Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India c10.s8: 6.8. Iconoclasm

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India c10.s8

Language: English

6.8. Iconoclasm

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Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam. Iconoclasm derives its justification from the Quranic revelations and the Prophet's Sunnah or practice. Muhammad had himself destroyed temples in Arabia and so had set an example for his followers. In return the *mujahid*, or fighter of jihad, is promised handsome rewards in this world as well as in the world to come. Because of early successes at home, Islam developed a full-fledged theory of iconoclasm.⁹⁷ India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the *Story of Civilization* that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s.

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Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on *Hindu Temples: What happened to them*.⁹⁸ These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.

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*Hindu Retaliation*

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Sometimes the Hindus have also retaliated. just as the Hindus do not believe in converting people of other faiths to Hinduism, yet, when Muslim proselytization continued unabated, Hindus also retaliated, although in a token way, by reconverting and taking back into Hinduism those who had fallen a prey to Muslim spree of conversion. In the same way Hindus do not desecrate or break the shrines of peoples of other faiths. But when Muslim vandalism got beyond Hindu patience, they also reconverted some Hindu temples which had been turned into mosques by Muslim invaders and rulers. But while the Muslims convert Hindus openly, punishment for renouncing Islam is death. Similarly, while the shrines of non-Muslims are regularly destroyed, non-Muslims cannot reclaim their desecrated temples. This is the law of Islam. Hindus are not bound by it. Muslims razed the temple of Somnath repeatedly; the Hindus rebuilt it again and again, so that the present majestic temple built after Independence is the seventh in the series. Similar is the attachment of Hindus to the temples of Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi. The Babri structure at Ayodhya was built by Babur with the debris of a Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Ram. The Hindus destroyed the Muslim structure on 6 December 1992 and reclaimed the site of the temple. The interesting part of the story is that not a day passes without some remark made about the demolition of the Ayodhya structure in 1992, particularly by Muslim secularists and Hindu Marxists and "intelligentsia". But Ayodhya is not the first act of people's reaction against the desecration of their shrines. Muslim armies of Delhi attacked Gujarat in 1299, and again sacked the temple of Somnath. They looted the opulent city of Anhilvara and sacked a number of monasteries, palaces and temples in Asavalli, Vanmanthali, Surat, Dholka and Khambayat. The Gujaratis could not forget or forgive this vandalism. 40,000 brave Dalit Barwaris from Gujarat arrived in Delhi over the years and sacked the main mosque in Siri in Delhi in 1320 under the rule of Sultan Nasiruddin Khusrau, a half-convert. Idol worship was started inside the palace and mosque. Copies of the Quran were tom to pieces and used as seats for idols which were placed in the *mehrabs* (niches) of the mosques, and the slaughter of cows was forbidden.⁹⁹ The Barwaris had known Muslim invader and rulers breaking temples, burning their religious books, and enslaving their women and children. The Barwaris paid them back in their own coin. They say "revenge is a kind of wild justice". And there are many more such examples of which only a few may be mentioned here. When Sher Shah conquered and occupied Jodhpur, the temple in the fort was converted into a mosque. There was retaliation and when the mosque was taken back by Hindus, they prevented the reading of Friday prayers there.¹⁰⁰ Temples were freely destroyed under Firoz Tughlaq and Sikandar Lodi. In return Rana Kumbha also claims to have broken a mosque.¹⁰¹ Medini Rai in Malwa turned some Muslim women into slave girls,¹⁰² a practice freely indulged in by Muslims in regard to Hindu women.

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Those who cannot forget 6 December 1992, should also remember another date, 9 April 1669. On this day Aurangzeb issued a general order "to demolish all schools and temples of the infidels and to put down their religious teaching and practice". Much vandalism had preceded this order and reckless destruction of shrines followed.

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During Aurangzeb's reign temples were desecrated and destroyed everywhere; 235 temples were destroyed in Rajasthan alone. This enraged Bhim, the younger son of the Rana of Udaipur, who retaliated by attacking Ahmadnagar and demolishing many mosques there.¹⁰³ Temples in Mathura and Kashi were destroyed by orders of Aurangzeb and mosques built in their stead. The Satnamis, the Jats, Marathas and Sikhs struck back against this fanaticism by destroying mosques at many places when they gathered strength.

