Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to
rewrite history and to deny the millennium-long attack of
Islam on Hinduism. Today, most politicians and English-
writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to
condemn any public reference to this long and painful
conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length
to create the illusion of a history of communal amity
between Hindus and Muslims.
The American historian Will Durant summed it up like
this:"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the
bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for
its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good,
whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and
peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians
invading from without or multiplying within."
Only off and on did this persecution have the intensity
of a genocide, but it was sustained much longer and spread
out much wider geographically than the Nazi massacre.
Whereas the Germans including most members of the Nazi
party, were horrified at the Nazi crimes against humanity
within a few years, the Muslims, for whom Gott mit uns
(God with us) was not a slogan but a religious certainty,
managed to keep a good conscience for centuries. We will
encounter similarities as well as differences between Nazi
and Islamic crimes against humanity, but the most striking
difference is definitely the persistence with which Islamic
persecutions have continued for 14 centuries. This is
because it had more spine, a more powerful psychological
grip on its adherents than Nazism.
The ideological foundation of the Islamic campaign was
similar to the Nazi ideology. The Muslium invaders (as we
can read in numerous documents which they left us, from the
Quran and the Hadith onwards) distinguished between three
kinds of people: first of all the Muslims, the Herrenvolk
(master nation) to which Allah had promised the world;
secondly the Jews and Christians, who could live on under
Muslim rule but only as third-class citizens, just like the
Slavic Untermenschen (inferior people) in Hitler's planned
new order, thirdly the species to be eliminated, the real
Pagans who had to disappear from the face of the earth.
Different from Hitler's victims, the non-combatants
among the unbelievers often got a chance to opt for
conversion rather than death. What Mohammed (imitated by
his successors) wanted, was his recognition as God's final
prophet, so he preferred people to live and give him this
recognition (by pronouncing the Islamic creed, i.e.
converting), and only those who refused him this recognition
were to be killed. Still, conversion often came too late to
save defeated Pagans from slavery. At this point, Mohammed
deserves comparison with Stalin: unlike Hitler, he killed
people not for their race but for their opinions. But one
can hardly say that the one totalitarianism is better than
the other.
The Blitzkrieg of the Muslim armies in the first decades
after the birth of their religion had such enduring results
precisely because the Pagan populations in West- and
Central-Asia had no choice (except death) but to convert.
Whatever the converts' own resentment, their children grew
up as Muslims and gradually identified with this religion.
Within a few generations the initial resistance against
these forcible converions was forgotten, and these areas
became heidenfrei (free from Pagans, cfr. judenfrei). In
India it didn't go like that, because the Muslims needed
five centuries of attempts at invasion before they could
catch hold of large parts of India, and even then they
encountered endless resistance, so that they often had to
settle for a compromise.
The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for
the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities
were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds
of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers
deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often
literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest
of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the
annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still
called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani
sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill
100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other
occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564
left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated.
And so on.
As a contribution to research on the quantity of the
Islamic crimes against humanity, we may mention Prof.
K.S.Lal's estimates about the population figures in medieval
India (Growth of Muslim Population in India). According to
his calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population
decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of
Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate). More
research is needed before we can settle for a quantitatively
accurate evaluation of Muslim rule in India, but at least
we know for sure that the term crime against humanity is
not exaggerated.
But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never
fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in
Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers
against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally
defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious
Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total
confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the (in
India dominant) Hanifite school of Islamic law made
possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the
school of Hanifa gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer
the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but
to allow them toleration as zimmis (protected ones) living
under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya
(toleration tax) from them. Normally the zimmi status was
only open to Jews and Christians (and even that concession
was condemned by jurists of the Hanbalite school like lbn
Taymiya), which explains why these communities have survived
in Muslim countries while most other religions have not. On
these conditions some of the higher Hindu castes could be
found willing to collaborate, so that a more or less stable
polity could be set up. Even then, the collaboration of
the Rajputs with the Moghul rulers, or of the Kayasthas with
the Nawab dynasty, one became a smooth arrangement when
enlightened rulers like Akbar (whom orthodox Muslims
consider an apostate) cancelled these humiliating conditions
and the jizya tax.
It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in
India considered themselves exempted from the duty to
continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for
which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs).
Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each
other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed
unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests,
Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total
campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers
preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous
kingdoms, and were content to extract the jizya tax, and to
limit their conversion effort to material incentives and
support to the missionary campaigns of sufis and mullahs (in
fact, for less zealous rulers, the jizya was an incentive to
discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of
revenue). The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect
limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar
to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman
empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to
some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions,
destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of
Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of
raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian
custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a
safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.
The last jihad against the Hindus before the full
establishment of British rule was waged by Tipu Sultan at
the end of the 18th century. In the rebellion of 1857, the
near-defunct Muslim dynasties (Moghuls, Nawabs) tried to
curry favour with their Hindu subjects and neighbours, in
order to launch a joint effort to re-establish their rule.
For instance, the Nawab promised to give the Hindus the Ram
Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site back, in an effort to quench
their anti-Muslim animosity and redirect their attention
towards the new common enemy from Britain. This is the only
instance in modern history when Muslims offered concessions
to the Hindus; after that, all the concessions made for the
sake of communal harmony were a one-way traffic from Hindu
to Muslim.
After the British had crushed the rebellion of 1857, the
Indian Muslims fell into a state of depression, increasing
backwardness due to their refusal of British education, and
nostalgia for the past. While the Hindu elites took to
Western notions like secular nationalism, the Muslims
remained locked up in their communal separateness. As soon
as the British drew them into the political process
(founding of Muslim League in 1906) in order to use them as
a counter-weight against the Indian National Congress, they
immediately made heavy and hurtful demands on the Hindus,
such as the unlimited right to slaughter cows, and they
started working for political separation. First they
obtained separate electorates where Muslim candidates would
only have to please Muslim voters, and later they would
succeed in separating a Muslim state from India.
By the twenties, they took to the unscrupled use of
muscle power in a big way, creating street riots and
outright pogroms. If Hindus retaliated in kind, it was a
welcome help in instilling the separate communal identity
into the ordinary Muslim, who would have preferred to
coexist with his Hindu neighbours in peace. By creating
riots and provoking relatiatory violence, the Muslim League
managed to swing the vast majority of the Muslim electorate
towards supporting its demand for the partition of India.
The roughly 600,000 victims of the violence accompanying the
Partition were the price which the Muslim League was willing
to pay for its Islamic state of Pakistan. While every Hindu
and Muslim who took part in the violence is responsible for
his own excesses, the over-all responsibility for this mass-
slaughter lies squarely with the Muslim leadership.
After independence, the Islamic persecution of Hindus
has continued in different degrees of intensity, in
Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Kashmir (as well as heavy
discrimination in Malaysia). This is not the place for
detailing these facts, which the international media have
been ignoring completely. What may cut short all denials of
this continued pestering of Hindus in Muslim states, are the
resulting migration figures: in 1948, Hindus formed 23% of
the population of Bangla Desh (then East Pakistan), in 1971
the figure was down to 15%, and today it stands at about 8%.
No journalist or human rights body goes in to ask the
minority Hindus for their opinion about the treatment they
get from the Muslim authorities and populations; but they
vote with their feet.
In the first months of 1990, the entire Hindu population
(about 2 lakhs) was forcibly driven from the Kashmir Valley,
which used to be advertised as a showpiece of communal
harmony. Muslim newspapers and mosque loudspeakers had
warned the Hindus to leave the valley or face bullets.
After the Islamic conquest of Kabul in April 1992, 50,000
Hindus had to flee Afghanistan (with the Indian government
unwilling to extend help, and Inder Kumar Gujral denying
that the expulsion of Indians had a communal motive). The
pogroms in Pakistan and Bangladesh after the demolition of
the Babri Masjid left 50,000 Hindus homeless in Bangladesh
and triggered another wave of refugees from both countries
towards India. In Pakistan, 245 Hindu temples were
demolished, in Bangladesh a similar number was attacked, and
even in England some temples were set on fire by Muslim
mobs. And then we haven't even mentioned the recurrent
attacks on Hindu processions and on police stations.
It will now be evident that the Hindu psyche has very
little sympathy for Islam. Doing something about this was
the chief motive for negationism.
This was a miscalculation: the khilafat movement
intensified the Islamic sense of communal identity
(therefore the rejection of Indian nationalism), and added
considerably to Muslim separatism and the Pakistan ideology.
But before 1923, when the Turks themselves abolished the
caliphate so that the movement lost its raison d'etre (and
got transmuted into pogroms against the Hindus), there was
great expectation in Congress circles. Therefore, Congress
people were willing to go to any length to iron out the
differences between Hindus and Muslims, including the
invention of centuries of communal amity.
At that time, the Congress leders were not yet actively
involved in the rewriting of history. They were satisfied
to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim
relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur in 1931, a
Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy-
image by changing the contents of the history-books.
The next generation of political leaders, especially the
left-wing that was to gain control of Congress in the
thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess
negationism very explicitly. The radical humanist (i.e.
bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had fulfilled a
historic mission of equality and abolition of
discrimination, and that for this, Islam had been welcomed
into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had
occurred, it was as a matter of justified class struggle by
the progressive forces against the reactionary forces,
meaning the fedual Hindu upper castes.
This is a modern myth springing from an incorrect and
much too grim picture of the caste system, a back-projection
of modern ideas of class struggle, and an uncritical
swallowing of contemporary Islamic apologetics, which has
incorporated some voguish socialist values. There is no
record anywhere of low-caste people welcoming the Muslims
as liberators. Just like in their homeland, the Muslim
generals had nothing but contempt for the common people, and
all the more so because these were idolaters. They made no
distinction between rich Pagans and poor Pagans: in the
Quran, Allah had promised the same fate to all idolaters.
By contrast, there is plenty of testimony that these
common people rose in revolt, not against their high-caste
co-religionists, but against the Muslim rulers. And not
only against heavy new taxes (50% of the land revenue for
Alauddin Khilji, whom the negationists hail as the
precursor of socialism) and land expropriations, but
especially against the rape and abduction of women and
children and the destruction of their idols, acts which
have been recorded with so much glee by the Muslim
chroniclers, without anywhere mentioning a separate
treatment of Hindu rich and Hindu poor, upper-caste Kafir or
low-caste Kafir. Even when some of the high-caste people
started collaborating, the common people gave the invaders
no rest, attacking them from hiding-places in the forests.
The conversion of low-caste people only began when Muslim
rulers were safely in power and in a position to reward and
encourage conversion by means of tax discrimination, legal
discrimination (win the dispute with your neighbour if you
convert), handing out posts to converts, and simple
coercion. Nevertheless, the myth which M.N. Roy spread, has
gained wide currency.
The best-known propounder of negationism was certainly
Jawarharlal Nehru. He was rather illiterate concerning
Indian culture and history, so his admirers may invoke for
him the benefit of doubt. At any rate, his writings contain
some crude cases of glorification of Muslim tyrants and
concealment or denial of their crimes. Witness his assessment
of Mahmud Ghaznavi, who, according to his
chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the temple complex at
Mathura and then immediately proceeded to destroy it. Nehru
writes: "Building interested Mahmud, and he was much
impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi". About this he
wrote: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the
faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has
attained its present condition but at the expense of many
millions of dinars, nor could such another be constructed
under a period of 200 years." And that is all: Nehru
described the destroyer of Mathura as an admirer of Mathura,
apparently without noticing the gory sarcasm in Ghaznavi's
eulogy.
Moreover, Nehru denied that Mahmud had committed his
acts of destruction out of any religious motive: "Mahmud was
not a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, but that was just
by the way. He was in the first place a soldier, and a
brilliant soldier." That Mahmud was definitely a religious
man, and that he had religious motives for his campaigns
against the Hindus, is quite clear from Utbi's contemporary
chronicle. Every night Mahmud copied from the Quran for
the benefit of his soul. He risked his life several times
for the sake of destroying and desecrating temples in which
there was nothing to plunder, just to terrorize and
humiliate the Pagans. In his campaigns, he never neglected
to invoke the appropriate Quran verses. In venerating
Mahmud as a pious hero of Islam, Indian Muslims are quite
faithful to history: unlike Nehru, the ordinary Muslim
refuses to practise negationism.
With Nehru, negationmism became the official line of the
Indian National Congress, and after Independence also of the
Indian state and government.
The Deoband school was (and is) orthodox-Islamic, and
rejected modern values like nationalism and democracy. It
simply observed that India had once been a Dar-ul-Islam
(house of Islam), and that therefore it had to be brought
back under Muslim control. The fact that the majority of the
population consisted of non-Muslims was not important: in the
medieval Muslim empires the Muslims had not been in a
majority either, and moreover, demography and conversion
could yet transform the Muslim minority into a majority.
Among the scions of the Deoband school we find Maulana
Maudoodi, the chief ideologue of modern fundamentalism. He
opposed the Pakistan scheme and demanded the Islamization of
all of British India. After independence, he settled in
Pakistan and agitated for the full Islamization of the
(still too British) polity. Shortly before his death in
1979, his demands were largely met when general Zia launched
his Islamization policy.
Outsiders will be surprised to find that the same school
of which Maudoodi was a faithful spokesman, also brought
forth Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was Congress president
for several terms and who was to become minister of
Education in free India. Understandably but unjustifiably,
Azad has often been described as as moderate and
nationalist Muslim: he rejected the Partition of India and
the foundation of Pakistan, not because he rejected the idea of a
Muslim state, but because he wanted all of India to become a
Muslim state in time.
When in the forties the Partition seemed unavoidable,
Azad patronized proposals to preserve India's unity,
stipulating that half of all members of parliament and of
the government had to be Muslims (then 24% of the
population), with the other half to be divided between
Hindus, Ambedkarites, Christians, and the rest. Short, a
state in which Muslims would rule and non-Muslims would be
second-class citizens electorally and politically. The
Cabinet Mission Plan, proposed by the British as the
ultimate sop for the Muslim League, equally promised an
effective parity between Muslims and non-Muslims at the
Central Government level and a veto right for the Muslim
minority. Without Gandhiji's and other Congress leaders'
knowing, Congress president Azad assured the British
negotiators that he would get the plan accepted by the
Congress. When he was caught in the act of lying to the
Mahatma about the plan and his assurance, he lost some
credit even among the naive Hindus who considered him a
moderate. But he retained his position of trust in
Nehru's cabinet, and continued his work for the ultimate
transformation of India into a Muslim State.
Maulana Azad's pleas for Hindu-Muslim co-operation had
an esoteric meaning, clear enough for Muslims but invisible
for wilfully gullible non-Muslims like his colleagues in the
Congress leadership. Azad declared that Hindu-Muslim co-
operation was in complete conformity with the Prophet's
vision, for "Mohammed had also made a treaty with the Jews of
Madina". He certainly had, but the practical impact of this
treaty was that within a few years, two of the three Jewish
clans in Medina had ben chased away, and the third clan had
been massacred to the last man (the second clan had only been
saved by the intervention of other Medinese leaders, for
Mohammed had wanted to kill them too). Maulana Azad could
mention Mohammed's treaty with the Jews as a model for
Hindu-Muslim co-operation only because he was confident that
few Hindus were aware of the end of the story, and that
better-informed Hindus honoured a kind of taboo on criticism
of Islam and its Prophet.
This parenthesis about Maulana Azad may help clear up
some illusions which Hindus and Westerners fondly entertain
about the possibility of Islamic moderacy. The Deoband
school was as fundamentalist in its Azad face as it was in
its Maudoodi heart, and its spokesmen had no problems with
the horrors of Islamic history, nor did they make attempts
to rewrite it. That Muslims had persecuted and massacred
Hindus, counted as the fulfilment of Allah's salvation plan
to transform the whole world into a Dar-ul-Islam. As
Mohammed Iqbal wrote: "All land belongs to the Muslims,
because it belongs to their God." (Iqbal would, however,
end up in the Aligarh camp, cfr. infra) Maulana Azad shared
this view of history. He condemned Moghul emperor Akbar's
tolerant rule as the near-suicide of Indian Islam, and
praised fanatics like the theologian Ahmad Sirhindi, who
through his opposition to Akbar's tolerance had brought the
Moghul dynasty back on the right track of Hind-persecution.
Unlike the Deoband school, the Aligarh school tried to
reconcile Islam with modern culture. It understood the
principles of democracy and majority rule, and recognized
that a modern democracy would be incompatible with the
transformation of India into an Islamic state as long as
Muslims only formed a minority. The tactical opposition
against the disadvantageous system of democracy was
underpinned ideologically by Mohammed Iqbal, who criticized
it as a system in which heads are counted but not weighed.
But Iqbal understood that democracy was the wave of the near
future, and, together with more modern and sincerely
democracy-minded people in the Muslim intelligentsia, he
faced the logical consequence that the Muslims had to give up
the ambition of gaining control over all of India immediately.
Instead they should create a separate state out of the
Muslim-majority areas of India: Pakistan. The ideal of
Pakistan was launched by Iqbal in 1930, and in 1940 it
became the official political goal of the Muslim League.
Aligarh Muslim University has often been described as the
cradle of Pakistan.
From their better knowledge of and appreciation for
modern culture, the Aligarh thinkers accepted the modern
value of religious tolerance. Not to the extent that they
would be willing to co-exist with the Hindus in a single
post-colonial state, but at least to this extent that they
wanted to do something about the imge of intolerance which
Islam had come to carry. Around 1920 Aligarh historian
Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the
history of the Indian religious conflict. The main points
of his version of history are the following.
Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail
to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some
rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and
Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction
of their women and children, and the destruction of their
places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib,
these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please
their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic
rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which
the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us.
At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this
convenient hypothesis with a single fact.
Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which
Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be
attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors.
Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but
this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at
work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and
therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.
Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial
factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from
the steppes who would need several centuries before getting
civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn
barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.
Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of
minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India.
What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in
public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam
and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smrti)
and Muslim law (shariat), it chose the latter.
Mohammed Habib's excise in history-rewriting cannot
stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can
demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi
(997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of
devastating raids in Sindh, Gujrat and Punjab. This
Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was
not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature
(including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up
in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and
the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a
fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his
anti-Hindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic
stock. His massacres and acts of destruction were merely a
replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in
Sindh in 712-15. He didn't care for material gain: he left
rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same
fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a
Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a
huge ransom: "I prefer to appear on Judgement Day as an
idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller." The one explanation
that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to
his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.
There is no record of his being welcomed by urban
artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social
system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies
how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all
Muslims.
Another ruler, Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1351-88), personally
confirms that the descruction of Pagan temples was done out
of piety, not out of greed: "The Hindus had accepted the
zimmi status and the concomitant jizya tax in exchange for
safety. But now they built idol temples in the city, in
defiance of the Prophet's law which forbids such temples.
Under divine leadership I destroyed these buildings, and
killed the leaders of idolatry, and the common followers
received physical chastisement, until this abomination had
been banned completely." When Firuz heard that a Pagan
festival was going on, he reacted forcefully: "My religious
feelings exhorted me to finish off this scandal, this insult
to Islam. On the day of the festival I went there myself, I
ordered the execution of the leaders and practitioners of
this abomination... I destroyed their idol temples and built
mosques in their places."
This is not to say that the entire report which the
Muslim chroniclers have left us, should be accepted at face
value. For instance, writers like Ghaznavi's contemporary
Utbi give the impression that the raids on, and ultimate
conquest of Hindustan were a walk-over. Closer study of all
the source material shows that the Muslim armies had a very
tough time in India. From Muslim chronicles one only gets a
faint glimpse of the intensity with which the Hindus kept on
offering resistance, and of the precariousness of the Muslim
grip on Hindistan through the Muslim period. The Muslim
chroniclers have not been caught in the act of lying very
often, but some of them distort the proportions of victory
and defeat a bit. This is quite common among partisan
historians everywhere, and a modern historian knows how to
take such minor distortions into account. The unanimous and
entirely coherent testimony that the wars in Hindustan were
religious wars of Muslims against Kafirs is a different
matter altogether: denying this testimony is not a matter of
small adjustments, but of replacing the well-attested
historical facts with their diametrical opposite.
Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the
undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans
by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however
point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were
merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the
Muslims are guilty, but Islam.
In this context, one should know that there is a strange
alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim
fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual
muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to
partition India and create an Islamic state. After
independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit
support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the
implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be
adopted as national language, and to force India into the
Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this
collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as
exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri
Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's
rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the
educational and research institutes and policies.
Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the
Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the
Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories.
They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be
reduced to economic and class contradictions. They also
adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always refer to
conscious Hindus as the communal forces or elements
(Marxism dehumanizes people to impersonal pawns, or
forces, in the hands of god History). The Marxist
historians had the field all to themselves, and they set to
work to decommunalize Indian history-writing, i.e. to
erase the importance of Islam as a factor of conflict.
It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with
the Muslim rulers, but that also counted for the British
colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as
foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto
in Warsaw the Nazis employed Jewish guards, in their search
for absconding Jews they employed Jewish informers, and in
their policy of deportation they even sought the co-operation
of the Zionist movement: none of this can disprove Nazi-
Jewish enmity. It is also a fact that the Muslim rulers
sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally
true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who
fought some wars on Indian territory: they were just as much
part of a single colonial movement with a common colonial
ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the
enemies of the indian freedom movement. Even in the history
of the Crusades, that paradigm of religious war, we hear a
lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and
another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization
of the Crusades as a war between Christians and Muslims
(triggered by the destruction of Christian churches by
Muslims).
After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period,
the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this
type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood
non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy
theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims
is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They
carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they
incited the communal separateness. As the example par
excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th -century
8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as
Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a
very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans
with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a
concoction by the British historians: as the title of their
work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers,
most of them Muslims.
Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly
created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of
faith with everyone in India who calls himself a
secularist. It became a central part of the negationist
argument in the debate over the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid
issue. Time and again, the negationist historians (including
Bipan Chandra, K.N. Panikkar, S. Gopal, Romila Thapar,
Harbans Mukhia, Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey,
Sushil Srivastava, Asghar Ali Engineer, as well as the
Islamic politician Syed Shahabuddin) have asserted that the
tradition according to which the Babri mosque forcibly
replaced a Hindu temple, is nothing but a myth purposely
created in the 19th century. To explain the popularity of
the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th
century, most of them say it was a deliberate British
concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule-
policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow
citing, from the copious archives which the British
administration in India has left behind, any kind of
positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let
alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would
base his assertions, especially in such controversial
questions.
They have kept on taking this stand even after five
documents by local Muslims outside the British sphere in the
19th century, two documents by Muslim officials from the
early 18th century, and two documents by European travellers
from the 18th and 17th century, as well as the extant
revenue records, all confirming the temple destruction
scenario, were brought to the public's notice in 1990. In
their pamphlets and books, the negationists simply kept on
ignoring most or all of this evidence, defiantly
disregarding historical fact as well as academic deontology.
Concerning the Ayodhya debate, it is worth recalling
that the negationists have also resorted to another tactic
so familiar to our European negationists, and to all
defenders of untenable positions: personal attacks on their
opponents, in order to pull the public's attention away from
the available evidence. In December 1990, the leading JNU
historians and several allied scholars, followed by the
herd of secularist penpushers in the Indian press, have
tried to raise suspicions against the professinal honesty of
Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P. Gupta, the archaeologists who
have unearthed evidence for the existence of a Hindu temple
at the Babri Masjid site. Rebuttals by these two and a
number of other archaelogists hae received coverage in the
secularist press.
In February 1991, Irfan Habib give his infamous speech
to the Aligarh Muslim University historians, in which he
made personal attacks on the scholars who took part in the
government-sponsored debate on Ayodhya in defence of the
Hindu claim, and on Prof. B.B. Lal. In this case, the
weekly Sunday did publish a lengthy reply by the deputy
superintending archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of
India, A.K. Sinha. The contents of this reply are very
relevant, but it is a bit technical (i.e. not adapted to the
medium of a weekly for the general public) and written in
clumsy English, which gives a poor over-all impression.
Actually, I speculate that the Sunday-editor may well
have selected it for publication precisely because of these
flaws. The practice is well-known in the treatment of
letters to the editor: those defending the wrong
viewpoint only get published if they are somewhat funny or
otherwise harmless. I cannot be sure about this particular
case, but it is a general fact that from their power
positions, the negationists use every means at their
disposal to create a negative image for the Hindu opponents
of Islamic imperialism, including the selective highlighting
of the most clumsy and least convincing formulations of the
Hindu viewpoint.
In his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, the
Islamic apologist Ali Asghar Engineer has also selected a
few incomplete and less convincing statements of the Hindu
position, in order to create a semblance of willingness to
hear the Hindu viewpoint while at the same time denying the
Hindu side any publicity for its strongest arguments. He
has kept the most decisive pieces of evidence entirely out
of the readers' view, but has covered this deliberate
distortion of the picture behind a semblance of even-
handedness. In Anatomy of a Confrontation, the JNU
historians do not even mention the powerful argumentation by
Prof. A.R. Khan, while Prof. Harsh Narain and Mr. A.K.
Chatterjee's presentation authentic testimonies (in Indian
Express, republished by Voice of India in Hindu Temples, What
happened to Them and in History vs. Casuistry) are only
mentioned but not detailed and discussed, let alone refuted;
but clumsy RSS pamphlets and improvised statements by BJP
orators are quoted and analyzed at length.
The concluding paragraph of A.K.Sinha's rebuttal to
Irfan Habib's speech points out the contradiction between
the earlier work of even Marxist historians about ancient
India (in which they treat the epics as sources of history,
not mere fable) and their recent Babri-politicized stand:
"Today, even taking the name of Mahabharata and Ramayana is
considered as anti-national and communal by the communist
leaders, Babri Masjid Action Committee historians and the
pseudo-secularists. What do they propose to do with all
that has been published so far in [this] context by the
Marxists themselves, notably D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma,
Romila Thapar, K.M. Shrimali, D.N. Jha and others? I have
been thinking about the behavious of our Marxist friends and
historians, their unprovoked slander campaign against many
colleagues, hurling abuses and convicting anyone and
everyone even before the charges could be framed and proved.
Their latest target is [so] sobre and highly respected a
person as prof. B.B. Lal, who has all his life (now he is
nearing 70) never involved himself in petty politics or in
the groupism [which is] so favourite a sport among the so-
called Marxist intellectuals of this country. But then
[slander] is a well-practised art among the Marxists."
Another trick which a student of Holocaust negationism
will readily recognize in the pro-Babri campaign of the
Indian negationists, is that truly daring form of
amnipulation: selectively quoting an authority to make him
say the opposite of his own considered opinion. When the
JNU historians started slandering Prof. B.B. Lal as a
turncoat hired by the VHP, this was a panic reaction after
their earlier tactic had been exposed (though only in Indian
Express, but the negationist front will not tolerate even
one hole in the cordon of information control). Until then,
they had been using B.B. Lal's fame to suport their own
position that the Babri Masjid had not replaced a temple.
In fact, this remark only proves that the ASI summarizer
saw no reason to give (or saw reasons not to give) details
about the uninteresting but nonetheless existing medieval
findings. But in autumn 1990, some of these details have
been made public and they turned out to be of decisive
importance in the Ram Janmabhoomi debate. Prof.K.N.
Panikkar (in Anatomy of a Confrontation) suggests that, if
these relevant details were not recently thought up to suit
the theories of the RSS, they must have been deliberately
concealed at that time (late seventies) by the ASI
summarizer. The latter possibility means that negationists
are active in the ASI publishing section, editing
archaeological reports to suit the negationist campaign.
The implied allegation is so serious that K.N. Panikkar
expects the reader to assume the other alternative, viz. an
RSS concoction. But he may well have hit the nail on its
head with his suggestion that negationists in the ASI are
doing exactly the same thing that they are doing in all
Indian institutions and media: misusing their positions to
distort information.
At any rate, the details of the full report were given
in articles by Dr. S.P. Gupta and by Prof. B.B. Lal himself
(and independently by other archaeologists in talks and
letters to Indian Express) in late 1990. The pillar-bases
of an 11th century building, aligned to the Babri Masjid
walls, were presented by Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P.Gupta in
separate filmed interviews with the BBC. There could be no
doubt about it anymore: Prof. B.B. Lal had arrived at a
conclusion opposite to the one ascribed to him by a number
of Marxist historians (not only from JNU).
That is why is early December 1990 several of the most
vocal Marxist historians suddenly took to slander and
accused Prof. B.B. Lal of having changed his opinion in
order to suit the VHP's political needs. Now that they
could no longer use Prof. Lal's reputation for their own
ends, they decided to try and destroy it. In the case of
Dr. S.P. Gupta, they have not taken back their ridiculous
allegation that he had falsely claimed participation in the
Ramayana sites excavations. But with a big name like B.B.
Lal, an impeccable academic of world fame, they had to be
careful, because slander against him might somehow backfire.
That is why they have nor pressed the point, and why a
number of Marxist historians and other participants in the
Ayodhya debate have quitely reverted to the earlier tactic
of selectively quoting from the ASI summary of Prof. B.B.
Lal's report, and acting as if the great archaeologist has
supported and even proven their own position. As the press
had given minimum coverage to B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta's
revelations, many people would not suspect the truth.
Another trick from the negationists' book that has been
very much in evidence during the Ayodhya debate, consists in
focusing all attention on the pieces of evidence given by
those who upheld the historical truth,, and trying to find
fault with them as valid evidence. Thus, at the press
conference (19 Dec. 1992) where Dr. S.P. Gupta and other
historians presented photographs of an inscription found
during the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which proved once
more that a temple had stood on the site, and that it was
specifically a birthplace temple for "Vishnu Hari who
defeated Bali and the ten-headed king [Ravana]", some
journalists heckled the speakers with remarks that "because
of the demolition, the inscription was not in situ and
therefore not valid as evidence", and similar feats of petty
fault-finding.
A few days later, a group of 70 archaeologists and
historians, mostly names who had not taken a prominent role
in this debate so far, brought shame on themselves by
pronouncing judgement on this piece of evidence without even
seeing, let alone studying it. They demanded not that the
government look into this new evidence, as would be proper
for representatives of the scientific spirit, but that it
trace down from which museum the planted evidence had been
stolen and brought to Ayodhya. In doing history
falsification, it is best to remain on the attack, and to
put the bonafide historians on the defensive by accusing
them first.
A final point of similarity between the Marxist
involvement in the Babri Masjid case and the techniques of
Holocaust negationism is the fact that there was a Babri
Masjid debate in the first place. Indeed, postulating doubt
and the need for a debate is the first step of denial. The
tradition that the Babri Masjid had forcibly replaced a
temple was firmly established ad supported by sources
otherwise accepted as authoritative; when it was challenged,
this was not on the basis of newfound material which
justified a re-examination of the historical position. The
correct procedure would have been that the deniers of the
established view come up with some positive evidence for
their innovative position: until then, there was simply no
reason for a debate. Instead, they started demanding that
the other side give proof of what had been known all along,
and forced a debate on something that was really a matter of
consensus. Subsequently, instead of entering the ring,
attacking or countering their opponents' case with positive
evidence of their own, the challengers set themselves up as
judges of the other side's argumentation. This is indeed
reminiscent of the negationist Institute for Historical
Review announcing a prize for whomever could prove that the
Holocaust had taken place.
There is yet another trick from the negationist arsenal
which has been tried in India: find a witness from the
victims' camp to testify to the aggressor's innocence. Of
course there are not witnesses around who lived through
Aurangzeb's terror, but there are many who lived through the
horrors of Partition. It is nobody's case that the killings
wich Jinnah considered a fair price for his Muslim state,
never took place. But the negationists have spent a lot of
effort on proving the next best thing: that the guilt was
spread evently among Hindus and Muslims.
The Communist novelist Bhishma Sahni has used the novel
Tamas to point the Hindus as the villains in the Partition
violence. The interesting thing is that Bhishma Sahni's own
family was among the Hindu refugees hounded out or Pakistan.
His anti-Hindu bias, coming from a man who would have more
reason for an anti-Muslim animus, is a gift from heaven for
the Hindu-baiters. Marxist Professor Bipan Chandra parades
a similar character in his paper: Communalism - the Way Out
(published together with two lectures by KJhushwant Singh
as: Many Faces of Communalism). One of his students had
survived the terror of Partition in Rawalpindi, losing 7
family members. Bud he did not have any animus against the
Muslims, for he said: "Very early I realized that my parents
had not been killed by the Muslims, they had been kiled by
communalism." Coming from a victim of Muslim violence, this
is excellent material for those who want to apportion equal
blame to Hindus nd Muslims.
Of course, Bipan Chandra's student was right. The cause
of Partition and of its accompanying violence was not the
Muslims, but communalism, i.e. the belief that people
with a common religion form a separate social and political
entity. This belief is not fostered by Hinduism, but it is
central to Islam ever since Mohammed founded his first
Islamic state in Medina. It is true that some Hindu groups
(most conspicuously the Sikhs) have recently adopted some
Islamic elements, including the communalist belief that a
religious group forms a separate nation entitled to a
separate state. But the source of this communalist poison
in India is and remains Islam. Therefore, Bipan Chandra's
student has in fact said: "My family was not killed by the
Muslims, but by Islam."
