Later Mughals v1.c6.s18.23

v1.c6.s18.23

The atrocities of which Banda and his agents were guilty aroused horror in the breasts of the Muhammadans. They forgot too readily, perhaps, that rulers of their own faith had formerly committed equal excesses. But, though the ways of the Muhammadan Government were never gentle in the suppression of rebellion, many generations must have passed since such wholesale and unjustifiable destruction of life and property had been done by them. Warid can only compare the doings of the Sikhs to the cruelties committed by Pharaoh upon the people of Israel, or to the massacres that followed the fall of Jerusalem. Even in those two instances, though the living were destroyed, the dead were spared. But "those infidels," the Sikhs, did not even spare the dead! The descendants of Shah Qamis Qadiri of Sadhaura were summoned before the Guru and told that their only chance of life lay in destroying with their own hands their mosque and the tomb of their ancestor. The wretched men complied. Thereupon the Guru declared that to sweep from the face of the earth men who could destroy their own holy places would be a righteous act, bringing full reward in a future world. He then directed them to be tortured and executed. When the tomb of the saint was dug up, there was no trace of the body to be found beyond a handful of dust. Instances of Muhammadans abandoning their faith were not unknown.* Dindar Khan, a man belonging to the neighbourhood of Sarhind, joined the false Guru and assumed the name of Dindar Singh ; while Mir Nasir-ud-din, the imperial news-writer of Sarhind, became known as Mir Nasir Singh, a curious and incongruous combination of titles.