Contextualizing Dhimmitude to the
Hindu Civilization
Col. (Ret'd) Mahendra
Mathur
Introduction
Prof BAT
YE'OR
of BrownUniversity calls dhimmitude
the comprehensive legal system established by the Muslim conquerors to rule the
native non-Muslim populations subdued by jihad wars. What follows is his
explanation of dhimmitude and jihad.
Dhimmitude
The
dhimmie condition can only be understood in the context of jihad
because it originates from this ideology. Muslim, as well as non-Muslim
scholars, from the 7th century through the present, have acknowledged
that all the lands from Portugal to Central
Asia
that constituted theMuslim Empires were conquered by Muslim armies.
These vast territories were neither populated by Arabs - except in specific
regions bordering the deserts - nor by Muslims. Around the Mediterranean, the population
was Christian and Jewish. Along with other religious groups, Jews and
Christians also lived in Iraq, Persia, and Arabia.
Beginning
in the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim theologians and jurists endeavored to
give to the jihad - a war of conquest - a religious and legal structure.
Living during and after the great wave of Arab-Muslim expansion on mainly
Christian lands, they built their theory of jihad on their
interpretations of the Koran and the hadiths (the sayings and acts
attributed to the prophet Muhammad). Thus they elaborated the concept and
doctrine of jihad that established the relationship between Muslims and
non-Muslims in terms of belligerency, temporary armistices, or submission. The
aims, tactics and strategies of jihad were defined, as well as the
specific rules concerning the troops, the compulsory conditions for treaties,
the treatment of prisoners, and the division of the booty. This
conceptualization of war led to a considerable literature that constituted the
classical doctrine of jihad, which was fixed, from the mid-eighth century
onward, in comprehensive theological and legal treatises.
The rules
of dhimmitude were elaborated from the Koran, the hadiths and the
biographies on the Prophet. Those laws and their religious justification were
taught throughout the Islamic Empires. Despite some differences in the four
schools of Islamic Sunni jurisprudence, there is a quasi unanimity in matters
concerning the shimmies. The fundamental rulings relevant to them were
established quite early. We read of them extensively in Abu Yusuf (731-98), a
follower of Abu Hanifa (d. 767) the founder of the HanafiSchool of
jurisprudence.
Jihad
The
ideology, strategy and tactics of jihad constitute a most important part
of Islamic jurisprudence and literature. Muslim theologians expounded that
jihad is acollective, religious obligation (fard 'ala
al‑kifaya) binding the community and each individual (fard 'ala al‑ayn)
indifferent ways according to situations and circumstances. Here are
two definitions of jihad by recognized authorities: Abu Muhammad
Abdallah Ibn Abi Zayd al‑Qayrawani in the 10thc. (d. 966); and
Ibn Khaldun in the 14th c.(d. 1406).
Ibn Abi Zayd
al-Qayrawani wrote: "Jihad
is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may
dispense others from it. We Malikis [one of the four schools of Muslim
jurisprudence] maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the
enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except
where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to
Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared
against them.
And Ibn
Khaldun: "In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because
of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert
everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by
force.
One may
ask: Who are the enemies? Here is a definition from al-Mawardi, the great jurist
in Baghdad in the
11thc.(d. 1058). "The mushrikun (infidels) of Dar al-Harb (region
of war) are of two types:
First, those whom the call of Islam has
reached, but they have refused it and have taken up arms. The amir of the army
has the option of fighting them in one of two ways that is in accordance with
what he judges to be in the best interest of the Muslims and most harmful to the
mushrikun: the first, to harry them from their houses and to inflict damage on
them day and night, by fighting and burning, or else to declare war and combat
them in ranks;
"Second, those whom the invitation to
Islam has not reached, although such persons are few nowadays (.....)If they
still refuse to accept after this, war is waged against them and they are
treated as those whom the call has reached."
Jihad may be exercised
by pen, speech or money. The 'enemies' are those who oppose the establishment of
Islamic law and its sovereignty over their lands. The world of infidels is
considered as one entity. It is called the dar al‑harb (region of war)
until, through jihad, itwill come under Islamic rule. The war
between the region of Islam (dar al‑Islam) and the region of war is
supposed to last so long as unbelief exists. According to Mawardi, the Muslim
"should give battle with the intention of supporting the deen [religion] of
Allah ... and of destroying any other deen which is in opposition to it:
"so as to render it victorious over all [other] deen even if the mushrikun
detest it." (Koran 9:33)
Mohammedan Conquest of
India
Will
Durant, the famous historian summed it up like this: "The Mohammedan 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 thing, whose delicate
complex of order and liberty, culture and peace, may at any time be overthrown
by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."