It is a different matter that Muslims are the most
likely carriers of the Islamic disease called communalism,
and that they had massively voted for the commnalist project
of creating a separate Muslim state. The culprit was Islam,
and concerning the positions of the Muslims in the light of
the fanatical nature of Islam, I
would quote Bipan Chandra's own simile for understanding the
difference between communalism and its adherents: when a
patient suffers from a terrible disease, you don't kill him,
but cure him. The victims of Islamic indoctrination should
not be the target of Hindu revenge, as they were in large
numbers in 1947. Don't kill the patient, kill the disease.
Remove Islam from the Muslims' minds through education and
India's communal problem will be as good as solved.
At this point we may take a second look at the Marxist
position, mentioned above, that the Hindu community is a
recent invention. The observations which I just made
concerning the Islamic provenance of communalism might
seem to confirm that there was no Hindu communal identity.
However, the authentic sources from the medieval period are
unanimous about the sharp realization of a separate communal
identity as Muslims and as Hindus, overwhelmingly on the
Muslim side, but also on the Hindu side. We know for
instance that Shivaji, who turned the tide of the Muslim
offensive in the late 17th centure, was a conscious partisan
of an all-Hindu liberation war against Muslim rule (Hindu
Pad Padashahi). The same counts for Rana Pratap and many
other Hindu leaders, and there cannot be any doubt that the
Vijayanagar empire was conscious of its role as the last
fortress of Hindu civilization.
It is true that some Hindu kings attacked neighbouring
Hindu states in the back when these were attacked by the
Muslim invaders. They were at first not aware that these
Islamic newcomers were a common enemy, motivated by hatred
against all non-Muslims; but their lack of insight into the
character of Islam in no way disproves their awareness of a
common Hindu identity. The fact that they were acutely
aware of their internal political rivalries, does not
exclude that they were aware of a more fundamental common
identity, which was not at stake in these internecine feuds,
but which they defended together once they realized that it
was the target of this new kind of ideologically motivated
aggressor, Islam. Brothers are aware that they have a lot
in common, and this is not disproven by the fact that, when
left to themselves, they also quarrel with each other.
If at all some Hindus had at first only been conscious
of their own caste or sect rather than of the Hindu
commonwealth, the Muslim persecutions of all Hindus without
distinction certainly made them aware of their common
identity and interest. So, if the Marxists perforce want to
deny the common culture and value system underlying the
diversity of the Hindu commonwealth, then let them apply
some of their own dialectics instead. "It is in their
common struggle aginst the Islamic aggressors, that the
disparate sections of the native Indian society have forged
their common identity as Hindus": I do not agree with this
statement which posits a negative and reactive basis for a
common Hindu identity, but it must be accepted if one
labours under the assumption that there never had been a
positive common identity before. It is unreasonable to
expect the Indian Pagans to be lumped together as Hindus
for centuries on end, to be uniformly made the target of one
neverending aggression by Islam, to be subjected to the same
humiliations and the same jizya tax, and yet not become
conscious of a common interest. This common interest would
then give rise to unifying cultural superstructure. That is
how the sustained and uniform Islamic attack on all India
Pagans would inevitably have given rise to at least a
measure of common Hindu identity if this had not previously
existed.
The Muslims called the Pagans of India sometimes
Kafirs, unbelievers, i.e. a religious designation; but
often they called them Hindus inhabitants of Hindustan,
i.e. an ethnic-geographical designation (from Hind, the
Persian equivalent of Sindh). And they gave religious
contents to this geographical term, which it has kept till
today: so it is correct that the Hindus never defined
themselves as Hindus, as this was the Persian and later
the Muslim term for the Indian Pagans adhering to Sanatana
Dharma. But that was only a terminological matter, the
fundamental religious unity of the Sanatana Dharmis was just
as much a fact. Similarly, the Hindus called these
newcomers Turks, but this does not exclude recognition of
their religious specificity. On the contrary, even Teimur
the Terrible, who made it absolutely clear in his memoirs
that he came to India to wage a religious war against the
Pagans, and who freed the Muslim captives from a conquered
city before putting the Hindu remainder to the sword,
referred to his own forces as the Turks. Conversely, the
Hindus describe as the typical Turkish behavious pattern
that which is enjoined by Islam.
While it is true that the Hindus have been much too slow
(till today) in studying the religious foundation of the
barbaric behavious which they experienced at the hands of
the Turushkas, at least they soon found out that for these
invaders religion was the professed motive of their inhuman
behavious. Prof. Sharma's piece of evidence, the
institution of a Turushkandana, does however prove very
clearly that the Islamic threat was extraordinary: the
normal armed forces and war credits were not sufficient to
deal with this threat which was in a class by itself.
The original source material leaves us in no doubt that
conflicts often erupted on purely religious grounds, even
against the political and economical interests of the
contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore
consists in keeping this original testimony out of view. A
good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's recent book, The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. As the
title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (the
Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed by the British
for colonial purposes anmd out of colonial prejuidices, was
later interiorized by Indians looking for new, politically
profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society.
This is like saying that anti-Judaism is a construction of
modern capitalists to divide the working class (the standard
Marxist explanation for all kinds of racism), while
concealing the copious medieval testimony of anti-Judaism
on undeniably non-capitalist grounds. Prof. Pandey
effectively denies a millenniumful of testimonies to Islamic
persecution of the Indian (Hindu) Kafirs.
Another example is prof. K.N. Panikkar's work on the
Moplah rebellion,,, a pofgrom against the Hindus by the
Malabar (Kerala) Muslims in the margin of the khilafat
movement in 1921 (official death toll 2,339). Panikkar
takes the orthodox Marxist position that this was not a
communal but a class conflict, not between Hindus and
Muslims but between workers who happened to be Muslims and
landlords who happened to be Hindus. In reality the
communal character of the massacre was so evident that even
Mahatma Gandhi recognized it as terrible blow for his ideal
of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is quite possible that the
occasion was used to settle scores with landlords and money-
lenders (that stereotype of anti-Hindu as well as of anti-
Jewish sloganeering), but the mullahs exhorted their flock
to attack all Hindus, and added in so many words that not
only the landlords but all the Hindus were their enemies.
The poison of Islamic fanaticism is such that it turns any
kind of conflict into an attack on the non-Muslims.
More Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar's
theory (in her contribution to S. Gopal's book on the
Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the current
Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, not because the
Hindus feel besieged by hostile forces, not because they
have a memory of centuries of jihad, but because "a
monolithic religion is more compatible with capitalism" (to
borrow the formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the
political Hindu movement is merely a concoction by Hindu
capitalists, or in her own words "part of the attempt to
redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the
middle class", in which "modernization is seen as linked to
the growth of capitalism". She reads the mind behind the
capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: "Capitalism
is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as
Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if
capitalism is to succeed in India, then Hinduism would also
have to be moulded in a Semitic form".
It is always interesting to see how Communists
presuppose the superiority of Hinduism by denouncing Hindu
militancy as the semiticization or islamization of
Hinduism. But the point is that the political mobilization
of Hindu society under the increasing pressure of hostile
forces is explained away as merely a camouflage of economic
forces. One smiles about such simplistic subjection of
unwilling facts of Marxist dogma. Especially because such
analyses were still being made in 1991, and are still
being made today: in India it has not yet dawned on the
dominant intelligentsia that Marxism has failed not only as
a political and economical system, but also as a
socialogical model of explanation. On the contrary, Indian
Marxists even manage to make foreign correspondents for non-
Marxist media swallow their analysis, e.g. after the Babri
Masjid demolition, even the conservative Frankfurter
Allgemeine Seitung explained Hindu fundamentalism in the
same socio-economical terms, complete with urban traders
who are looking for an identity etc.
Incidentally, Romila Thapar is right in observing that
certain Hindu revivalists ae trying to "find parallels with
the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary
for the future of Hinduism" (though her attempt to force the
Ram Janmabhoomi movement into this mould, with Rama being
turned into a prophet and the Ramayana into the sole
revealed Scripture etc., is completely unfounded and another
pathetic case of trying to force unwilling facts into a pre-
conceived scheme). She sounds like favouring a renewed
emphasis on "the fact that the religious experience of
Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched
together under the label of Hindu are distinctively
different from that of the Semitic".
It is true that some Hindu revivalist movements have
tried to redefine Hinduism in terms borrowed from
monotheism, with rudiments of notions like an infallible
Scripture (back to the Vedas: the Arya Samaj),
iconoclastic monotheism (Arya Samaj, Akali neo-Sikhs), or a
monolithic hierarchic organization (the RSS). But the
reason for this development cannot with any stretch of the
imagination be deduced from the exigencies of capitalism.
An honest analysis of this tendency in Hinduism to imitate
the Christian-Islamic model will demonstrate that a psychology
of tactical imitation as a way of self-defence
against these aggressive Semitic religions was at work.
The tendency cannot possibly be reduced to the socio-
economical categories dear to Marxism, but springs from the
terror which Islam (not fedualism or capitalism, but Islam)
had struck in the Hindu mind, and which was subsequently
fortified with an intellectual dimension by the Christian
missionary propaganda against primitive polytheism. Those
Hindus who were waging the struggle for survival against the
Islamic and Christian onslaught have come to resemble their
enemies a bit, and have interiorized a lot of the
aggressors' contempt for typical Hindu things, such as idol-
worship, doctrinal pluralism, social decentralization. It
is for Hindu society to reflect on whether this imitation
was the right course, and whether it has not been self-
defeating in some respects.
At any rate, the very existence of this psychological
need among some militant Hindus to imitate the prophetic-
monotheistic religions is a symptom of an already old
polarization between Hinduism and aggressive monotheism,
especially Islam. Bipan Chandra's chronology of
communalism as a 20th century phenomenon cannot explain
the communal polarization of which Sikhism and the Arya
Samaj were manifestations. These can only be understood
from the centuries oif active hostility between Islam and
Hinduism. Shivaji was not a herald of capitalism, nor a
product of British divide and rule policy, but a
participant in an ongoing war between Hindu civilization and
Islamic aggression.
Since the 1950s the history market is being flooded with
publications conveying the negationist version to a greater
or lesser extent. The public is fed negationist TV serials
like The Sword of Tipu Sultan, an exercise in whitewashing
the arch-fanatic last Muslim ruler. Most general readers
and many serious students only get to know about Indian
history through negationist glasses. In India, the
negationists have managed what European negationists can
only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and
marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting
history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the
political abuse of history. By contrast, geunine
historians who have refused to tamper with the record of
Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, K.S. Lal) are
held us as examples of communalist historywriting in
textbooks which are required reading in all history
departments in India.
But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their
own version of the facts being repeated in more and more
books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions
from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National
Council of Educational Research and Training issued a
directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other
things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the
medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and
Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism
has become India's official policy.
Now that Marxism is no longer the fashion of the day, it
is very easy to expose the shameless dishonesty of many
vocal Marxist intellectuals. It is time to go through the
record and see what they have said about the "economic
successes" of the Soviet Union, the enthusiasm of the
Chinese people for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution, about the Communist involvement in crimes like
Katyn, and about the lies put out by the CIA-sponsored
dissidents and camp survivors. Their Islam negationism is
by far not their first systematic falsification of a chapter
of history.
When the Marxists start lecturing Hindus about tolerance
and the respect for Barbar's mosque, it is easy to put them
on the defensive by asking what happened to churches,
mosques and temples when Mao took over. Communist regimes'
treatment of religion has been similar to Islam's treatment
of infidelity. Either religious people had the zimmi
status, i.e. they were suffered to exist but at the cost of
career prospects, benefit of social or material benefits,
always under the watchful eye of police informers, and of
course without the right to convert or to object to state
atheism's conversion efforts (according to the chinese
Constitution, there is a right to practise religion and a
right to practise and propagete atheism); or they were
simply persecuted, their religious education forbidden (in
the Soviet Union, many people have spent years in jail for
transporting Bibles or teaching Hebrew), their places of
worship demolished or expropriated for secular use.
Communism and Islam are truly comrades in intolerance.
Certainly some statements can be dug up of Indian
Communists defending the Cultural Revolution in which so
many thousands of places of worship were destroyed and their
personnel brutalized or killed. When the Khumar Rouge were
in power, less that 1,000 of the 65,000 Buddhist monks
managed to survive : what did the Indian Marxists (card-
carrying and other) say then? The bigger part of the
Marxists' success was in their aggressiveness: as long as
they remained on the offensive, everyone tried to live up to
the norms they prescribed. Now it is time to put them to
scrutiny.
This is a repetition of the thesis defended by
Zahiruddin Faruki in his "Aurangzeb and his times" (1935),
recently taken up again by S.N.M. Abdi in Illustrated Weekly
of India (5/12/1992), who claims that Aurangzeb was not
anti-Hindu, and that the Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri (made available
to the public by the Royal Society of Bengal and translated
by Jadunath Sarkar), which lists Aurangzeb's temple-
destroying activities from day to day, is a forgery. Faruki
and Abdi count on the public's limited zeal for checking the
sources, when they falsely claim that "apart from the
Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri, there is no other reference to the order
for the destruction of temples", and that we do not hear of
any protest which large-scale temple destruction would have
caused.
Abdi thinks he can get away with claiming as evidence a
stone slab allegedly seen by Faruki in the Gyanvapi mosque
in Benares, mentioning a date (1659) that does not tally
with the traditional date (1669) of the forcible replacement
of the Kashi Vishvanath temple with this mosque; even while
admitting that "the slab seen by Faruki has disappeared
mysteriously, along with another significant piece of
evidence". Without blinking, he then cites a theory that
the Gyanvapi mosque already existed under Akbar, i.e. a
century before either of the two dates. Further, he quotes
as authority a local agitator who claims: "My research
reveals that a Buddhist vihara was demolished to make way
for a temple, which was subsequently pulled down and the
Gyanvapi mosque constructed on its site." The first claim,
in spite of flaunting the pretentious term research, in a
plain lie; the second is of course true but contradicts the
case which Mr. Abdi is building up. Such is the quality of
the argument for Aurangzeb's tolerance and Hindu-
friendliness.
What are the facts? In Beneras (Varanasi), Aurangzeb
(1658-1707) did not just build an isolated mosque on a
destroyed temple. He ordered all temples destroyed, among
them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of
Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared
temple sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his
reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on
them; among them, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the
rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujrat, the Vishnu
temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking
Benares, the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number
of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not in
5 figures. According to the official court chronicle,
Aurangzeb "ordered all provincial governors to destroy all
schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end
to all Pagan teachings and practices". The chronicle sums
up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said
that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed... His
majesty went to Chittor, and 63 temples were destroyed... Abu
Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of Amber,
reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground".
In quite a number of cases, inscriptions on mosques and
local tradition do confirm that Aurangzeb built them in
forcible replacement of temples (some of these inscriptions
have been quoted in Sitaram Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2,
along with a number of independent written accounts).
Aurangzeb's reign ws marked by never-ending unrest and
rebellions, caused by his anti-Hindu policies, which
included the reimposition of the jizya and other zimma
rules, and indeed the demolition of temples.
Aurangzeb did not stop at razing temples: their users
too were levelled. There were not just the classical
massacres of thousands of resisters, Brahmins, Sikhs. What
gives a more pointed proof of Aurangzeb's fanaticism, is the
execution of specific individuals for specific reason of
intolerance. To name the best-known ones: Aurangzeb's
brother Dara Shikoh was executed because of apostasy (i.e.
taking an interest in Hindu philosophy), and the Sikh guru
Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because of his objecting to
Aurangzeb's policy of forcible conversions in general, and
in particular for refusing to become a Muslim himself.
Short, Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's
fanaticism is but a hostile legend, is a most serious case
of negationism.
An example of a less blatant (i.e. more subtle) form of
negationism in Western histories of India, is the India
entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. Its chapter on the
Sultanate period (which was much more bloody than even the
Moghul period) does not mention any persecutions and
massacres of Hindus by Muslims, except that Firuz Shah
Tughlaq "made largely unsuccessful attempts to convert his
Hindu subjects and sometimes persecuted them". The article
effectively obeys the negationist directive that
"characterization of the medieval period as a time of Hindu-
Muslim conflict is forbidden".
It also contains blissful nonsense about communal amity
in places where the original sources only mention enmity.
Thus, it says that Bahmani sultan Tajuddin Firuz extracted
tribute payments and the hand of the king's daughter from
the Hindu bastion Vijayanagar after two military campaigns,
and that this resulted in "the establishment of an
apparently amicable relationship between the two rulers".
Jawaharlal Nehru considered the induction of Hindu women in
Muslim harems as the cradle of composite culture (his
euphemism for Hindu humiliation), but it is worse if even
the venerable Encyclopedia considers the terms of debate as
a sign of friendship. At any rate, the article goes on to
observe naively that peace lasted only for ten years,
when Vijaynagar forces inflicted a crushing defeat on Firuz.
In this case, the more circumspect form of negationism is at
work: keeping the inconvenient facts out of the readers'
view, and manipulating the terminology.
This sophisticated verbiage cannot conceal that the
book's approach is merely the standard secularist version
propagated by Indian establishment historians since decades.
There is nothing new and provocative about a book that
claims to explain communalism without touching on its single
most important determinant, viz. the doctrine laid down in
Islamic scripture, and that blurs the clear-cut process of
India's communalization by Islam with the help of scapegoats
like colonialism.
It is not entirely clear to what extent such Western
authors are conscious accomplices in the intellectual crime
of negationism, and to what extent they are just gullible
copiers of the version given to them by English-speaking
Indians. In the case of a historian invited by Penguin to
write a History of India, it is hard to believe that he
didn't know better.
Another case of malafide reporting is former Time
correspondent Edward Desmond's lengthy review of JNU
Professof S. Gopal's Anatomy of a Confrontation in the New
York Review of Books. I know that Mr. Desmond had gone
through the books stating the Hindu case on Ayodhya; he had
talked to both Mr. Sitaram Goel and myself (by telephone);
he knew about hard evidence for the temple that was forcibly
replaced by the Babri Masjid, including Prof. B.B. Lal's
filmed presentation of the archarological evidence. And
yet, like Prof. Gopal, he strictly keeps the lid on the
Hindu case, does not mention the extensive documentary
evidence, and curtly dismisses the archaeological evidence
as bogus. Here, the psychology at work is apparently that
of status-consciousness: you wouldn't expect a senior
correspondent of a big American magazine to prefer the
company of marginal pro-Hindu writers to that of prestigious
Stalinist professors of India's Harvard, would you?
On the other hand, in the day-to-day reporting on the
communal situation in India, there is a lot of bonafide
copying of the anti-Hindu views dominant in the Indian
English-language press. A typical mixed case of some
complicity and some gullibility was the TV documentary about
Hindu fundamentalism made by BBC correspondent Brian
Barron, and boradcase in the week of the first round of the
Lok Sabha elections in May 1991. Brian Barron is an
otherwise meritorious journalist, witness his revelations in
October 1991 about the massacre of thousands of Buddhist
monks in the early years of communist rule in Mongolia. But
his programme about the Hindu movement was second-rate and
biased. For a start, it contained some factual mistakes
(like a map meant to show the trail of Hindu leader L.K.
Advani's procession in support of the Ram Janmabhoomi cause,
which drew a line unrelated to the actual trail, apart from
placing Delhi on the Ganga river), exemplifying the
carelessness which Western correspondents can afford when it
comes to India reporting.
Barron said that India had already been partitioned
because of religion. In fact, India has been partitioned
because of Islam, against the will of other religions, and
this seemingly small inaccuracy is an old trick to
distribute the guilt of Islam in partitioning India over all
religions equally. Barron made no attempt to seem
impartial, and introduced BJP leader L.K. Advani as a
demagogue. He asked Advani's declared enemy V.P. Singh
whether Advani was not merely putting a humane mask on
fanaticism. Easy, that way V.P. Singh only had to say
yes. He failed to take the opportunity to question V.P.
Singh about his political marriage with the Muslim
fundamentalist leader Imam Bukhari, while that was a case of
a Hindu promoting fundamentalism as well. He let Swami
Agnivesh, a Marxist in ochre robe, accuse the BJP of mixing
religion and politics, but neglected to inform the viewers
that Swami Agnivesh has himself combining monkhood with
being a Janata Dal candidate in the Lok Sabha elections.
When Barron asked Advani why he had allowed so much
bloodshed on his procession (the rathyatra of October 1990),
whereas in fact there had been no riots all along the path
of his month-long journey, Advani correctly said: "You are
taken in by a disinformation campaign." A serious
journalist would have inquired deeper when his sources, with
which the quality of his work stands or falls, are
questioned so pointedly. When a sadhu said that Muslims
refuse to respect Hindus and that Hindus are legally
discriminated against, Barron did not inquire what these
discriminations were. Like all western reporters, he has
reported on Hindu fundamentalism without asking even once
why this movement has emerged, instead relaying the Marxist
line that it is all a camouflage for class (c.q. caste)
interests, an artificial creation for petty political gain.
Barron interviewed prof. Romila Thapar, who accused the
Hindu movement of aiming at a system in which some
communities would be second-class citizens living in
constant fear for their lives. From a spokeswoman of
Marxism, which has held entire populations in constant fear
and oppression, and which has killed numerous millions of
"contrarevolutionary elements" (to use the criminalizing,
dehumanizing Marxist term), the allegation sounds rather
shameless. But the viewers were not told where Romila
Thapar stands, they were led to believe that this was a
neutral observer who had been asked for an objective
explanation. The
same thing has happened a number of times in both Time
Magazine and Newsweek: Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and
their comrades get quoted as if they are non-partisan
authorities. Though anti-Communist in their general
reporting, when it comes to India, these papers
(unknowingly?) present the Marxists' viewpoint as objective
in-depth background information.
Only ten years ago, the Left-oriented media in many
Western countries freely attacked the really existing
capitalism and also conjured up all kinds of fantastic CIA
and neo-fascist conspiracies, but scrupulously shielded the
really existing socialism from criticism. Similarly,
Brian Barron gave Prof. Thapar the chance to say her thing
about unproven sinister plans imputed to the Hindu movement,
but scrupulously refrained from pointing out that Miss
Thapar's picture of a theocratic society in which minorities
are second-class citizens living in mortal fear, is already
reallly existing in the neighbouring Islamic republic of
Pakistan and in many Muslim states (and, mutatis mutandis in
Communist countries).
The Ayodhya conflict offers a good examples of the
absurd standards applied by reporters. A Hindu sacred
site, back in use as a Hindu temple (since 1949 with, since
1986 without restrictions) after centuries of Muslim
occupation, is claimed by Muslim leaders, who also insist on
continuing the occupation of two other sacred sites in
Mathura and Kashi (and numerous other sites which the Hindu
leaders are not even claiming back). Claiming the right to
occupy other communities' sacred sites: if this is not
fanatical, I don't know what is. Yet, the whole world press
is one the side of the Muslims, and decries a Hindu plan to
build proper temple architecture on the Ram Janmabhoomi site
in Ayodhya as fanatical. These are not just double
standards, but inverted standards.
The very fact that Muslims in India loudly complain
about their situation (e.g. about their low educational
level, which is 100% the fault of their own mullahs), proves
that they are relatively well-off: as I have had the
occasion to observe, Hindu visitors or refugees from
Pakistan often do not dare to speak of the horrible
conditions in which they are forced to live under Muslim
rule, because they fear for their relatives, and because the
constant terror has conditioned them never to raise any
objections against the Muslim master race. Inside these
Muslim states, the remaining Hindus are even more careful never to
displease the Muslim masters. For unthinking journalists, their
silence is proof that all is well for the minorities in Muslim
states, and so they prefer to listen to the vocal
malcontents who air the Muslim grievances in tolerant
India. Whoever shouts loudest, will get our correspondents'
attention, if only because India reporting is mostly of a
very low professional quality.
An example of the slanted impression which the Nehruvian
establishment creates about Hindu-Muslim relations, concerns
the internationally highlighted martyrdom of the Flemish
Jesuit Father Rasschaert, near Ranchi in 1964. Father
Rasschaert's sister was a friend of my mother's, so as a
child I have often heard the details of the story. The part
which everybody knows, is that Muslims had fled into a
mosque, where Hindus wanted to pursue them, when Father
Rasschaert intervened to pacify the crowd, but was killed by
the Hindus who subsequently massacred the Muslims.
But the start of the story, never highlighted and
sometimes not even mentioned in the contemporary newspaper
reports (much less in later references), was that the Hindus
in the area had been angered by the sight of mutilated
Hindus who had been brought by train from East Pakistan,
where they had at least survived the massacres which many
more had not. As always, Hindu violence was a retaliation
against Muslim violence. No missionary has stepped in to
defend the Hindus of Pakistan, in fact no missionary was
around, as missions have a vey hard time in Pakistan. The
missions in Islamic countries find their converts harassed
and even killed by their own families, their schools and
churches attacked on all kinds of pretexts, their graduates
not given jobs. So, the missionary centres prefer to direct their
energies to more hospitable countries like India. The fact
that a missionary was killed by a Hindu while defending the
Muslims, and not the other way round, proves in the first
place that Catholic priests can function in India, much more
than in Pakistan. A closer scrutiny of this one incidence
of Hindu fanaticism reveals a background of much more
systematic and institutionalized Muslim fanaticism.
There is a third aspect to the story, which is never
mentioned at all. It is that the Hindus in Ranchi were
desperate about their government's unwillingness to defend
the Hindus in Pakistan. One of the chief culprits behind
the massacre was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the patron
of secularism, who used Father Rasschaert's death as yet
another occasion to parade his concern for the minorities in
India, and to put Hindus in the dock. He himself (and the
entire secularist establishment till today) reneged on his
duty to defend the Hindus surviving in the Islamic state
which he had helped to create. By effectively condoning the
persecution of Hindus in Pakistan, he was also responsible
for the retalitory Hindu violence. But the international
press has never thought the matter through, and confined its
reporting on Father Rasschaert's death to condemning the
Hindu fanatics, weeping for the Muslim victims, and praising
Nehru as the voice of sanity amid the religious madness.
The way our journalists are led by the nose towards
reporting Muslim grievances and ignoring grievances of Hindu
minorities (and ridiculing the very real grievances of even
the Hindu majority in India), is reminiscent of the sneaking
bias in all non-rightist media in Western Europe about the
Left-right conflict before the Gorbachov era. They all
complied with Marxist-imposed terminology like dictator
Pinochet but president Ceaucescu, or rightist rebels
but leftist resistance. Criticism of the West was
available in plenty, and given wide coverage, but the muted
populations of the Soviet bloc were not heard, and little
effort was made to go in and hear them. Those who supported
the cause of freedom in the Soviet bloc were riduclued.
Worse, when in 1968 the Russian physicist Sakharov had a
report about massive human rights violations in the USSR
published, leading intellectuals actually denied the
existence of "that so-called Russian physicist invented by
the reactionary forces to slander the glorious achievements
of socialism in the USSR". Yes, so noxious was the
intellectual atmosphere in the heyday of Marxism. In those
days it was "better to be wrong with [communist] Sartre than
to be right with [anti-communist] Aron".
When glasnost made clear just how strong the Soviet bloc
populations' disgust with communalism really was, Western
intellectuals and socialist parties seemed sincerely
surprised. They themselves had so often pleaded that life
in the Soviet system was not really worse than in the "so-
called free" West. The press had never given us an adequate
picture, not by telling outright lies, but by ignoring the
muted voices which the communist dictators wanted us to
ignore. At any rate, if there used to be far more
demonstrations in the streets of the West than in the Soviet
bloc, did it prove that there was less discontent in the
latter? We now know better: there was more protest in the
West than in the Soviet bloc because there was more freedom
and less fear in the West, and in spite of deeper discontent
in the Soviet bloc. There is no excuse for making the same
mistake in our reporting on the situation of the minorities
in India and in Muslim countries.
Without really noticing, the Western press has become
the mouth-piece of the Marxist-Muslim alliance which
dictates political parlance in India. I assume only a few
frontline journalists are conscious participants in the
ongoing disinformation campaign. Brian Barron, for one, has
demonstrated to what extent he has interiorized the anti-
Hindu bias of his Indian spokespersons, with a very little
but truly unpardonable piece of disinformation. Reporting
on the million-strong demonstration for the Ram Janmabhoomi
temple (Delhi, 4 April 1991), he showed a monk carrying a
saffron- coloured flag with a white swstika. And for the
less perceptive viewers, he added in so many words that the
Hindu movement carried the swastika. Of course he knew
these two things: (1) most Western viewers know the swastika
only as the symbol of Nazism; (2) most Indians know the
swastika only as their own age-old symbol of good fortune
(swasti = well-being). He must have known perfectly well
that he was making the Western viewers read a message which
the Hindu demonstrators never sent, viz. that the Hindu
movement links up with Nazism. Regardless of the moral
quality of such distortive reporting, it goes to show to
what extent the negationist faction in the Indian media has
managed to picture the Hindus as the bad guys in the eyes of
the world.
A few more examples of how Western India-watchers
swallow Indian secularist disinformation. The pro-Ram
Janmabhoomi demonstration in Delhi on 4 April 1991 was not
reported in 99% of the Western papers and electronic news
channels. I have inquired among journalists about what they
had received on their telexes concerning the largest-ever
demonstration in the biggest democracy in the world. It
turned out that these had mentioned 3 lakh demonstrators
(when even the government-controlled police had given the
estimate of 8 lakh), and not made the object of the
demonstration clear at all. The Indian sources had
deliberately blurred and minimized the information, so that
the Western media had, in good faith, not deemed it worth
mentioning. If six weeks later Brian Barron reported the
number as more than a million demonstrators, it was not to
correct this earlier lapse, but because of a different
psychology. His aim was not to deny the importance and
magnitude of the Hindu movement which he detests so much,
but on the contrary to make it into a titillatingly gruesome
dinosaur: the TV consumers have heard enough about Muslim
fundamentalism, so if you want to get them interested in a
new brand of fundamentalism, you have to make it extra big
and colourful.
Another example is the news concerning the Indian
attitude to the second Gulf War in early 1991. The Delhi
correspondent for the Flemish radio station BRTN said that
the Indian population was on the side of Saddam, against the
Anglo-American forces (and their Saudi employers). That is
just what the Times of india editorial had said a few days
earlier. In fact, the Indian people was not on Saddam's
side at all. The Hindus had always cheered for Israel in
its wars with the Arabs, and now they were all for the
defeat of this Arab Hitler who had announced he would "burn
half of Israel with chemical weapons". The Muslim
support for Saddam's jihad against the Crusaders was not
exactly massive either. Firstly, millions of Indian Muslims
personally suffered when they or their reltives lost their
jobs in Iraq and Kuwait as a result of Saddam's annexation
of Kuwait. Secondly, most Muslim leaders are financed by
the Arab monarchies (including Kuwait), and they sided with
their paymasters, either openly or by their quiet refusal to
support Saddam. The only ones who supported Saddam were the
hard core of the Nehruvian establishment (who forced the
Chandra Shekhar government to stop allowing American war
planes to land in Bombay), and the communists with their
visceral anti-Americanism. A strike imposed on the
communists with their visceral anti-Americanism. A strike
imposed on the Calcutta dockers by the Communist trade-union
was about the only sign of Indian support for Saddam, but
our correspondent played it up as merely one example of a
nation-wide movement. I hope it was in good faith on his
part, but for the Times of India there cannot be such a
benefit of the doubt.
Foreign correspondents in Delhi should realize that the
Indian media and academia are entirely untrustworthy when it
comes to reporting on the Hindu-Muslim conflict. When you
report the truth about the democratic opposition in China or
Tibet, you don't copy the People's Daily. When you want to
know the truth about the Kurdish freedom struggle, you
don't trust the Iraqi stae radio. So, when you want to
understand the Hindu backlash, you don't believe strictly
partisan sources like the Times of India, or party-line
historians like those from JNU or AMU.
If a Mr. Vijay Singh writes in Le Monde Diplomatique an
article full of secularist invective titled: Hindu
Fundamentalism, a Menace for India, it is simply the
reflection of a vested interest in blackening Hinduism,
though it is sold as an in-depth comment by a first-hand
observer. It so happens that the article is partly an
unacknowledged quotation from the introductory chapter of
the book "Understanding the Muslim Mind" by Rajmohan Gandhi, a
party politician of Iman Bukhari's favourite Janata Dal
(nicknamed Jinnah Dal). If in another issue of the same
prestigious French monthly, Mrs. Francine R. Frankel mouths
all the worn-out secularist slogans against what she calls
the "Violent Offensive of Hindu Extremists", it merely proves
her incapability of reading her Indian sources with the
distance befitting partisan pamphlets. It is quite a shameful
matter that Western media have swallowed and reproduced many
similar motivated distortion.
The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign
press provides the negationists with a strategic cover.
Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western
intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they
keep on believing this even in domains where the West is
completely ignorant and incomponent. So the negationists
feel supported in the back by an outside world which they
can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a
standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the
trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's
political configuration, it would have blown this cover away
by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media,
and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the
Indian establishment.