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Recent events about Ayodhya are well-known. Long before the structure was pulled down, Muslims in Bangladesh had destroyed more than 200 temples in November 1989 (reacting against the *Shilanyas* at Ayodhya). In November 1990 another 50 temples were razed or burnt, not to mention about the women raped and men killed. So also was done in Pakistan. The Kashmir Samiti has produced a report titled *Riots in Kashmir*, listing 85 temples destroyed, and claiming that 550 people had been killed in the Islamic purification campaign in 1990.¹⁰⁴ And still many Muslims and some Hindu "intellectuals" make a hell of a noise about Ayodhya. Hindu religion and scriptures do not permit, much less 'advocate' desecration of the religious places of other peoples. But there is a limit to forbearance. Destruction of the shrines of other faiths cannot for ever remain a one way traffic.

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But Hindu fear of Muslim iconoclasm still remains. A thousand years of aggression and terror cannot be easily erased. While many Hindus are happy at the achievements of *Karsevaks* in eliminating centuries old humiliation at Ayodhya, they do not exhibit any bravado about it. Contrast it with the assertion of Taliban in Afghanistan. They openly declared recently that they would destroy the statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan. On the other hand in India many Hindu leaders plead that the destruction of the Babri structure was unfortunate, that they do not know who did it. In this context they mention the letter of Mr. "un Singh dated 1 December 1992 addressed to Mr. S. Rajgopal, Cabinet Secretary, which says: "There is indication that some agent provocateurs from Pakistan have been able to infiltrate into Ayodhya and would try to damage the Babri masjid if the VHP *Karsevaks* fail in their mission to do the same. The resulting civil strife as consequence of this event is what Pakistan would very much like to happen."¹⁰⁵ The credit due to Karsevaks is thus tried to be snatched away by the fear in the Hindu intelligentsia generated by centuries of iconoclastic oppression of Islam. Those who approved of the destruction of Babri structure and reclamation of their holy Ram Lala temple, should be obliged to Pakistan if it repeated Ayodhya in Mathura and Kashi also and helped them in not soiling their hands by repeating such "unfortunate" acts in Mathura and Varanasi also. Such disordered thinking cannot be sustained. As has been repeatedly said, all history is contemporary. It is not possible to forget 9 April 1669 because it is 'remote past' and . continue to be apologetic about 6 December 1992 because it is 'immediate past'. Nothing is past. These two dates are just two points on the eternity of Time in which action and reaction go on and on in the course of our history.

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¹ Quran, Surah 98, ayat 6; 25:52; 9:14; 68:40, 69-74; 22:19-22

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² Quran, Surah 55, ayats 47-77; 12:36; 52:17-24.

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³ These conditions are reproduced in many books, e.g., Zakhiratul-Mulk by Shaikh Hamdani quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958, pp. 489-90; The Delhi Sultanate, R.C. Majumdar (ed.), Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1960, pp. 618-20.

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⁴ Quran, Surah 4, ayat 144; 5:51.

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⁵ Quran, Surah 2, ayat 221.

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⁶ "Focus on Muslim appeasement", Times of India, 24 January 1994.

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⁷ "Harassed minorities in Bangladesh", by Saradindu Mukherjee, The Times of India, New Delhi, 15 November 1994.

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⁸ Mashriqi Awaz, New Delhi, 2 March 1995. Also Myths of Composite Culture, New Delhi, 1991.

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⁹ "Indian Secularism X-rayed", Indian Express, 2 January 1991.

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¹⁰ Surah 4, ayat 34.

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¹¹ 33:59

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¹² 24:30-31, also 33:35.

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¹³ Surah 24, ayat 2231. Sunan Ibn Daud, vol. II, pp. 155-63; Sahib Muslim, vol. II, part 3, p. 55.

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¹⁴ Ibn Majah, vol. I, pp. 552-53, ahadis 2053-56; Tirmizi, vol. I, pp. 428-31.

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15 E.g. Ibn Majah, vol. II, pp. 489-91, ahadis 1796-1801.

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16 Hitti, The Arabs, p. 59; Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, p. 168

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17 Ram Swarup, Woman in Islam, pp. 3-4, 20, 21.

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18 Ibid, p. 3.

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19 Ibn Warraq, op. cit., p. 293.

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20 Times of India, New Delhi, 20 October and 1 November, 1994.

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21 Ibid., New Delhi, 30 March, 1995.

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22 Ibid., Saturday Interview, New Delhi, 30 November 1996.

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23 Ibid., Briefs, New Delhi, 22.11.93.