The first
Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western
Punjab (664 A.D.).
Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next
three centuries, with the result that the Moslems established themselves in
the Indus valley about the
same time that their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle
of Tours (732 A.D.) for
the mastery of Europe.
In the
year 997 a Turkish chieftan by the name of Mahmud became of Sultan of the little
state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that
his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the
border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. He met the unprepared
Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their
temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. . . . . Each
winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his
treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and
kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on
the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious
stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry;
he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged
that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of 200
years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naptha and burnt to the ground. Six
years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed
all its 50,000 inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he
became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he
spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as
slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no
one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every
important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon
his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years
and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time and
one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.
Seeing the canonization that
success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by
his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the
Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of
Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its
palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi - - - an alien despotism fastened
upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and
revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal
specimen of his kind - fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the
Mohammedan historian tells us, "were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his
slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands."In one victory
of this warrior 50,000 men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain
became black as pitch with Hindus." Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and
brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins,
stuffing these with straw and hanging them from the gates of Delhi.
Sultan
Muhammed bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great
scholar and an elegant writer. dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek
philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh
of a rebel nephew to the rebel's wife and children, ruined the country with
reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the
inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a
Moslem historian, "there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his
Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and
executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging" the victims "and
putting them to death in crowds." ... Sultan Ahmed Shah feasted for three days
whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day
reached twenty thousand.
Koenraad Elst , the German historian writes in
"Negation in India": 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 that the Indian
(subcontinent) population decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of
Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of
Delhi Sultanate)..
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.
Dhimmitude for the
Hindus
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 (or shimmies - protected ones) living under
humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya (toleration tax)
from them. Normally the dhimmi 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).
Treatment of Hindus by Muslim
Conquerors
What
follow are the extracts from writings by Historian Jadunath Sarkar in
1950.The temples of the Hindus often served as seats
of learning besides being scenes of religious worship. The late Sister Nivedita
never wearied in her praise of the vast temples of South
India
as exactly like the Cathedral closes of medieval England. Here in, the
many cloisters running along the inside of the boundary walls, the young
students lived and studied and they joined in the arati in the evening. To
strike at the great temples was to strike at the roots of Hindu learning through
Sanskrit, then the only vehicle of higher education. Instances are on record of
Hindu teachers and preachers being put to death by Firuz Shah, Aurangzib and
other pious Muslim sovereigns - who are still extolled as model rulers of the
theocracy. In Aurangzeb's letters collected by his "disciple" and "secretary"
Inayetullah Khan, we find one that states: "The temple of Somnath was demolished
early in my reign and idol-worship there put down. It is not known what the
state of things there is at present. If the idolaters have again taken to the
worship of images, then destroy the temple in such a way that no trace of the
building may be left." On 9th April
1669,
he issued a general order to the governors of all the provinces of his Empire to
demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and to put down strongly their
teaching and religious practices. A Persian report, written from Delhi and
preserved among the state records of Jaipur, tells us that Aurangzib had sent an
order to the ever-loyal Raja of Jaipur to demolish a large number of temples in
his dominions, and when His Majesty read the Muhtasib's report that the order
had been faithfully carried out, he cried out in admiration, "Ah, he (i.e. Raja
Ram Singh Kachhwa) is a khanazad, i.e., a hereditary loyal slave." And a
hereditary loyal slave he indeed was. After all Jaipur had provided a Hindu
princess (Jodhabai) to Aurangzeb's great-grandfather, Akbar.
The
Emperor Aurangzib (reign 1658-1707) was an orthodox Hanafi Sunni sovereign and
the political exemplar of Mohammedan writers, past and present. Every regulation
of his Government was determined like that of Firuz Tughlaq and Sikandar Lodi -
by the letter of the Quranic law. He reimposed the jizya or tax per head on the
Hindus. The Quran (IX, 29) calls upon the Muslims "to fight those who do not
profess the true faith, till they pay jizya with the hand in humility (ham
sagkhirun)." This was a poll-tax payable by Hindus (and also Christians) for
permission to live in their ancestral homes under a Muslim sovereign. The object
of Aurangzib in imposing it (by a decree operating from 2nd April,
1679), was "to spread
Islam and depress the infidel faith" as his own Secretary words it. The Italian
traveler Nicholo Manucci at the very time noted this fact: he writes, "Many
Hindus, who were unable to pay turned Muslim to obtain relief from the insults
of the tax-collectors, Aurangzib rejoices that by such exactions these Hindus
will be forced into embracing the Mohammedan faith."