In Great Britain and the United States, the anti-Hindu
and pro-Muslim bias in India reporting can partly be
explained by the political tilt towards Pakistan (now waning
because of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions). Thus, the
prestigious British weekly The Economist has, in a
predictably negative article about nationalism and
separatism, held up the creation of Pakistan as an
undisputably justified case of separatism (small wonder that
British Muslims are imitating their Indian Muslim
grandfathers and demanding a separate "non-territorial state
of British Muslims", justifiable on exactly the same
grounds). A more universal reason is that they never get to
know the Hindu viewpoint from competent and eloquent
spokesmen: firstly, these have practically no access to the
national English-language press, which Western
correspondents in Delhi faithfully copy because they are too
lazy to seek out news for themselves; secondly, the Hindus
themselves have not yet suifficiently realized the
importance of public relations.
The most important reason is probably the political
atmosphere in Europe which demands that for the sake of
anti-racism and multiculturalism, Islam as the most
conspicuous and assertive guest culture in Europe gets
painted in rosy colours. The result of this imperative not
to expose Muslim fanaticism is that even avowedly Christian
papers in the West keep silent about the ongoing persecution
of Christian papers and other minorities in the Middle East.
Christians cherish the illusion of a dialogue with Islam,
so they will not offend their Muslim partners by raising
incovenient issues like the status of religious minorities
in Muslim countries. Now, if the West does not stand up for
its persecuted Christian brethren, how much less will it be
bothered about the idolatrous Hindus.
And so, Western India-watchers go on licking the boots
of the aggressor, and keep on twisting contemporary news in
the media, and to a lesser extent even historical facts in
academic publications, to the advantage of the Muslim side.
They have not invented the Indian brand of negationism, but
they are amplifying and fortifying it.
The interesting thing is that the quoted passage comes
straight from the original Hadis, and is not a slanderous
distortion at all. The agitation against the book reveals
an important fact about the Muslim community: the ordinary
Muslim does not know the contents of Quran and Hadis, and
projects on Mohammed his own moral ideals, which he largely
shares with his non-Muslim fellow-men. Because of his
attachment to the mental image of a morally perfect
Mohammed, he is shocked when he gets confronted with the
historical Mohammed. Among the many historical acts of
Mohammed is his arranging the hand-over to himself of
Zaynab, the beautiful wife of his sdopted son. The fact
that a revelation from Allah came to legitimize the marriage
between Mohammed and Zaynab (which was a breach of the
tribal incest taboo), became the classic illustration of the
view that the Quran is nothing but the self-interested
product of Mohammed's own mind.
This ignorance about the historical Mohammed, both among
the common Muslims and among the Hindus, is precisely what
the banned book wanted to do something about, in keeping
with the Indian Constitution's injuction to "develop the
scientific temper". But the Nehruvian establishment (which
includes the Congress Party and its Janata Dal offshoot) has
no liking for free research into the contents of Islamic
doctrine and history, and in spite of loud slogans about
secularism, the administration gave in to the Muslim
fanatics. None of the so-called secularist intelectuals has
bothered to protest against this obscurantist act of
censorship.
The official motivation for this banning of meritortious
books is that they have been written with the intention of
insulting a religion or inciting communal conflict (art.
153A amd art. 295A of the Indian Penal Code). Under section
95 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the executive power must
take action against its initial users. For, according to
some, there is a bok which fulfils the description given in
the Penal Code, even to a far greater extent than the
already banned book; but which is recited and invested with
supreme authority in state-subsidized schools and in prayer-
houses in every town and village of india. This
objectionable book is known as the Quran.
In 1984 a citizen of India, H.K. Chakraborty, filed a
petition with the West Bengal state government to ban the
Quran. He added a list of 37 Quran verses which "preach
cruelty, incite violence and disturb public peace" (to use
the terminology of the Penal Code), 17 verses which
"promote, on grounds of religion, feelings of enmity, hatred
and ill-will between different communities in India", and 31
verses which "insult other religions as also the religious
beliefs of other communities". Indeed, even after
subtracting some verses which could be regarded as
legitimate polemics (esp. against the Christian belief in
Incarnation), there are about 60 passages in the Quran that
formulate a doctrine of demonization of non-Muslims, and of
hatred and war against them. If the Indian laws prohibit
communal hate propatganda, Mr. Chakraborty was right in
considering the Quran as an excellent candidate for banning.
But even after reminder-letters, the West Bengal authorities
gave no response.
At this stage, Mr. Chakraborty met Chandmal Chopra, an
adherent of the extremely non-violent Jain sect, who had
taken up the study of the Quran in order to understand the
plight of the Hindus in Bangladesh, who are gradually being
chased from their ancestral homeland by the Muslims. In
1985 Chandmal Chopra filed a petition with the Calcutta high
Court, asking for a ban on the Quran. He added a list with
reprehensible verses from the Quran: 29 passages from the
Quran (1 to 8 verses in length) that incite violence against
unbelievers, 15 which promote enmity, 26 which insult other
religions.
The petition created a lot of furore in Calcutta and
abroad. Muslims created street riots. The government
intervened and put heavy pressure on the judicial process.
The secret service was put to work to find possible
objectionable biographical data of the petitioner. The
court used some dirty tricks to disturb the peritioner's
case, like changing dates and changing the object of a
session to which the petitioner had been summoned, during
the same session itself, with apparent foreknowldege of the
government's counsel.
Both the authorities and the court violated the secular
basis of the Indian Constitution by using as justification
for their policy c.q. judgement a statement of religious
belief. The Marxist West Bengal government stated in its
affidavit: "The Quran contains the words of God Almighty
revealed to His last Prophet Mohammed... As the Holy Quran
is a Divine Book, no earthly power can sit in judgement on
it, and no court of law has jurisdiction to adjudicate it."
The judge dismissed the petition on this ground:
"Banning or forfeiture of the Quran... would amount to
abolition of the Muslim religion itself." Indeed, the very
text which preaches war against the unbelievers is the core
text of Islam, so abolition of Islamic hate propaganda
amounts to abolition of Islam itself. Islam without hatred
is not Islam. The judge further observed: "This book is not
prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between religions.
Because of the Quran no public tranquillity has been
disturbed upto now..." - a resounding statement of
negationism.
This verdict was only what the petitioner expected:
because of political pressure, an anti-Quran verdict was
simply unthinkable, and moreover, the Penal Code keeps
scriptures and classics outside its own purview. The
petitioner has made it clear that he considers book-banning
counterproductive, and that the controversial petition was
meant to direct public attentiton towards the Quran's
contents: people should read it, because Indian citizens
have a right to know why their country is plagued with
never-ending religious riots.
When Chandmal Chopra had the documents of the legal
dispute published, the administration decided to prosecute
him and his publisher on the basis of the very same Penal
Code articles which he had invoked to request a ban on the
Quran. The case is still pending.
Beside H.K. Chakraborty's and Chandmal Chopra's
petitions, a third text which pointed at the Quran as a
source of religious violence, was a poster published in
Delhi (1986) by I.S. Sharma and Rajkumar Arya, prominent
members of the Hindu Mahasabha, a small political party more
extreme than the BJP. The poster carried the title: "Why do
riots break out in this country?" It showed 24 Quran
verses, such as: "Fight the unbelievers in your
surroundings, and let them find harshness in you" (Q.9:123),
and : "Kill the unbelievers wherever ye find them,, capture
and besiege them and prepare them every kind of ambush"
(Q.9.5).
Both publishers were arrested on the basis of arts. 153A
and 295A. However, they were acquitted. The judged ruled
that they had made a "fair criticism", for: "With all due
respect to the holy Quran, an attentive perusal of the
verses shows that these are indeed harmful and preach
violence and have the potential to cause conflicts between
the Muslims and the others." An appeal against the court
ruling is still pending.
This criticism of the Quran pulls the carpet from under
the negationists' feet. The enmity between Muslims and
Pagans is clearly not a back-projection from contemporary
artificially created religio-political tensions. Neither is
it a conflict which developed historically long after
Mohammed and which can be reduced to socio-economical
factors. This enmity is, on the contrary, present in the
very core of Islamic doctrine.
With this information about Quranic doctrine, we find
that the negationist thesis is not only contradicted by a
massive body of authentic evidence; it is also highly
implausible in itself. For, the thesis that Islam in India
was not systematically (proportionately to its possibilities
in given situations) in conflict with other religions,
claims in fact that Islam in India deviated from its own
principles, and behaved completely uncharacteristically for
centuries on end. It is methodologically more usual to
provisionally assume a consistent and probable bahaviour
(viz. that adherents of a God-given call to war against the
unbelievers effectively make war on the unbelievers, and
that a religion which persecuted other religions everywhere
else, did the same in India), and only give this up if
positive evidence for a less plausible and more inconsistent
course has been found. But what positive evidence there is,
points in the opposite direction: a long list of Muslim
invaders and rulers faithfully put the Quranic injuctions
into practice.
The problem of book-banning and censorship on Islam
criticism is compounded by the related problem of self-
censorship. Thus, when in late 1992, the famous columnist
Arun Shourie wanted to publish a collection of his columns
on Islamic fundamentalism, esp. the Rushdie and Ayodhya
affairs (Indian Controversies), the publisher withdrew at
the last moment, afraid of administrative or physical
reprisals, and the printer also backed out. Earlier,
Shourie had been lucky to find one paper willing to publish
these columns, for most Indian newspapers strictly keep the
lid on Islam criticism. Hindu society is a terrorized
society.
A final aspect of the ban (sometimes legal, mostly
imposed by secularist convention) on criticism of Islam is
that it is the re-institution of an old Islamic rule. When
the Christians in Syria in the first century of Islam were
forced to submit, they had to sign a long list of promises
to their Islamic overlords. These comprised the well-known
conditions imposed on the zimmis, but also some extra ones,
including "not to teach our children the Quran". Like
Mohammed, his successors found it hard to counter the
numerous objections to the contradictions and unethical
injuctions in the Quran, which perceptive infidels kept on
raising. It was logical that they prohibited the study of
the Quran by non-Muslims, in order to pre-emptively disarm
future anti-Islamic polemists. This ban by the theocratic
caliphate on unfriendly inspection of the Quran is now re-
instituted in India in the name of secularism.
2.7 THE NEGATIONISTS' SECOND FRONT
Not satisfied with denying the crimes of Islam, the
negationists have recently made a big effort to spread the
notion that Hinduism itself is guilty of just the same
things of which it accuses Islam. Remember, Holocaust
negationists always allege and highlight Israeli injustice
against the Palestinians: if you prove that the victim is
not so innocent, it will ultimately become questionable that
he was a victim at all. If ever the denial of Muslim
fanaticism has to be given up, a second line of defence (or
counter-attack) will be ready: accusing Hinduism of a
similar fanaticism.
For example, in the Indian media you regularly come
across the contention that "the Hindus destroyed Nalanda
Buddhist university". This is a plain lie: under several
Hindu dynasties, Nalanda flourished and was the biggest
university in the world for centuries; it was destroyed by
the Muslim invader Bakhtiar Khilji in 1200. But if you
repeat a lie often enough, it gains currency, and now many
Indians have come to believe that Buddhism had been replaced
by Hinduism as India's chief religion in a most violent
manner.
In reality, Buddhism had always been a minority religion
in India, confined to nobles and traders; before its
disappearance around 1200 AD, it had been partly reabsorbed
by mainstream Hinduism; otherwise it co-existed peacefully
with other Hindu sects, often sharing the same temple-
complexes. The historical allegations of violent conflicts
between mainstream Hinduism and Buddhism can be counted on
one hand. It is not Brahminical onslaught but Islam that
chased Buddhism from India.
In Central Asia, Islam had wiped out Buddhism together
with Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, and whatever
other religion it encountered. The Persian word for idol
is but, from Buddha, because the Buddhists with their
Buddha-status were considered as the idol-worshippers par
excellence. The Buddhists drew the wrath of every Muslim
but-shikan (idol-breaker), even where they had not offered
resistance aganinst the Muslim armies because of their
doctrine of non-violence. As a reminder of the Buddhist
past of Central Asia, the city name Bukhara is nothing but a
corruption of vihara, i.e. a Buddhist monastery; other
Indian names include Samarkhand and Takshakhand, i.e.
Tashkent. In India, Buddhism was a much easier target than
other sects and traditions, because it was completely
centralized around the monasteries. Once the monsteries
destroyed and the monks killed, the Buddhist community had lost
its backbone and was helpless before the pressure to convert
to Islam (as happened on a large scale in East Bengal).
A handful of negationist historians have tried to
substantiate the allegations against Hinduism and spared no
effort to colect instances of Hindus acts of persectution.
We will take a look at them here. It would take a whole
volume to sum up Aurangzeb's career as an iconoclast and
persecutor, but the Hindu record of persecution will not
take us more than a few pages.
To my knowledge, all the alleged cases of intra-Hindu
persecution have been summed up in "Communal History and
Rama's Ayodhya by prof. R.S. Sharma, the chapter in
Communalism and the Writing of Indian History" contributed by
prof. Harbans Mukhia, and most explicitly Cultural
Transactions and Early India by Prof. Romila Thapar.
According to Romila Thapar, "the insistence on the tradition
of religious tolerance and non-violence as characteristic of
Hinduism... is not borne out by historical evidence". Given
their strong motivation, we need not assume that they have
overlooked incidents that could be useful for the case they
are making.
The two best-known cases, involving Pushyamitra Shunga
and Shashank, cannot withstand historical criticism. The
non-contemporary story (which surfaces more than three
centuries after the facts) about Pushyamitra's offering
money for the heads of monks is rendered improbable by firm
historical facts of his allowing and patronizing monasteries
and Buddhist universities in his domains. After Ashoka's
lavish sponsorship of Buddhism, it is perfectly possible
that Buddhist institutions fell on slightly harder times
under the Shungas, but persecution is still another matter.
The famous historian of Buddhism Etienne Lamotte has
observed: "To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be
acquitted through lack of proof." The only reason to
sustain the suspicion against Pushyamitra, once it has been
levelled, is that "where there is smoke, there must be fire"
- but that piece of received wisdom is presupposed in every
act of slander as well.
Hsuan Tsang's story from hearsay about Shashank's
devastating a monastery in Bihar, killing the monks and
destroying Buddhist relics, only a few years before Hsuan
Tsang's own arrival, is contradicted by other elements in
his own report. Thus, according to the Chinese pilgrim,
Shashank threw a stone with the Buddha's footprint into the
river, but it was returned through a miracle; and he felled
the bodhi tree but a sapling from it was replanted which
miraculously grew into a big tree overnight. So, the fact
of the matter was that the stone and the tree were still
there in full glory. In both cases, the presence of the
footprint-stone and the fully grown bodhi tree contradict
Husan Tsang's allegations, but he explains the contradiction
away by postulating miracles (which everywhere have a way of
mushrooming around relics, to add to their aura of divine
power). If we do not accept miracles, we conclude that the
bodhi tree which Husan Tsang saw, and which was too big to
have been a recently replanted sapling, cannot have been
felled by Shashank.
Hsuan Tsang is notorious for his exaggerations and his
insertions of miracle stories, and he had to explain to
China, where Buddhism was readhing its peak, why it was
declining in India. It seems safer to base our judgement on
the fact that in his description of Buddhist life in the
Ganga basin, nothing shows the effects of recent
persecutions. In fact, Hsuan Tsang himself gives a clue to
the real reason of pre-Islamic Buddhist decline, by
describing how many Buddhist monasteries had fallen into
disuse, esp. in areas of lawlessness and weak government,
indicating that the strength of Buddhism was in direct
proportion to state protection and patronage. Unlike
Brahminism, which could sustain itself against heavy odds,
the fortunates of Buddhist monasticism (even more than those
of the Christian abbeys in early medieval Europe) were
dependent upon royal favours, as under Ashoka, the Chinese
early T'ang dynasty, and the rulers of Tibet and several
Southeast-Asian countries.
A third story, about a 12th century king Harsha of
Kashmir, is apparently true but has nothing to do with
religious persecution: he plundered Hindu temples of all
sects including Buddhism, in his own kingdom, without
bothering to desecrate them or their keepers apart from
lucrative plunder. It is the one geunine case of a ruler
plundering not out of religious motives but for the gold.
There is no known case of a Muslim marauder who merely stole
from temples without bothering to explicity desecrate them,
much less of a Muslim ruler who plundered the sanctuaries of
his own religion. Moreover, Kalhana's history book
Rajatarangini relates this story with the comment: "Promoted
by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk." This
Harsha employed Turkish mercenaries (which his successors
would regret, for they spied and ultimately grabbed power),
and these Muslims already had a firm reputation of
plundering temples with a good conscience.
Number four is the attack by the Paramara king
Subhataverman (1193-1210) on Gujrat, in which "a large
number of Jain temples in Dabhoi and Cambay" were
plundered (not "destroyed" or "desecrated"). Harbans
Mukhia cites this as proof that "many Hindu rulers did the
same [as the Muslims, i.e. destroy] with temples in enemy-
territory long before the Muslims had emerged as a political
challenge to these kingdoms." However, it is well-known
that when Subhatavarman acceded to the throne, the Muslims
had more than emerged: North India was being ravaged by
Mohammed Ghori's decisive campaign of conquest. As a proof
that Hindus outside the Islamic sphere of influence
practised persecution, this incident will not do. On the
contrary, if the report is correct, then the background may
well be similar to the attested case of Harsha of Kashmir:
inspired by the Turks, he behaved like a Turk.
Another case is the recurrent conflicts between the
Shaiva and the Vaishnava renunciates in Ayodhya. Prof. R.S.
Sharma quotes a description from 1804, which talks of
"soldiers taking pleasure in battle", "misery", "great fear"
and "shelter in secret places", but no death toll is given,
in fact no killing is mentioned in so many words. But prof.
Sharma concludes nonetheless: "The passage given above is
sufficient to expose the myth of tolerance practised by
medieval Hindu religious leaders."
Hindu tradition acknowledges that a rivalry between
Shaivas and Vaishnavas disturbed life in Ayodhya: it was the
context in which Tulsidas decided to write the
Ramcharitmanas. In order to emphasize the superficial and
erroneous character of the conflict between the followers of
Shiva and those of Vishnu (and his incarnation Rama),
Tulsidas made Shiva the story-teller of his Rama biography.
Shiva and Vishnu are one, and devotees who don't understand
this, well, they have to learn it. There is no similar
record of any Islamic authority who has said that Shiva and
Allah are one, nor Ram and Rahim, nor Kashi and Kaaba. All
this "oneness of all religions" rhetoric is a strictly Hindu
projection of the oneness of the different Hindu gods and
traditions on a juxtaposition of radically incompatible
notions from Islam and Hinduism. Whereas the opposition
between Ram and Rahim, between Kashi and Kaaba, led to
endless persecutions and a Partition, such things have not
happened between Shaivas and Vaishnavas. All that Prof.
Sharma can show, is a riot which was not bigger than those
which take place between drunken football fans.
As we might expect from Marxists who seek to mould
rather than inform public opinion, this listing of evidence
has been done with some editing. Thus, Romila Thapar writes
that "the Shaivite saint Jnana Sambandar is attributed with
having converted the Pandya ruler from Jainism to Shaivism,
whereupon it is said that 8,000 Jainas were impaled by the
king". She omits that this king, Arikesari Parankusa
Maravarman, is also described as having first persecuted
Shaivas; that Sambandar vanquished the Jainas not in battle
but in debate (upon which the king converted from Jainism to
Shaivism); and that he had escaped Jaina attempts to kill
him. Unlike the Muslim persecutions, this Shaiva-Jaina
conflict was clearly not a one-way affair. For the sake of
blackening Hinduism, the Buddhists and Jains had to be
depicted as hapless victims, and their share in the intra-
Hindu violence had to be concealed.
It is even a matter of debate whether this persecution
has occurred at all: the Hindus were never careful
historians, and like Hsuan Tsang they mixed legend and
historical fact, so that the modern historian can only
accept their testimony if he finds supportive outside
(epigraphical and archaeological) evidence. Unlike the
conscientious Muslim chronicles or Kalhana's Rajatarangini,
this story about Sambandar comes in the form of a local
legend with at most a historical core. Nilkanth Shastri, in
his unchallenged History of South India, writes about it:
"This, however, is little more than an unpleasant legend and
cannot be treated as history." I admit that this sounds like
Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's persecutions are
"little more than hostile legend". However, Mr. Spear's
contention is amply disproven by a lot of contemporary
documents including the royal orders to kill Pagans and
destroy Pagan institutions, as well as by eye-witness
accounts; such evidence has not been offered at all in the
case of Jnana Sambandar.
Warned by this unmistakable case of distortion of
evidence, we take the rest of the list cum grano salis.
But at least, the next incident is reported by two seemingly
independent sources: the persecution of Buddhists by the
Huna king Mihirakula in Kashmir. Romila Thapar herself
admits that Hsuan Tsang's account about "the destruction of
1.600 Buddhist stupas and sangharamas and the killing of
thousands of monks and lay-followers" sounds exaggerated,
but she has faith in Kalhana's more detailed version which
mentions "killing innocent people by the hundreds".
But Hsuan Tsang gives an interesting detail which does
not sound like a fairy-tale and may well be historical.
Mihirakula, "wishing to apply his leisure to the study of
Buddhism", asked the Buddhist sangha to appoint a teacher
for him. But none of the more accomplished monks was
willing, so they appointed a monk who had the rank of a
servant. The king found this procedure insulting, and
ordered the destruction of the Buddhist church in his
kingdom. This king was not anti-Buddhist, was open-minded
and took a sincere interest in Buddhism. But once a king's
ego is hurt, he can get violent, regardless of his religion.
That is regrettable, but it is something else than
religious fanaticism.
When a commander in the service of the Buddhist emperor
Ashoka was angered by the Buddhist monks' refusal to let the
king meddle in their affairs, he had 500 of them killed.
The massacre had nothing to do with religious intolerance,
merely with hurt pride, and the Marxist historians have done
well not to put it in their list. For the same reason,
Mihirakula's rage against the impolite monks cannot be
equated with the religiously motivated persecutions by the
Muslim rulers. There was never a Muslim king who invited
Pagan scholars to instruct him in the Pagan doctrines, the
way Mihirakula asked for a Buddhist teacher. The only
exceptions to this rule were the apostate emperor Akbar, who
was vehemently criticized for it by the Muslim clergy, and
Dara Shikoh, who was executed for apostasy by his brother
Aurangzeb.
Another incident of intra-Hindu persecution quoted from
Kalhana's Rajatarangini, is "an earlier persecution of
Buddhists in Kashmir and the wilful destruction of a vihara,
again by a Shaivite king". There is an interesting little
tailpiece to this incident: "But on this occasion the king
repented and built a new monastery for the Buddhist monks".
This proves that a substantial number, if not all, of the
monks had survived the persecution. But more importantly,
it highlights something completely unknown in the long
history of Islamic fanaticism: remorse. This Shaivite king
knew at heart that intolerance was wrong, and when he had
regained his self-control, he made up for his misdeed. Such
a thing has never been done by Mohammed, or by Ghaznavi or
Aurangzeb. If any proof was neded for the radical
difference between the systematic persecutions by the
Muslims and the rare abberation into isolated acts of
intolerance by Hindus, Prof. Romila Thapar has just given
it.
The next case: "The Jaina temples of Karnataka went
through a traumatic experience at the hands the Lingayats or
Virashaivas in the early second millennium AD". If all they
suffered was trauma they were well-off in comparison with
the thousands of temples destroyed by the Muslims in the same
period. After a time of peaceful co-existence, which Romila
Thapar acknowledges, "one of the temples was converted into
a Shiva temple. At Hubli, the temple of the five Jinas was
converted into a panchalingeshwara
Shaivite temple, the five lingas replacing the five Jinas
in the sancta. Some other Jaina temples met the same fate."
To be sure, conversions of the temples have indeed
happened, and the panchalingeshwara temple may well be a
case in point. Yet, that does not prove there was
persecution. When rivalling sects entered public debate,
they often put in high wagers, esp. the promise to convert
to be winner's sect. In such a case, the temple or ashram
was taken along into the new sect. Here, it could well be
such a case of peaceful handover: after all, the temples
were not destroyed. Against this, Prof. Thapar informs us:
"An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar eulogizes attacks on
Jaina temples as retaliation for opposition to Shaivite
worship."
Here we may have another case of distoring evidence by
means of selective quoting. The inscription of which Prof.
Thapar summarizes a selected part, says first of all that
the dispute arose because the Jains tried to prevent a
Shaiva from worshipping his own idol. It further relates
that the Jains also promised to throw out Jina and worship
Shiva if the Shiva devotee performed a miracle, but when the
miracle was produced, they did not fulfil their promise. In
the ensuing quarrel, the Jina idol was broken by the
Shaivas. The most significant element is that the Jain king
Bijjala decided in favour of the Shaivas when the matter was
brought before him. He dismissed the Jains and showered
favours on the Shaivas.
Again, in this story the conflict is not a one-way
affair at all. We need not accept the story at face value,
as it is one of those sectarian miracle stories (with the
message: "My saint is holier than thy saint") which abound
in the traditions surrounding
most places of pilgrimage, be they Christian, Sufi or Hindu.
Dr. Fleet, who has edited and translated this inscription
along with four others found at the same place, gives
summaries of two Lingayat Puranas and the Jain
Bijjalacharitra, and observes that the story in this
inscription finds no support in the literary traditions of
the two sects. Bijjala's own inscription dated 1162 AD
discovered at Managoli also does not support the story. The
fact that the inscription under consideration does not bear a
date or a definite reference to the reign of a king, does not
help its credibility either. And do authentic inscriptions
deal in miracles?
It is obvious that an inscription of this quality, if it
had been cited in support of the Hindu claim to the Babri
Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi site, would have been dismissed by
the Marxist historians as ridiculous and totally
groundless. They would not view it as a serious obstacle to
their foregone conclusion that there is absolutely
definitely no indication whatsover at all that a Hindu temple
was forcibly replaced with a mosque. But in this case, we
are asked to see it as evidence that Shaivas attacked Jain
temples, and that Hindu tolerance is a myth.
Unlike the party-line historians of JNU, I do not think
that historians working with conflicting testimonies are in
a position to make apodictic statements and definitive
conclusions,, so I will not completely dismiss this
inscription as fantasy. It is possible that the Jainas had
indeed fallen on hard times, and I do not dispose of
material that would refute Prof. Thapar's contention that
"in the fourteenth century the harassment of Jainas was so
acute that they had to appeal for protection to the ruling
power at Vijayanagar". Still, in size, duration, intensity
and degree of ideological motivation, this conflict does not
at all compare with the terror wrought by Islam.
Incidentally, the ruling power at Vijayanagar, whose
protection the Jains sought, was of course a Hindu power.
From Dr. Fleet's study of these sources, it seems that
the Shaivas who were so hostile to the Jains, belonged to
the Veerashaiva or Lingayat sect. And indeed, Prof.
Thapar's next piece of evidence is that "inscriptions of the
sixteenth century from the Srisailam area of Andhra Pradesh
record the pride taken by Veerashaivas in beheading
Shvetambara Jains". Now, the Veerashaivas were an anti-caste
and anti-Brahminical sect. As these are considered good
qualities, negationists have tried to link them to the
influence of Muslim missionaries ("bringing the message of
equality and brotherhood"), who were indeed very acvtive on
India's West coast, where and when the Veerashaiva doctrine
was developed. Let us assume there was indeed Muslim
influence on the Veerashaiva sect. In that case, the
negationists should acknowledge that the Veerashaivas'
occasional acts of intolerance may equally be due to the
influence of Islam. At any rate Brahminism cannot be held
guilty of any misdeeds committed by this anti-Brahminical
sect.
Finally, "in Gujrat, Jainism flourished during the reign
of Kumarapala, but his successor [i.e. Ajayapala] persecuted
the Jainas and destroyed their temples". In "The History and
Culture of the Indian People", edited by R.C. Majumdar, we
read about this: "The Jain chronicles allege that Ajayapala
was a persecutor of the Jains, that he demolished Jain
temples, mercilessly executed the Jain scholar Ramachandra,
and killed Ambada, a minister of Kumarapala, in an
encounter." Here, the alleged crime is related by the
victims, not by the aggressors. It is possible that they
exaggerated, but I see no reason to believe that they simply
invented the story. So, let us agree that some temples
were destroyed and at least one prominent Jain killed by
Hindu aggressors. After all, the fanaticism displayed
systematically by Islam has not come falling out of the sky,
it exists in human nature and may occasionally pop up in
contexts of tension; the difference is that Hindu acts of
fanaticism were occasional and took place in spite of the
doctrine, while Islamic fanaticism was systematic and merely
an application of the doctrine.
The Marxist scholars who have collected this material,
have omitted from their presentations the following cases of
intra-Hindu persecution. The Mahavamsha says that the
Buddhist king Vattagamini (29-17 BC) destroyed a Jain vihara
on the same site. In the Shravana-Belagola epitaph of
Mallishena, the Jain teacher Aklanka says that after a
successful debate with Buddhists, he broke a Buddha statue
with his own foot. There are some more instances of Jain-
Buddhist conflict, but suich material did not fit in with
the designs of the negationists. They have this pet theory
of Jainism and Buddhism as revolts against Brahminical
tyranny, subsequently crushed out by the Brahminical
reaction. In fact, the minor instances of intra-Hindu
violence were distributed roughly proportionately between
Brahminical, Buddhist, Jaina and other sects.
Among the above-mentioned reports of conflict between
the different traditions within the Sanatana Dharma common
wealth, several are probably unfounded, and several
exaggerated. But as we have no firm evidence for this
plausible hypothesis yet, let us assume for now that all
these reports are simply correct and accurate. Let us moreover
assume that a similar number of similar cases has gone
unrecorded or unnoticed by the Marxist historians. Then, as
a sum total, we still do not have the number of victims that
Teimur made in a single day. Then we still do not have the
number of temple demolitions that Aurangzeb wrought on his
own. Then we still do not have the amount of glorification
of temple destruction that we find in any of the diaries of
Muslim conquerors like Babr or Firuz Shah Tughlaq or Teimur,
or any of their chroniclers. The fanaticism record of
Hinduism throughout millennia is dwarfed by the record of a
single Ghaznavi, Ghori or Aurangzeb and becomes completely
negligeable when compared with the total record of Islamic
destruction and massacre in India. Moreover, a proper
comparison of the fanaticism record of Hindu civilization
would not be with Indian Islam, which represents a far
smaller number of people, but with the entire Muslim world
from the Prophet (peace be upon him) onwards.
Prof. Romila Thapar writes: "The desire to portray
tolerance and non-violence as the eternal values of the
Hindu tradition has led to the pushing aside of such
evidence." What evidence? These few disputable cases will
not do to prove that "Hindu tolerance is a myth". Hindus
can afford to face this evidence sqarely. A final judgement
on whether Hinduism is tolerant or not shujld not depend on
a few instances selected and edited to fit the proconceived
picture, but on an over-view of the whole of Hindu history.
The larger patterns of Hindu history leave no doubt that the
impression cunningly created by the negationists is false.
Many foreign groups of people persecuted for their
religion came to seek reguge in India. The Parsis have
thrived. The heterodox Syrian Christians have lived in
peace until the Portuguese came to enlist them in their
effort to christianize India. The Jews have expressed their
gratitude when they left for Israel because India was the
only country where their memories were not of persecution
but of friendly co-existence. Even the Moplah Muslims were
accepted without any questions asked. All these groups were
not merely tolerated, but received land and material support
for building places of worship.
What should really clinch the issue, is the tolerant
treatment which the Muslims received after their reign of
terror had been overthrown and replaced with Hindu rashtras
like those of the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats. The
Hindus could have emulated the policy of the Spanish
Christians after the Reconquista, and given the Muslims the
choice between conversion and emigration. With the benefit
of hindsight, we can say that they would have saved many
lives and India's unity by doing so, but forcing people to
convert was not in conformity with their traditions.
When negationists are confronted with the evidence of
persecutions by Islam, they are sure to mention a few cases
where Muslim rulers patronized the building of Hindu
temples. In some cases this is deceitful: in the JNU
historians' pamphlet "The Political Abuse of History", they
mention three such cases, but on closer inspection two of
them do not concern Muslim rulers, but their Hindu ministers
(in his rebuttal, Prof. A.R. Khan called this "not only
concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence").
But all right, a few Muslim rulers have made gifts to Hindu
institutions. The negationists insist that these few gifts
make up for the systematic Islamic persecutions. By
contrast, their blatantly unequal standards do not allow
them to accept the systematic patronage of the institutions
of Buddhists and Jains by Hindu kings through the ages as
compensation for the few isolated and aberrant cases of
religious conflict.
In order to undersand the problem of religious
intolerance, it is necessary to distinguish between two
types of conflict between religions. The first one is the
ordinary conflict between two groups of people, who may
derive their identity from their nationality, language
family stock, economic interests, social class, or
allegiance to a football team: any two people or groups of
people can pick a quarrel. Therefore, two religious
communities can have a conflict of interest as well, and
behave just like any kind of group in conflict situation.