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24 Amulya Ganguli, "Bigotry in Islam: The silent majority's surrender", Ibid., New Delhi, 3 January 1994.

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25 Surah 2, ayat 228.

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26 Times of India, 'Saturday Interview', New Delhi, 30 November 1996

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27 Ibid., New Delhi, 23 June 1997.

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28 Rakesh Bhatnagar, "Legal View", The Times of India, New Delhi, 4 March 1997.

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29 The Shah Bano case is known to all. "Talat Parveen is an educated, fairly westernised medical practitioner living in Delhi. Attractive and successful at the age of 22, she is already a divorcee. The reason: her former husband pronounced the three deadly words which Muslim women have come to dread: Talaq, talaq, talaq; without weighing the spin-off, her husband had annulled the marriage without any ceremony. Unfortunately for the woman her cause did not have many backers. The Ulema sided with the husband interpreting the holy book in their own way. That left the woman no option but to sound the court. It was here that a young Delhi High Court lawyer M. Aytab Siddiqui came to her rescue, and after a short legal battle, he ensured that Parveen's maintenance, at least until the birth of her child, would be the responsibility of her husband. This is one of the cases that the Indian courts are tackling, and it remains at best the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is far below. In this particular case, the woman was aware enough and had some support from her immediate family. In a majority of cases, divorced women have nowhere to go." A fatwa issued by the Jamat-i-Ahl-i-Hadis which includes members from the Muslim Law Board and All India Milli Council, has challenged the traditional preserve of the mullah, and proclaimed that pronouncement of talaq thrice in a row would be considered only a single talaq.

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³⁰ Kumkum Chadha's article entitled "War of Veils in Middle East" in The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 7 October 1995.

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³¹ "Around the world" column in The Times of India, New Delhi, 28 October' 97.

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³² "Veiled, yet free to let their hair-down", The Times of India, New Delhi, 5 November 1997.

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³³ Muzaffar Hussain in "Islamic atrocities on Women". Organiser, New Delhi, 16 July 1995.

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³⁴ Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, cited in "Crime or Punishment?" (in Pakistan), by Anwar Azeem, The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 8 February, 1988. Also Review by Seema Alavi in the Indian Express, 28 May 1995.

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³⁵ Zafar Jung, "Women in Islam", The Times of India, New Delhi, 25 August 1994.

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³⁶ As reported in The Times of India, New Delhi, 18 March 1997.

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37 MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) has informed in a note dated 27.4.1993 (received on 28.4.1993) that the amount is Rs.5.33 crores as intimated to them by the Department of Shipping.

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38 Lok Sabha Secretariat, New Delhi, April 1993, pp. 4, 8-9.

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39 The above piece has been summarised from Rakesh Bhatnagar's reports in The Times of India, New Delhi, 18 December 1995 and 15 January 1996.

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40 See my Twilight of the Sultanate, p. 187.

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41 The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 24 September 1996.

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42 Ibn Battuta, p. 75.

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43 Summarized from Organiser, 9 March 1997, p. 12.

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44 "Heresy and History", interview with Pakistani historian Mubarak Ali, Indian Express, Sunday Magazine, 6 February 1994.

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45 Sahara Samachar, Lucknow, 7 November 1994. Also the Indian Express.

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46 Jansatta, Lucknow, 23 November, 1994.

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47 The Times of India, New Delhi, 7 May 1997.

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48 Nadwa ka Sacch, pp. 13-14.

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49 Nadwa ka Sacch, All Mian's phone calls to foreign countries p. 35, Bomb blasts in Delhi p. 43, Nadwa raid pp. 57-59, Muslims active in U.P. p. 77, Foreign reaction on Nadwa, pp. 90-92, 100.

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50 The Times of India, Ahmedabad, 2 December 1994.

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51 Abu Daud, vol. II, p. 281; Mishkat, vol. II, pp. 34-35.

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52 The Times of India, New Delhi, 20 August 1997.

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⁵³ "The holy war within the self" by Asghar All Engineer in The Times of India, New Delhi, 1 October 1997. This is restated in another article by Engineer entitled "The multiple paths of faith", The Times of India, New Delhi, 16 February 1998.

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⁵⁴ P.M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Muin-al-din Chishti of Ajmer, Oxford, Delhi, 1989, pp. 1-19, 66-96.

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⁵⁵ Richard Maxwell Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, Princeton, 1978, particularly the chapter titled "Sufi Warriors".

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⁵⁶ The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, under "Meditations", 17 November 1997.