In
addition to the obligation to pay this poll-tax, the Hindu was subjected to many
disabilities by the very constitution of the Muslim theocracy. He must
distinguish himself from the Muslims by wearing a humble dress, and sometimes
adding a label of a certain colour to his coat. He must not ride on horse-back
or carry arms - though wearing the sword was a necessary part of the dress of
every gentleman of that age. He must show a generally respectful attitude
towards Muslims - "Natives must salam every sahib they meet on the road." The
Hindu was also under certain legal disabilities in giving testimony in law
courts, protection under the criminal law, and in marriage. Finally, in the
exercise of his religion he must avoid any publicity that may rouse the wrath of
the followers of the Prophet.
Of the
forcible abduction of Hindu women by powerful grandees and even by Nawabs, which
went unpunished and was not even treated as "cognisable" by the then police and
judiciary, examples are frequent in the histories and travel-reports of that
time. It will be enough to say here that the French Chief of Chandemagore, M.
Jean Law, who came to fight the English for Siraj-ud-daula, but arrived too late
(after Plassey had been fought), tells in his Memoire that the young nawab used
to ride to any village where his servants reported the existence of a beautiful
young woman, and then get her abducted and placed in his harem. This was in
1757.
About the
same time Shuja-ud-daula, the Nawab Wazir of Lucknow, took a fancy on a young
Khatri virgin whom he had seen during his ride, and after getting her abducted
by his servile tools and ruining her turned her out of his harem. The story is
told without any blush by the historian of his house, Sayyid Ghulam Ali Naqavi
in his Imad-us-Sadat.
The worst
mischief done by the dominance of Islam in the state was its reaction in
brutalising the Hindu character. Hinduism in many places lost its liberal
tolerant character, which sees God in every being and admits that every
religion, if sincerely practiced, will lead to salvation. "Just as the water of
the Ganges, flowing through a hundred mouths, all enters the ocean, so the
different paths of salvation prescribed by the different scriptures of the world
all lead to God." (Kalidas). Hindus now learnt to retaliate and pay the ruling
bigots in their own coins. The Jaipur Raja (bout 1660-100) reconverted some
former Hindus from Islam by Shuddhi. Shivaji's general Netaji Balkar had been
forced by Aurangzib in 1646 to embrace Islam as Muhammad QuIi, but in 1676 the
great Maratha king "made him Hindu again by Prayashchitta." When the pealing of
conches in Hindu temples was obstructed, a Rajput raja forbade the chanting of
the Azan or the Muslim call to prayer. One jizya-collector's beard were plucked
in Berar, another of these harsh officers was beaten to death in Rutlam. The
Sikhs retaliated for the desecration of their temple by the Muslims and the
slaying of cows in Amritsar (1762): when they returned in full force they
compelled their Muslim prisoners to work in chains under the lash and cleanse
the temple and wash the ground with hog's blood.
A Path for Hindus to counter
Dhimmitude
For a
thousand years have Hindus suffered from Muslims in a one-way battle. Even in
present times we have seen Hindus and Sikhs paying Jizya in Pakistan and Hindus
driven away from their homes in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. Time has come
to make it a two-way street. Unless Pakistan becomes a secular state, India
should become a non-Muslim state where Muslims are treated in the same way as
Hindus in Pakistan. And in India if the terrorists attack Hindus, then they
should be dealt with as they were in Gujrat in the year 2002. If Muslim clergy
insists on teaching unedited Quran in Madarsas the Hindu children should be
taught to treat Muslims in the way the Quran teaches to treat ‘non-believers'.
For example, take this cerse of Quran: Then, when the
sacred months have passed, slay the pagans wherever you find them-take them
[captive], besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent
and establish worship and pay the poor-due [i.e. submit to Islam], then leave
their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful (K 9:5). A new Hindu text
should say: Then, when the
sacred months have passed, slay the Muslims wherever you find them-take them
[captive], besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent
and establish worship and pay the poor-due [i.e. submit to Hinduism], then leave
their way free.
Training
in self-defense, history of Mohammedan sword in India and pride in Hinduism
should be made compulsory for all Hindu children. Revenge for any injustice to
Hindus anywhere should be swift.
Finally.
Since Hindus are forever in the crosswires of Pakistan the Indian Government
should exploit its present weakness: its ethnic, regional and tribal disunity.
She should provide support to Baluch, Sindhi, and Northwestern tribal
separatists - support of the kind that Islamabad has been giving to
Kashmiri jihadists for decades. Once Pakistan disintegrates it would be a better
and safer world. It can be done and it should be done.
