The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.5.1

v3.c30.5.1

By the close of the twelfth century, then, when the Muslims established their power permanently in India, it was no longer a case of their having to be tutored by their new subjects in the art of building; they themselves were already possessed of a highly-developed architecture of their own, as varied and magnificent as the contemporary architecture of Christian Europe; and the Muslims, moreover, who conquered India—men of Afghān, Persian and Turkī blood—were endowed with remarkably good taste and a natural talent for building. The picture that some writers have drawn of them as wild and semi-barbarous hill-men descending on an ancient and vastly superior civilisation, is far from the truth. That they were brutal fighters, without any of the chivalry, for example, of the Rājputs, and that they were capable of acts of savagery and gross intemperance, may be conceded. But these were vices common in those ages to most Asiatic nations and did not preclude them any more than they had precluded the Ghaznavids from participating in the prevalent culture and arts of Islam. Qutb-ud-dīn Aibak was ruthless enough to enslave *en masse* the population of Kālinjar, but he also had the genius and imagination to create a mosque as superb as any in Islam; and though ‘Alā-ud-dīn Khaljī slaughtered thousands of Mongols in cold blood at Delhi, he was the author of buildings of unexampled grace and nobility.