Indian Muslims: Who Are They c5.s6.13

c5.s6.13

In this strife, the foreign Muslims had an edge. They were closer to the sultan and wielded influence with him. They were ever doing research on the ancestry of Indian Muslim officers, and informing the king about their origins and genealogy with a view to denigrating them and attempting at the removal of those who had infiltrated into it. Ziyauddin Barani derives a cynical pleasure in writing about the exclusion and expulsion of low-born Muslims from state employment. He says that Iltutmish dismissed thirtythree persons from government service by one stroke of the pen on account of their low birth. He also writes that the Vazir Nizamul Mulk Junaidi had appointed one Jamal Marzuq as the *Mutsarrif* (Superintendent) of Kannauj. The sultan not only cancelled the appointment of Marzuq, he even went into the antecedents of Nizamul Mulk himself on the representation of Malik Qutbuddin Hasan the Barbak and Malik Izzuddin Salari the Vali-i-Dar, who had some personal score to settle with the Vazir. Nizamul Mulk is highly praised by Muhammad Ufi, who dedicates his book the *Jami-ul-Hikayat* to the Vazir. This shows that he was high born. But it was not difficult for vested interests to prove that the Vazirs grandfather had descended from the *julaha* class. It is said that the latter lost the confidence of the sultan. But not his office. Obviously, the sultan dared not remove him. Barani wrongly writes that no Indian Muslim could be retained on an *iqta* or appointed to the post of *khwajgi*, *mutsarrifi* or *Mir Muharriri*. It is true that Balban also made detailed enquiries about the families of all his officers. He refused to grant audience to a low-born officer (*Amir-i-Bazariyan*) for granting him an interview would reduce the status of the king in the eyes of the common people and diminish the prestige of the throne,⁹⁴ and removed one Kamal Maiyher from the *khwajgi* of Amroha. The situation never changed, and Francois Bernier, late in the seventeenth century, talks of originally real Mongols, White men, foreigners. He also says that children of the third and fourth generation, who have the brown complexion... are held in much less respect than new comers, and are seldom invested with official situations: they consider themselves happy, if permitted to serve as private soldiers in the infantry or cavalry.⁹⁵