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Starting with Al-Bilãdhurî who wrote in Arabic in the second half of the ninth century, and coming down to Syed Mahmudul Hasan who wrote in English in the fourth decade of the twentieth, we have cited from eighty histories spanning a period of more than twelve hundred years. Our citations mention sixty-one kings, sixty-three military commanders and fourteen sufis who destroyed Hindu temples in one hundred and fifty-four localities, big and small, spread from Khurasan in the West to Tripura in the East, and from Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, over a period of eleven hundred years. In most cases the destruction of temples was followed by erection of mosques, madrasas and khãnqãhs, etc., on the temple sites and, frequently, with temple materials. Allãh was thanked every time for enabling the iconoclast concerned to render service to the religion of Muhammad by means of this pious performance.
Some more kings or commanders or sufis who figure in these histories in a similar context may have remained unmentioned because we had access to the full texts only in a few cases; most of the time we had to remain content with excerpts or summaries made by modern historians in one context or the other. Many more localities have remained unspecified because quite often the histories under reference, instead of naming particular places, mention provinces and regions where large-scale destruction of temples took place as a result of general orders issued to this effect, or intensive campaigns undertaken for this purpose alone.
It is seldom that translations retain the full flavour of the language and meaning of the original works. In our case, some of the flavour must have been lost in citations which we had to translate into English from Urdu or Hindi renderings of the Persian texts. Even so, we feel that, taken together, the citations do bring out something of the religious zeal harboured by the historians concerned when they sat down to glorify Islam and highlight its heroes.
Coming to the heroes themselves, some of them figure more prominently or frequently in our citations, such as Muhammad bin Qãsim, Mahmûd of Ghazni, Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish, Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî, Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq, Ahmad Shãh I and Mahmûd BegDha of Gujarat, Sikander Lodî, and Aurangzeb; they have earned permanent fame in the annals of Islam by doing what they did to Hindus in general and to Hindu temples in particular. But the others, too, do not come out discreditably if a state of mind or an expressed intention is any indication. Maybe, their achievements in this context have found a more detailed description in histories to which we have had no access.
It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his policy of sulh-i-kul, at least among the learned Hindus. It is no more remembered that to start with he was also a pious Muslim who had viewed as jihãd his sack of Chittor. Nor is it understood by the learned Hindus that his policy of sulh-i-kul was motivated mainly by his bid to free himself from the stranglehold of the orthodox ‘Ulamã, and that any benefit which Hindus derived from it was no more than a by-product. Akbar never failed to demand daughters of the Rajput kings for his harem. Moreover, as our citations show, he was not able to control the religious zeal of his functionaries at the lower levels so far as Hindu temples were concerned. Jahãngîr, like many other Muslim kings, was essentially a pleasure-seeking person. He, however, became a pious Muslim when it came to Hindu temples of which he destroyed quite a few. Shãh Jahãn did not hide what he wanted to do to the Hindus and their places of worship. His Islamic record on this score was much better than that of Jahãngîr. The reversal of Akbar’s policy thus started by his two immediate successors reached its apotheosis in the reign of Aurangzeb, the paragon of Islamic piety in the minds of India’s Muslims. What is more significant, Akbar has never been forgiven by those who have regarded themselves as custodians of Islam, right upto our own times; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is a typical example. In any case one swallow has never made a summer.
Author : Shri Sita Ram Goel
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