By definition, every community can run into this kind of
conflict (though some may remain non-violent throughout
because of their doctrine). But this kind of conflict is
temporary, dependent on an accidental state of affairs and
always gravitates back to normal.
The second kind of religious conflict is not accidental,
but is a consequence of the doctrines to which the community
adheres. This is the case only with a handful of religions
(including the Marxist quasi-religion), distinguished by
their exclusivism and their ambition for conquest. Islam has
been the most consistent in denying others the right to
exist or at least to freely practise their religion. Its
conflicts with other religions are merely the
materialization of its doctrines.
This discinction between religious conflict as an
accident or aberration, and religious conflict as the direct
outcome of fanatical doctrines inherent in a religion, is
fundamental to an understanding of the problem. In the
first case, acts of fanaticism are committed in spite of the
doctrine. The Vedas say that "the wise call the One by many
names", and exhort us to "let good thoughts come to us from
everywhere"; in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna assures the
adherents of all religions that "those who pray with
devotion to any god, it is to Me that they pray".
Differences in religion are considered superficial and
unimportant, therefore religious tolerance is the norm, and
intolerance cannot be more than an aberration. But in the
second case, acts of fanaticism are sanctioned by the
doctrine, and are bound to happen on a substantial scale as
long as the doctrine is taken seroiously. "Enmity and
hatred will reign between us until ye believe in Allah
alone" says the Quran, and it is only logical that enmity
and hatred have indeed reigned between Muslims and non-
Muslims.
Of course, those with a bad conscience go out of their
way to blur this distinction. Marxists insist on
disregarding or blurring the distinction either because they
want to blacken all religion, or because they are in league
with Muslim fanatics.
Among those who like to say that "all are equally
guilty", we also find the Christian missionaries. They too
have a history of persecutions and temple destructions to
cover up, not only in Europe and America, but in India as
well. The Portuguese organized a branch of the Inquisition
in Goa, and they practised conversion by force on a large
scale. The French and British missionaries were less
brutal, often resorting to subversion tactics and inducement
by means of material advantages for converts, but they too
have a record of temple destructions in India. Hundreds of
churches contain rubble of the Hindu temples which they
replaced. We may look a bit more closely into one case
which sums it all up: the Saint Thomas church on Mylapore
beach in Madras.
According to Christian leaders in India, the apostle
Thomas came to India in 52 AD, founded the Syrian Christian
church, and was killed by the fanatical Brahmins in 72 AD.
Near the site of his martyrdom, the Saint Thomas church was
built. In fact this apostle never came to India, and the
Christian community in South India was founded by a merchant
Thomas Cananeus in 345 AD ( a name which readily explains the
Thomas legend ). He led 400 refugees who fled persecution
in Persia and were given asylum by the Hindu authorities.
In Catholic universities in Europe, the myth of the apostle
Thomas going to India is no longer taught as history, but in
India it is still considered useful. Even many vocal
secularists who attack the Hindus for relying on myth in
the Ayodhya affair, off-hand profess their belief in the
Thomas myth. The important point is that Thomas can be
upheld as a martyr and the Brahmins decried as fanatics.
In reality, the missionaries were very disgruntled that
these damned Hindus refused to give them martyrs (whose
blood is welcomed as the seed of the faith), so they had
to invent one. Moreover, the church which they claim
commemorates Saint Thomas' martyrdom at the hands of Hindu
fanaticism, is in fact a monument of Hindu martyrdom at the
hands of Christian fanaticism: it is a forcible replacement of two
important Hindu temples (Jain and Shaiva), whose existence was
insupportable to Christian missionaries. No one knows how
many priests and worshippers were killed when the Christian
soldiers came to remove the curse of Paganism from Mylapore
beach. Hinduism doesn't practise martyr-mongering, but if at
all we have to speak of martyrs in this context, the title
goes to these Shiva-worshippers and not to the apostle
Thomas.
So, applying the old maxim that "attack is the best
defence", the spokesmen of intolerant creeds falsely accuse
the tolerant Hindus of the same intolerance. While nobody
claims that Hinduism is without faults, or that Hindu
society has never brought forth fanatical individuals,it is
a plain lie that Hinduism has record of fanaticism similar
(however remotely) to that of the three world-conquerors:
Christianity, Islam and Mrxism.
2.8 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ISLAM NEGATIONISM
India has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a
movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes
against humanity committed by Islam. This movement is led
by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by
all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call
themselves secularists. In contrast to the European
negationism regarding the Nazi acts of genocide, but similar
to the Turkish negationism regarding the Armenian genocide,
the Indian negationism regarding the terrible record of
Islam is fully supported by the establishment. It has
nearly full control of the media and dictates all state and
government parlance concerning the communal problem (more
properly to be called the Islam problem).
Its techniques are essentially the same as those of
negationists elsewhere :
- Head-on denial: The crassest form of negationism is
obviously the simple denial of the facts. This is mostly
done in the form of general claims, such as: "Islam is
tolerant", "Islamic Spain was a model of multicultural
harmony", "the anti-Jewish hatred was unknown among Muslims
until Zionism and anti-Semitism together entered the Muslim
world from Europe". Since it is rare that a specific crime
of Islam is brought to the public's notice, there is little
occasion to come out and deny specific crimes. Exceptions
are the Armenian genocide, officially denied in Turkey and
the entire Muslim world, and the temple destructions in
India, which have been highlighted in the Ayodhya debate but
flatly denied by Syed Shahanuddin, Sushil Srivastava and
many other pro-Babri polemists.
The Rushdie affair was the occasion for negationism on a
grand scale. There happens to be an unambiguous answer to
the question: "Is it Islamic to kill those who voice
criticism of the Prophet?" According to the media and most
experts, the answer was definitely: no. According to the
basic traditions of Islam, it was: yes. Mohammed as well
as his immediate successors have killed critics, both in
formal executions and in night-time stabbings. In Islamic
law, the Prophet's example is valid precedent. At most
there could be some quarreling over the procedure: some
jurists thought that Rushdie should first be kidnapped to an
Islamic country and given a chance to recant before an
Islamic court, though the ayatollahs have ruled that no
amount of remorse can save Rushdie. If he stands by his
book, even the so-called moderates think he must be killed.
Islamic law punishes both apostasy and insults to the
Prophet with the death penalty: twice there is no escape for
Rushdie. In the Muslim world, several publications have
restated the clear-cut Islamic provisions for cases like
Rushdie's including Ahaanat-i Rasool ki Sazaa ("Punishment
for Insulting the Prophet") by JNU Prof. Maulana Mohsin
Udmani Nadwi, and Muqaddas-i Ayat ("The Sacred Verses") by
Maulana Majid Ali Khan, both published by the Islamic
Research Foundation, Delhi. Yet, the outside public was
told by many experts that killing Rushdie is un-islamic.
Flat denial will work very well if your grip on the
press and education media is sufficient. Otherwise, there
is a danger of being shown up as the negationist one really
is. In that case, a number of softer techniques are
available.
- Ignoring the facts: This passive negationism is
certainly the safest and the most popular. The media and
textbook-writers simply keep the vast corpus of inconvenient
testimony out of the readers' view.
- Minimizing the facts: If the inconvenient fact is
pointed out that numerous Muslim chroniclers have reported a
given massacre of unbelievers themselves, one can posit
a priori that they must have exaggerated to flatter their
patron's martial vanity - as if it is not significant enough
that Muslim rulers felt flattered by being described as
mass-murderers of infidels.
Apart from minimizing the absolute size of Islamic
crimes, there is the popular technique of relative
minimizing: make the facts look smaller by comparing them
with other, carefully selected facts. Thus, one can say
that "all religions are intolerant", which sounds plausible
to many though it is patently false: in the Roman Empire
only those sects were persecuted which had political
ambitions (Jews when they fought for independence,
Christians because they sought to take over the Empire and
outlaw all other religions, as they effectively did), while
the others enjoyed the status of religio licita; similarly
with the Persian Empire and many other states and cultures.
An oft-invoked counterweight for the charge-sheet
against Islam, is the fanaticism record of Christianity. it
is indeed well-known that Christianity has been guilty of
numerous temple destructions and persecutions. But the
reason for this fanaticism is found in the common
theological foundation of both religions: exclusivist
prophetic monotheism. The case against Christianity is at
once a case against Islam. Moreover, in spite of its
theologically motivated tendency to intolerance,
Christianity has had to go through the experience of "live
and let live" because in its formative period, it was but
one of the numerous sects in the pluralist Roman empire.
Islam never had this experience, and in order to bring out
its full potential of fanaticism, Christianity has needed
the influence of Islam on a few occasions. Thus, it is no
coincidence that Charlemagne, who defeated the Saxons by
force, was the grandson of Charles Martel, who defeated the
Islamic army in Poitiers; no coincidence either that the
Teutonic knights who forcibly converted the Balts, were
veterans of the Crusades, i.e. the campaign to liberate
Palestine from Islam; nor is it a coincidence that the
Spanish Inquisition emerged in a country that had needed
centuries to shake off Islamic oppression. Finally,
Christianity is, by and large, facing the facts of it own
history, though its is still struggling with the need to own
up the responsibility for these facts.
An even more general way of drowning Islamic fanaticism
in relativist comparisons, is to point out that after all,
every imperialism has been less than gentle. That may well
be true, but then, we are not setting up cults for the
Genghis Khans of this world. A religion should contribute
to man's transcending his natural defects like greed and
cruelty, and not sanction and glorify them.
- Whitewashing: When one cannot conceal, deny or
minimize the facts, one can still calim that on closer
analysis,, they are not as bad as they seem. One can call
right what is obviously wrong. This can go very far, e.g.
in his biography of Mohammed, Maxime Rodinson declared
unashamedly that the extermination of the Medinese Jews by
Mohammed was doubtlessly the best solution. In numerous
popular introductions to Islam, the fact that Islam imposes
the death penalty on apostates (in modern terminology: that
Islam opposes freedom of religion in the most radical
manner) is acknowledged; but then it is explained that
"since Islam was at war with the polytheists, apostasy
equalled treason and desertion, something which is still
punished with death in our secular society". All right, but
the point is precisely that Islam chose to be at war with
the traditional religion of Arabia, as also with all other
religions, and that it has made this state of war into a
permanent feature of its law system.
- Playing up unrepresentative facts: A popular tactic
in negationism consists in finding a positive but
uncharacteristic event, and highlighting it while keeping
the over-all picture out of the public's view. For
instance, a document is found in which Christians whose son
has forcibly been inducted in the Ottoman Janissary army,
express pride because their son has made it made it to high
office within this army. The fact that these people manage
to see the bright side of their son's abduction, is then
used to prove that non-muslims were quite happy under
Muslim rule, and to conceal the fact that the devshirme, the
forcible conversion and abduction of one fifth of the
Christian children by the Ottoman authorities, constituted a
constant and formidable terror bewailed in hundreds of
heart-rending songs and stories.
For another example, negationists always mentionn cases
of collaboration by non-Muslims (Man Singh with the
Moghuls,etc.) to suggest that these were treated as partners
and equals and that Muslim rule was quite benevolent; when
in fact every history of an occupation, even the most cruel
one, is also the history of a collaboration. As has been
pointed out, the Nazis employed Jewish guards in the Warsaw
ghetto, disprove the Nazi oppression of the Jews.
- Denying the motive: Negationists sometimes accept the
facts, but disclaim their hero's responsibility for them.
Thus, Mohammed Habib tried to exonerate Islam by ascribing
to the Islamic invaders alternative motives: Turkish
barbarity, greed, the need to put down conspiracies brewing
in temples. In reality, those rulers who had secular
reasons to avoid an all-out confrontation with the
unbelievers, were often reprimanded by their clerical
courtiers for neglecting their Islamic duty. The same
clerics were never unduly worried over possible secular
motives in a ruler's mind as long as these prompted him to
action against the unbelievers. At any rate, the fact that
Islam could be used routinely to justify plunder and
enslavement (unlike, say, Buddhism), is still significant
enough.
- Smokescreen: Another common tactic consists in
blurring the problem by questioning the very terms of the
debate: "Islam does not exist, for there are many Islams,
with big differences between countries etc." It would
indeed be hard to criticize something that is so ill-
defined. But the simple fact is that Islam does exist: it
is the doctrine contained in the Quran, normative for all
Muslims, and in the Hadis, normative at least for all Sunni
Muslims. There are differences between the law schools
concerning minor points, and of course there are
considerable differences in the extent to which Muslims are
effectively faithful to islamic doctrine, and
correspondingly, the extent to which they mix it with un-
islamic elements.
- Blaming fringe phenomena: When faced with hard facts
of Islamic fanaticism, negationists often blame them on some
fringe tendency, now popularly known as fundamentalism.
This is said to be the product of post-colonial frustration,
basically foreign to genuine Islam. In reality,
fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi and Ayatollah
Khomeini knew their Quran better than the self-deluding
secularists who brand them as bad Muslims. What is called
fundamentalism is in fact the original Islam, as is proven
by the fact that fundamentalists have existed since long
before colonialism, e.g. the 13th century theologian Ibn
Taimiya, who is still a lighthouse for today's Maudoodis,
Turabis, Madanis and Khomeinis. When Ayatollah Khomeini
declared that the goal of Islam is the conquest of all non-
Muslim countries, this was merely a reformulation of
Mohammed's long-term strategy and of the Quranic assurance
that God has promised the entire world to Islam. In the
case of communism, one can shift the blame from Marx to
Lenin and Stalin, but Islamic terrorism has started with
Mohammed himself.
- Arguments ad hominem: If denying the evidence is not
tenable, one can always distort it by means of selective
quoting and imputing motives to the original authors of the
source material; or manipulating quotations to make them say
the opposite of the over-all picture which the original
author has presented. Focus all attention on a few real or
imagined flaws in a few selected pieces, and act as if the
entire corpus of evidence has been rendered untrustworthy.
To extend the alleged untrustworthiness of one piece of
evidence to the entire corpus of evidence, it is necessary
to create suspicion against those who present the evidence:
the implication is that they have a plan of history
falisification, that this plan has been exposed in the case
of this one piece of evidence, but that it is only logical
that such motivated history falsifiers are also behind the
concoction of the rest of the alleged evidence.
If the discussion of inconvenient evidence cannot be
prevented, disperse it by raising other issues, such as the
human imperfections which every victim of crimes against
humanity inevitablly has (Jewish harshness against the
Palestinians, Hindu untouchability); describe the demand for
the truth as a ploy to justify and cover up these
imperfections. If the facts have to be faced at all, then
blame the victim.
If people ignore or refute your distorted version of
history, accuse them of distortion and political abuse of
history. Slander scholars whose testimony is inconvenient;
impute political or other motives to them in order to pull
the attention away from the hard evidence they present.
- Slogans: Finally, all discussion can be sabotaged
with the simple technique of shouting slogans: prejudice,
myth, "racism/communalism". Take the struggle from the
common battlefield of arguments into the opponent's camp:
his self-esteem as a member of the civilized company that
abhors ugly things like prejudice and communalism. After
all, attack is the best defence.
After summing up the forms of negationism, we have to
look into its causes. The following factors come to mind:
- Orientalism and Islamology: After the medieval
Christian pamphlets against "Mohammed the impostor", not
much has been published thematizing the ideological and
factual crimes of Islam. Books on, say, "slavery in Islam"
are extremely rare: the raw information that could fill such
a publication will have to be found in more general
publications, in which Islam is only referred to in passing,
often without the author's realizing the implications for an
evaluation of Islam. It is often said (when introducing
"refutations of prejudice") that people always associate
Islam with intolerance; but finding a book specifically
devoted to the subject of Islamic intolerance will be
harder. How many millions have been killed by Islam simply
because they were non-Muslims? Nobody has yet tabulated the
figures available to prepare a general estimate. We can
only notice that critical research of Islam is not exactly
encouraged, and that there is an increasing tendency to
self-censorship regarding Islam criticism. In part, this is
due to muchdelayed reaction against the long-abandoned
Christian polemical appraoch.
Now that Islamic Studies departments in Europe are
increasingly manned by Muslims and sponsored by Islamic
foundations and states, as has been the case in India for
long, the climate for critical studies of Islam is only
worsening. When comparing the first (pre-World War 2)
edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, Netherlands)
with the new edition, it is striking how critical
observations have been ironed out. But even in the past,
Islam has enjoyed a rather favourable treatment in academic
circles. Thus, about Islamic slavery the prominent Dutch
Islamologist C. Snouck-Hurgronje wrote in 1887 (i.e. thirty
years after the Americans had waged a war to impose the
abolition of slavery in their southern states, and some
seventy years after its abolition in the colonies): "For
most slaves their abduction was a blessing... They
themselves are convicted that it is their enslavement that
has for the first time made them human."
The political context of the growth phase of Islamology
provides a part of the explanation. Mature colonialism was
not waging war against Islam, but sought the co-operation of
the established social forces in the colonized populations.
The British co-operation with the Indian Muslims is well-
known; it is epitomized by the founding in 1906 of the
Muslim League, which sought to "inculcate loyalty to the
British Empire in the Indian Muslims". In French West
Africa, in the same period, Islam was accepted as a factor
of social stability, and General Lyautey pursued a dream of
a Franco-Islamic synthesis culture in Algeria. In the
1930s, in the last European attempt at fresh colonization,
the Italian Fascists actively supported the spread of Islam
in the Horn of Africa. But already since 1853 the colonial
powers had been supporting the Caliphate against a Christian
power, Czarist Russia, esp. in the Crimean War (a mistaken
war if ever there was one), and this had strongly
contributed to climate of benevolence towards the Muslim
culture.
- Church policy: Christianity has for centuries waged a
lively polemic against Islam, with Raimundus Lullus as
probably the most remarkable exponent. Recently, this
criticism has subsided. Worse, polemical works by clerics
have been withdrawn or kept unpublished (such as, early this
centure, Father Henri Lammens' paper arguing that Mohammed's
revelations were a psychopathological phenomenon). One
reason is that the Church is aware of the similarity between
Jesus' and Mohammed's missions, so that a criticism of the
foundations of Islam may backfire on Christianity. The
second reason is the fear that Christians in the Muslim
world would have to pay for even ideological attack on Islam
(that is why Church polemists save their sharpest words for
harmless religions like Hinduism). This fear also motivates
other Church policies, such as the non-recognition of the
state of Israel.
Meanwhile, the face of the Church has changed. A small
but significant event in the wake of the Second Vatican
Council was the deletion from the Saints' calendar of Our
Lady of the Redemption of Slaves, whose feast was on 24
September. In the Middle Ages, there was a special clerical
order and a whole fund-raising network devoted to the
redemption ("buying back") of Christian slaves held in
Barbary. Until the 19th century, coastal villages in
Italy had watchtowers to alarm the people when a ship of the
slave-catching Barbarese pirates was in sight. The terror of
Islamic slavery was a permanent feature of Christian history
from the 7th till the 19th century, but now the Church is
working hard to erase this memory.
Today, its pastors are the most fervent pleaders for the
rights of Islam. Muslims in Europe are for them a
substitute for the disappearing parish members. Separate
Christian institutions, whose reson of existence is being
questioned, find a new legitimacy in the fact that Islam in
its turn is also opening separate schools, charities and
even political parties. Islam has become a sister
religion regularly praised as a religion of peace.
- Anti-colonialism: One of the ideological guidelines
of anti-colonialism was: "Of the (ex-)colonized, nothing but
good must be said." Therefore, mentioning the colonialism
and mass slavery practised by the Muslims had become
undesirable.
Add to this general taboo the warning that Islam
criticism effectively implies support to Israel, described
by Maxime Rodinson as a "colonial settler-state". If one
acknowledges that Islam has always oppressed the Jews, one
accepts that Israel was a necessary refuge for the Jews
fleeing not only the European but also the Islamic variety
of anti-Judaisms. Let us not forget that decolonization was
followed immediately by renewed discrimination of and
attacks on the Jewish and Christian minorities, and that
those Jews who could get out have promptly fled to Israel
(or France, in the case of Algeria). It is no coincidence
that these Sephardic Jews are mostly supporters of the hard-
liners in Israel.
- The enemy's enemy is a friend: Many people brought up
as Christians, or as nominal Hindus, never outgrow their
pubescent revolt against their parents' religion, and
therefore automatically sympathize with every rival or
opponent of the religion they have come to despise. Because
Islam poses the most formidable threat, they like it a lot.
- Leftism: In this century, Islam has come to be
advertised as a naturally leftist "religion of equality".
This line has been developed by Muslim apoligists such as
Mohammed Habib, and they have even taken it as a
rationalization of the irrational claim that Mohammed was
the "last Prophet": after all, as the "prophet of
equality", he had brought the ultimate message upon which no
improvement is possible. Sir Mohammed Iqbal, one of the
fathers of Pakistan, had claimed that "Islam equals
Communism plus Allah". The Iranian Ayatollahs, by contrast,
and most of the vocal Muslims after the Soviet-Islamic war
in Afghanistan, have restated the orthodox position that
Communism is un-Islamic, not only because of its atheism but
also because of its rejection of free entreprise; the
current claim is that Islam provides a "better form of
equality" than Communism.
Even while Communists were slaughtered in Islamic Iran,
and even while political analysts classify the Islamist
movements as "extreme rightist", most leftists have kept on
cultivating some sympathy for Islam. During the Lebanese
civil war, they fed us news stories about "leftist Muslims,
rightist Christians", "Islamo-progressive, christiano-
reactionnaire".
Negationism in India is practised with the most prowess
by historians and writers who are under the spell of
Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the
French and British colonialists, but what was a tactical
alliance for Lenin became a love-affair for the Indian
Communists. However, it would be wrong to expect that the
collapse of Soviet Communism and the inevitable decline of
Communism in India will automatically lead to the
dissolution of negationism. It has become a bias and a
thought-habit for many people who have only vaguely been
influenced by Marxism. Children mostly survive their
parents, and certain forms of negationism may survive Indian
Marxism for some time, unless a serious effort is made to
expose it on a grand scale.
- Rightist traditionalism: There is also a rightist
sympathy for Islam. An obvious point of agreement is of
course anti-Judaism. A subtler basis for sympathy is the
so-called traditionalist current, which was represented by
the converts Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, and still has
a following: it has been idealizing Islam and esp. Sufism as
the preserver of the age-old philosophia pernnis against
modernity. In Russia, some Slavophile anti-Western groups
now seek an alliance with Islam against the impending
Americanization of their society. In the U.S., Christian
fundamentalists and Islamic organizations are increasingly
creating common platforms to speak out against trends of
moral decay (abortion, pornography, etc.). Some of these
phenomena of traditionalist alliance-building are quite
respectable, but they are nevertheless conducive to Islam
negationism.
- Hindu cowardice: Even among so-called militant
Hindus, there is a shameful eagerness to praise Islam and
deny its criminal record. E.g., during the Ayodhya
movement, many Hindu leaders have been pleading that the
Muslims should renounce the Ram Janmabhoomi site because
"geunine Islam is against temple demolition", so that a
mosque standing on a demolished temple is not in conformity
with Islamic law. This was, of course, blatantly untrue:
Islamic scripture and history prove that destroying all
expressions of unbelief and idolatry is a duty and an honour
for Muslims. The doctrines that have led to the temple
destructions including the one on Ram Janmabhoomi, are still
being taught in all Islamic schools.
Apart from being untruthful, this Hindu appeal to
"geunine Islam's tolerance" was also bad debating tactics:
if you say that temple demolition was standard Islamic
practice, and that what had happened in Ayodhya was merely
the local application of the general rule, the onus is on
the Babri advocates to prove that the Babri Masjid was an
exception; but if you say that the Babri Masjid was an
exception to the rule of Islamic tolerance, the onus is on
you to prove that in this case, an exceptional and
uncharacteristic incident had taken place. It was also bad
bargaining tactics: if you say that the Babri Masjid was
merely one among thousands, then renouncing this one non-
mosque would sound like a very low price for the Muslims to
buy the Hindus' goodwill; but if you say that the Babri
Masjid was an exceptional case, an insignificant incident
amid the many big problems thrown up by history, you look
petty by demanding the restoration of this one site. Short,
Hindu leaders were damaging their own position by denying
history and avoiding Islam criticism.
One could understand people telling lies when it serves
their own interest; but people who tell lies when it is the
truth that would serve their interest, really deserve to be
kicked around. This truly strange and masochistic behaviour
can only be understood if we keep in mind that Hindu society
is a terorized society. During the Muslim period, all those
who stood up and spoke out against Islam were eliminated;
and under Nehruvian rule, they were sidelined and abused.
The oppressed Hindus started licking the boot that kicked
them, and this has become a habit which in their slumber
they have not yet identified and stopped.
- Liberal Islam: In the Islamic world, it is unwise to
attack Islam head-on. Yet, sometimes people in those
countries feel the need to oppose Islamic phenomena and
campaigns, such as the witch-hunt on un-Islamic cultural
remnants, violence on the non-Muslims, extreme forms of
gender inequality. In order to have a chance, these people
have to use Islamic language: "Mohammed was actually against
polygamy", "violence against others is in conflict with the
tolerance which Mohammed has taught us", "respect for other
cultures is part of Islamic tradition". In order to press
their humanist point, they have to formally identify with
Islam and lie about its contents.
Many Muslims have started to believe their own rhetoric.
If you point out to them that the Quran teaches intolerance
and war against the unbelievers in the most explicit terms,
many of them will sincerely protest, and not know what to
say when you show them the Quranic passages concerned.
There is no reason to doubt that the Moroccanm authoress
Fatima Mernissi genuinely believes in her own argument that
the Quranic instructions on how to organize your polygamous
household are to be read as an abolition of polygamy (albeit
in veiled terms, because Allah, the same Allah Almighty who
went straight against the prevalent customs of idolatry and
pluralism, had to be careful not to offend the spirit of the
times). Many nominal Muslims have outgrown Islamic values
and developed a commitment to modern values, but their
sentimental attachment to the religion imbibed in their
childhood prevents them from formally breaking with Islam
and makes them paint a rosy picture of it.
Among Muslim spokesmen, is is certainly not the
fundamentalists who are the most active proponents of
negationism. It is liberals like Asghar Ali Engineer who
deny that Islam ordains war on the infidels. It is those
who are acclaimed by Hindus as being good "secular" Muslims,
like Saeed Naqvi, who go as far as to deny that the
Partition of India was brought about by Muslims. An Islam
that wants to be secular, cannot but be dishonest and
untrue to itself. Unfortunately, a tolerant Islam is a
contradiction, and a tolerant past for Islam to buttress the
position of liberal Muslims, is a lie.
- Muslims differing from Islam: Many people have a
Muslim neighbour who is a fine man, and from this empirical
fact they conclude: Islam cannot be all that bad considering
our friend Mustapha. This one empirical fact gives them a
tremendous resistance against all information about Islamic
intolerance. People usually reduce the world to their own
sphere of experience, and general historical facts of
Islamic fanaticism are not allowed to disturb the private
experience of good neighbourly relations.
Many nominal Muslims have retained from their Quran
classes only some vague generalities about morality, and
they normally go by their own conscience and sensibility
without ever developing the doctrinally prescribed hostility
towards non-Muslims. These good people but had Muslims can
ignore but not change Islamic doctrine. They cannot prevent
the Quranic message of hatred from infecting at least some
of the more sesceptible among their brethren.
There have certainly been situations where sane Muslims
have calmed down their more riotous brethren, and such
individuals do make a real difference. We should not make
the Islamic mistake of judging people simply by their
belonging or not belonging to the Muslim community, rather
than by their human qualities. But the fact remains that
the presence of a doctrine of intolerance as the official
and identity-defining ideology of a community, exerts a
constant pressure tending towards separatism and
confrontation. The alleviating presence of the humanist
factor even within the Muslim community should not be used
to deny the ominous presence of Islamic factor.
"Those who deny history are bound to repeat it": that is
what many critics of Holocaust negationism allege. This
seems slightly exaggerated, though it is of course the well-
wishers of Nazism who practise negationism. In the case of
Islam, it is equally true that negationism is practised by
the well-wishers of that same doctrine which has led to the
crimes against humanity under consideration. While Nazism
is simply too stained to get a second chance, Islam is
certainly in a position to force unbelievers into the zimmi
status (as is happening in dozens of Muslim countries in
varying degrees), and even to wage new jihads, this time
with weapons of mass-destruction. Those who are trying to
close people's eyes to this danger by distorting or
concealing the historical record of Islam are effective
accomplices in the injustice and destruction which Islam is
sure to cause before the time of its dissolution comes.
Therefore, I consider it a duty of all intellectuals to
expose and denounce the phenomenon of negationism whenever
it is practised.
Negationism In India - Chapter Two - Negationism In India
CHAPTER TWO - NEGATIONISM IN INDIA
The negationism regarding the Nazi crimes has been the
object of much public discussion. Turkish negationism about
the Armenian genocide has received some attention. Less
well-known is that India has its own brand of negationism.
Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to
rewrite history and to deny the millennium-long attack of
Islam on Hinduism. Today, most politicians and English-
writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to
condemn any public reference to this long and painful
conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length
to create the illusion of a history of communal amity
between Hindus and Muslims.
2.1 HINDU VS. MUSLIM
Making people believe in a history of Hindu-Muslim amity
is not an easy task: the number of victims of the
persecutions of Hindus by Muslims is easily of the same
order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy,
though no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the
reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of
how many millions exactly must have died in the course of
the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is
taboo). On top of these there is a similar number of
abductions and deportations to harems and slave-markets, as
well as centuries of political oppression and cultural
destruction.
The American historian Will Durant summed it up like
this:"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the
bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for
its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good,
whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and
peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians
invading from without or multiplying within."
Only off and on did this persecution have the intensity
of a genocide, but it was sustained much longer and spread
out much wider geographically than the Nazi massacre.
Whereas the Germans including most members of the Nazi
party, were horrified at the Nazi crimes against humanity
within a few years, the Muslims, for whom Gott mit uns
(God with us) was not a slogan but a religious certainty,
managed to keep a good conscience for centuries. We will
encounter similarities as well as differences between Nazi
and Islamic crimes against humanity, but the most striking
difference is definitely the persistence with which Islamic
persecutions have continued for 14 centuries. This is
because it had more spine, a more powerful psychological
grip on its adherents than Nazism.
The ideological foundation of the Islamic campaign was
similar to the Nazi ideology. The Muslium invaders (as we
can read in numerous documents which they left us, from the
Quran and the Hadith onwards) distinguished between three
kinds of people: first of all the Muslims, the Herrenvolk
(master nation) to which Allah had promised the world;
secondly the Jews and Christians, who could live on under
Muslim rule but only as third-class citizens, just like the
Slavic Untermenschen (inferior people) in Hitler's planned
new order, thirdly the species to be eliminated, the real
Pagans who had to disappear from the face of the earth.
Different from Hitler's victims, the non-combatants
among the unbelievers often got a chance to opt for
conversion rather than death. What Mohammed (imitated by
his successors) wanted, was his recognition as God's final
prophet, so he preferred people to live and give him this
recognition (by pronouncing the Islamic creed, i.e.
converting), and only those who refused him this recognition
were to be killed. Still, conversion often came too late to
save defeated Pagans from slavery. At this point, Mohammed
deserves comparison with Stalin: unlike Hitler, he killed
people not for their race but for their opinions. But one
can hardly say that the one totalitarianism is better than
the other.
The Blitzkrieg of the Muslim armies in the first decades
after the birth of their religion had such enduring results
precisely because the Pagan populations in West- and
Central-Asia had no choice (except death) but to convert.
Whatever the converts' own resentment, their children grew
up as Muslims and gradually identified with this religion.
Within a few generations the initial resistance against
these forcible converions was forgotten, and these areas
became heidenfrei (free from Pagans, cfr. judenfrei). In
India it didn't go like that, because the Muslims needed
five centuries of attempts at invasion before they could
catch hold of large parts of India, and even then they
encountered endless resistance, so that they often had to
settle for a compromise.
The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for
the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities
were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds
of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers
deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often
literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest
of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the
annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still
called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani
sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill
100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other
occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564
left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated.
And so on.
As a contribution to research on the quantity of the
Islamic crimes against humanity, we may mention Prof.
K.S.Lal's estimates about the population figures in medieval
India (Growth of Muslim Population in India). According to
his calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population
decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of
Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate). More
research is needed before we can settle for a quantitatively
accurate evaluation of Muslim rule in India, but at least
we know for sure that the term crime against humanity is
not exaggerated.
