musalman subjects in the erstwhile State of His Royal Highness. So it was no wonder that the Nizams were the richest of men in the world well into the middle of the 20th century, when others overtook them with their innovation or enterprise, and / or both. And won’t their famed collection of the priceless jewels give a measure of the poverty into which they had pushed the hapless populace of their vast province?

If only the ‘Fortune 500’ was in compilation in the times of the Muhammadan rule in India, it would have been no surprise that the Muslim Nawabs would have taken the cake, leaving the Hindu Rajas a few crumbs to satiate themselves with. Why for the Muslim parasites Mother India, the Hindu land of milk and honey, became the Islamic paradise ‘here’ itself. And yet, the Musalmans are ever averse to having vandemātaram as the Indian national anthem for it would require their veneration of her! What rank ingratitude for a land that contributed to Islam its Musalmans in their millions! But in catering to their Islamic whim, Gandhi’s Congress gave India a national anthem that salutes Sind, a province of the ‘conceded’ Pakistan! What should be India’s objection if its neighbour accuses her of hegemonic designs to set up an Akhand Bharat?

However, while the Quran had revealed how to share the ‘Spoils of War’ and Muhammad had stipulated the ‘Code de Distribution’ of the ransom amongst his followers, Islam has no clue about the generation of wealth. Added to the ingrained Arab belief in their moral right to loot, the religious sanction that Islam accords them to plunder the kafirs might have led the Muhammadan marauders to believe in their divine right to live off the wealth of the idolaters. It is another matter though; that the example set by Muhammad to distribute the loot among the faithful was diluted by the latter-day Sultans of Islam for the Muslim despots of the day to appropriate it all for themselves so as to indulge in a life of vile luxury.

Besides, preoccupied as it is with the ‘Hereafter’, Islam has no time to deal with the nation building ‘here’, and thus the Muslim rulers were at a loss as to how to bring the conquered countries back into economic well-being after their plunder rendered them into wastelands. What with the lands that came under their reign having become unyielding thus, and lacking the old jihadi zeal to embark upon plundering the European kingdoms, in time, the Islamic world sunk into economic decay and dissipation. That was the ‘moment in waiting’ for the West, industrialized in the meantime, for the wholesale colonization of the Muslim world that it coveted for so long. Well where the Christian crusades failed, the Western enterprise succeeded in subjugating the Musalmans!

 

Chapter 22

The Number Game

 

“If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen.”

Well, this fascinating proposition of Maryam Jameelah in Islam and Orientalism, Adam Publishers, New Delhi, would deserve the indulgence of any historian.

It might be so that even as man’s strengths could debilitate him at times, his weaknesses might become blessings in disguise for him, something akin to the Shakespearean assertion that “virtue itself turns vice being misapplied and vice sometime by action dignified.” This paradoxical mirror effect, by extension to people’s strengths and weaknesses, tend to shape the history of their nation, which seemed to have saved Hindustan from becoming a Sunnistan for Maryam’s delight. Whatever, the political plight of the Hindus that paved the way for the Islamic onslaught on their sacred soil probably served the cause of their sanātana dharma in the long run!

It was the fragmentation of Hindustan into minor kingdoms and tiny principalities that enabled the Turko-Afghan juggernaut to overrun its Western and the Northern parts to begin with. However, it was one thing for the marauding invaders to turn parts of it into their pocket burrows and another to make the whole of it as an Islamic State, to achieve which they would have to run over many a Hindu kingdom / principality, spread far and wide in the vast landmass. That would have entailed unremitting jihad in umpteen battles, but probably, as the unlimited riches of the limited land they conquered would have made the Sultans stay put in their grand palaces annexed with vast harems.

Moreover, they would have been alive to the problems logistics would pose in fighting wars far off from their Afghan backyards, and so desisted from venturing farther into the hinterland of Hindustan. As for Allah’s ‘barren’ soldiers, their urge to make it to the ‘Hereafter’ would have been fulfilled ‘here’ itself in Hindustan for it had all that their prophet said they would have ‘there’. Hence the invaders would have been averse to the risk of defeat in expansionist wars and thus, for long, their political domain was confined to some scattered Northern parts of Hindustan till in the latter-years Babur ushered in the mogul rule that his grandson Akbar expanded to some significance. But then, he tried to reconcile the subjects of his communally divisive empire through his Din-e-llahi, shaped by the best of Islam and Hinduism.

