The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c12.s3.2

c12.s3.2

Impatient of delay, Muslim invaders, conquerors and kings openly and unscrupulously converted people to Islam by force. Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sind in C.E. 712. Whatever place he captured like Alor, Nirun, Debal, Sawandari, Kiraj, and Multan, therein he forcibly converted people to Islam. Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded Hindustan seventeen times, and every time he came he converted people from Peshawar to Mathura and Kashmir to Somnath. Such was the insistence on the conversion of the vanquished Hindu princes that many rulers just fled before Mahmud even without giving a battle.¹⁴ Al Qazwini writes in his *Asar-ul-Bilad* that when Mahmud went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath, in the hope that the Hindus would then become Muhammadans.¹⁵ The exploits of Mahmud Ghaznavi in the field of forced proselytization were cherished for long. His example was presented as the model before all good Muslim rulers, as early as the fourteenth century by Ziyauddin Barani in his *Fatawa-i-Jahandari* and as late as the close of the eighteenth century by Muhammad Aslam in his *Farhat-un-Nazirin*.¹⁶ There were forcible conversion both during the war and in peace. Sikandar Butshikan in Kashmir to Tipu Sultan in Mysore, Mahmud Beghara in Gujarat to Jalaluddin Muhammad in Bengal, all Muslim rulers carried on large-scale forcible conversions through *jihad*.