But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never
fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in
Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers
against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally
defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious
Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total
confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the (in
India dominant) Hanifite school of Islamic law made
possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the
school of Hanifa gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer
the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but
to allow them toleration as zimmis (protected ones) living
under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya
(toleration tax) from them. Normally the zimmi status was
only open to Jews and Christians (and even that concession
was condemned by jurists of the Hanbalite school like lbn
Taymiya), which explains why these communities have survived
in Muslim countries while most other religions have not. On
these conditions some of the higher Hindu castes could be
found willing to collaborate, so that a more or less stable
polity could be set up. Even then, the collaboration of
the Rajputs with the Moghul rulers, or of the Kayasthas with
the Nawab dynasty, one became a smooth arrangement when
enlightened rulers like Akbar (whom orthodox Muslims
consider an apostate) cancelled these humiliating conditions
and the jizya tax.
It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in
India considered themselves exempted from the duty to
continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for
which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs).
Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each
other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed
unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests,
Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total
campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers
preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous
kingdoms, and were content to extract the jizya tax, and to
limit their conversion effort to material incentives and
support to the missionary campaigns of sufis and mullahs (in
fact, for less zealous rulers, the jizya was an incentive to
discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of
revenue). The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect
limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar
to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman
empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to
some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions,
destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of
Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of
raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian
custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a
safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.
The last jihad against the Hindus before the full
establishment of British rule was waged by Tipu Sultan at
the end of the 18th century. In the rebellion of 1857, the
near-defunct Muslim dynasties (Moghuls, Nawabs) tried to
curry favour with their Hindu subjects and neighbours, in
order to launch a joint effort to re-establish their rule.
For instance, the Nawab promised to give the Hindus the Ram
Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site back, in an effort to quench
their anti-Muslim animosity and redirect their attention
towards the new common enemy from Britain. This is the only
instance in modern history when Muslims offered concessions
to the Hindus; after that, all the concessions made for the
sake of communal harmony were a one-way traffic from Hindu
to Muslim.
After the British had crushed the rebellion of 1857, the
Indian Muslims fell into a state of depression, increasing
backwardness due to their refusal of British education, and
nostalgia for the past. While the Hindu elites took to
Western notions like secular nationalism, the Muslims
remained locked up in their communal separateness. As soon
as the British drew them into the political process
(founding of Muslim League in 1906) in order to use them as
a counter-weight against the Indian National Congress, they
immediately made heavy and hurtful demands on the Hindus,
such as the unlimited right to slaughter cows, and they
started working for political separation. First they
obtained separate electorates where Muslim candidates would
only have to please Muslim voters, and later they would
succeed in separating a Muslim state from India.
By the twenties, they took to the unscrupled use of
muscle power in a big way, creating street riots and
outright pogroms. If Hindus retaliated in kind, it was a
welcome help in instilling the separate communal identity
into the ordinary Muslim, who would have preferred to
coexist with his Hindu neighbours in peace. By creating
riots and provoking relatiatory violence, the Muslim League
managed to swing the vast majority of the Muslim electorate
towards supporting its demand for the partition of India.
The roughly 600,000 victims of the violence accompanying the
Partition were the price which the Muslim League was willing
to pay for its Islamic state of Pakistan. While every Hindu
and Muslim who took part in the violence is responsible for
his own excesses, the over-all responsibility for this mass-
slaughter lies squarely with the Muslim leadership.
After independence, the Islamic persecution of Hindus
has continued in different degrees of intensity, in
Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Kashmir (as well as heavy
discrimination in Malaysia). This is not the place for
detailing these facts, which the international media have
been ignoring completely. What may cut short all denials of
this continued pestering of Hindus in Muslim states, are the
resulting migration figures: in 1948, Hindus formed 23% of
the population of Bangla Desh (then East Pakistan), in 1971
the figure was down to 15%, and today it stands at about 8%.
No journalist or human rights body goes in to ask the
minority Hindus for their opinion about the treatment they
get from the Muslim authorities and populations; but they
vote with their feet.
In the first months of 1990, the entire Hindu population
(about 2 lakhs) was forcibly driven from the Kashmir Valley,
which used to be advertised as a showpiece of communal
harmony. Muslim newspapers and mosque loudspeakers had
warned the Hindus to leave the valley or face bullets.
After the Islamic conquest of Kabul in April 1992, 50,000
Hindus had to flee Afghanistan (with the Indian government
unwilling to extend help, and Inder Kumar Gujral denying
that the expulsion of Indians had a communal motive). The
pogroms in Pakistan and Bangladesh after the demolition of
the Babri Masjid left 50,000 Hindus homeless in Bangladesh
and triggered another wave of refugees from both countries
towards India. In Pakistan, 245 Hindu temples were
demolished, in Bangladesh a similar number was attacked, and
even in England some temples were set on fire by Muslim
mobs. And then we haven't even mentioned the recurrent
attacks on Hindu processions and on police stations.
It will now be evident that the Hindu psyche has very
little sympathy for Islam. Doing something about this was
the chief motive for negationism.
2.2 NEGATIONISM AND THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS
The political context of the frist attempts at
negationism was chiefly the attempt of the independence
movement, led by the Indian National Congress, to eliminate
all factors of disunity between Hindus and Muslims. It was
the time of the Khilafat movement (1919-23), the agitation
of Indian Muslims against the British take-over of the
Islamic sacred places from the deceased Ottoman empire.
The khilafatists demanded the restoration of the Ottoman
caliph's authority over the sacred places. Congress saw in
this the occasion to enlist the Muslims in the national
freedom struggle against the same British imperialists.
This was a miscalculation: the khilafat movement
intensified the Islamic sense of communal identity
(therefore the rejection of Indian nationalism), and added
considerably to Muslim separatism and the Pakistan ideology.
But before 1923, when the Turks themselves abolished the
caliphate so that the movement lost its raison d'etre (and
got transmuted into pogroms against the Hindus), there was
great expectation in Congress circles. Therefore, Congress
people were willing to go to any length to iron out the
differences between Hindus and Muslims, including the
invention of centuries of communal amity.
At that time, the Congress leders were not yet actively
involved in the rewriting of history. They were satisfied
to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim
relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur in 1931, a
Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy-
image by changing the contents of the history-books.
The next generation of political leaders, especially the
left-wing that was to gain control of Congress in the
thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess
negationism very explicitly. The radical humanist (i.e.
bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had fulfilled a
historic mission of equality and abolition of
discrimination, and that for this, Islam had been welcomed
into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had
occurred, it was as a matter of justified class struggle by
the progressive forces against the reactionary forces,
meaning the fedual Hindu upper castes.
This is a modern myth springing from an incorrect and
much too grim picture of the caste system, a back-projection
of modern ideas of class struggle, and an uncritical
swallowing of contemporary Islamic apologetics, which has
incorporated some voguish socialist values. There is no
record anywhere of low-caste people welcoming the Muslims
as liberators. Just like in their homeland, the Muslim
generals had nothing but contempt for the common people, and
all the more so because these were idolaters. They made no
distinction between rich Pagans and poor Pagans: in the
Quran, Allah had promised the same fate to all idolaters.
By contrast, there is plenty of testimony that these
common people rose in revolt, not against their high-caste
co-religionists, but against the Muslim rulers. And not
only against heavy new taxes (50% of the land revenue for
Alauddin Khilji, whom the negationists hail as the
precursor of socialism) and land expropriations, but
especially against the rape and abduction of women and
children and the destruction of their idols, acts which
have been recorded with so much glee by the Muslim
chroniclers, without anywhere mentioning a separate
treatment of Hindu rich and Hindu poor, upper-caste Kafir or
low-caste Kafir. Even when some of the high-caste people
started collaborating, the common people gave the invaders
no rest, attacking them from hiding-places in the forests.
The conversion of low-caste people only began when Muslim
rulers were safely in power and in a position to reward and
encourage conversion by means of tax discrimination, legal
discrimination (win the dispute with your neighbour if you
convert), handing out posts to converts, and simple
coercion. Nevertheless, the myth which M.N. Roy spread, has
gained wide currency.
The best-known propounder of negationism was certainly
Jawarharlal Nehru. He was rather illiterate concerning
Indian culture and history, so his admirers may invoke for
him the benefit of doubt. At any rate, his writings contain
some crude cases of glorification of Muslim tyrants and
concealment or denial of their crimes. Witness his assessment
of Mahmud Ghaznavi, who, according to his
chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the temple complex at
Mathura and then immediately proceeded to destroy it. Nehru
writes: "Building interested Mahmud, and he was much
impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi". About this he
wrote: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the
faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has
attained its present condition but at the expense of many
millions of dinars, nor could such another be constructed
under a period of 200 years." And that is all: Nehru
described the destroyer of Mathura as an admirer of Mathura,
apparently without noticing the gory sarcasm in Ghaznavi's
eulogy.
Moreover, Nehru denied that Mahmud had committed his
acts of destruction out of any religious motive: "Mahmud was
not a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, but that was just
by the way. He was in the first place a soldier, and a
brilliant soldier." That Mahmud was definitely a religious
man, and that he had religious motives for his campaigns
against the Hindus, is quite clear from Utbi's contemporary
chronicle. Every night Mahmud copied from the Quran for
the benefit of his soul. He risked his life several times
for the sake of destroying and desecrating temples in which
there was nothing to plunder, just to terrorize and
humiliate the Pagans. In his campaigns, he never neglected
to invoke the appropriate Quran verses. In venerating
Mahmud as a pious hero of Islam, Indian Muslims are quite
faithful to history: unlike Nehru, the ordinary Muslim
refuses to practise negationism.
With Nehru, negationmism became the official line of the
Indian National Congress, and after Independence also of the
Indian state and government.
2.3 THE ALIGARH SCHOOL
A second factor in the genesis of negationism was the
penetration of Western ideas among a part of the Muslim
elite, and especially the (in Europe newly emerged) positive
valuation of tolerance. The Islamic elite was concentrated
around two educational institutes, spearheads of the
traditional and of the (superficially) westernizing trends
among Indian Muslims. One was the theological academy at
Deoband, the other the British-oriented Aligarh Muslim
university.
The Deoband school was (and is) orthodox-Islamic, and
rejected modern values like nationalism and democracy. It
simply observed that India had once been a Dar-ul-Islam
(house of Islam), and that therefore it had to be brought
back under Muslim control. The fact that the majority of the
population consisted of non-Muslims was not important: in the
medieval Muslim empires the Muslims had not been in a
majority either, and moreover, demography and conversion
could yet transform the Muslim minority into a majority.
Among the scions of the Deoband school we find Maulana
Maudoodi, the chief ideologue of modern fundamentalism. He
opposed the Pakistan scheme and demanded the Islamization of
all of British India. After independence, he settled in
Pakistan and agitated for the full Islamization of the
(still too British) polity. Shortly before his death in
1979, his demands were largely met when general Zia launched
his Islamization policy.
Outsiders will be surprised to find that the same school
of which Maudoodi was a faithful spokesman, also brought
forth Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was Congress president
for several terms and who was to become minister of
Education in free India. Understandably but unjustifiably,
Azad has often been described as as moderate and
nationalist Muslim: he rejected the Partition of India and
the foundation of Pakistan, not because he rejected the idea of a
Muslim state, but because he wanted all of India to become a
Muslim state in time.
When in the forties the Partition seemed unavoidable,
Azad patronized proposals to preserve India's unity,
stipulating that half of all members of parliament and of
the government had to be Muslims (then 24% of the
population), with the other half to be divided between
Hindus, Ambedkarites, Christians, and the rest. Short, a
state in which Muslims would rule and non-Muslims would be
second-class citizens electorally and politically. The
Cabinet Mission Plan, proposed by the British as the
ultimate sop for the Muslim League, equally promised an
effective parity between Muslims and non-Muslims at the
Central Government level and a veto right for the Muslim
minority. Without Gandhiji's and other Congress leaders'
knowing, Congress president Azad assured the British
negotiators that he would get the plan accepted by the
Congress. When he was caught in the act of lying to the
Mahatma about the plan and his assurance, he lost some
credit even among the naive Hindus who considered him a
moderate. But he retained his position of trust in
Nehru's cabinet, and continued his work for the ultimate
transformation of India into a Muslim State.
Maulana Azad's pleas for Hindu-Muslim co-operation had
an esoteric meaning, clear enough for Muslims but invisible
for wilfully gullible non-Muslims like his colleagues in the
Congress leadership. Azad declared that Hindu-Muslim co-
operation was in complete conformity with the Prophet's
vision, for "Mohammed had also made a treaty with the Jews of
Madina". He certainly had, but the practical impact of this
treaty was that within a few years, two of the three Jewish
clans in Medina had ben chased away, and the third clan had
been massacred to the last man (the second clan had only been
saved by the intervention of other Medinese leaders, for
Mohammed had wanted to kill them too). Maulana Azad could
mention Mohammed's treaty with the Jews as a model for
Hindu-Muslim co-operation only because he was confident that
few Hindus were aware of the end of the story, and that
better-informed Hindus honoured a kind of taboo on criticism
of Islam and its Prophet.
This parenthesis about Maulana Azad may help clear up
some illusions which Hindus and Westerners fondly entertain
about the possibility of Islamic moderacy. The Deoband
school was as fundamentalist in its Azad face as it was in
its Maudoodi heart, and its spokesmen had no problems with
the horrors of Islamic history, nor did they make attempts
to rewrite it. That Muslims had persecuted and massacred
Hindus, counted as the fulfilment of Allah's salvation plan
to transform the whole world into a Dar-ul-Islam. As
Mohammed Iqbal wrote: "All land belongs to the Muslims,
because it belongs to their God." (Iqbal would, however,
end up in the Aligarh camp, cfr. infra) Maulana Azad shared
this view of history. He condemned Moghul emperor Akbar's
tolerant rule as the near-suicide of Indian Islam, and
praised fanatics like the theologian Ahmad Sirhindi, who
through his opposition to Akbar's tolerance had brought the
Moghul dynasty back on the right track of Hind-persecution.
Unlike the Deoband school, the Aligarh school tried to
reconcile Islam with modern culture. It understood the
principles of democracy and majority rule, and recognized
that a modern democracy would be incompatible with the
transformation of India into an Islamic state as long as
Muslims only formed a minority. The tactical opposition
against the disadvantageous system of democracy was
underpinned ideologically by Mohammed Iqbal, who criticized
it as a system in which heads are counted but not weighed.
But Iqbal understood that democracy was the wave of the near
future, and, together with more modern and sincerely
democracy-minded people in the Muslim intelligentsia, he
faced the logical consequence that the Muslims had to give up
the ambition of gaining control over all of India immediately.
Instead they should create a separate state out of the
Muslim-majority areas of India: Pakistan. The ideal of
Pakistan was launched by Iqbal in 1930, and in 1940 it
became the official political goal of the Muslim League.
Aligarh Muslim University has often been described as the
cradle of Pakistan.
From their better knowledge of and appreciation for
modern culture, the Aligarh thinkers accepted the modern
value of religious tolerance. Not to the extent that they
would be willing to co-exist with the Hindus in a single
post-colonial state, but at least to this extent that they
wanted to do something about the imge of intolerance which
Islam had come to carry. Around 1920 Aligarh historian
Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the
history of the Indian religious conflict. The main points
of his version of history are the following.
Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail
to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some
rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and
Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction
of their women and children, and the destruction of their
places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib,
these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please
their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic
rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which
the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us.
At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this
convenient hypothesis with a single fact.
Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which
Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be
attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors.
Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but
this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at
work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and
therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.
Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial
factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from
the steppes who would need several centuries before getting
civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn
barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.
Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of
minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India.
What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in
public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam
and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smrti)
and Muslim law (shariat), it chose the latter.
Mohammed Habib's excise in history-rewriting cannot
stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can
demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi
(997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of
devastating raids in Sindh, Gujrat and Punjab. This
Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was
not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature
(including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up
in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and
the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a
fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his
anti-Hindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic
stock. His massacres and acts of destruction were merely a
replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in
Sindh in 712-15. He didn't care for material gain: he left
rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same
fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a
Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a
huge ransom: "I prefer to appear on Judgement Day as an
idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller." The one explanation
that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to
his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.
There is no record of his being welcomed by urban
artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social
system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies
how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all
Muslims.
Another ruler, Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1351-88), personally
confirms that the descruction of Pagan temples was done out
of piety, not out of greed: "The Hindus had accepted the
zimmi status and the concomitant jizya tax in exchange for
safety. But now they built idol temples in the city, in
defiance of the Prophet's law which forbids such temples.
Under divine leadership I destroyed these buildings, and
killed the leaders of idolatry, and the common followers
received physical chastisement, until this abomination had
been banned completely." When Firuz heard that a Pagan
festival was going on, he reacted forcefully: "My religious
feelings exhorted me to finish off this scandal, this insult
to Islam. On the day of the festival I went there myself, I
ordered the execution of the leaders and practitioners of
this abomination... I destroyed their idol temples and built
mosques in their places."
The contention that Hindus stored their riches in
temples is completely plucked out of thin air (though some
of the richer temples contained golden statues, which were
temple property): it is one among many ad hoc hypotheses
which make Habib's theory a methodologically indefensible
construction. In fact, Habib is proclaining a grand
conspiracy theory: all the hundreds of Islamic authors who
declared unanimously that what they reported was a war of
Islam against Infidelity, would all have co-ordinated one
single fake scenario to deceive us.
This is not to say that the entire report which the
Muslim chroniclers have left us, should be accepted at face
value. For instance, writers like Ghaznavi's contemporary
Utbi give the impression that the raids on, and ultimate
conquest of Hindustan were a walk-over. Closer study of all
the source material shows that the Muslim armies had a very
tough time in India. From Muslim chronicles one only gets a
faint glimpse of the intensity with which the Hindus kept on
offering resistance, and of the precariousness of the Muslim
grip on Hindistan through the Muslim period. The Muslim
chroniclers have not been caught in the act of lying very
often, but some of them distort the proportions of victory
and defeat a bit. This is quite common among partisan
historians everywhere, and a modern historian knows how to
take such minor distortions into account. The unanimous and
entirely coherent testimony that the wars in Hindustan were
religious wars of Muslims against Kafirs is a different
matter altogether: denying this testimony is not a matter of
small adjustments, but of replacing the well-attested
historical facts with their diametrical opposite.
Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the
undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans
by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however
point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were
merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the
Muslims are guilty, but Islam.
2.4 NEGATIONISM RAMPANT: THE MARXISTS
The Aligarh school has been emulated on a large scale.
Soon its torch was taken over by Marxist historians, who
were building a reputation for unscrupled history-rewriting
in accordance with the party-line.
In this context, one should know that there is a strange
alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim
fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual
muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to
partition India and create an Islamic state. After
independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit
support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the
implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be
adopted as national language, and to force India into the
Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this
collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as
exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri
Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's
rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the
educational and research institutes and policies.
Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the
Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the
Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories.
They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be
reduced to economic and class contradictions. They also
adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always refer to
conscious Hindus as the communal forces or elements
(Marxism dehumanizes people to impersonal pawns, or
forces, in the hands of god History). The Marxist
historians had the field all to themselves, and they set to
work to decommunalize Indian history-writing, i.e. to
erase the importance of Islam as a factor of conflict.
In Communalism and the Writing of indian History, Romila
Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at
Jawaharlal Nehry University (JNU, the Mecca of secularism
and negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of
medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back-
projection of contemporary religious conflict artificially
created for political purposes. In Bipan Chandra's famous
formula, communalism is not a dinosaur, it is a strictly
modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny that before the
modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity
or Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between
Hindus and Muslims, only between rulers or classes who
incidentally also belonged to one religious community or the
other. They point to the conflicts within the communities
and to alliances across community boundaries.
It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with
the Muslim rulers, but that also counted for the British
colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as
foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto
in Warsaw the Nazis employed Jewish guards, in their search
for absconding Jews they employed Jewish informers, and in
their policy of deportation they even sought the co-operation
of the Zionist movement: none of this can disprove Nazi-
Jewish enmity. It is also a fact that the Muslim rulers
sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally
true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who
fought some wars on Indian territory: they were just as much
part of a single colonial movement with a common colonial
ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the
enemies of the indian freedom movement. Even in the history
of the Crusades, that paradigm of religious war, we hear a
lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and
another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization
of the Crusades as a war between Christians and Muslims
(triggered by the destruction of Christian churches by
Muslims).
After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period,
the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this
type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood
non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy
theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims
is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They
carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they
incited the communal separateness. As the example par
excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th -century
8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as
Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a
very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans
with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a
concoction by the British historians: as the title of their
work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers,
most of them Muslims.
Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly
created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of
faith with everyone in India who calls himself a
secularist. It became a central part of the negationist
argument in the debate over the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid
issue. Time and again, the negationist historians (including
Bipan Chandra, K.N. Panikkar, S. Gopal, Romila Thapar,
Harbans Mukhia, Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey,
Sushil Srivastava, Asghar Ali Engineer, as well as the
Islamic politician Syed Shahabuddin) have asserted that the
tradition according to which the Babri mosque forcibly
replaced a Hindu temple, is nothing but a myth purposely
created in the 19th century. To explain the popularity of
the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th
century, most of them say it was a deliberate British
concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule-
policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow
citing, from the copious archives which the British
administration in India has left behind, any kind of
positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let
alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would
base his assertions, especially in such controversial
questions.
They have kept on taking this stand even after five
documents by local Muslims outside the British sphere in the
19th century, two documents by Muslim officials from the
early 18th century, and two documents by European travellers
from the 18th and 17th century, as well as the extant
revenue records, all confirming the temple destruction
scenario, were brought to the public's notice in 1990. In
their pamphlets and books, the negationists simply kept on
ignoring most or all of this evidence, defiantly
disregarding historical fact as well as academic deontology.
Concerning the Ayodhya debate, it is worth recalling
that the negationists have also resorted to another tactic
so familiar to our European negationists, and to all
defenders of untenable positions: personal attacks on their
opponents, in order to pull the public's attention away from
the available evidence. In December 1990, the leading JNU
historians and several allied scholars, followed by the
herd of secularist penpushers in the Indian press, have
tried to raise suspicions against the professinal honesty of
Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P. Gupta, the archaeologists who
have unearthed evidence for the existence of a Hindu temple
at the Babri Masjid site. Rebuttals by these two and a
number of other archaelogists hae received coverage in the
secularist press.
In February 1991, Irfan Habib give his infamous speech
to the Aligarh Muslim University historians, in which he
made personal attacks on the scholars who took part in the
government-sponsored debate on Ayodhya in defence of the
Hindu claim, and on Prof. B.B. Lal. In this case, the
weekly Sunday did publish a lengthy reply by the deputy
superintending archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of
India, A.K. Sinha. The contents of this reply are very
relevant, but it is a bit technical (i.e. not adapted to the
medium of a weekly for the general public) and written in
clumsy English, which gives a poor over-all impression.
Actually, I speculate that the Sunday-editor may well
have selected it for publication precisely because of these
flaws. The practice is well-known in the treatment of
letters to the editor: those defending the wrong
viewpoint only get published if they are somewhat funny or
otherwise harmless. I cannot be sure about this particular
case, but it is a general fact that from their power
positions, the negationists use every means at their
disposal to create a negative image for the Hindu opponents
of Islamic imperialism, including the selective highlighting
of the most clumsy and least convincing formulations of the
Hindu viewpoint.
In his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, the
Islamic apologist Ali Asghar Engineer has also selected a
few incomplete and less convincing statements of the Hindu
position, in order to create a semblance of willingness to
hear the Hindu viewpoint while at the same time denying the
Hindu side any publicity for its strongest arguments. He
has kept the most decisive pieces of evidence entirely out
of the readers' view, but has covered this deliberate
distortion of the picture behind a semblance of even-
handedness. In Anatomy of a Confrontation, the JNU
historians do not even mention the powerful argumentation by
Prof. A.R. Khan, while Prof. Harsh Narain and Mr. A.K.
Chatterjee's presentation authentic testimonies (in Indian
Express, republished by Voice of India in Hindu Temples, What
happened to Them and in History vs. Casuistry) are only
mentioned but not detailed and discussed, let alone refuted;
but clumsy RSS pamphlets and improvised statements by BJP
orators are quoted and analyzed at length.
The concluding paragraph of A.K.Sinha's rebuttal to
Irfan Habib's speech points out the contradiction between
the earlier work of even Marxist historians about ancient
India (in which they treat the epics as sources of history,
not mere fable) and their recent Babri-politicized stand:
"Today, even taking the name of Mahabharata and Ramayana is
considered as anti-national and communal by the communist
leaders, Babri Masjid Action Committee historians and the
pseudo-secularists. What do they propose to do with all
that has been published so far in [this] context by the
Marxists themselves, notably D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma,
Romila Thapar, K.M. Shrimali, D.N. Jha and others? I have
been thinking about the behavious of our Marxist friends and
historians, their unprovoked slander campaign against many
colleagues, hurling abuses and convicting anyone and
everyone even before the charges could be framed and proved.
Their latest target is [so] sobre and highly respected a
person as prof. B.B. Lal, who has all his life (now he is
nearing 70) never involved himself in petty politics or in
the groupism [which is] so favourite a sport among the so-
called Marxist intellectuals of this country. But then
[slander] is a well-practised art among the Marxists."
Another trick which a student of Holocaust negationism
will readily recognize in the pro-Babri campaign of the
Indian negationists, is that truly daring form of
amnipulation: selectively quoting an authority to make him
say the opposite of his own considered opinion. When the
JNU historians started slandering Prof. B.B. Lal as a
turncoat hired by the VHP, this was a panic reaction after
their earlier tactic had been exposed (though only in Indian
Express, but the negationist front will not tolerate even
one hole in the cordon of information control). Until then,
they had been using B.B. Lal's fame to suport their own
position that the Babri Masjid had not replaced a temple.
In their pamphlet The Political Abuse of History, the
JNU historians had quoted from a brief summary, published by
the Archaeological Survey of India in 1980, of Prof. B.B.
Lal's report on his excavations in Ayodhya and other
Ramayana sites. They knew this report perfectly well, for
they had gleefully quoted its finding that the excavations
just near the Babri Masjid had not yielded any remains pre-
dating the 9th century BC. But then they had gone on to
state that there was no archeological indication for a pre-
Masjid temple on that controversial site at all, even when
the same report had cursorily mentioned the remains of a
building dated to the 11th century AD. Later on, they have
quoted the same summary as saying that the later period was
devoid of any interest, suggesting that nothing of any
importance dating from the medieval period had been found.
In fact, this remark only proves that the ASI summarizer
saw no reason to give (or saw reasons not to give) details
about the uninteresting but nonetheless existing medieval
findings. But in autumn 1990, some of these details have
been made public and they turned out to be of decisive
importance in the Ram Janmabhoomi debate. Prof.K.N.
Panikkar (in Anatomy of a Confrontation) suggests that, if
these relevant details were not recently thought up to suit
the theories of the RSS, they must have been deliberately
concealed at that time (late seventies) by the ASI
summarizer. The latter possibility means that negationists
are active in the ASI publishing section, editing
archaeological reports to suit the negationist campaign.
The implied allegation is so serious that K.N. Panikkar
expects the reader to assume the other alternative, viz. an
RSS concoction. But he may well have hit the nail on its
head with his suggestion that negationists in the ASI are
doing exactly the same thing that they are doing in all
Indian institutions and media: misusing their positions to
distort information.
At any rate, the details of the full report were given
in articles by Dr. S.P. Gupta and by Prof. B.B. Lal himself
(and independently by other archaeologists in talks and
letters to Indian Express) in late 1990. The pillar-bases
of an 11th century building, aligned to the Babri Masjid
walls, were presented by Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P.Gupta in
separate filmed interviews with the BBC. There could be no
doubt about it anymore: Prof. B.B. Lal had arrived at a
conclusion opposite to the one ascribed to him by a number
of Marxist historians (not only from JNU).
That is why is early December 1990 several of the most
vocal Marxist historians suddenly took to slander and
accused Prof. B.B. Lal of having changed his opinion in
order to suit the VHP's political needs. Now that they
could no longer use Prof. Lal's reputation for their own
ends, they decided to try and destroy it. In the case of
Dr. S.P. Gupta, they have not taken back their ridiculous
allegation that he had falsely claimed participation in the
Ramayana sites excavations. But with a big name like B.B.
Lal, an impeccable academic of world fame, they had to be
careful, because slander against him might somehow backfire.
That is why they have nor pressed the point, and why a
number of Marxist historians and other participants in the
Ayodhya debate have quitely reverted to the earlier tactic
of selectively quoting from the ASI summary of Prof. B.B.
Lal's report, and acting as if the great archaeologist has
supported and even proven their own position. As the press
had given minimum coverage to B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta's
revelations, many people would not suspect the truth.
Another trick from the negationists' book that has been
very much in evidence during the Ayodhya debate, consists in
focusing all attention on the pieces of evidence given by
those who upheld the historical truth,, and trying to find
fault with them as valid evidence. Thus, at the press
conference (19 Dec. 1992) where Dr. S.P. Gupta and other
historians presented photographs of an inscription found
during the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which proved once
more that a temple had stood on the site, and that it was
specifically a birthplace temple for "Vishnu Hari who
defeated Bali and the ten-headed king [Ravana]", some
journalists heckled the speakers with remarks that "because
of the demolition, the inscription was not in situ and
therefore not valid as evidence", and similar feats of petty
fault-finding.
A few days later, a group of 70 archaeologists and
historians, mostly names who had not taken a prominent role
in this debate so far, brought shame on themselves by
pronouncing judgement on this piece of evidence without even
seeing, let alone studying it. They demanded not that the
government look into this new evidence, as would be proper
for representatives of the scientific spirit, but that it
trace down from which museum the planted evidence had been
stolen and brought to Ayodhya. In doing history
falsification, it is best to remain on the attack, and to
put the bonafide historians on the defensive by accusing
them first.
After dozens of pieces of evidence for the forcible
replacement of temple with mosque scenario had been given,
the Babri negationists had never come up with a single piece
of counter- evidence (i.e. positive evidence for an
alternative scenario); they could not do better than keep
silent over the most striking evidence, and otherwise scream
at the top of their voice that evidence A did not count,
evidence B was not valid, evidence C was flawed, evidence D
was fabricated. In 1992 alone, in the clearing operations
near the Janmabhoomi site in June, during several visits of
experts, and during the demolition on 6 December, more than
200 pieces of archaeological evidence for the pre-existent
Vaishnava temple had been found, but these 70 scholars
preferred to disregard all them. This time, the suggestion
was that in the middle of the kar seva, the inscription had
been planted there. You could just as well join the
Holocaust negationists and say that the gas chambers found
in 1945 had been a Hollywood mise-en-scene. Picking at a single
testimony as if the whole case depends on it has been a
favourite technique of the negationists to distract
attention from the larger picture, to make people forget
that even if this one piece of evidence were flawed, this
would not invalidate the general conclusions built on a
whole corpus of evidence.
A final point of similarity between the Marxist
involvement in the Babri Masjid case and the techniques of
Holocaust negationism is the fact that there was a Babri
Masjid debate in the first place. Indeed, postulating doubt
and the need for a debate is the first step of denial. The
tradition that the Babri Masjid had forcibly replaced a
temple was firmly established ad supported by sources
otherwise accepted as authoritative; when it was challenged,
this was not on the basis of newfound material which
justified a re-examination of the historical position. The
correct procedure would have been that the deniers of the
established view come up with some positive evidence for
their innovative position: until then, there was simply no
reason for a debate. Instead, they started demanding that
the other side give proof of what had been known all along,
and forced a debate on something that was really a matter of
consensus. Subsequently, instead of entering the ring,
attacking or countering their opponents' case with positive
evidence of their own, the challengers set themselves up as
judges of the other side's argumentation. This is indeed
reminiscent of the negationist Institute for Historical
Review announcing a prize for whomever could prove that the
Holocaust had taken place.
There is yet another trick from the negationist arsenal
which has been tried in India: find a witness from the
victims' camp to testify to the aggressor's innocence. Of
course there are not witnesses around who lived through
Aurangzeb's terror, but there are many who lived through the
horrors of Partition. It is nobody's case that the killings
wich Jinnah considered a fair price for his Muslim state,
never took place. But the negationists have spent a lot of
effort on proving the next best thing: that the guilt was
spread evently among Hindus and Muslims.
The Communist novelist Bhishma Sahni has used the novel
Tamas to point the Hindus as the villains in the Partition
violence. The interesting thing is that Bhishma Sahni's own
family was among the Hindu refugees hounded out or Pakistan.
His anti-Hindu bias, coming from a man who would have more
reason for an anti-Muslim animus, is a gift from heaven for
the Hindu-baiters. Marxist Professor Bipan Chandra parades
a similar character in his paper: Communalism - the Way Out
(published together with two lectures by KJhushwant Singh
as: Many Faces of Communalism). One of his students had
survived the terror of Partition in Rawalpindi, losing 7
family members. Bud he did not have any animus against the
Muslims, for he said: "Very early I realized that my parents
had not been killed by the Muslims, they had been kiled by
communalism." Coming from a victim of Muslim violence, this
is excellent material for those who want to apportion equal
blame to Hindus nd Muslims.
