Dhimmitude for Hindus

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:31:32 +0100

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Contextualizing Dhimmitude to the Hindu Civilization

By Mahendra Mathur, on 30-06-2009 06:49

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Contextualizing Dhimmitude to the Hindu Civilization

Col. (Ret'd) Mahendra Mathur

Introduction

Prof BAT YE'OR of Brown University 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 7^th century through the present, have acknowledged that all the lands from Portugal to Central Asia that constituted the Muslim 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 Hanafi School 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 a collective, religious obligation (fard 'ala al‑kifaya) binding the community and each individual (fard 'ala al‑ayn) in different 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 10^thc. (d. 966); and Ibn Khaldun in the 14^th 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 11^thc.(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, it will 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.