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⁵⁷ Wahiduddin Khan, Tabligh Movement, Al Risala Books, The Islamic Centre, New Delhi, second reprint, 1994, p. 55, cited in Time For Stock Taking, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1997, p. 430.

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⁵⁸ The Hindustan Times, 17 November 1997.

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⁵⁹ "Discourses on Religion and Philosophy" in The Times of India, New Delhi, 4 September, 1997.

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⁶⁰ Sahib Bukhari, vol. II, p. 495, hadis 1127 and p. 706, hadis 1588. Bukhari gives the details of all expeditions in Kitab-ul-Maghazi, vol. II, pp. 495-706; Sahih Muslim, vol. III, part 5, p. 105.

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⁶¹ Eg. Ibn Majah, vol. II, p. 109, hadis 337; Sahih Muslim, vol. III, part 5, p.72.

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⁶² In "Distorted facts", in a letter to the Editor, The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 14 November 1997. Zafar Jung's articles and letters themselves are full of distorted facts.

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⁶³ M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims, pp. 21-22.

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⁶⁴ This has been done by me for some centuries - as samples. See my Indian Muslims: Who are they. pp. 8-14.

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⁶⁵ See, my Growth of Scheduled Tribes and Castes in Medieval India.

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⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 72-99.

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⁶⁷ By M. Titus, S.A.A. Rizvi, Mohammad Habib and others. For details see my Indian Muslim: Who are they, pp. 92-95.

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⁶⁸ Bribe was given for making converts from the very beginning of Islam. For example, Nasai, vol. II, pp. 176-77, hadis 2582.

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⁶⁹ Jan Knappert, cited in Time For Stock Taking, pp. 339-40.

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⁷⁰ The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 28 December 1997.

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⁷¹ Bantam Books, Canada and USA, 1980. It was translated from Persian into French in 1979 and from French into English in 1980 and carries an introduction by Clive Irving.

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⁷² Nine years have passed since the fatwa (religious ruling) was issued by Iran's late spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini months before his death. The fatwa condemned Salman Rushdie to death for alleged blasphemy against Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. It said that any Muslim in a position to kill the author had a duty to do so. After this many rewards were announced for the killing. On its ninth anniversary the British Foreign Secretary wrote to the Government of Iran for revocation of the fatwa. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mahmoud Mohammadi said a fatwa issued by a supreme religious jurisprudent is irrevocable and will remain so throughout history, The Times of India, New Delhi, 16 February 1998.

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⁷³ This anonymous letter from Pakistan was published in London's Observer newspaper and has been quoted by Professor Daniel Pipes of Harvard University in his review of Ibn Warraq's book Why I Am Not A Muslim published in The Weekly Standard of New York dated 22 January 1996. See in Time For Stock Taking, p. 311.

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74 In an interview published in The Times of India, New Delhi, 29 October 1997.

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75 Sahih Muslim, vol. I, pp. 106, 125, 135.

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76 Sahih Muslim, vol. II, part 4, pp. 299-30, 307. Bukhari, vol. I, p. 567, hadis 1406, also p. 636, hadis 1623; Nasai, vol. II, p. 193, hadis 263.

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77 Fatima Merrissi, op. cit.

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78 Bukhari, vol. I, pp. 103-4, 145, 511, hadis 1257.

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79 Sahih Muslim, vol. I, part I, Kitab-ul-Iman, pp. 244-45. Also Bukhari, vol. I, p. 677, hadis 1749.

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80 Manzur-ul-Haqq Siddiqi, Massir-ul-Jadad, published by al-Maktaba al-Saifia, Shish Mahal Road, Lahore, 1964, pp. 94-115, esp. pp. 98, 106. Muhammad Abul Shakur, Aslah-i-Mewat, Sadar Bazar, Delhi, 1925, pp. 23, 35-40. Also see K.C. Yadav, "Urdu Sahityakaron ki Haryanvi ko den", in Harigandha, September-October, 1989, pp. 26-28, for similar literature.

Cites (5)

تحفة النظار في غرائب الأمصار وعجائب الأسفار — Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Arabic
الجامع الصحيح — Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī, Arabic
السنن الصغرى — Aḥmad b. Shuʿayb al-Nasāʾī, Arabic
Tārīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī — Shams-i Sirāj ʿAfīf, Persian
Tārīkh-i Mubārakshāhī — Yaḥyā b. Aḥmad Sirhindī