However, Aurangzeb, the Muslim zealot of his lineage, had in mind an intensive tabliq to Maryam Jameelah’s approval, but owing to the impediment of a Shivaji and his Maratha warriors, he could do no more to Islam in India than to sack its temples, including the most sacred ones of Lord Vishwanāth in Kashi and Lord Krishna in Mathura, and going by some accounts that came to light in the court halls in Ram Janmabhōmi–Babri Masjid land dispute, Ram Lalla of Ayodhya as well. Thus, for centuries, the pleasure-seeking Sultans, militarily constrained to boot, failed to bring about the Islamic tabliq in Hindustan that is unlike the Arab conquests in other parts of the planet. Besides, the concept of swadharma that insidiously weakened the Hindu polity seems to have served as an obstacle for the Islamic tabliq in ways unexpected.

In the history of conversions, even as the religious dogmas per se are a set of beliefs; mistrust is an accomplice of human nature that enables others to sow the seeds of doubts in the minds of the believers about their own beliefs. That done, it would only be a matter of time before their minds become conducive for infusing a set of new religious beliefs into their mental arena. That’s what enabled the Christ, with a new ‘Code de Conduct’ that was ingeniously sourced to the Ten Commandments, to induce some of the Jews to turn their backs on the Laws of Moses.

Later, borrowing the Christ’s idea, Muhammad in his “O ye believe” refrain came up with a newer set of dogmas handed out to him by none other than Jehovah, albeit in His avatar as Allah Ta’ala, to alter the belief system of the entire Arabia to start with. Wiser to this human proclivity that enabled him to cement his new faith in the minds of the Musalmans, and to ensure that the mind of man would never be able to play the spoilsport for Islam, Muhammad had positioned himself as the Seal of Prophets and declared that the Quran is the God’s final guidance to man for all times to come. Why, didn’t Guru Gobind Singh likewise proclaim Guru Grandh Sahib as the final Guru of the panth?

It’s no wonder then that when the statues of Zeus were pulled down all over the Roman Empire; its Pagan subjects had earnestly hoped that the Father of their Gods would destroy the Christians for the sacrilege. But as none of that happened, they lost faith in the religion of their progenitors, and thereafter, they needed no great persuasion from the evangelists to change their faith, more so as their Emperor Constantine himself had become a Christian. Nevertheless, the Pagan fate didn’t visit Hinduism as Mahmud Ghazni hoped his destruction of the temple and the desecration of the Deity of Somnath would, but why? Maybe, the answer lies in the social ethos of Hindustan

Unlike the Semitic religions that are steeped in the realms of belief, the Hindu swadharma is a ‘way of life’, that at once is habit forming as well as pride inducing. As an illustration, if not as an analogy, we now have this American Way of Life, regardless of its ethno-cultural diversity, which the politicians of all hues in the U.S. vow to safeguard regardless. And since habits, unlike beliefs, die hard, the habituation of various caste groups to their own swadharma would have thwarted any Islamic attempt to uproot Hinduism from the social soil of Arya Varta.

It is a measure of the sway swadharma had on the Indian populace that the Imams of Islam were constrained to let the Musalman converts from the outcastes to retain their Hindu dress code and social mores in their new religious habitats, nevertheless as bait for conversion. Yet one may wonder, if not for this Sufi softening of the Islamic rigidity, how many outcastes, in spite of their ill-treatment by the caste Hindus, would have embraced Islam in the first place?

Why wouldn’t it be interesting to speculate as to what would have happened had there been an expansive Hindu kingdom in place in Arya Varta when the Ghaznis and Ghuris eyed it for plunder? Maybe, the might of such an empire, might have put paid to the Islamic misadventure at the foothills of the Hindu Kush itself. And probably Islam would have never been able to set its bigoted foot on the Hindustani soil to be able to convert part of its populace, occasioning its eventual partition into India and Pakistan.

But what if, had the jihadi zeal of the Musalmans to plunder ‘here’ or die for the joys of ‘the Hereafter’ overwhelmed the imperial might of an