Of course, Bipan Chandra's student was right. The cause
of Partition and of its accompanying violence was not the
Muslims, but communalism, i.e. the belief that people
with a common religion form a separate social and political
entity. This belief is not fostered by Hinduism, but it is
central to Islam ever since Mohammed founded his first
Islamic state in Medina. It is true that some Hindu groups
(most conspicuously the Sikhs) have recently adopted some
Islamic elements, including the communalist belief that a
religious group forms a separate nation entitled to a
separate state. But the source of this communalist poison
in India is and remains Islam. Therefore, Bipan Chandra's
student has in fact said: "My family was not killed by the
Muslims, but by Islam."
It is a different matter that Muslims are the most
likely carriers of the Islamic disease called communalism,
and that they had massively voted for the commnalist project
of creating a separate Muslim state. The culprit was Islam,
and concerning the positions of the Muslims in the light of
the fanatical nature of Islam, I
would quote Bipan Chandra's own simile for understanding the
difference between communalism and its adherents: when a
patient suffers from a terrible disease, you don't kill him,
but cure him. The victims of Islamic indoctrination should
not be the target of Hindu revenge, as they were in large
numbers in 1947. Don't kill the patient, kill the disease.
Remove Islam from the Muslims' minds through education and
India's communal problem will be as good as solved.
At this point we may take a second look at the Marxist
position, mentioned above, that the Hindu community is a
recent invention. The observations which I just made
concerning the Islamic provenance of communalism might
seem to confirm that there was no Hindu communal identity.
However, the authentic sources from the medieval period are
unanimous about the sharp realization of a separate communal
identity as Muslims and as Hindus, overwhelmingly on the
Muslim side, but also on the Hindu side. We know for
instance that Shivaji, who turned the tide of the Muslim
offensive in the late 17th centure, was a conscious partisan
of an all-Hindu liberation war against Muslim rule (Hindu
Pad Padashahi). The same counts for Rana Pratap and many
other Hindu leaders, and there cannot be any doubt that the
Vijayanagar empire was conscious of its role as the last
fortress of Hindu civilization.
It is true that some Hindu kings attacked neighbouring
Hindu states in the back when these were attacked by the
Muslim invaders. They were at first not aware that these
Islamic newcomers were a common enemy, motivated by hatred
against all non-Muslims; but their lack of insight into the
character of Islam in no way disproves their awareness of a
common Hindu identity. The fact that they were acutely
aware of their internal political rivalries, does not
exclude that they were aware of a more fundamental common
identity, which was not at stake in these internecine feuds,
but which they defended together once they realized that it
was the target of this new kind of ideologically motivated
aggressor, Islam. Brothers are aware that they have a lot
in common, and this is not disproven by the fact that, when
left to themselves, they also quarrel with each other.
If at all some Hindus had at first only been conscious
of their own caste or sect rather than of the Hindu
commonwealth, the Muslim persecutions of all Hindus without
distinction certainly made them aware of their common
identity and interest. So, if the Marxists perforce want to
deny the common culture and value system underlying the
diversity of the Hindu commonwealth, then let them apply
some of their own dialectics instead. "It is in their
common struggle aginst the Islamic aggressors, that the
disparate sections of the native Indian society have forged
their common identity as Hindus": I do not agree with this
statement which posits a negative and reactive basis for a
common Hindu identity, but it must be accepted if one
labours under the assumption that there never had been a
positive common identity before. It is unreasonable to
expect the Indian Pagans to be lumped together as Hindus
for centuries on end, to be uniformly made the target of one
neverending aggression by Islam, to be subjected to the same
humiliations and the same jizya tax, and yet not become
conscious of a common interest. This common interest would
then give rise to unifying cultural superstructure. That is
how the sustained and uniform Islamic attack on all India
Pagans would inevitably have given rise to at least a
measure of common Hindu identity if this had not previously
existed.
In his Communal History and Rama's Ayodhya (1990), the
Marxist Professor R.S. Sharma argues that the medieval
Hindus did not see the Muslims as a distinct religious
entity, but as an ethnic group, the Turks. His proof: the
Gahadvala dynasty levied a tax called Turushkadanda, tax
financing the war effort against the Turks. But this does
not prove what Sharma thinks it proves.
The Muslims called the Pagans of India sometimes
Kafirs, unbelievers, i.e. a religious designation; but
often they called them Hindus inhabitants of Hindustan,
i.e. an ethnic-geographical designation (from Hind, the
Persian equivalent of Sindh). And they gave religious
contents to this geographical term, which it has kept till
today: so it is correct that the Hindus never defined
themselves as Hindus, as this was the Persian and later
the Muslim term for the Indian Pagans adhering to Sanatana
Dharma. But that was only a terminological matter, the
fundamental religious unity of the Sanatana Dharmis was just
as much a fact. Similarly, the Hindus called these
newcomers Turks, but this does not exclude recognition of
their religious specificity. On the contrary, even Teimur
the Terrible, who made it absolutely clear in his memoirs
that he came to India to wage a religious war against the
Pagans, and who freed the Muslim captives from a conquered
city before putting the Hindu remainder to the sword,
referred to his own forces as the Turks. Conversely, the
Hindus describe as the typical Turkish behavious pattern
that which is enjoined by Islam.
While it is true that the Hindus have been much too slow
(till today) in studying the religious foundation of the
barbaric behavious which they experienced at the hands of
the Turushkas, at least they soon found out that for these
invaders religion was the professed motive of their inhuman
behavious. Prof. Sharma's piece of evidence, the
institution of a Turushkandana, does however prove very
clearly that the Islamic threat was extraordinary: the
normal armed forces and war credits were not sufficient to
deal with this threat which was in a class by itself.
The original source material leaves us in no doubt that
conflicts often erupted on purely religious grounds, even
against the political and economical interests of the
contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore
consists in keeping this original testimony out of view. A
good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's recent book, The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. As the
title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (the
Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed by the British
for colonial purposes anmd out of colonial prejuidices, was
later interiorized by Indians looking for new, politically
profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society.
This is like saying that anti-Judaism is a construction of
modern capitalists to divide the working class (the standard
Marxist explanation for all kinds of racism), while
concealing the copious medieval testimony of anti-Judaism
on undeniably non-capitalist grounds. Prof. Pandey
effectively denies a millenniumful of testimonies to Islamic
persecution of the Indian (Hindu) Kafirs.
Another example is prof. K.N. Panikkar's work on the
Moplah rebellion,,, a pofgrom against the Hindus by the
Malabar (Kerala) Muslims in the margin of the khilafat
movement in 1921 (official death toll 2,339). Panikkar
takes the orthodox Marxist position that this was not a
communal but a class conflict, not between Hindus and
Muslims but between workers who happened to be Muslims and
landlords who happened to be Hindus. In reality the
communal character of the massacre was so evident that even
Mahatma Gandhi recognized it as terrible blow for his ideal
of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is quite possible that the
occasion was used to settle scores with landlords and money-
lenders (that stereotype of anti-Hindu as well as of anti-
Jewish sloganeering), but the mullahs exhorted their flock
to attack all Hindus, and added in so many words that not
only the landlords but all the Hindus were their enemies.
The poison of Islamic fanaticism is such that it turns any
kind of conflict into an attack on the non-Muslims.
More Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar's
theory (in her contribution to S. Gopal's book on the
Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the current
Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, not because the
Hindus feel besieged by hostile forces, not because they
have a memory of centuries of jihad, but because "a
monolithic religion is more compatible with capitalism" (to
borrow the formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the
political Hindu movement is merely a concoction by Hindu
capitalists, or in her own words "part of the attempt to
redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the
middle class", in which "modernization is seen as linked to
the growth of capitalism". She reads the mind behind the
capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: "Capitalism
is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as
Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if
capitalism is to succeed in India, then Hinduism would also
have to be moulded in a Semitic form".
It is always interesting to see how Communists
presuppose the superiority of Hinduism by denouncing Hindu
militancy as the semiticization or islamization of
Hinduism. But the point is that the political mobilization
of Hindu society under the increasing pressure of hostile
forces is explained away as merely a camouflage of economic
forces. One smiles about such simplistic subjection of
unwilling facts of Marxist dogma. Especially because such
analyses were still being made in 1991, and are still
being made today: in India it has not yet dawned on the
dominant intelligentsia that Marxism has failed not only as
a political and economical system, but also as a
socialogical model of explanation. On the contrary, Indian
Marxists even manage to make foreign correspondents for non-
Marxist media swallow their analysis, e.g. after the Babri
Masjid demolition, even the conservative Frankfurter
Allgemeine Seitung explained Hindu fundamentalism in the
same socio-economical terms, complete with urban traders
who are looking for an identity etc.
Incidentally, Romila Thapar is right in observing that
certain Hindu revivalists ae trying to "find parallels with
the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary
for the future of Hinduism" (though her attempt to force the
Ram Janmabhoomi movement into this mould, with Rama being
turned into a prophet and the Ramayana into the sole
revealed Scripture etc., is completely unfounded and another
pathetic case of trying to force unwilling facts into a pre-
conceived scheme). She sounds like favouring a renewed
emphasis on "the fact that the religious experience of
Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched
together under the label of Hindu are distinctively
different from that of the Semitic".
It is true that some Hindu revivalist movements have
tried to redefine Hinduism in terms borrowed from
monotheism, with rudiments of notions like an infallible
Scripture (back to the Vedas: the Arya Samaj),
iconoclastic monotheism (Arya Samaj, Akali neo-Sikhs), or a
monolithic hierarchic organization (the RSS). But the
reason for this development cannot with any stretch of the
imagination be deduced from the exigencies of capitalism.
An honest analysis of this tendency in Hinduism to imitate
the Christian-Islamic model will demonstrate that a psychology
of tactical imitation as a way of self-defence
against these aggressive Semitic religions was at work.
The tendency cannot possibly be reduced to the socio-
economical categories dear to Marxism, but springs from the
terror which Islam (not fedualism or capitalism, but Islam)
had struck in the Hindu mind, and which was subsequently
fortified with an intellectual dimension by the Christian
missionary propaganda against primitive polytheism. Those
Hindus who were waging the struggle for survival against the
Islamic and Christian onslaught have come to resemble their
enemies a bit, and have interiorized a lot of the
aggressors' contempt for typical Hindu things, such as idol-
worship, doctrinal pluralism, social decentralization. It
is for Hindu society to reflect on whether this imitation
was the right course, and whether it has not been self-
defeating in some respects.
At any rate, the very existence of this psychological
need among some militant Hindus to imitate the prophetic-
monotheistic religions is a symptom of an already old
polarization between Hinduism and aggressive monotheism,
especially Islam. Bipan Chandra's chronology of
communalism as a 20th century phenomenon cannot explain
the communal polarization of which Sikhism and the Arya
Samaj were manifestations. These can only be understood
from the centuries oif active hostility between Islam and
Hinduism. Shivaji was not a herald of capitalism, nor a
product of British divide and rule policy, but a
participant in an ongoing war between Hindu civilization and
Islamic aggression.
Since the 1950s the history market is being flooded with
publications conveying the negationist version to a greater
or lesser extent. The public is fed negationist TV serials
like The Sword of Tipu Sultan, an exercise in whitewashing
the arch-fanatic last Muslim ruler. Most general readers
and many serious students only get to know about Indian
history through negationist glasses. In India, the
negationists have managed what European negationists can
only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and
marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting
history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the
political abuse of history. By contrast, geunine
historians who have refused to tamper with the record of
Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, K.S. Lal) are
held us as examples of communalist historywriting in
textbooks which are required reading in all history
departments in India.
But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their
own version of the facts being repeated in more and more
books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions
from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National
Council of Educational Research and Training issued a
directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other
things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the
medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and
Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism
has become India's official policy.
Now that Marxism is no longer the fashion of the day, it
is very easy to expose the shameless dishonesty of many
vocal Marxist intellectuals. It is time to go through the
record and see what they have said about the "economic
successes" of the Soviet Union, the enthusiasm of the
Chinese people for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution, about the Communist involvement in crimes like
Katyn, and about the lies put out by the CIA-sponsored
dissidents and camp survivors. Their Islam negationism is
by far not their first systematic falsification of a chapter
of history.
When the Marxists start lecturing Hindus about tolerance
and the respect for Barbar's mosque, it is easy to put them
on the defensive by asking what happened to churches,
mosques and temples when Mao took over. Communist regimes'
treatment of religion has been similar to Islam's treatment
of infidelity. Either religious people had the zimmi
status, i.e. they were suffered to exist but at the cost of
career prospects, benefit of social or material benefits,
always under the watchful eye of police informers, and of
course without the right to convert or to object to state
atheism's conversion efforts (according to the chinese
Constitution, there is a right to practise religion and a
right to practise and propagete atheism); or they were
simply persecuted, their religious education forbidden (in
the Soviet Union, many people have spent years in jail for
transporting Bibles or teaching Hebrew), their places of
worship demolished or expropriated for secular use.
Communism and Islam are truly comrades in intolerance.
Certainly some statements can be dug up of Indian
Communists defending the Cultural Revolution in which so
many thousands of places of worship were destroyed and their
personnel brutalized or killed. When the Khumar Rouge were
in power, less that 1,000 of the 65,000 Buddhist monks
managed to survive : what did the Indian Marxists (card-
carrying and other) say then? The bigger part of the
Marxists' success was in their aggressiveness: as long as
they remained on the offensive, everyone tried to live up to
the norms they prescribed. Now it is time to put them to
scrutiny.
2.5 FOREIGN SUPPORT FOR INDIAN NEGATIONISM
Some foreign authors, influenced by Indian colleagues,
have also added a big dose of negationism to their work on
Indian history. For instance, Percival Spear, co-author
(with Romila Thapar) of the Penguin History of India,
writes: "Aurangzeb's supposed intolerance is little more
than a hostile legend based on isolated acts such as the
erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares."
This is a repetition of the thesis defended by
Zahiruddin Faruki in his "Aurangzeb and his times" (1935),
recently taken up again by S.N.M. Abdi in Illustrated Weekly
of India (5/12/1992), who claims that Aurangzeb was not
anti-Hindu, and that the Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri (made available
to the public by the Royal Society of Bengal and translated
by Jadunath Sarkar), which lists Aurangzeb's temple-
destroying activities from day to day, is a forgery. Faruki
and Abdi count on the public's limited zeal for checking the
sources, when they falsely claim that "apart from the
Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri, there is no other reference to the order
for the destruction of temples", and that we do not hear of
any protest which large-scale temple destruction would have
caused.
Abdi thinks he can get away with claiming as evidence a
stone slab allegedly seen by Faruki in the Gyanvapi mosque
in Benares, mentioning a date (1659) that does not tally
with the traditional date (1669) of the forcible replacement
of the Kashi Vishvanath temple with this mosque; even while
admitting that "the slab seen by Faruki has disappeared
mysteriously, along with another significant piece of
evidence". Without blinking, he then cites a theory that
the Gyanvapi mosque already existed under Akbar, i.e. a
century before either of the two dates. Further, he quotes
as authority a local agitator who claims: "My research
reveals that a Buddhist vihara was demolished to make way
for a temple, which was subsequently pulled down and the
Gyanvapi mosque constructed on its site." The first claim,
in spite of flaunting the pretentious term research, in a
plain lie; the second is of course true but contradicts the
case which Mr. Abdi is building up. Such is the quality of
the argument for Aurangzeb's tolerance and Hindu-
friendliness.
What are the facts? In Beneras (Varanasi), Aurangzeb
(1658-1707) did not just build an isolated mosque on a
destroyed temple. He ordered all temples destroyed, among
them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of
Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared
temple sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his
reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on
them; among them, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the
rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujrat, the Vishnu
temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking
Benares, the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number
of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not in
5 figures. According to the official court chronicle,
Aurangzeb "ordered all provincial governors to destroy all
schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end
to all Pagan teachings and practices". The chronicle sums
up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said
that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed... His
majesty went to Chittor, and 63 temples were destroyed... Abu
Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of Amber,
reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground".
In quite a number of cases, inscriptions on mosques and
local tradition do confirm that Aurangzeb built them in
forcible replacement of temples (some of these inscriptions
have been quoted in Sitaram Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2,
along with a number of independent written accounts).
Aurangzeb's reign ws marked by never-ending unrest and
rebellions, caused by his anti-Hindu policies, which
included the reimposition of the jizya and other zimma
rules, and indeed the demolition of temples.
Aurangzeb did not stop at razing temples: their users
too were levelled. There were not just the classical
massacres of thousands of resisters, Brahmins, Sikhs. What
gives a more pointed proof of Aurangzeb's fanaticism, is the
execution of specific individuals for specific reason of
intolerance. To name the best-known ones: Aurangzeb's
brother Dara Shikoh was executed because of apostasy (i.e.
taking an interest in Hindu philosophy), and the Sikh guru
Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because of his objecting to
Aurangzeb's policy of forcible conversions in general, and
in particular for refusing to become a Muslim himself.
Short, Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's
fanaticism is but a hostile legend, is a most serious case
of negationism.
An example of a less blatant (i.e. more subtle) form of
negationism in Western histories of India, is the India
entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. Its chapter on the
Sultanate period (which was much more bloody than even the
Moghul period) does not mention any persecutions and
massacres of Hindus by Muslims, except that Firuz Shah
Tughlaq "made largely unsuccessful attempts to convert his
Hindu subjects and sometimes persecuted them". The article
effectively obeys the negationist directive that
"characterization of the medieval period as a time of Hindu-
Muslim conflict is forbidden".
It also contains blissful nonsense about communal amity
in places where the original sources only mention enmity.
Thus, it says that Bahmani sultan Tajuddin Firuz extracted
tribute payments and the hand of the king's daughter from
the Hindu bastion Vijayanagar after two military campaigns,
and that this resulted in "the establishment of an
apparently amicable relationship between the two rulers".
Jawaharlal Nehru considered the induction of Hindu women in
Muslim harems as the cradle of composite culture (his
euphemism for Hindu humiliation), but it is worse if even
the venerable Encyclopedia considers the terms of debate as
a sign of friendship. At any rate, the article goes on to
observe naively that peace lasted only for ten years,
when Vijaynagar forces inflicted a crushing defeat on Firuz.
In this case, the more circumspect form of negationism is at
work: keeping the inconvenient facts out of the readers'
view, and manipulating the terminology.
An American historian's book is introduced thus: "In
this book [Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in
North India], Sandra Freitag examines one of the central
problems of modern Indian history, the Hindu-Muslim
conflict, with new and provocative insight. She challenges
long-standing interpretations by defining this conflict as a
developing social process groups, not simply Hindu or
Muslim, in highly specific local contexts bound together
in a changing institutional order."
This sophisticated verbiage cannot conceal that the
book's approach is merely the standard secularist version
propagated by Indian establishment historians since decades.
There is nothing new and provocative about a book that
claims to explain communalism without touching on its single
most important determinant, viz. the doctrine laid down in
Islamic scripture, and that blurs the clear-cut process of
India's communalization by Islam with the help of scapegoats
like colonialism.
It is not entirely clear to what extent such Western
authors are conscious accomplices in the intellectual crime
of negationism, and to what extent they are just gullible
copiers of the version given to them by English-speaking
Indians. In the case of a historian invited by Penguin to
write a History of India, it is hard to believe that he
didn't know better.
Another case of malafide reporting is former Time
correspondent Edward Desmond's lengthy review of JNU
Professof S. Gopal's Anatomy of a Confrontation in the New
York Review of Books. I know that Mr. Desmond had gone
through the books stating the Hindu case on Ayodhya; he had
talked to both Mr. Sitaram Goel and myself (by telephone);
he knew about hard evidence for the temple that was forcibly
replaced by the Babri Masjid, including Prof. B.B. Lal's
filmed presentation of the archarological evidence. And
yet, like Prof. Gopal, he strictly keeps the lid on the
Hindu case, does not mention the extensive documentary
evidence, and curtly dismisses the archaeological evidence
as bogus. Here, the psychology at work is apparently that
of status-consciousness: you wouldn't expect a senior
correspondent of a big American magazine to prefer the
company of marginal pro-Hindu writers to that of prestigious
Stalinist professors of India's Harvard, would you?
On the other hand, in the day-to-day reporting on the
communal situation in India, there is a lot of bonafide
copying of the anti-Hindu views dominant in the Indian
English-language press. A typical mixed case of some
complicity and some gullibility was the TV documentary about
Hindu fundamentalism made by BBC correspondent Brian
Barron, and boradcase in the week of the first round of the
Lok Sabha elections in May 1991. Brian Barron is an
otherwise meritorious journalist, witness his revelations in
October 1991 about the massacre of thousands of Buddhist
monks in the early years of communist rule in Mongolia. But
his programme about the Hindu movement was second-rate and
biased. For a start, it contained some factual mistakes
(like a map meant to show the trail of Hindu leader L.K.
Advani's procession in support of the Ram Janmabhoomi cause,
which drew a line unrelated to the actual trail, apart from
placing Delhi on the Ganga river), exemplifying the
carelessness which Western correspondents can afford when it
comes to India reporting.
Barron said that India had already been partitioned
because of religion. In fact, India has been partitioned
because of Islam, against the will of other religions, and
this seemingly small inaccuracy is an old trick to
distribute the guilt of Islam in partitioning India over all
religions equally. Barron made no attempt to seem
impartial, and introduced BJP leader L.K. Advani as a
demagogue. He asked Advani's declared enemy V.P. Singh
whether Advani was not merely putting a humane mask on
fanaticism. Easy, that way V.P. Singh only had to say
yes. He failed to take the opportunity to question V.P.
Singh about his political marriage with the Muslim
fundamentalist leader Imam Bukhari, while that was a case of
a Hindu promoting fundamentalism as well. He let Swami
Agnivesh, a Marxist in ochre robe, accuse the BJP of mixing
religion and politics, but neglected to inform the viewers
that Swami Agnivesh has himself combining monkhood with
being a Janata Dal candidate in the Lok Sabha elections.
When Barron asked Advani why he had allowed so much
bloodshed on his procession (the rathyatra of October 1990),
whereas in fact there had been no riots all along the path
of his month-long journey, Advani correctly said: "You are
taken in by a disinformation campaign." A serious
journalist would have inquired deeper when his sources, with
which the quality of his work stands or falls, are
questioned so pointedly. When a sadhu said that Muslims
refuse to respect Hindus and that Hindus are legally
discriminated against, Barron did not inquire what these
discriminations were. Like all western reporters, he has
reported on Hindu fundamentalism without asking even once
why this movement has emerged, instead relaying the Marxist
line that it is all a camouflage for class (c.q. caste)
interests, an artificial creation for petty political gain.
Barron interviewed prof. Romila Thapar, who accused the
Hindu movement of aiming at a system in which some
communities would be second-class citizens living in
constant fear for their lives. From a spokeswoman of
Marxism, which has held entire populations in constant fear
and oppression, and which has killed numerous millions of
"contrarevolutionary elements" (to use the criminalizing,
dehumanizing Marxist term), the allegation sounds rather
shameless. But the viewers were not told where Romila
Thapar stands, they were led to believe that this was a
neutral observer who had been asked for an objective
explanation. The
same thing has happened a number of times in both Time
Magazine and Newsweek: Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and
their comrades get quoted as if they are non-partisan
authorities. Though anti-Communist in their general
reporting, when it comes to India, these papers
(unknowingly?) present the Marxists' viewpoint as objective
in-depth background information.
Only ten years ago, the Left-oriented media in many
Western countries freely attacked the really existing
capitalism and also conjured up all kinds of fantastic CIA
and neo-fascist conspiracies, but scrupulously shielded the
really existing socialism from criticism. Similarly,
Brian Barron gave Prof. Thapar the chance to say her thing
about unproven sinister plans imputed to the Hindu movement,
but scrupulously refrained from pointing out that Miss
Thapar's picture of a theocratic society in which minorities
are second-class citizens living in mortal fear, is already
reallly existing in the neighbouring Islamic republic of
Pakistan and in many Muslim states (and, mutatis mutandis in
Communist countries).
These days, reporting on the communal in situation in
India consists in highlighting the splinter in the Hindu eye
and concealing the beam in the Muslim eye. At the time of
the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, the German left-leaning weekly
Der Spiegel summarized the communal riots in independent
India as follows: "Since 1947, Indian statisticians have
counted 11,000 riots with 12,000 Muslim victims." Hindu
victims are not even mentioned, as if you were reading a
fundamentalist paper like Muslim India or Radiance.
The Ayodhya conflict offers a good examples of the
absurd standards applied by reporters. A Hindu sacred
site, back in use as a Hindu temple (since 1949 with, since
1986 without restrictions) after centuries of Muslim
occupation, is claimed by Muslim leaders, who also insist on
continuing the occupation of two other sacred sites in
Mathura and Kashi (and numerous other sites which the Hindu
leaders are not even claiming back). Claiming the right to
occupy other communities' sacred sites: if this is not
fanatical, I don't know what is. Yet, the whole world press
is one the side of the Muslims, and decries a Hindu plan to
build proper temple architecture on the Ram Janmabhoomi site
in Ayodhya as fanatical. These are not just double
standards, but inverted standards.
The very fact that Muslims in India loudly complain
about their situation (e.g. about their low educational
level, which is 100% the fault of their own mullahs), proves
that they are relatively well-off: as I have had the
occasion to observe, Hindu visitors or refugees from
Pakistan often do not dare to speak of the horrible
conditions in which they are forced to live under Muslim
rule, because they fear for their relatives, and because the
constant terror has conditioned them never to raise any
objections against the Muslim master race. Inside these
Muslim states, the remaining Hindus are even more careful never to
displease the Muslim masters. For unthinking journalists, their
silence is proof that all is well for the minorities in Muslim
states, and so they prefer to listen to the vocal
malcontents who air the Muslim grievances in tolerant
India. Whoever shouts loudest, will get our correspondents'
attention, if only because India reporting is mostly of a
very low professional quality.
An example of the slanted impression which the Nehruvian
establishment creates about Hindu-Muslim relations, concerns
the internationally highlighted martyrdom of the Flemish
Jesuit Father Rasschaert, near Ranchi in 1964. Father
Rasschaert's sister was a friend of my mother's, so as a
child I have often heard the details of the story. The part
which everybody knows, is that Muslims had fled into a
mosque, where Hindus wanted to pursue them, when Father
Rasschaert intervened to pacify the crowd, but was killed by
the Hindus who subsequently massacred the Muslims.
But the start of the story, never highlighted and
sometimes not even mentioned in the contemporary newspaper
reports (much less in later references), was that the Hindus
in the area had been angered by the sight of mutilated
Hindus who had been brought by train from East Pakistan,
where they had at least survived the massacres which many
more had not. As always, Hindu violence was a retaliation
against Muslim violence. No missionary has stepped in to
defend the Hindus of Pakistan, in fact no missionary was
around, as missions have a vey hard time in Pakistan. The
missions in Islamic countries find their converts harassed
and even killed by their own families, their schools and
churches attacked on all kinds of pretexts, their graduates
not given jobs. So, the missionary centres prefer to direct their
energies to more hospitable countries like India. The fact
that a missionary was killed by a Hindu while defending the
Muslims, and not the other way round, proves in the first
place that Catholic priests can function in India, much more
than in Pakistan. A closer scrutiny of this one incidence
of Hindu fanaticism reveals a background of much more
systematic and institutionalized Muslim fanaticism.
There is a third aspect to the story, which is never
mentioned at all. It is that the Hindus in Ranchi were
desperate about their government's unwillingness to defend
the Hindus in Pakistan. One of the chief culprits behind
the massacre was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the patron
of secularism, who used Father Rasschaert's death as yet
another occasion to parade his concern for the minorities in
India, and to put Hindus in the dock. He himself (and the
entire secularist establishment till today) reneged on his
duty to defend the Hindus surviving in the Islamic state
which he had helped to create. By effectively condoning the
persecution of Hindus in Pakistan, he was also responsible
for the retalitory Hindu violence. But the international
press has never thought the matter through, and confined its
reporting on Father Rasschaert's death to condemning the
Hindu fanatics, weeping for the Muslim victims, and praising
Nehru as the voice of sanity amid the religious madness.
The way our journalists are led by the nose towards
reporting Muslim grievances and ignoring grievances of Hindu
minorities (and ridiculing the very real grievances of even
the Hindu majority in India), is reminiscent of the sneaking
bias in all non-rightist media in Western Europe about the
Left-right conflict before the Gorbachov era. They all
complied with Marxist-imposed terminology like dictator
Pinochet but president Ceaucescu, or rightist rebels
but leftist resistance. Criticism of the West was
available in plenty, and given wide coverage, but the muted
populations of the Soviet bloc were not heard, and little
effort was made to go in and hear them. Those who supported
the cause of freedom in the Soviet bloc were riduclued.
Worse, when in 1968 the Russian physicist Sakharov had a
report about massive human rights violations in the USSR
published, leading intellectuals actually denied the
existence of "that so-called Russian physicist invented by
the reactionary forces to slander the glorious achievements
of socialism in the USSR". Yes, so noxious was the
intellectual atmosphere in the heyday of Marxism. In those
days it was "better to be wrong with [communist] Sartre than
to be right with [anti-communist] Aron".
When glasnost made clear just how strong the Soviet bloc
populations' disgust with communalism really was, Western
intellectuals and socialist parties seemed sincerely
surprised. They themselves had so often pleaded that life
in the Soviet system was not really worse than in the "so-
called free" West. The press had never given us an adequate
picture, not by telling outright lies, but by ignoring the
muted voices which the communist dictators wanted us to
ignore. At any rate, if there used to be far more
demonstrations in the streets of the West than in the Soviet
bloc, did it prove that there was less discontent in the
latter? We now know better: there was more protest in the
West than in the Soviet bloc because there was more freedom
and less fear in the West, and in spite of deeper discontent
in the Soviet bloc. There is no excuse for making the same
mistake in our reporting on the situation of the minorities
in India and in Muslim countries.
Without really noticing, the Western press has become
the mouth-piece of the Marxist-Muslim alliance which
dictates political parlance in India. I assume only a few
frontline journalists are conscious participants in the
ongoing disinformation campaign. Brian Barron, for one, has
demonstrated to what extent he has interiorized the anti-
Hindu bias of his Indian spokespersons, with a very little
but truly unpardonable piece of disinformation. Reporting
on the million-strong demonstration for the Ram Janmabhoomi
temple (Delhi, 4 April 1991), he showed a monk carrying a
saffron- coloured flag with a white swstika. And for the
less perceptive viewers, he added in so many words that the
Hindu movement carried the swastika. Of course he knew
these two things: (1) most Western viewers know the swastika
only as the symbol of Nazism; (2) most Indians know the
swastika only as their own age-old symbol of good fortune
(swasti = well-being). He must have known perfectly well
that he was making the Western viewers read a message which
the Hindu demonstrators never sent, viz. that the Hindu
movement links up with Nazism. Regardless of the moral
quality of such distortive reporting, it goes to show to
what extent the negationist faction in the Indian media has
managed to picture the Hindus as the bad guys in the eyes of
the world.
A few more examples of how Western India-watchers
swallow Indian secularist disinformation. The pro-Ram
Janmabhoomi demonstration in Delhi on 4 April 1991 was not
reported in 99% of the Western papers and electronic news
channels. I have inquired among journalists about what they
had received on their telexes concerning the largest-ever
demonstration in the biggest democracy in the world. It
turned out that these had mentioned 3 lakh demonstrators
(when even the government-controlled police had given the
estimate of 8 lakh), and not made the object of the
demonstration clear at all. The Indian sources had
deliberately blurred and minimized the information, so that
the Western media had, in good faith, not deemed it worth
mentioning. If six weeks later Brian Barron reported the
number as more than a million demonstrators, it was not to
correct this earlier lapse, but because of a different
psychology. His aim was not to deny the importance and
magnitude of the Hindu movement which he detests so much,
but on the contrary to make it into a titillatingly gruesome
dinosaur: the TV consumers have heard enough about Muslim
fundamentalism, so if you want to get them interested in a
new brand of fundamentalism, you have to make it extra big
and colourful.
Another example is the news concerning the Indian
attitude to the second Gulf War in early 1991. The Delhi
correspondent for the Flemish radio station BRTN said that
the Indian population was on the side of Saddam, against the
Anglo-American forces (and their Saudi employers). That is
just what the Times of india editorial had said a few days
earlier. In fact, the Indian people was not on Saddam's
side at all. The Hindus had always cheered for Israel in
its wars with the Arabs, and now they were all for the
defeat of this Arab Hitler who had announced he would "burn
half of Israel with chemical weapons". The Muslim
support for Saddam's jihad against the Crusaders was not
exactly massive either. Firstly, millions of Indian Muslims
personally suffered when they or their reltives lost their
jobs in Iraq and Kuwait as a result of Saddam's annexation
of Kuwait. Secondly, most Muslim leaders are financed by
the Arab monarchies (including Kuwait), and they sided with
their paymasters, either openly or by their quiet refusal to
support Saddam. The only ones who supported Saddam were the
hard core of the Nehruvian establishment (who forced the
Chandra Shekhar government to stop allowing American war
planes to land in Bombay), and the communists with their
visceral anti-Americanism. A strike imposed on the
communists with their visceral anti-Americanism. A strike
imposed on the Calcutta dockers by the Communist trade-union
was about the only sign of Indian support for Saddam, but
our correspondent played it up as merely one example of a
nation-wide movement. I hope it was in good faith on his
part, but for the Times of India there cannot be such a
benefit of the doubt.
