ARUN SHOURIE
HARSH NARAIN
JAY DUBASHI
RAM SWARUP
SITA RAM GOEL
Preface
1. Hideaway Communalism
2. The Tip of An Iceberg
3. Some Historical Questions
4. In the Name of Religion
5. A Need to Face the Truth
6. Historians Versus History
7. November 9 Will Change History
8. From Shilanyas to Berlin Wall
9. Rama-Janmabhumi Temple Muslim Testimony
10. Let the Mute Witnesses Speak
Appendix
destruction of Hindu temples1 by the Islamised invaders. This chapter is by no means
closed. The Appendix to this book provides details of many temples destroyed by
Muslims all over Bangladesh as recently as October-November 1989. Currently,
temples, or whatever had remained of them, are meeting a similar fate in the Kashmir
valley.
This chapter, however, though significant, was only a part of the Muslim behaviour-
pattern as recorded by Muslim historians of medieval India. The other parts were: 1)
mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam had
emerged victorious; 2) capture of large numbers of non-combatant men, women and
children as booty and their sale as slaves all over the Islamic world; 3) forcible
conversion to Islam of people who were in no position to resist; 4) reduction to the status
of zimmis or non-citizens of all those who could not be converted and imposition of
inhuman disabilities on them; 5) emasculation of the zimmis by preventing them from
possessing arms; 6) impoverishment of the zimmis through heavy discriminatory taxes
and misappropriation of a major part of what the peasants produced; 7) ruination of the
native and national culture of the zimmis by suppressing and holding in contempt all its
institutions and expressions.
Nor is this behaviour pattern a thing of the past. It persisted even after the Muslim rule
was over. The Muslim revivalist movements in the nineteenth century, particularly in
Bengal, tried to repeat, as far as they could, the performance of the medieval Muslim
swordsmen and sultans. More recently, after the Islamic state of Pakistan was carved out,
Hindus have been forced to leave their ancestral homes, en masse from its western wing
and in a continuous stream of refugees from its eastern wing, now an independent Islamic
state of Bangladesh that came into being with the help of India. Hindu temples and other
cultural institutions have more or less disappeared from Pakistan, while they continue to
be under constant attack in Bangladesh.
How to understand this behaviour pattern so persistently followed over a thousand years
under very different conditions and so consistent in its expression? What is its deeper
ideological source?
It is rooted in Islams religious teachings, its theology and its religious laws; it derives from its peculiar conception of momins and kafirs, from its doctrines of Jihad, Darul- Islam and Darul-harb, and from what it regards as the duty of a Muslim state. Hindu
there, it also mentions other theological props and concomitants of the iconoclastic
ideology. In the book Ayodhya retain its importance, but it does not occupy the centre of
discussion. In dealing with its subject, it exercises complete fidelity to truth; unlike
secularist and Marxist writers, it does not believe in re-writing and fabricating history. Its
aim is to raise the informational level of our people and to make them better aware of the
more persistent ideological forces at work.
A case in which the English version of a major book by a renowned Muslim scholar, the fourth
Rector of one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning in India, listing some of the mosques,
including the Babri Masjid, which were built on the sites and foundations of temples, using their
stones and structures, is found to have the tell-tale passages censored out;
It is traced: And is found to have been commanded just 15 years a-o by the most influential living
Muslim scholar of our country today, the current Rector of that great centre of Islamic learning, and
the Chairman of the Muslim Personal Law Board.
publication,Centres of Islamic Learning in India, recalls how the foundersaimed at producing capable scholars who could project a true image of Islam before the modern world in an effective way; it recalls howTowards fulfilling its avowed aim in the matter of educational reform, it (the group) decided to
Hindu Temples-What Happend to Them by Sita Ram Goel
