The world famous historian, Will Durant has written in his Story of Civilisation that "the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history".

India before the advent of Islamic imperialism was not exactly a zone of peace. There were plenty of wars fought by Hindu princes. But in all their wars, the Hindus had observed some time-honoured conventions sanctioned by the Sastras. The Brahmins and the Bhikshus were never molested. The cows were never killed. The temples were never touched. The chastity of women was never violated. The non-combatants were never killed or captured. A human habitation was never attacked unless it was a fort. The civil population was never plundered. War booty was an unknown item in the calculations of conquerors. The martial classes who clashed, mostly in open spaces, had a code of honor. Sacrifice of honor for victory or material gain was deemed as worse than death.

Islamic imperialism came with a different code--the Sunnah of the Prophet. It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special attention in mass murders of non-combatants. The temples and monasteries were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the booty looted even from the bodies of the dead, was a measure of the success of a military mission. And they did all this as mujahids (holy warriors) and ghazls (kafir-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet.

This week I received an email from an Indian listener with an interesting perspective on the Pope's comments about Islam.


'If Muslims around the world are claiming hurt or insult at the Pope's comments about the sword being used to spread religion in mediaeval times, then how should Hindu Indians react to what happened to their culture in the name of true religion?


'This is what the American historian Will Durant wrote in his first volume of The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage, published in 1935:'


(And of course this was before the Second World War and Maoist China)


"The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precarious thing. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride, the slaughter of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam between 800 AD and 1700 AD."


'Just imagine putting up with a 9/11-style event every decade for a few hundred years, and you get a sense of why many Hindus are not surprised at all by the latest jihad activities. They have seen it all before.


'When the Hindus made their last big stand at Vijayanagar in the 16th century, local Muslim historians themselves recorded how it took five months to destroy all the kingdom's sculpture and art. They described how, loaded up with loot and slaves, the Muslim armies marched home proclaiming that there was not a breathing creature either man or beast, left in a 50 miles radius of Vijayanagar.'


(And he concludes) 'Perhaps the Hindus also deserve an apology.'

http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/modern/moghal_atro.html

Quote:

rotflmao

seems to be a typical Muslim response...  blame or distract by blaming someone else for something.  Anything.

Actual sunnah of war actually doesn't allow damage to civilians or their property