Number of words: 779

There was a no further Islamicincursion from outsideover the next 285 years. But Islam spread through the gentle Sufi seints, which gave Islam in Sind its defenetive eclectic stamp. It was not till AD 997-nearly three centuries after Quassim – that Subutgin forced his passage through the Khyber Pass. This opened the route for his son, the notorious Mahmud of Gazani, who invaded India seventeen times over the next twenty six years. Plundering among many other shrines and temples the great temple at Somanasta, the ransacking of which has become the symbol of Muslim Vandalism to not only the sangh parivar but many other Hindus too. Although historism Romila Thapar has conclusively established that the treasures of the Samanatha temple were always a target for Hindu rulers fighting each other. And that somanatha reaches contributed singnificantly to Mahmud of Gazani subsequent efforts to established renowned centures of learning and scholarship in central Asia, there can be no disputing that the raids of Mahmud of Gazni exposed the vulnerability of India and the weakness of its defences.

It is astonishing therefore that after Mahmud of Ghazani a further two centuries were two elapse – 195 years to be exact before the Delhi sultanate came to be established in ad 1192 at the invitation, as it were of raja Jaichand who bagged mohhamad Ghori to assist him in a family quallel  with his son-in law, prithviraj Chauhan.

Two centuries between Ghazani and Ghori were notable for the spread of the message of the Prophet through large swathes of north India. Again, it was not the  sword but the appeal of Islam that promoted its propogation through the five state was not Islamic. Islam spread because  it carried a revolutionary message the message of equality between human beings at least in the eyes of god, if not in the eyes of badshahs and nawabs. Hindu India  watched in astonishment and disbelief as slave and sultan washed in the same pool and bowed together before the mirab with no priestly intermediary between the petitioner and his Lord. Allah could be approached directly in the language of the petitioner and His blessings were gor all, high or low.

This was a severe challenge to the entire Hindu philosophical and social construct. The fact is that the world is a very unjust place and much of its pervasive inequality is grounded in the accident of birth. Those born poor remain, with rare exception poor, those born with a silver spoon in their mouth more often than not have the  option of turning it to gold. The only explanation for the manifest injustice of the human condition is either to eschew a metaphysical explanation altogether or resort to the only satisfactory metaphysical answer ever given, in my view, to the conundrum of a just creator and his unjust creation: the Hindu theory of Karma the singular belief which unites all Hindu and related schools of philosophy and religion. In karmic belief inequality today is explained by the imperative of expiating the sins of a previos life or lives; but better positioning in one’s next life is guaranteed by good works in this. The institutionalization of inequality in the castesystem in thus validated – one’s place in the hiecrarchy being the consequence of actions in the past and one’s expectation of the improvement in the next round being contigent on one performance in this life.

The contrast with much of the rest of the world where Islam penetrated  is significant. From North Africa to the Indonesian  Archipelago and out to the southern Phillipines overwhelmed and completely replaced all that went before. The advent of Islam opened not just a new page of history but a new page of civilization in these countries. This is well captured in Iqbal evocative poem. Written in Granada the centre of the Andalusian empire established in spain. On the other hand where Islam was worsted as in Andalsia after 500 years of the Muslim rule, Islam has been vanquished without almost a trace. Only in the Indian subcontinent Islam has neither triumphed totally nor has it been totally repulsed or entirely uprooted. Pre-islamic Hinduism has flourished even as the subcontinent has become home to by far the largest community of Muslims in the world. There are more Muslims between peshwar and Chittagong and between Kashmir and kerala/lakshwadeep in china to the western  reaches of the Sahara desert in Mauritania Islam today without Islam. Yet, the Mislims of India, and in south Asia as majority religion even as Islam aquaired its largest concentration of adherens in the same geographic region and the same political space?

Excerpted from “Confessions of a secular fundamentalist” by Mani Shankar Aiyar