Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (An appraisal of Islam 'n India)

The Number Game

"If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen."

Well, this fascinating proposition of Maryam Jameelah in Islam and Orientalism, Adam Publishers, New Delhi, would deserve the indulgence of any historian.

It might be so that even as man's strengths could debilitate him at times, his weaknesses might become blessings in disguise for him, something akin to the Shakespearean assertion that "virtue itself turns vice being misapplied and vice sometime by action dignified." This paradoxical mirror effect, by extension to people's strengths and weaknesses, tend to shape the history of their nation, which seemed to have saved Hindustan from becoming a Sunnistan for Maryam's delight. Whatever, the political plight of the Hindus that paved the way for the Islamic onslaught on their sacred soil probably served the cause of their sanātana dharma in the long run!

It was the fragmentation of Hindustan into minor kingdoms and tiny principalities that enabled the Turko-Afghan juggernaut to overrun its Western and the Northern parts to begin with. However, it was one thing for the marauding invaders to turn parts of it into their pocket burrows and another to make the whole of it as an Islamic State, to achieve which they would have to run over many a Hindu kingdom / principality, spread far and wide in the vast landmass. That would have entailed unremitting jihad in umpteen battles, but probably, as the unlimited riches of the limited land they conquered would have made the Sultans stay put in their grand palaces annexed with vast harems.

Moreover, they would have been alive to the problems logistics would pose in fighting wars far off from their Afghan backyards, and so desisted from venturing farther into the hinterland of Hindustan. As for Allah's 'barren' soldiers, their urge to make it to the 'Hereafter' would have been fulfilled 'here' itself in Hindustan for it had all that their prophet said they would have 'there'. Hence the invaders would have been averse to the risk of defeat in expansionist wars and thus, for long, their political domain was confined to some scattered Northern parts of Hindustan till in the latter-years Babur ushered in the mogul rule that his grandson Akbar expanded to some significance. But then, he tried to reconcile the subjects of his communally divisive empire through his Din-e-llahi, shaped by the best of Islam and Hinduism.

However, Aurangzeb, the Muslim zealot of his lineage, had in mind an intensive tabliq to Maryam Jameelah's approval, but owing to the impediment of a Shivaji and his Maratha warriors, he could do no more to Islam in India than to sack its temples, including the most sacred ones of Lord Vishwanāth in Kashi and Lord Krishna in Mathura, and going by some accounts that came to light in the court halls in Ram Janmabhōmi–Babri Masjid land dispute, Ram Lalla of Ayodhya as well. Thus, for centuries, the pleasure-seeking Sultans, militarily constrained to boot, failed to bring about the Islamic tabliq in Hindustan that is unlike the Arab conquests in other parts of the planet. Besides, the concept of swadharma that insidiously weakened the Hindu polity seems to have served as an obstacle for the Islamic tabliq in ways unexpected.

In the history of conversions, even as the religious dogmas per se are a set of beliefs; mistrust is an accomplice of human nature that enables others to sow the seeds of doubts in the minds of the believers about their own beliefs. That done, it would only be a matter of time before their minds become conducive for infusing a set of new religious beliefs into their mental arena. That's what enabled the Christ, with a new 'Code de Conduct' that was ingeniously sourced to the Ten Commandments, to induce some of the Jews to turn their backs on the Laws of Moses.