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US News
Words into swords
A historical clash of Muslims and Hindus
BY JONAH BLANK
At the turn of the millennium, a fertile flatland watered by five rivers was experiencing a greater cataclysm than any corner of Christendom. The horsemen of this particular apocalypse thundered down from the Afghan mountains, and life on the Indian subcontinent would never be the same.
India had seen many invasions, and the pattern was drearily familiar: Brutal hordes would sweep in from the West, make a nuisance of themselves for a while, and eventually be absorbed into polite society. The Rajput princes who fought the new marauders were themselves descended from barbaric Huns who had burned and pillaged their way down from Central Asia a few centuries earlier. Before them had been Scythians, Greeks, and all sorts of other unwelcome guests. Even the Indo-Europeans, who brought the Vedas, the caste system, and other foundations of Hinduism, were relative newcomers to the neighborhood: 2,500 years earlier they’d supplanted the fading Indus Valley civilization, a literate, technologically advanced culture created by still earlier migrants.
Infinite variety. In the year 1000, the Hindus of India didn’t think of themselves as “Hindus,” and wouldn’t have identified their homeland as “India.” Those words had been coined far away and used from the time of Alexander the Great to describe the people and the lands east of the Indus River. Indeed, the ideas behind those foreign words were equally alien: The inhabitants of the region lived in a mishmash of kingdoms, spoke myriad languages, and worshiped a multiplicity of gods in a boundless variety of ways. As far as religious identity went, the only clear line they drew was between people who recognized the primacy of Vedic scriptures and people who did not.
And people who did not were nothing new. Less than 200 years earlier, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu (the two most widely worshiped Hindu deities, then and now) had wrested political control of many principalities back from Buddhists and Jains. And even before that, India had been home to far more unusual beliefs: Christians, Jews and (more recently) Zoroastrians–people who thought that divinity could assume only one form–had found refuge in towns up and down the western coast for 900 years.
Perhaps the most stubbornly monotheistic newcomers were the Muslims. They’d arrived as merchants in the late seventh century and had made thousands of converts with their radical message of social equality. It was a shocking notion–how could a person who mucked out latrines be considered the equal of a Brahman or a maharajah? The new faith proved attractive to members of the lower castes, but Hindus of all levels felt that as long as everyone continued to perform the tasks laid out in the Code of Manu (the text detailing the ideal Hindu society), it didn’t matter whether they prayed to Krishna, Ganesh–or Allah.
In 997, all of that changed.
The Muslim warlord Mahmud of Ghazni stormed through the Khyber Pass and wreaked devastation through the rich provinces of Punjab and Sindh. His Turkic cavalrymen looted all that lay in their path, desecrating temples and smashing sacred idols in their pious, pitiless iconoclasm. There would be 16 more attacks over the next three decades.
Mahmud’s invasions have shaped the popular image of how Islam penetrated South Asia, but they are only part of the story. It is also true that the Muslim sultans who succeeded him included tolerant princes like Shamsuddin Iltutmish and the great Mughal emperor Akbar. And that the vast majority of South Asian Muslims–who now compose nearly one third of the population of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh–were converted to Islam by the words of missionaries rather than the swords of conquerors.
The spears and scimitars of the first millennium may have given way to the MiGs and Stingers of the second. But to assume from the recent conflict in Kashmir that India’s history is one of continuous religious conflict would be quite wrong. Modern historians like Gyanendra Pandey argue that until the late 19th century, most Indians identified more strongly with their local community than with the faith that their community happened to follow. It is still quite common for Hindus to seek the blessing of Muslim holy men at Sufi shrines throughout India.
Mahmud the Ghaznavid, hacking the heads off worshipers and the icons they worshiped, is an image burned into the collective consciousness of the subcontinent. But while Hindus and Muslims were dying at each others’ hands in the icy mountains above Kargil last month, they were living peacefully, side by side, throughout most of India. The same was true even as Mahmud carried out his bloody depredations, almost exactly 1,000 years before.