To
grasp the validity of this approach, it is necessary that we give up
what may be called the frog-in-the-well approach to
history. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru railed against this narrow approach
but not to much avail. Indeed, in respect of the Hindu-Muslim
civilizational encounter, he too suffered from the same handicap.
Thus we discuss Mohammed bin Quasim's invasion of Sind in the eighth
century more or less independently of the expansion of Arab Islam as
far as North Africa and the Iberian peninsula in the west, with
Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Palestine thrown in, and Transoxania
in the north, with the once mighty Iran, Medina, Khurasan and Sistan
included in it. And more often than not we fail to take note of the
fact that while Akbar Muslim armies cut through Christian and
Zoroastrian lands like knife through butter, in southern and eastern
Afghanistan, the region of Zamindawar (land of justice-gicers) and
Kabul, the Arabs were effectively opposed for more than two
centuries, from A.D. 643 to 870 by the indigenous rulers, the
Zunbils and the related Kabulshahs. Though with Makran and
Baluchistan and much of Sind, this area can be said to belongs to a
cultural and political frontier zone between India and Persia, in
the persis, in the period in question the Zunbils and their kinsmen,
the Kabulshahs, ruled over a predominantly Indian rather than
Persian realm. Arab geographers commonly speak of the king of Al-
Hind who bore the title of Zunbil. (Zun was a Shaivite
God.) Andre Wink has detailed an equally prolonged resistance on the
Markran coast in his Al-Hind : The marking of the Indo-Islamic
World.1
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