Foreign correspondents in Delhi should realize that the
Indian media and academia are entirely untrustworthy when it
comes to reporting on the Hindu-Muslim conflict. When you
report the truth about the democratic opposition in China or
Tibet, you don't copy the People's Daily. When you want to
know the truth about the Kurdish freedom struggle, you
don't trust the Iraqi stae radio. So, when you want to
understand the Hindu backlash, you don't believe strictly
partisan sources like the Times of India, or party-line
historians like those from JNU or AMU.
If a Mr. Vijay Singh writes in Le Monde Diplomatique an
article full of secularist invective titled: Hindu
Fundamentalism, a Menace for India, it is simply the
reflection of a vested interest in blackening Hinduism,
though it is sold as an in-depth comment by a first-hand
observer. It so happens that the article is partly an
unacknowledged quotation from the introductory chapter of
the book "Understanding the Muslim Mind" by Rajmohan Gandhi, a
party politician of Iman Bukhari's favourite Janata Dal
(nicknamed Jinnah Dal). If in another issue of the same
prestigious French monthly, Mrs. Francine R. Frankel mouths
all the worn-out secularist slogans against what she calls
the "Violent Offensive of Hindu Extremists", it merely proves
her incapability of reading her Indian sources with the
distance befitting partisan pamphlets. It is quite a shameful
matter that Western media have swallowed and reproduced many
similar motivated distortion.
The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign
press provides the negationists with a strategic cover.
Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western
intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they
keep on believing this even in domains where the West is
completely ignorant and incomponent. So the negationists
feel supported in the back by an outside world which they
can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a
standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the
trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's
political configuration, it would have blown this cover away
by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media,
and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the
Indian establishment.
In Great Britain and the United States, the anti-Hindu
and pro-Muslim bias in India reporting can partly be
explained by the political tilt towards Pakistan (now waning
because of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions). Thus, the
prestigious British weekly The Economist has, in a
predictably negative article about nationalism and
separatism, held up the creation of Pakistan as an
undisputably justified case of separatism (small wonder that
British Muslims are imitating their Indian Muslim
grandfathers and demanding a separate "non-territorial state
of British Muslims", justifiable on exactly the same
grounds). A more universal reason is that they never get to
know the Hindu viewpoint from competent and eloquent
spokesmen: firstly, these have practically no access to the
national English-language press, which Western
correspondents in Delhi faithfully copy because they are too
lazy to seek out news for themselves; secondly, the Hindus
themselves have not yet suifficiently realized the
importance of public relations.
The most important reason is probably the political
atmosphere in Europe which demands that for the sake of
anti-racism and multiculturalism, Islam as the most
conspicuous and assertive guest culture in Europe gets
painted in rosy colours. The result of this imperative not
to expose Muslim fanaticism is that even avowedly Christian
papers in the West keep silent about the ongoing persecution
of Christian papers and other minorities in the Middle East.
Christians cherish the illusion of a dialogue with Islam,
so they will not offend their Muslim partners by raising
incovenient issues like the status of religious minorities
in Muslim countries. Now, if the West does not stand up for
its persecuted Christian brethren, how much less will it be
bothered about the idolatrous Hindus.
And so, Western India-watchers go on licking the boots
of the aggressor, and keep on twisting contemporary news in
the media, and to a lesser extent even historical facts in
academic publications, to the advantage of the Muslim side.
They have not invented the Indian brand of negationism, but
they are amplifying and fortifying it.
2.6 BANNING INCONVENIENT BOOKS
A consequence of the negationist orientation of the
Indian state's religious policy, is the readiness to ban
books critical of Islam at the slightest suggestion by some
mullah or Muslim politician. It is symptomatic that India
was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic
Verses, at the insistence of Syed Shahabuddin, MP (in
exchange, with some other concessions, for his calling off a
march on Ayodhya). Among other banned books, we may
mentioned pamphlet-like but nonetheless truthful books like
Colin Maine's "The Dead hand of Islam" or A. Ghosh's "The Koran
and the Kafir", which list what the Quran has in store for
the unbelievers; but also more prestigious books like R.M.
Eaton's "Sufis of Bijapur", which debunks the myth of the
Sufis as bringers of a tolerant Islam (in fact they were not
only fanatical preachers against idolatry, but also spies
and sometimes mercenaries).
In March 1991, Ram Swarup's book "Understanding Islam
through Hadis" was banned, after the Hindi version had
already been banned in 1990. This happened after two
committees set up by the Delhi administration had screened
the book and found it unobjectionable, and after the judge
had dismissed the plea for prosecution of its publisher,
under the pressure of Muslim demonstrations. This book is a
faithful summary of the Sahih al-Muslim, one of the two most
authoritative Hadis collections (acts of the Prophet).
According to the fundamentalist party Jamaat-i Islami the
book contained "distortion and slander", and as an example
of this slanderous distortion, it mentions this passage:
"Mohammed saw Zaynab in half-naked condition, and he fell in
love with her". With this revelation, the fundamentalists
managed to get some agitation going, and the book was
banned.
The interesting thing is that the quoted passage comes
straight from the original Hadis, and is not a slanderous
distortion at all. The agitation against the book reveals
an important fact about the Muslim community: the ordinary
Muslim does not know the contents of Quran and Hadis, and
projects on Mohammed his own moral ideals, which he largely
shares with his non-Muslim fellow-men. Because of his
attachment to the mental image of a morally perfect
Mohammed, he is shocked when he gets confronted with the
historical Mohammed. Among the many historical acts of
Mohammed is his arranging the hand-over to himself of
Zaynab, the beautiful wife of his sdopted son. The fact
that a revelation from Allah came to legitimize the marriage
between Mohammed and Zaynab (which was a breach of the
tribal incest taboo), became the classic illustration of the
view that the Quran is nothing but the self-interested
product of Mohammed's own mind.
This ignorance about the historical Mohammed, both among
the common Muslims and among the Hindus, is precisely what
the banned book wanted to do something about, in keeping
with the Indian Constitution's injuction to "develop the
scientific temper". But the Nehruvian establishment (which
includes the Congress Party and its Janata Dal offshoot) has
no liking for free research into the contents of Islamic
doctrine and history, and in spite of loud slogans about
secularism, the administration gave in to the Muslim
fanatics. None of the so-called secularist intelectuals has
bothered to protest against this obscurantist act of
censorship.
The official motivation for this banning of meritortious
books is that they have been written with the intention of
insulting a religion or inciting communal conflict (art.
153A amd art. 295A of the Indian Penal Code). Under section
95 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the executive power must
take action against its initial users. For, according to
some, there is a bok which fulfils the description given in
the Penal Code, even to a far greater extent than the
already banned book; but which is recited and invested with
supreme authority in state-subsidized schools and in prayer-
houses in every town and village of india. This
objectionable book is known as the Quran.
In 1984 a citizen of India, H.K. Chakraborty, filed a
petition with the West Bengal state government to ban the
Quran. He added a list of 37 Quran verses which "preach
cruelty, incite violence and disturb public peace" (to use
the terminology of the Penal Code), 17 verses which
"promote, on grounds of religion, feelings of enmity, hatred
and ill-will between different communities in India", and 31
verses which "insult other religions as also the religious
beliefs of other communities". Indeed, even after
subtracting some verses which could be regarded as
legitimate polemics (esp. against the Christian belief in
Incarnation), there are about 60 passages in the Quran that
formulate a doctrine of demonization of non-Muslims, and of
hatred and war against them. If the Indian laws prohibit
communal hate propatganda, Mr. Chakraborty was right in
considering the Quran as an excellent candidate for banning.
But even after reminder-letters, the West Bengal authorities
gave no response.
At this stage, Mr. Chakraborty met Chandmal Chopra, an
adherent of the extremely non-violent Jain sect, who had
taken up the study of the Quran in order to understand the
plight of the Hindus in Bangladesh, who are gradually being
chased from their ancestral homeland by the Muslims. In
1985 Chandmal Chopra filed a petition with the Calcutta high
Court, asking for a ban on the Quran. He added a list with
reprehensible verses from the Quran: 29 passages from the
Quran (1 to 8 verses in length) that incite violence against
unbelievers, 15 which promote enmity, 26 which insult other
religions.
Some typical examples are: "Mohammed in Allah's apostle.
Those who follow him are merciless for the unbelievers but
kind to each other." (Q.48:29) "Make war on them until
idolatry does not exist any longer and Allah's religion
reigns universally." (Q.8:39, also 2:193) "We break with
you; hatred and enmity will reign bnetween us until ye
believe in Allahh alone." (Q. 60.4) "The Jews and
Christians and the Pagans will burn forever in the fire of
hell. They are the vilest of all creatures." (Q.98:51)
There are dozens of Quran verses like this which in their
unanimity cannot be dismissed as "isolated, mistranslated"
little accidents "quoted out of context".
Chandmal Chopra stated in his writ petition: "The cited
passages in the Quran... arouse in Muslims the worst
sectarian passions and religious fanaticism, which has
manifested itself in murders, massacres, plunder, arson,
rape and destruction or desecration of sacred places both in
historical and in the contemporary period, not only in India
but in large parts of the world."
The petition created a lot of furore in Calcutta and
abroad. Muslims created street riots. The government
intervened and put heavy pressure on the judicial process.
The secret service was put to work to find possible
objectionable biographical data of the petitioner. The
court used some dirty tricks to disturb the peritioner's
case, like changing dates and changing the object of a
session to which the petitioner had been summoned, during
the same session itself, with apparent foreknowldege of the
government's counsel.
Both the authorities and the court violated the secular
basis of the Indian Constitution by using as justification
for their policy c.q. judgement a statement of religious
belief. The Marxist West Bengal government stated in its
affidavit: "The Quran contains the words of God Almighty
revealed to His last Prophet Mohammed... As the Holy Quran
is a Divine Book, no earthly power can sit in judgement on
it, and no court of law has jurisdiction to adjudicate it."
The judge dismissed the petition on this ground:
"Banning or forfeiture of the Quran... would amount to
abolition of the Muslim religion itself." Indeed, the very
text which preaches war against the unbelievers is the core
text of Islam, so abolition of Islamic hate propaganda
amounts to abolition of Islam itself. Islam without hatred
is not Islam. The judge further observed: "This book is not
prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between religions.
Because of the Quran no public tranquillity has been
disturbed upto now..." - a resounding statement of
negationism.
This verdict was only what the petitioner expected:
because of political pressure, an anti-Quran verdict was
simply unthinkable, and moreover, the Penal Code keeps
scriptures and classics outside its own purview. The
petitioner has made it clear that he considers book-banning
counterproductive, and that the controversial petition was
meant to direct public attentiton towards the Quran's
contents: people should read it, because Indian citizens
have a right to know why their country is plagued with
never-ending religious riots.
When Chandmal Chopra had the documents of the legal
dispute published, the administration decided to prosecute
him and his publisher on the basis of the very same Penal
Code articles which he had invoked to request a ban on the
Quran. The case is still pending.
Beside H.K. Chakraborty's and Chandmal Chopra's
petitions, a third text which pointed at the Quran as a
source of religious violence, was a poster published in
Delhi (1986) by I.S. Sharma and Rajkumar Arya, prominent
members of the Hindu Mahasabha, a small political party more
extreme than the BJP. The poster carried the title: "Why do
riots break out in this country?" It showed 24 Quran
verses, such as: "Fight the unbelievers in your
surroundings, and let them find harshness in you" (Q.9:123),
and : "Kill the unbelievers wherever ye find them,, capture
and besiege them and prepare them every kind of ambush"
(Q.9.5).
Both publishers were arrested on the basis of arts. 153A
and 295A. However, they were acquitted. The judged ruled
that they had made a "fair criticism", for: "With all due
respect to the holy Quran, an attentive perusal of the
verses shows that these are indeed harmful and preach
violence and have the potential to cause conflicts between
the Muslims and the others." An appeal against the court
ruling is still pending.
This criticism of the Quran pulls the carpet from under
the negationists' feet. The enmity between Muslims and
Pagans is clearly not a back-projection from contemporary
artificially created religio-political tensions. Neither is
it a conflict which developed historically long after
Mohammed and which can be reduced to socio-economical
factors. This enmity is, on the contrary, present in the
very core of Islamic doctrine.
With this information about Quranic doctrine, we find
that the negationist thesis is not only contradicted by a
massive body of authentic evidence; it is also highly
implausible in itself. For, the thesis that Islam in India
was not systematically (proportionately to its possibilities
in given situations) in conflict with other religions,
claims in fact that Islam in India deviated from its own
principles, and behaved completely uncharacteristically for
centuries on end. It is methodologically more usual to
provisionally assume a consistent and probable bahaviour
(viz. that adherents of a God-given call to war against the
unbelievers effectively make war on the unbelievers, and
that a religion which persecuted other religions everywhere
else, did the same in India), and only give this up if
positive evidence for a less plausible and more inconsistent
course has been found. But what positive evidence there is,
points in the opposite direction: a long list of Muslim
invaders and rulers faithfully put the Quranic injuctions
into practice.
The problem of book-banning and censorship on Islam
criticism is compounded by the related problem of self-
censorship. Thus, when in late 1992, the famous columnist
Arun Shourie wanted to publish a collection of his columns
on Islamic fundamentalism, esp. the Rushdie and Ayodhya
affairs (Indian Controversies), the publisher withdrew at
the last moment, afraid of administrative or physical
reprisals, and the printer also backed out. Earlier,
Shourie had been lucky to find one paper willing to publish
these columns, for most Indian newspapers strictly keep the
lid on Islam criticism. Hindu society is a terrorized
society.
A final aspect of the ban (sometimes legal, mostly
imposed by secularist convention) on criticism of Islam is
that it is the re-institution of an old Islamic rule. When
the Christians in Syria in the first century of Islam were
forced to submit, they had to sign a long list of promises
to their Islamic overlords. These comprised the well-known
conditions imposed on the zimmis, but also some extra ones,
including "not to teach our children the Quran". Like
Mohammed, his successors found it hard to counter the
numerous objections to the contradictions and unethical
injuctions in the Quran, which perceptive infidels kept on
raising. It was logical that they prohibited the study of
the Quran by non-Muslims, in order to pre-emptively disarm
future anti-Islamic polemists. This ban by the theocratic
caliphate on unfriendly inspection of the Quran is now re-
instituted in India in the name of secularism.
2.7 THE NEGATIONISTS' SECOND FRONT
Not satisfied with denying the crimes of Islam, the
negationists have recently made a big effort to spread the
notion that Hinduism itself is guilty of just the same
things of which it accuses Islam. Remember, Holocaust
negationists always allege and highlight Israeli injustice
against the Palestinians: if you prove that the victim is
not so innocent, it will ultimately become questionable that
he was a victim at all. If ever the denial of Muslim
fanaticism has to be given up, a second line of defence (or
counter-attack) will be ready: accusing Hinduism of a
similar fanaticism.
For example, in the Indian media you regularly come
across the contention that "the Hindus destroyed Nalanda
Buddhist university". This is a plain lie: under several
Hindu dynasties, Nalanda flourished and was the biggest
university in the world for centuries; it was destroyed by
the Muslim invader Bakhtiar Khilji in 1200. But if you
repeat a lie often enough, it gains currency, and now many
Indians have come to believe that Buddhism had been replaced
by Hinduism as India's chief religion in a most violent
manner.
In reality, Buddhism had always been a minority religion
in India, confined to nobles and traders; before its
disappearance around 1200 AD, it had been partly reabsorbed
by mainstream Hinduism; otherwise it co-existed peacefully
with other Hindu sects, often sharing the same temple-
complexes. The historical allegations of violent conflicts
between mainstream Hinduism and Buddhism can be counted on
one hand. It is not Brahminical onslaught but Islam that
chased Buddhism from India.
In Central Asia, Islam had wiped out Buddhism together
with Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, and whatever
other religion it encountered. The Persian word for idol
is but, from Buddha, because the Buddhists with their
Buddha-status were considered as the idol-worshippers par
excellence. The Buddhists drew the wrath of every Muslim
but-shikan (idol-breaker), even where they had not offered
resistance aganinst the Muslim armies because of their
doctrine of non-violence. As a reminder of the Buddhist
past of Central Asia, the city name Bukhara is nothing but a
corruption of vihara, i.e. a Buddhist monastery; other
Indian names include Samarkhand and Takshakhand, i.e.
Tashkent. In India, Buddhism was a much easier target than
other sects and traditions, because it was completely
centralized around the monasteries. Once the monsteries
destroyed and the monks killed, the Buddhist community had lost
its backbone and was helpless before the pressure to convert
to Islam (as happened on a large scale in East Bengal).
A handful of negationist historians have tried to
substantiate the allegations against Hinduism and spared no
effort to colect instances of Hindus acts of persectution.
We will take a look at them here. It would take a whole
volume to sum up Aurangzeb's career as an iconoclast and
persecutor, but the Hindu record of persecution will not
take us more than a few pages.
To my knowledge, all the alleged cases of intra-Hindu
persecution have been summed up in "Communal History and
Rama's Ayodhya by prof. R.S. Sharma, the chapter in
Communalism and the Writing of Indian History" contributed by
prof. Harbans Mukhia, and most explicitly Cultural
Transactions and Early India by Prof. Romila Thapar.
According to Romila Thapar, "the insistence on the tradition
of religious tolerance and non-violence as characteristic of
Hinduism... is not borne out by historical evidence". Given
their strong motivation, we need not assume that they have
overlooked incidents that could be useful for the case they
are making.
The two best-known cases, involving Pushyamitra Shunga
and Shashank, cannot withstand historical criticism. The
non-contemporary story (which surfaces more than three
centuries after the facts) about Pushyamitra's offering
money for the heads of monks is rendered improbable by firm
historical facts of his allowing and patronizing monasteries
and Buddhist universities in his domains. After Ashoka's
lavish sponsorship of Buddhism, it is perfectly possible
that Buddhist institutions fell on slightly harder times
under the Shungas, but persecution is still another matter.
The famous historian of Buddhism Etienne Lamotte has
observed: "To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be
acquitted through lack of proof." The only reason to
sustain the suspicion against Pushyamitra, once it has been
levelled, is that "where there is smoke, there must be fire"
- but that piece of received wisdom is presupposed in every
act of slander as well.
Hsuan Tsang's story from hearsay about Shashank's
devastating a monastery in Bihar, killing the monks and
destroying Buddhist relics, only a few years before Hsuan
Tsang's own arrival, is contradicted by other elements in
his own report. Thus, according to the Chinese pilgrim,
Shashank threw a stone with the Buddha's footprint into the
river, but it was returned through a miracle; and he felled
the bodhi tree but a sapling from it was replanted which
miraculously grew into a big tree overnight. So, the fact
of the matter was that the stone and the tree were still
there in full glory. In both cases, the presence of the
footprint-stone and the fully grown bodhi tree contradict
Husan Tsang's allegations, but he explains the contradiction
away by postulating miracles (which everywhere have a way of
mushrooming around relics, to add to their aura of divine
power). If we do not accept miracles, we conclude that the
bodhi tree which Husan Tsang saw, and which was too big to
have been a recently replanted sapling, cannot have been
felled by Shashank.
Hsuan Tsang is notorious for his exaggerations and his
insertions of miracle stories, and he had to explain to
China, where Buddhism was readhing its peak, why it was
declining in India. It seems safer to base our judgement on
the fact that in his description of Buddhist life in the
Ganga basin, nothing shows the effects of recent
persecutions. In fact, Hsuan Tsang himself gives a clue to
the real reason of pre-Islamic Buddhist decline, by
describing how many Buddhist monasteries had fallen into
disuse, esp. in areas of lawlessness and weak government,
indicating that the strength of Buddhism was in direct
proportion to state protection and patronage. Unlike
Brahminism, which could sustain itself against heavy odds,
the fortunates of Buddhist monasticism (even more than those
of the Christian abbeys in early medieval Europe) were
dependent upon royal favours, as under Ashoka, the Chinese
early T'ang dynasty, and the rulers of Tibet and several
Southeast-Asian countries.
A third story, about a 12th century king Harsha of
Kashmir, is apparently true but has nothing to do with
religious persecution: he plundered Hindu temples of all
sects including Buddhism, in his own kingdom, without
bothering to desecrate them or their keepers apart from
lucrative plunder. It is the one geunine case of a ruler
plundering not out of religious motives but for the gold.
There is no known case of a Muslim marauder who merely stole
from temples without bothering to explicity desecrate them,
much less of a Muslim ruler who plundered the sanctuaries of
his own religion. Moreover, Kalhana's history book
Rajatarangini relates this story with the comment: "Promoted
by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk." This
Harsha employed Turkish mercenaries (which his successors
would regret, for they spied and ultimately grabbed power),
and these Muslims already had a firm reputation of
plundering temples with a good conscience.
Number four is the attack by the Paramara king
Subhataverman (1193-1210) on Gujrat, in which "a large
number of Jain temples in Dabhoi and Cambay" were
plundered (not "destroyed" or "desecrated"). Harbans
Mukhia cites this as proof that "many Hindu rulers did the
same [as the Muslims, i.e. destroy] with temples in enemy-
territory long before the Muslims had emerged as a political
challenge to these kingdoms." However, it is well-known
that when Subhatavarman acceded to the throne, the Muslims
had more than emerged: North India was being ravaged by
Mohammed Ghori's decisive campaign of conquest. As a proof
that Hindus outside the Islamic sphere of influence
practised persecution, this incident will not do. On the
contrary, if the report is correct, then the background may
well be similar to the attested case of Harsha of Kashmir:
inspired by the Turks, he behaved like a Turk.
Another case is the recurrent conflicts between the
Shaiva and the Vaishnava renunciates in Ayodhya. Prof. R.S.
Sharma quotes a description from 1804, which talks of
"soldiers taking pleasure in battle", "misery", "great fear"
and "shelter in secret places", but no death toll is given,
in fact no killing is mentioned in so many words. But prof.
Sharma concludes nonetheless: "The passage given above is
sufficient to expose the myth of tolerance practised by
medieval Hindu religious leaders."
Hindu tradition acknowledges that a rivalry between
Shaivas and Vaishnavas disturbed life in Ayodhya: it was the
context in which Tulsidas decided to write the
Ramcharitmanas. In order to emphasize the superficial and
erroneous character of the conflict between the followers of
Shiva and those of Vishnu (and his incarnation Rama),
Tulsidas made Shiva the story-teller of his Rama biography.
Shiva and Vishnu are one, and devotees who don't understand
this, well, they have to learn it. There is no similar
record of any Islamic authority who has said that Shiva and
Allah are one, nor Ram and Rahim, nor Kashi and Kaaba. All
this "oneness of all religions" rhetoric is a strictly Hindu
projection of the oneness of the different Hindu gods and
traditions on a juxtaposition of radically incompatible
notions from Islam and Hinduism. Whereas the opposition
between Ram and Rahim, between Kashi and Kaaba, led to
endless persecutions and a Partition, such things have not
happened between Shaivas and Vaishnavas. All that Prof.
Sharma can show, is a riot which was not bigger than those
which take place between drunken football fans.
As we might expect from Marxists who seek to mould
rather than inform public opinion, this listing of evidence
has been done with some editing. Thus, Romila Thapar writes
that "the Shaivite saint Jnana Sambandar is attributed with
having converted the Pandya ruler from Jainism to Shaivism,
whereupon it is said that 8,000 Jainas were impaled by the
king". She omits that this king, Arikesari Parankusa
Maravarman, is also described as having first persecuted
Shaivas; that Sambandar vanquished the Jainas not in battle
but in debate (upon which the king converted from Jainism to
Shaivism); and that he had escaped Jaina attempts to kill
him. Unlike the Muslim persecutions, this Shaiva-Jaina
conflict was clearly not a one-way affair. For the sake of
blackening Hinduism, the Buddhists and Jains had to be
depicted as hapless victims, and their share in the intra-
Hindu violence had to be concealed.
It is even a matter of debate whether this persecution
has occurred at all: the Hindus were never careful
historians, and like Hsuan Tsang they mixed legend and
historical fact, so that the modern historian can only
accept their testimony if he finds supportive outside
(epigraphical and archaeological) evidence. Unlike the
conscientious Muslim chronicles or Kalhana's Rajatarangini,
this story about Sambandar comes in the form of a local
legend with at most a historical core. Nilkanth Shastri, in
his unchallenged History of South India, writes about it:
"This, however, is little more than an unpleasant legend and
cannot be treated as history." I admit that this sounds like
Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's persecutions are
"little more than hostile legend". However, Mr. Spear's
contention is amply disproven by a lot of contemporary
documents including the royal orders to kill Pagans and
destroy Pagan institutions, as well as by eye-witness
accounts; such evidence has not been offered at all in the
case of Jnana Sambandar.
Warned by this unmistakable case of distortion of
evidence, we take the rest of the list cum grano salis.
But at least, the next incident is reported by two seemingly
independent sources: the persecution of Buddhists by the
Huna king Mihirakula in Kashmir. Romila Thapar herself
admits that Hsuan Tsang's account about "the destruction of
1.600 Buddhist stupas and sangharamas and the killing of
thousands of monks and lay-followers" sounds exaggerated,
but she has faith in Kalhana's more detailed version which
mentions "killing innocent people by the hundreds".
But Hsuan Tsang gives an interesting detail which does
not sound like a fairy-tale and may well be historical.
Mihirakula, "wishing to apply his leisure to the study of
Buddhism", asked the Buddhist sangha to appoint a teacher
for him. But none of the more accomplished monks was
willing, so they appointed a monk who had the rank of a
servant. The king found this procedure insulting, and
ordered the destruction of the Buddhist church in his
kingdom. This king was not anti-Buddhist, was open-minded
and took a sincere interest in Buddhism. But once a king's
ego is hurt, he can get violent, regardless of his religion.
That is regrettable, but it is something else than
religious fanaticism.
When a commander in the service of the Buddhist emperor
Ashoka was angered by the Buddhist monks' refusal to let the
king meddle in their affairs, he had 500 of them killed.
The massacre had nothing to do with religious intolerance,
merely with hurt pride, and the Marxist historians have done
well not to put it in their list. For the same reason,
Mihirakula's rage against the impolite monks cannot be
equated with the religiously motivated persecutions by the
Muslim rulers. There was never a Muslim king who invited
Pagan scholars to instruct him in the Pagan doctrines, the
way Mihirakula asked for a Buddhist teacher. The only
exceptions to this rule were the apostate emperor Akbar, who
was vehemently criticized for it by the Muslim clergy, and
Dara Shikoh, who was executed for apostasy by his brother
Aurangzeb.
Another incident of intra-Hindu persecution quoted from
Kalhana's Rajatarangini, is "an earlier persecution of
Buddhists in Kashmir and the wilful destruction of a vihara,
again by a Shaivite king". There is an interesting little
tailpiece to this incident: "But on this occasion the king
repented and built a new monastery for the Buddhist monks".
This proves that a substantial number, if not all, of the
monks had survived the persecution. But more importantly,
it highlights something completely unknown in the long
history of Islamic fanaticism: remorse. This Shaivite king
knew at heart that intolerance was wrong, and when he had
regained his self-control, he made up for his misdeed. Such
a thing has never been done by Mohammed, or by Ghaznavi or
Aurangzeb. If any proof was neded for the radical
difference between the systematic persecutions by the
Muslims and the rare abberation into isolated acts of
intolerance by Hindus, Prof. Romila Thapar has just given
it.
The next case: "The Jaina temples of Karnataka went
through a traumatic experience at the hands the Lingayats or
Virashaivas in the early second millennium AD". If all they
suffered was trauma they were well-off in comparison with
the thousands of temples destroyed by the Muslims in the same
period. After a time of peaceful co-existence, which Romila
Thapar acknowledges, "one of the temples was converted into
a Shiva temple. At Hubli, the temple of the five Jinas was
converted into a panchalingeshwara
Shaivite temple, the five lingas replacing the five Jinas
in the sancta. Some other Jaina temples met the same fate."
To be sure, conversions of the temples have indeed
happened, and the panchalingeshwara temple may well be a
case in point. Yet, that does not prove there was
persecution. When rivalling sects entered public debate,
they often put in high wagers, esp. the promise to convert
to be winner's sect. In such a case, the temple or ashram
was taken along into the new sect. Here, it could well be
such a case of peaceful handover: after all, the temples
were not destroyed. Against this, Prof. Thapar informs us:
"An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar eulogizes attacks on
Jaina temples as retaliation for opposition to Shaivite
worship."
Here we may have another case of distoring evidence by
means of selective quoting. The inscription of which Prof.
Thapar summarizes a selected part, says first of all that
the dispute arose because the Jains tried to prevent a
Shaiva from worshipping his own idol. It further relates
that the Jains also promised to throw out Jina and worship
Shiva if the Shiva devotee performed a miracle, but when the
miracle was produced, they did not fulfil their promise. In
the ensuing quarrel, the Jina idol was broken by the
Shaivas. The most significant element is that the Jain king
Bijjala decided in favour of the Shaivas when the matter was
brought before him. He dismissed the Jains and showered
favours on the Shaivas.
Again, in this story the conflict is not a one-way
affair at all. We need not accept the story at face value,
as it is one of those sectarian miracle stories (with the
message: "My saint is holier than thy saint") which abound
in the traditions surrounding
most places of pilgrimage, be they Christian, Sufi or Hindu.
Dr. Fleet, who has edited and translated this inscription
along with four others found at the same place, gives
summaries of two Lingayat Puranas and the Jain
Bijjalacharitra, and observes that the story in this
inscription finds no support in the literary traditions of
the two sects. Bijjala's own inscription dated 1162 AD
discovered at Managoli also does not support the story. The
fact that the inscription under consideration does not bear a
date or a definite reference to the reign of a king, does not
help its credibility either. And do authentic inscriptions
deal in miracles?
It is obvious that an inscription of this quality, if it
had been cited in support of the Hindu claim to the Babri
Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi site, would have been dismissed by
the Marxist historians as ridiculous and totally
groundless. They would not view it as a serious obstacle to
their foregone conclusion that there is absolutely
definitely no indication whatsover at all that a Hindu temple
was forcibly replaced with a mosque. But in this case, we
are asked to see it as evidence that Shaivas attacked Jain
temples, and that Hindu tolerance is a myth.
Unlike the party-line historians of JNU, I do not think
that historians working with conflicting testimonies are in
a position to make apodictic statements and definitive
conclusions,, so I will not completely dismiss this
inscription as fantasy. It is possible that the Jainas had
indeed fallen on hard times, and I do not dispose of
material that would refute Prof. Thapar's contention that
"in the fourteenth century the harassment of Jainas was so
acute that they had to appeal for protection to the ruling
power at Vijayanagar". Still, in size, duration, intensity
and degree of ideological motivation, this conflict does not
at all compare with the terror wrought by Islam.
Incidentally, the ruling power at Vijayanagar, whose
protection the Jains sought, was of course a Hindu power.
From Dr. Fleet's study of these sources, it seems that
the Shaivas who were so hostile to the Jains, belonged to
the Veerashaiva or Lingayat sect. And indeed, Prof.
Thapar's next piece of evidence is that "inscriptions of the
sixteenth century from the Srisailam area of Andhra Pradesh
record the pride taken by Veerashaivas in beheading
Shvetambara Jains". Now, the Veerashaivas were an anti-caste
and anti-Brahminical sect. As these are considered good
qualities, negationists have tried to link them to the
influence of Muslim missionaries ("bringing the message of
equality and brotherhood"), who were indeed very acvtive on
India's West coast, where and when the Veerashaiva doctrine
was developed. Let us assume there was indeed Muslim
influence on the Veerashaiva sect. In that case, the
negationists should acknowledge that the Veerashaivas'
occasional acts of intolerance may equally be due to the
influence of Islam. At any rate Brahminism cannot be held
guilty of any misdeeds committed by this anti-Brahminical
sect.
Finally, "in Gujrat, Jainism flourished during the reign
of Kumarapala, but his successor [i.e. Ajayapala] persecuted
the Jainas and destroyed their temples". In "The History and
Culture of the Indian People", edited by R.C. Majumdar, we
read about this: "The Jain chronicles allege that Ajayapala
was a persecutor of the Jains, that he demolished Jain
temples, mercilessly executed the Jain scholar Ramachandra,
and killed Ambada, a minister of Kumarapala, in an
encounter." Here, the alleged crime is related by the
victims, not by the aggressors. It is possible that they
exaggerated, but I see no reason to believe that they simply
invented the story. So, let us agree that some temples
were destroyed and at least one prominent Jain killed by
Hindu aggressors. After all, the fanaticism displayed
systematically by Islam has not come falling out of the sky,
it exists in human nature and may occasionally pop up in
contexts of tension; the difference is that Hindu acts of
fanaticism were occasional and took place in spite of the
doctrine, while Islamic fanaticism was systematic and merely
an application of the doctrine.
