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Islamic Onslaught
An event of immense and lasting impact in Indian history was the advent of the Muslims in the north-west. Lured by tales of the fertile plains of the Punjab and the fabulous wealth of Hindu temples, Mahmud of Ghazni first attacked India in 1000 AD. Other raiders from Central Asia followed him. Hindus never forgot the repeated destruction of the Somnath Temple, the massacre of Buddhists at Nalanda, or the pogroms of the Mughals. Hindus gallantly resisted, knowing full well that defeat would mean a choice of economic discrimination via the jaziya tax on non- Muslims, forced conversion, or death. It is no wonder that the residents of Chittor, and countless other people over the length and breadth of Bharat, from present-day Afghanistan to present-day bangladesh, thought it better to die gloriously rather than face cold-blooded slaughter. Francois Gautier in his book - Rewriting Indian History "Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis;or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese." Alain Danielou in Histoire de la Inde -"From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of urders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races." Will Durant, the well-known American historian says in The Story of Civilization: "...the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Almost all the Muslims of South Asia are descendants of weaker elements of the population who had succumbed to forcible Islamic conversion.
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