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PAKISTAN : BREAK-UP OF UNITY
before the judges, doctors, elders and lawyers. Their reply was that the provisions of the law were clear. The Brahmin must either become a Muslim or be burned. The true faith was declared to him and the right course pointed out, but he refused to accept it. Consequently he was burned by the order of the Sultan, and the commentator adds, ‘Behold the Sultan’s strict adherence to law and rectitude, how he would not deviate in the least from its decrees ’.”
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Muhammad not only destroyed temples but made it a policy to make slaves of the Hindus he conquered. In the words of Dr. Titus:
“Not only was slaughter of the infidels and the destruction of their temples resorted to in earlier period of Islam’s contact with India, but as we have seen, many of the vanquished were led into slavery. The dividing up of booty was one of the special attractions, to the leaders as well as to the common soldiers in these expeditions. Muhammad seems to have made the slaughter of infidels, the destruction of their temples, the capturing of slaves, and the plundering of the wealth of the people, particularly of the temples and the priests, the main object of his raids. On the occasion of his first raid he is said to have taken much booty ; and half a million Hindus, ‘beautiful men and women’, were reduced to slavery and taken back to Ghazni.” *
When Muhammad later took Kanauj, in A. D. 1017, he took so much booty and so many prisoners that ‘the fingers of those who counted them would have tired ’. Describing how common Indian slaves had become in Ghazni and Central Asia after the campaign of A. D. 1019, the historian of the times says † :
“The number of prisoners may be conceived from the fact that each was sold for from two to ten dirhams. These were afterwards taken to Ghazni, and merchants came from far distant cities to purchase them ;…….and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor were commingled in one common slavery.
“In the year A. D. 1202, when Qutb-ud-Din captured Kalinjar, after the temples had been converted into mosques, and the very name of idolatry was annihilated, fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”
Slavery was the fate of those Hindus who were captured in the holy war. But, when there was no war the systematic abasement of the Hindus played no unimportant part in the methods adopted
- Quoted by Dr. Titus— Indian Islam, p. 24.
† lbid.,p. 26.