History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c45.s5: §5. Influence of the Quranic political ideals on the Muslim population.
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c45.s5
- Language
- English
§5. Influence of the Quranic political ideals on the Muslim population.
v3.c45.s5.1
Nor has it been conducive to the true interests of its followers. Muslim polity formed "the faithful" into a body with no other profession than war. As long as there were any fresh lands to conquer and any rich *kafirs* to plunder, all went well with the State.* The dominant body prospered and multiplied rapidly; even arts and industries, literature and painting of a certain type were fostered. But when the tide of Muslim expansion reached its farthest limit and broke in vain on the hills of Assam and Chatgaon, or the arid rocks of Maharashtra, there was nothing to avert a rapid downfall. The State had no economic basis, and was not able to stand a time of peace. Repose was fatal not only to its growth but to its very life.
v3.c45.s5.2
This is the opinion held by the highest exponent of Islamic law in a modern civilized country.
v3.c45.s5.3
∗ "The Arabs lived on the fat of the conquered provinces, and subject peoples served them. Of booty taken in war four-fifths were distributed to the army on the field...And there arose, also, new sources of revenue in the land assessment and poll-tax of conquered countries, the surplus of which, after defraying civil and military charges, became equally with spoils of war patrimony of the Arab nation." (Muir's *Caliphate*, 158.) Elliot, i. 461.
v3.c45.s5.4
For, the cruel kindness of the Government had unfitted the dominant people for avocations of peace and the silent but deadly struggle for existence. Like the Romans of the empire and the Spaniards of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Turks are an essentially military and non-economic people. War is the only trade they have a natural aptitude for, and peace means to them "unemployment," vice and downfall.
v3.c45.s5.5
The settled principle of Islam ended by making the Muslims a privileged class, nourished on State bounties, naturally prone to indolence in peace times and unable to stand on their own legs in the arena of life. Brave and active as the hungry first conquerors were, their sons merely lived on the paternal fiefs without feeling any incentive to exertion, and soon began to look on military service as a hateful tax payable for their lands.* Public office came to be regarded as the birthright of the faithful, and so every inducement to display superior ability or exertion was taken away from them. The enormous areas of land given away by the kings as religious and service grants, nourished thousands of Muslim families in a life of slothful ease, while the natural increase of every succeeding generation turned their competence into deepening squalor. The vast sums* spent by the State in maintaining pauper houses and in scattering alms during Ramzan and other holy days and joyous ceremonies, were a direct premium on laziness. It was more lucrative and comfortable to be a *faqir* at the capital than to earn an honest living as a cultivator, subject to the caprices of the seasons and the worse caprices of the revenue underlings and officials on tour. Thus a lazy and pampered class was created in the empire, who sapped its strength and was the first to suffer when its prosperity was arrested. Wealth bred indolence and love of ease; these soon led to vice; and vice finally brought about poverty and ruin.
v3.c45.s5.6
∗ "The old Shamsi military grantees of land were unfit for service, and never went out [on campaign]. Thirty or forty years had passed...Some of these holders of service lands went leisurely to perform their military duties, but the greater part stayed at home making excuses." When orders were issued by Balban for the enforcement of military service and the resumption of the lands of the infirm, widows and orphans, "a loud outcry arose in every quarter"...and the Sultan withdrew his order! (Elliot, iii. 107-108.)
v3.c45.s5.7
§6. Moral and economic decay of the rulers and of the subject population under Islam.
v3.c45.s5.8
At the same time that the ruling class was placed on an unsound non-economic basis, the treatment of the subject people prevented the full development of the resources of the State by them. When a class of men is publicly depressed and harassed by law and executive caprice alike, it merely contents itself with dragging on an animal existence. With every generous instinct of the soul crushed out of them, with intellectual culture merely adding a keen edge to their sense of humiliation, the Hindus could not be expected to produce the utmost of which they were capable; their lot was to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to their masters, to bring grist to the fiscal mill, to develop a low cunning and flattery as the only means of saving what they could out of the fruits of their own labour. Amidst such social conditions, the human hand and the human mind cannot achieve their best; the human soul cannot soar to its highest pitch. The barrenness of the Hindu intellect and the meanness of spirit of the Hindu upper classes are the greatest condemnation of Muhammadan rule in India. The Islamic political tree, judged by its fruit, was an utter failure.
v3.c45.s5.9
∗ In June 1663, Aurangzib ordered that Rs. 1,49,000 should be spent annually in alms to beggars. This was in addition to what he gave away on his two birthdays, lunar and solar, every year and on other special occasions. *A.N.* 830-831.
v3.c45.s5.10
As a widely travelled and profound modern philosopher writes, "Islam is a religion of absolute surrender and submissiveness to God—but to a God of a certain character—a War-Lord who is entitled to do with us as he will and who bids us stand ever in line of battle against the foe...The ritual of this belief embodies the idea of discipline. When the true believers every day at fixed hours perform their prayers in serried ranks in the mosque, all going through the same gestures at the same moment, this is not, as in Hinduism, done as a method of self-realization, but in the spirit in which the Prussian soldier defiled before his Kaiser. This military basis of Islam explains all the essential virtues of the Musalman. It also explains his fundamental defects—his unprogressiveness, his incapacity to adapt himself, his lack of initiative and invention. The soldier has simply to obey orders. All the rest is the affair of Allah.” (H. Keyserling’s *Travel Diary of a Philosopher*).