The Marxist scholars who have collected this material,
have omitted from their presentations the following cases of
intra-Hindu persecution. The Mahavamsha says that the
Buddhist king Vattagamini (29-17 BC) destroyed a Jain vihara
on the same site. In the Shravana-Belagola epitaph of
Mallishena, the Jain teacher Aklanka says that after a
successful debate with Buddhists, he broke a Buddha statue
with his own foot. There are some more instances of Jain-
Buddhist conflict, but suich material did not fit in with
the designs of the negationists. They have this pet theory
of Jainism and Buddhism as revolts against Brahminical
tyranny, subsequently crushed out by the Brahminical
reaction. In fact, the minor instances of intra-Hindu
violence were distributed roughly proportionately between
Brahminical, Buddhist, Jaina and other sects.
Among the above-mentioned reports of conflict between
the different traditions within the Sanatana Dharma common
wealth, several are probably unfounded, and several
exaggerated. But as we have no firm evidence for this
plausible hypothesis yet, let us assume for now that all
these reports are simply correct and accurate. Let us moreover
assume that a similar number of similar cases has gone
unrecorded or unnoticed by the Marxist historians. Then, as
a sum total, we still do not have the number of victims that
Teimur made in a single day. Then we still do not have the
number of temple demolitions that Aurangzeb wrought on his
own. Then we still do not have the amount of glorification
of temple destruction that we find in any of the diaries of
Muslim conquerors like Babr or Firuz Shah Tughlaq or Teimur,
or any of their chroniclers. The fanaticism record of
Hinduism throughout millennia is dwarfed by the record of a
single Ghaznavi, Ghori or Aurangzeb and becomes completely
negligeable when compared with the total record of Islamic
destruction and massacre in India. Moreover, a proper
comparison of the fanaticism record of Hindu civilization
would not be with Indian Islam, which represents a far
smaller number of people, but with the entire Muslim world
from the Prophet (peace be upon him) onwards.
Prof. Romila Thapar writes: "The desire to portray
tolerance and non-violence as the eternal values of the
Hindu tradition has led to the pushing aside of such
evidence." What evidence? These few disputable cases will
not do to prove that "Hindu tolerance is a myth". Hindus
can afford to face this evidence sqarely. A final judgement
on whether Hinduism is tolerant or not shujld not depend on
a few instances selected and edited to fit the proconceived
picture, but on an over-view of the whole of Hindu history.
The larger patterns of Hindu history leave no doubt that the
impression cunningly created by the negationists is false.
Many foreign groups of people persecuted for their
religion came to seek reguge in India. The Parsis have
thrived. The heterodox Syrian Christians have lived in
peace until the Portuguese came to enlist them in their
effort to christianize India. The Jews have expressed their
gratitude when they left for Israel because India was the
only country where their memories were not of persecution
but of friendly co-existence. Even the Moplah Muslims were
accepted without any questions asked. All these groups were
not merely tolerated, but received land and material support
for building places of worship.
What should really clinch the issue, is the tolerant
treatment which the Muslims received after their reign of
terror had been overthrown and replaced with Hindu rashtras
like those of the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats. The
Hindus could have emulated the policy of the Spanish
Christians after the Reconquista, and given the Muslims the
choice between conversion and emigration. With the benefit
of hindsight, we can say that they would have saved many
lives and India's unity by doing so, but forcing people to
convert was not in conformity with their traditions.
When negationists are confronted with the evidence of
persecutions by Islam, they are sure to mention a few cases
where Muslim rulers patronized the building of Hindu
temples. In some cases this is deceitful: in the JNU
historians' pamphlet "The Political Abuse of History", they
mention three such cases, but on closer inspection two of
them do not concern Muslim rulers, but their Hindu ministers
(in his rebuttal, Prof. A.R. Khan called this "not only
concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence").
But all right, a few Muslim rulers have made gifts to Hindu
institutions. The negationists insist that these few gifts
make up for the systematic Islamic persecutions. By
contrast, their blatantly unequal standards do not allow
them to accept the systematic patronage of the institutions
of Buddhists and Jains by Hindu kings through the ages as
compensation for the few isolated and aberrant cases of
religious conflict.
In order to undersand the problem of religious
intolerance, it is necessary to distinguish between two
types of conflict between religions. The first one is the
ordinary conflict between two groups of people, who may
derive their identity from their nationality, language
family stock, economic interests, social class, or
allegiance to a football team: any two people or groups of
people can pick a quarrel. Therefore, two religious
communities can have a conflict of interest as well, and
behave just like any kind of group in conflict situation.
By definition, every community can run into this kind of
conflict (though some may remain non-violent throughout
because of their doctrine). But this kind of conflict is
temporary, dependent on an accidental state of affairs and
always gravitates back to normal.
The second kind of religious conflict is not accidental,
but is a consequence of the doctrines to which the community
adheres. This is the case only with a handful of religions
(including the Marxist quasi-religion), distinguished by
their exclusivism and their ambition for conquest. Islam has
been the most consistent in denying others the right to
exist or at least to freely practise their religion. Its
conflicts with other religions are merely the
materialization of its doctrines.
This discinction between religious conflict as an
accident or aberration, and religious conflict as the direct
outcome of fanatical doctrines inherent in a religion, is
fundamental to an understanding of the problem. In the
first case, acts of fanaticism are committed in spite of the
doctrine. The Vedas say that "the wise call the One by many
names", and exhort us to "let good thoughts come to us from
everywhere"; in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna assures the
adherents of all religions that "those who pray with
devotion to any god, it is to Me that they pray".
Differences in religion are considered superficial and
unimportant, therefore religious tolerance is the norm, and
intolerance cannot be more than an aberration. But in the
second case, acts of fanaticism are sanctioned by the
doctrine, and are bound to happen on a substantial scale as
long as the doctrine is taken seroiously. "Enmity and
hatred will reign between us until ye believe in Allah
alone" says the Quran, and it is only logical that enmity
and hatred have indeed reigned between Muslims and non-
Muslims.
Of course, those with a bad conscience go out of their
way to blur this distinction. Marxists insist on
disregarding or blurring the distinction either because they
want to blacken all religion, or because they are in league
with Muslim fanatics.
Among those who like to say that "all are equally
guilty", we also find the Christian missionaries. They too
have a history of persecutions and temple destructions to
cover up, not only in Europe and America, but in India as
well. The Portuguese organized a branch of the Inquisition
in Goa, and they practised conversion by force on a large
scale. The French and British missionaries were less
brutal, often resorting to subversion tactics and inducement
by means of material advantages for converts, but they too
have a record of temple destructions in India. Hundreds of
churches contain rubble of the Hindu temples which they
replaced. We may look a bit more closely into one case
which sums it all up: the Saint Thomas church on Mylapore
beach in Madras.
According to Christian leaders in India, the apostle
Thomas came to India in 52 AD, founded the Syrian Christian
church, and was killed by the fanatical Brahmins in 72 AD.
Near the site of his martyrdom, the Saint Thomas church was
built. In fact this apostle never came to India, and the
Christian community in South India was founded by a merchant
Thomas Cananeus in 345 AD ( a name which readily explains the
Thomas legend ). He led 400 refugees who fled persecution
in Persia and were given asylum by the Hindu authorities.
In Catholic universities in Europe, the myth of the apostle
Thomas going to India is no longer taught as history, but in
India it is still considered useful. Even many vocal
secularists who attack the Hindus for relying on myth in
the Ayodhya affair, off-hand profess their belief in the
Thomas myth. The important point is that Thomas can be
upheld as a martyr and the Brahmins decried as fanatics.
In reality, the missionaries were very disgruntled that
these damned Hindus refused to give them martyrs (whose
blood is welcomed as the seed of the faith), so they had
to invent one. Moreover, the church which they claim
commemorates Saint Thomas' martyrdom at the hands of Hindu
fanaticism, is in fact a monument of Hindu martyrdom at the
hands of Christian fanaticism: it is a forcible replacement of two
important Hindu temples (Jain and Shaiva), whose existence was
insupportable to Christian missionaries. No one knows how
many priests and worshippers were killed when the Christian
soldiers came to remove the curse of Paganism from Mylapore
beach. Hinduism doesn't practise martyr-mongering, but if at
all we have to speak of martyrs in this context, the title
goes to these Shiva-worshippers and not to the apostle
Thomas.
So, applying the old maxim that "attack is the best
defence", the spokesmen of intolerant creeds falsely accuse
the tolerant Hindus of the same intolerance. While nobody
claims that Hinduism is without faults, or that Hindu
society has never brought forth fanatical individuals,it is
a plain lie that Hinduism has record of fanaticism similar
(however remotely) to that of the three world-conquerors:
Christianity, Islam and Mrxism.
2.8 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ISLAM NEGATIONISM
India has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a
movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes
against humanity committed by Islam. This movement is led
by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by
all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call
themselves secularists. In contrast to the European
negationism regarding the Nazi acts of genocide, but similar
to the Turkish negationism regarding the Armenian genocide,
the Indian negationism regarding the terrible record of
Islam is fully supported by the establishment. It has
nearly full control of the media and dictates all state and
government parlance concerning the communal problem (more
properly to be called the Islam problem).
Its techniques are essentially the same as those of
negationists elsewhere :
- Head-on denial: The crassest form of negationism is
obviously the simple denial of the facts. This is mostly
done in the form of general claims, such as: "Islam is
tolerant", "Islamic Spain was a model of multicultural
harmony", "the anti-Jewish hatred was unknown among Muslims
until Zionism and anti-Semitism together entered the Muslim
world from Europe". Since it is rare that a specific crime
of Islam is brought to the public's notice, there is little
occasion to come out and deny specific crimes. Exceptions
are the Armenian genocide, officially denied in Turkey and
the entire Muslim world, and the temple destructions in
India, which have been highlighted in the Ayodhya debate but
flatly denied by Syed Shahanuddin, Sushil Srivastava and
many other pro-Babri polemists.
The Rushdie affair was the occasion for negationism on a
grand scale. There happens to be an unambiguous answer to
the question: "Is it Islamic to kill those who voice
criticism of the Prophet?" According to the media and most
experts, the answer was definitely: no. According to the
basic traditions of Islam, it was: yes. Mohammed as well
as his immediate successors have killed critics, both in
formal executions and in night-time stabbings. In Islamic
law, the Prophet's example is valid precedent. At most
there could be some quarreling over the procedure: some
jurists thought that Rushdie should first be kidnapped to an
Islamic country and given a chance to recant before an
Islamic court, though the ayatollahs have ruled that no
amount of remorse can save Rushdie. If he stands by his
book, even the so-called moderates think he must be killed.
Islamic law punishes both apostasy and insults to the
Prophet with the death penalty: twice there is no escape for
Rushdie. In the Muslim world, several publications have
restated the clear-cut Islamic provisions for cases like
Rushdie's including Ahaanat-i Rasool ki Sazaa ("Punishment
for Insulting the Prophet") by JNU Prof. Maulana Mohsin
Udmani Nadwi, and Muqaddas-i Ayat ("The Sacred Verses") by
Maulana Majid Ali Khan, both published by the Islamic
Research Foundation, Delhi. Yet, the outside public was
told by many experts that killing Rushdie is un-islamic.
Flat denial will work very well if your grip on the
press and education media is sufficient. Otherwise, there
is a danger of being shown up as the negationist one really
is. In that case, a number of softer techniques are
available.
- Ignoring the facts: This passive negationism is
certainly the safest and the most popular. The media and
textbook-writers simply keep the vast corpus of inconvenient
testimony out of the readers' view.
- Minimizing the facts: If the inconvenient fact is
pointed out that numerous Muslim chroniclers have reported a
given massacre of unbelievers themselves, one can posit
a priori that they must have exaggerated to flatter their
patron's martial vanity - as if it is not significant enough
that Muslim rulers felt flattered by being described as
mass-murderers of infidels.
Apart from minimizing the absolute size of Islamic
crimes, there is the popular technique of relative
minimizing: make the facts look smaller by comparing them
with other, carefully selected facts. Thus, one can say
that "all religions are intolerant", which sounds plausible
to many though it is patently false: in the Roman Empire
only those sects were persecuted which had political
ambitions (Jews when they fought for independence,
Christians because they sought to take over the Empire and
outlaw all other religions, as they effectively did), while
the others enjoyed the status of religio licita; similarly
with the Persian Empire and many other states and cultures.
An oft-invoked counterweight for the charge-sheet
against Islam, is the fanaticism record of Christianity. it
is indeed well-known that Christianity has been guilty of
numerous temple destructions and persecutions. But the
reason for this fanaticism is found in the common
theological foundation of both religions: exclusivist
prophetic monotheism. The case against Christianity is at
once a case against Islam. Moreover, in spite of its
theologically motivated tendency to intolerance,
Christianity has had to go through the experience of "live
and let live" because in its formative period, it was but
one of the numerous sects in the pluralist Roman empire.
Islam never had this experience, and in order to bring out
its full potential of fanaticism, Christianity has needed
the influence of Islam on a few occasions. Thus, it is no
coincidence that Charlemagne, who defeated the Saxons by
force, was the grandson of Charles Martel, who defeated the
Islamic army in Poitiers; no coincidence either that the
Teutonic knights who forcibly converted the Balts, were
veterans of the Crusades, i.e. the campaign to liberate
Palestine from Islam; nor is it a coincidence that the
Spanish Inquisition emerged in a country that had needed
centuries to shake off Islamic oppression. Finally,
Christianity is, by and large, facing the facts of it own
history, though its is still struggling with the need to own
up the responsibility for these facts.
An even more general way of drowning Islamic fanaticism
in relativist comparisons, is to point out that after all,
every imperialism has been less than gentle. That may well
be true, but then, we are not setting up cults for the
Genghis Khans of this world. A religion should contribute
to man's transcending his natural defects like greed and
cruelty, and not sanction and glorify them.
- Whitewashing: When one cannot conceal, deny or
minimize the facts, one can still calim that on closer
analysis,, they are not as bad as they seem. One can call
right what is obviously wrong. This can go very far, e.g.
in his biography of Mohammed, Maxime Rodinson declared
unashamedly that the extermination of the Medinese Jews by
Mohammed was doubtlessly the best solution. In numerous
popular introductions to Islam, the fact that Islam imposes
the death penalty on apostates (in modern terminology: that
Islam opposes freedom of religion in the most radical
manner) is acknowledged; but then it is explained that
"since Islam was at war with the polytheists, apostasy
equalled treason and desertion, something which is still
punished with death in our secular society". All right, but
the point is precisely that Islam chose to be at war with
the traditional religion of Arabia, as also with all other
religions, and that it has made this state of war into a
permanent feature of its law system.
- Playing up unrepresentative facts: A popular tactic
in negationism consists in finding a positive but
uncharacteristic event, and highlighting it while keeping
the over-all picture out of the public's view. For
instance, a document is found in which Christians whose son
has forcibly been inducted in the Ottoman Janissary army,
express pride because their son has made it made it to high
office within this army. The fact that these people manage
to see the bright side of their son's abduction, is then
used to prove that non-muslims were quite happy under
Muslim rule, and to conceal the fact that the devshirme, the
forcible conversion and abduction of one fifth of the
Christian children by the Ottoman authorities, constituted a
constant and formidable terror bewailed in hundreds of
heart-rending songs and stories.
For another example, negationists always mentionn cases
of collaboration by non-Muslims (Man Singh with the
Moghuls,etc.) to suggest that these were treated as partners
and equals and that Muslim rule was quite benevolent; when
in fact every history of an occupation, even the most cruel
one, is also the history of a collaboration. As has been
pointed out, the Nazis employed Jewish guards in the Warsaw
ghetto, disprove the Nazi oppression of the Jews.
- Denying the motive: Negationists sometimes accept the
facts, but disclaim their hero's responsibility for them.
Thus, Mohammed Habib tried to exonerate Islam by ascribing
to the Islamic invaders alternative motives: Turkish
barbarity, greed, the need to put down conspiracies brewing
in temples. In reality, those rulers who had secular
reasons to avoid an all-out confrontation with the
unbelievers, were often reprimanded by their clerical
courtiers for neglecting their Islamic duty. The same
clerics were never unduly worried over possible secular
motives in a ruler's mind as long as these prompted him to
action against the unbelievers. At any rate, the fact that
Islam could be used routinely to justify plunder and
enslavement (unlike, say, Buddhism), is still significant
enough.
- Smokescreen: Another common tactic consists in
blurring the problem by questioning the very terms of the
debate: "Islam does not exist, for there are many Islams,
with big differences between countries etc." It would
indeed be hard to criticize something that is so ill-
defined. But the simple fact is that Islam does exist: it
is the doctrine contained in the Quran, normative for all
Muslims, and in the Hadis, normative at least for all Sunni
Muslims. There are differences between the law schools
concerning minor points, and of course there are
considerable differences in the extent to which Muslims are
effectively faithful to islamic doctrine, and
correspondingly, the extent to which they mix it with un-
islamic elements.
- Blaming fringe phenomena: When faced with hard facts
of Islamic fanaticism, negationists often blame them on some
fringe tendency, now popularly known as fundamentalism.
This is said to be the product of post-colonial frustration,
basically foreign to genuine Islam. In reality,
fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi and Ayatollah
Khomeini knew their Quran better than the self-deluding
secularists who brand them as bad Muslims. What is called
fundamentalism is in fact the original Islam, as is proven
by the fact that fundamentalists have existed since long
before colonialism, e.g. the 13th century theologian Ibn
Taimiya, who is still a lighthouse for today's Maudoodis,
Turabis, Madanis and Khomeinis. When Ayatollah Khomeini
declared that the goal of Islam is the conquest of all non-
Muslim countries, this was merely a reformulation of
Mohammed's long-term strategy and of the Quranic assurance
that God has promised the entire world to Islam. In the
case of communism, one can shift the blame from Marx to
Lenin and Stalin, but Islamic terrorism has started with
Mohammed himself.
- Arguments ad hominem: If denying the evidence is not
tenable, one can always distort it by means of selective
quoting and imputing motives to the original authors of the
source material; or manipulating quotations to make them say
the opposite of the over-all picture which the original
author has presented. Focus all attention on a few real or
imagined flaws in a few selected pieces, and act as if the
entire corpus of evidence has been rendered untrustworthy.
To extend the alleged untrustworthiness of one piece of
evidence to the entire corpus of evidence, it is necessary
to create suspicion against those who present the evidence:
the implication is that they have a plan of history
falisification, that this plan has been exposed in the case
of this one piece of evidence, but that it is only logical
that such motivated history falsifiers are also behind the
concoction of the rest of the alleged evidence.
If the discussion of inconvenient evidence cannot be
prevented, disperse it by raising other issues, such as the
human imperfections which every victim of crimes against
humanity inevitablly has (Jewish harshness against the
Palestinians, Hindu untouchability); describe the demand for
the truth as a ploy to justify and cover up these
imperfections. If the facts have to be faced at all, then
blame the victim.
If people ignore or refute your distorted version of
history, accuse them of distortion and political abuse of
history. Slander scholars whose testimony is inconvenient;
impute political or other motives to them in order to pull
the attention away from the hard evidence they present.
- Slogans: Finally, all discussion can be sabotaged
with the simple technique of shouting slogans: prejudice,
myth, "racism/communalism". Take the struggle from the
common battlefield of arguments into the opponent's camp:
his self-esteem as a member of the civilized company that
abhors ugly things like prejudice and communalism. After
all, attack is the best defence.
After summing up the forms of negationism, we have to
look into its causes. The following factors come to mind:
- Orientalism and Islamology: After the medieval
Christian pamphlets against "Mohammed the impostor", not
much has been published thematizing the ideological and
factual crimes of Islam. Books on, say, "slavery in Islam"
are extremely rare: the raw information that could fill such
a publication will have to be found in more general
publications, in which Islam is only referred to in passing,
often without the author's realizing the implications for an
evaluation of Islam. It is often said (when introducing
"refutations of prejudice") that people always associate
Islam with intolerance; but finding a book specifically
devoted to the subject of Islamic intolerance will be
harder. How many millions have been killed by Islam simply
because they were non-Muslims? Nobody has yet tabulated the
figures available to prepare a general estimate. We can
only notice that critical research of Islam is not exactly
encouraged, and that there is an increasing tendency to
self-censorship regarding Islam criticism. In part, this is
due to muchdelayed reaction against the long-abandoned
Christian polemical appraoch.
Now that Islamic Studies departments in Europe are
increasingly manned by Muslims and sponsored by Islamic
foundations and states, as has been the case in India for
long, the climate for critical studies of Islam is only
worsening. When comparing the first (pre-World War 2)
edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, Netherlands)
with the new edition, it is striking how critical
observations have been ironed out. But even in the past,
Islam has enjoyed a rather favourable treatment in academic
circles. Thus, about Islamic slavery the prominent Dutch
Islamologist C. Snouck-Hurgronje wrote in 1887 (i.e. thirty
years after the Americans had waged a war to impose the
abolition of slavery in their southern states, and some
seventy years after its abolition in the colonies): "For
most slaves their abduction was a blessing... They
themselves are convicted that it is their enslavement that
has for the first time made them human."
The political context of the growth phase of Islamology
provides a part of the explanation. Mature colonialism was
not waging war against Islam, but sought the co-operation of
the established social forces in the colonized populations.
The British co-operation with the Indian Muslims is well-
known; it is epitomized by the founding in 1906 of the
Muslim League, which sought to "inculcate loyalty to the
British Empire in the Indian Muslims". In French West
Africa, in the same period, Islam was accepted as a factor
of social stability, and General Lyautey pursued a dream of
a Franco-Islamic synthesis culture in Algeria. In the
1930s, in the last European attempt at fresh colonization,
the Italian Fascists actively supported the spread of Islam
in the Horn of Africa. But already since 1853 the colonial
powers had been supporting the Caliphate against a Christian
power, Czarist Russia, esp. in the Crimean War (a mistaken
war if ever there was one), and this had strongly
contributed to climate of benevolence towards the Muslim
culture.
- Church policy: Christianity has for centuries waged a
lively polemic against Islam, with Raimundus Lullus as
probably the most remarkable exponent. Recently, this
criticism has subsided. Worse, polemical works by clerics
have been withdrawn or kept unpublished (such as, early this
centure, Father Henri Lammens' paper arguing that Mohammed's
revelations were a psychopathological phenomenon). One
reason is that the Church is aware of the similarity between
Jesus' and Mohammed's missions, so that a criticism of the
foundations of Islam may backfire on Christianity. The
second reason is the fear that Christians in the Muslim
world would have to pay for even ideological attack on Islam
(that is why Church polemists save their sharpest words for
harmless religions like Hinduism). This fear also motivates
other Church policies, such as the non-recognition of the
state of Israel.
Meanwhile, the face of the Church has changed. A small
but significant event in the wake of the Second Vatican
Council was the deletion from the Saints' calendar of Our
Lady of the Redemption of Slaves, whose feast was on 24
September. In the Middle Ages, there was a special clerical
order and a whole fund-raising network devoted to the
redemption ("buying back") of Christian slaves held in
Barbary. Until the 19th century, coastal villages in
Italy had watchtowers to alarm the people when a ship of the
slave-catching Barbarese pirates was in sight. The terror of
Islamic slavery was a permanent feature of Christian history
from the 7th till the 19th century, but now the Church is
working hard to erase this memory.
Today, its pastors are the most fervent pleaders for the
rights of Islam. Muslims in Europe are for them a
substitute for the disappearing parish members. Separate
Christian institutions, whose reson of existence is being
questioned, find a new legitimacy in the fact that Islam in
its turn is also opening separate schools, charities and
even political parties. Islam has become a sister
religion regularly praised as a religion of peace.
- Anti-colonialism: One of the ideological guidelines
of anti-colonialism was: "Of the (ex-)colonized, nothing but
good must be said." Therefore, mentioning the colonialism
and mass slavery practised by the Muslims had become
undesirable.
Add to this general taboo the warning that Islam
criticism effectively implies support to Israel, described
by Maxime Rodinson as a "colonial settler-state". If one
acknowledges that Islam has always oppressed the Jews, one
accepts that Israel was a necessary refuge for the Jews
fleeing not only the European but also the Islamic variety
of anti-Judaisms. Let us not forget that decolonization was
followed immediately by renewed discrimination of and
attacks on the Jewish and Christian minorities, and that
those Jews who could get out have promptly fled to Israel
(or France, in the case of Algeria). It is no coincidence
that these Sephardic Jews are mostly supporters of the hard-
liners in Israel.
- The enemy's enemy is a friend: Many people brought up
as Christians, or as nominal Hindus, never outgrow their
pubescent revolt against their parents' religion, and
therefore automatically sympathize with every rival or
opponent of the religion they have come to despise. Because
Islam poses the most formidable threat, they like it a lot.
- Leftism: In this century, Islam has come to be
advertised as a naturally leftist "religion of equality".
This line has been developed by Muslim apoligists such as
Mohammed Habib, and they have even taken it as a
rationalization of the irrational claim that Mohammed was
the "last Prophet": after all, as the "prophet of
equality", he had brought the ultimate message upon which no
improvement is possible. Sir Mohammed Iqbal, one of the
fathers of Pakistan, had claimed that "Islam equals
Communism plus Allah". The Iranian Ayatollahs, by contrast,
and most of the vocal Muslims after the Soviet-Islamic war
in Afghanistan, have restated the orthodox position that
Communism is un-Islamic, not only because of its atheism but
also because of its rejection of free entreprise; the
current claim is that Islam provides a "better form of
equality" than Communism.
Even while Communists were slaughtered in Islamic Iran,
and even while political analysts classify the Islamist
movements as "extreme rightist", most leftists have kept on
cultivating some sympathy for Islam. During the Lebanese
civil war, they fed us news stories about "leftist Muslims,
rightist Christians", "Islamo-progressive, christiano-
reactionnaire".
Negationism in India is practised with the most prowess
by historians and writers who are under the spell of
Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the
French and British colonialists, but what was a tactical
alliance for Lenin became a love-affair for the Indian
Communists. However, it would be wrong to expect that the
collapse of Soviet Communism and the inevitable decline of
Communism in India will automatically lead to the
dissolution of negationism. It has become a bias and a
thought-habit for many people who have only vaguely been
influenced by Marxism. Children mostly survive their
parents, and certain forms of negationism may survive Indian
Marxism for some time, unless a serious effort is made to
expose it on a grand scale.
- Rightist traditionalism: There is also a rightist
sympathy for Islam. An obvious point of agreement is of
course anti-Judaism. A subtler basis for sympathy is the
so-called traditionalist current, which was represented by
the converts Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, and still has
a following: it has been idealizing Islam and esp. Sufism as
the preserver of the age-old philosophia pernnis against
modernity. In Russia, some Slavophile anti-Western groups
now seek an alliance with Islam against the impending
Americanization of their society. In the U.S., Christian
fundamentalists and Islamic organizations are increasingly
creating common platforms to speak out against trends of
moral decay (abortion, pornography, etc.). Some of these
phenomena of traditionalist alliance-building are quite
respectable, but they are nevertheless conducive to Islam
negationism.
- Hindu cowardice: Even among so-called militant
Hindus, there is a shameful eagerness to praise Islam and
deny its criminal record. E.g., during the Ayodhya
movement, many Hindu leaders have been pleading that the
Muslims should renounce the Ram Janmabhoomi site because
"geunine Islam is against temple demolition", so that a
mosque standing on a demolished temple is not in conformity
with Islamic law. This was, of course, blatantly untrue:
Islamic scripture and history prove that destroying all
expressions of unbelief and idolatry is a duty and an honour
for Muslims. The doctrines that have led to the temple
destructions including the one on Ram Janmabhoomi, are still
being taught in all Islamic schools.
Apart from being untruthful, this Hindu appeal to
"geunine Islam's tolerance" was also bad debating tactics:
if you say that temple demolition was standard Islamic
practice, and that what had happened in Ayodhya was merely
the local application of the general rule, the onus is on
the Babri advocates to prove that the Babri Masjid was an
exception; but if you say that the Babri Masjid was an
exception to the rule of Islamic tolerance, the onus is on
you to prove that in this case, an exceptional and
uncharacteristic incident had taken place. It was also bad
bargaining tactics: if you say that the Babri Masjid was
merely one among thousands, then renouncing this one non-
mosque would sound like a very low price for the Muslims to
buy the Hindus' goodwill; but if you say that the Babri
Masjid was an exceptional case, an insignificant incident
amid the many big problems thrown up by history, you look
petty by demanding the restoration of this one site. Short,
Hindu leaders were damaging their own position by denying
history and avoiding Islam criticism.
One could understand people telling lies when it serves
their own interest; but people who tell lies when it is the
truth that would serve their interest, really deserve to be
kicked around. This truly strange and masochistic behaviour
can only be understood if we keep in mind that Hindu society
is a terorized society. During the Muslim period, all those
who stood up and spoke out against Islam were eliminated;
and under Nehruvian rule, they were sidelined and abused.
The oppressed Hindus started licking the boot that kicked
them, and this has become a habit which in their slumber
they have not yet identified and stopped.
- Liberal Islam: In the Islamic world, it is unwise to
attack Islam head-on. Yet, sometimes people in those
countries feel the need to oppose Islamic phenomena and
campaigns, such as the witch-hunt on un-Islamic cultural
remnants, violence on the non-Muslims, extreme forms of
gender inequality. In order to have a chance, these people
have to use Islamic language: "Mohammed was actually against
polygamy", "violence against others is in conflict with the
tolerance which Mohammed has taught us", "respect for other
cultures is part of Islamic tradition". In order to press
their humanist point, they have to formally identify with
Islam and lie about its contents.
Many Muslims have started to believe their own rhetoric.
If you point out to them that the Quran teaches intolerance
and war against the unbelievers in the most explicit terms,
many of them will sincerely protest, and not know what to
say when you show them the Quranic passages concerned.
There is no reason to doubt that the Moroccanm authoress
Fatima Mernissi genuinely believes in her own argument that
the Quranic instructions on how to organize your polygamous
household are to be read as an abolition of polygamy (albeit
in veiled terms, because Allah, the same Allah Almighty who
went straight against the prevalent customs of idolatry and
pluralism, had to be careful not to offend the spirit of the
times). Many nominal Muslims have outgrown Islamic values
and developed a commitment to modern values, but their
sentimental attachment to the religion imbibed in their
childhood prevents them from formally breaking with Islam
and makes them paint a rosy picture of it.
Among Muslim spokesmen, is is certainly not the
fundamentalists who are the most active proponents of
negationism. It is liberals like Asghar Ali Engineer who
deny that Islam ordains war on the infidels. It is those
who are acclaimed by Hindus as being good "secular" Muslims,
like Saeed Naqvi, who go as far as to deny that the
Partition of India was brought about by Muslims. An Islam
that wants to be secular, cannot but be dishonest and
untrue to itself. Unfortunately, a tolerant Islam is a
contradiction, and a tolerant past for Islam to buttress the
position of liberal Muslims, is a lie.
- Muslims differing from Islam: Many people have a
Muslim neighbour who is a fine man, and from this empirical
fact they conclude: Islam cannot be all that bad considering
our friend Mustapha. This one empirical fact gives them a
tremendous resistance against all information about Islamic
intolerance. People usually reduce the world to their own
sphere of experience, and general historical facts of
Islamic fanaticism are not allowed to disturb the private
experience of good neighbourly relations.
Many nominal Muslims have retained from their Quran
classes only some vague generalities about morality, and
they normally go by their own conscience and sensibility
without ever developing the doctrinally prescribed hostility
towards non-Muslims. These good people but had Muslims can
ignore but not change Islamic doctrine. They cannot prevent
the Quranic message of hatred from infecting at least some
of the more sesceptible among their brethren.
There have certainly been situations where sane Muslims
have calmed down their more riotous brethren, and such
individuals do make a real difference. We should not make
the Islamic mistake of judging people simply by their
belonging or not belonging to the Muslim community, rather
than by their human qualities. But the fact remains that
the presence of a doctrine of intolerance as the official
and identity-defining ideology of a community, exerts a
constant pressure tending towards separatism and
confrontation. The alleviating presence of the humanist
factor even within the Muslim community should not be used
to deny the ominous presence of Islamic factor.
"Those who deny history are bound to repeat it": that is
what many critics of Holocaust negationism allege. This
seems slightly exaggerated, though it is of course the well-
wishers of Nazism who practise negationism. In the case of
Islam, it is equally true that negationism is practised by
the well-wishers of that same doctrine which has led to the
crimes against humanity under consideration. While Nazism
is simply too stained to get a second chance, Islam is
certainly in a position to force unbelievers into the zimmi
status (as is happening in dozens of Muslim countries in
varying degrees), and even to wage new jihads, this time
with weapons of mass-destruction. Those who are trying to
close people's eyes to this danger by distorting or
concealing the historical record of Islam are effective
accomplices in the injustice and destruction which Islam is
sure to cause before the time of its dissolution comes.
Therefore, I consider it a duty of all intellectuals to
expose and denounce the phenomenon of negationism whenever
it is practised.
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