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Islam and the Arab Invasions - Part 1
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Islam, literally meaning 'submission' and ‘peace’, took birth at Mecca in Arabia. The location of Mecca at the intersection of busy commercial routes had made it very affluent. Its commercial importance was almost doubled by the annual pilgrimage to the cube-like sanctuary called 'Kaba'. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born to Abdullah and Amina, and was brought up by his uncle Abu Talib. After marrying a widow called Khadija, he started identifying himself with the downtrodden sections of society. Muhammad was convinced that he was the messenger of Allah. His wife and his cousin Ali became his earliest followers and soon some of his friends also accepted him as the Prophet. But his teachings made most of the wealthy Meccans his sworn enemies. Consequently Muhammad migrated to Medina, arriving on September 24, 622.
Later his emigration was made the starting-point of the Muslim hijra (immigration) era, when the date was changed to July 16, 622 to make it compatible with the first day of the first month of the Muslim lunar calendar. The immigrants were known as muhajirs. The other inhabitants of Medina, who welcomed the immigrants were known as ansars or the helpers. By the close of 630 Muhammad returned to Mecca with his followers. He died in June 632.
After the demise of Muhammad, the muhajirs and ansars of Medina, believing that Muhammad had not appointed anyone as successor, elected Abu Bakr as caliph or khalifa (successor). But other followers of the Prophet and the members of the Prophet's Hashimile clan, who believed that Muhammad had nominated his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his heir, broke away. While Ali's supporters came to be known as Shias (partisans), the former (followers of Abu Bakr) acquired the title of Sunnis in due course of time.
Abu Bakr (632-34) nominated Umar al-Khattab (634-44) as his successor, under whom the Byzantine territories of Syria, Palestine and Egypt and the Sasanid countries of Iran and Iraq were annexed to the caliphate. When Umar was assassinated by one of his Iranian slaves, Usman (644-56), one of the Prophet's senior companions, was elected caliph. The first six years of Usman's reign were peaceful but civil war broke out in the second half. Subsequently, Ali (656-61) accepted the caliphate in order to save the community from disintegration.
However, Muawiya, the governor of Syria, who was related to Usman, refused to submit to Ali. Finally when Ali was assassinated, Muawiya became caliph and founded a dynasty called the Umayyads (661 - 749). Within a century, however, the Umayyads were also overthrown by the Abbasids (749-1258), who had secretly built up their strength among the anti-Umayyad sections of the Iranian and Arab population.
Thus, the Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Prophet Muhammad, descending from the Prophet's youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib. Although the Umayyads and the Abbasids were called caliphs, they were hereditary. The first four rulers (Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman and Ali) following the Prophet are known as Rashidun (rightly guided caliphs).
To Summarise, Islam rose and grew up in the deserts of Arabia, and Arabs, its first converts, made it a powerful force in Asia. They decided to spread their new religion and carry on military conquest all over the world. They established a big empire which extended from the Atlantic ocean in the west to the banks of river Indus in the east and from the Caspian Sea in the north to the valley of the Nile in the south.
The successors of Prophet Muhammad (622-32 AD) were called the khalifas and Abu Bakr was the first khalifa. Abu and three of his successors (632-661 AD) were known as Rashidun (rightly guided khalifas) and then came the dynastic rule of the Umayyads (661-749 AD), who were replaced by the Abbasids (749-1258 AD). Despite the changes in the ruling families, the khalifa continued to be the nominal head of the Muslims all over the world. It was during the time of the Umayyads that the Arabs succeeded in conquering Sindh.
2.0 Arabs in SindH
Muhammad bin Qasim's invasion of Sindh was part of the forward policy of the Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj, to annex the region from Sindh to Transoxiana. Sindh was then ruled by Dahir, the son of Chach, who had usurped power from the previous Buddhist rulers. In 712 Muhammad invaded Sindh and killed Dahir in a hotly contested battle near Brahmanabad. Muhammad married Dahir's widow, Rani Ladi, and became the master of lower Sindh. The Chach Numah deals with the administrative regulations Muhammad introduced in Sindh. On the orders of Hajjaj, the people of Sindh were accorded the status of zimmis (protected subjects), and hence no interference was to he made in their lives and property. Among the founders of different Islamic schools of law, it was only Abu Hanifa (founder of the Hanafi school, eighth century AD) who had authorised the collection of jizya from the Hindus, while others had ordered for them 'either death or Islam'. Hajjaj's death in 714, followed next year by that of his patron, Caliph Walid, led to the recall of Muhammad. The new Caliph put him in prison, and subsequently the administration in Sindh broke down.
Henceforth Sindh continued to be under muslim occupation. But the Arabs were unable to penetrate further into India in the eighth century due to the presence of the formidable Pratihara kingdom in western India and also due to the wrong choice of Sindh, which could not provide them with the necessary resources to conquer India.
2.1 Causes for Arab conquest
The foremost cause was the lure of wealth. The Arabs, having trade contact with India from the ancient times, knew that India was a rich country. Sindh, whose Makran coast played an important role in the international trade and which was next to the then Arab empire, became their first target. The religious zeal of the Arabs is also another important cause. Islam inspired a warlike spirit and national consciousness among the Arabs. The desire for territorial expansion is yet another cause. The khalifas were not only the heads of Islamic faith but also the heads of the Islamic state.
By 712 A.D., the Arabs had reached Makran in modern day Pakistan. Makran was bound in the east by the kingdom of Sindh ruled by Dahir, son of Brahman Chach.
In 711 AD the king of Ceylon sent , the orphan daughters of Muslim merchants who had died in his dominion to Hajjaj, Viceroy of the eastern provinces of the Caliphate. The vessel was attacked and plundered by the pirates at the coast of Sindh. Hajjaj sent a letter through Mohammed Bin Haroon, Governor of Mekran demanding reparation. But Dahir, the king of Sindh replied that the aggressors were beyond his control. Enraged at this, Hajjaj with The Caliph's permission sent an expedition into Sindh under Ubaidullah against Dahir but he was defeated and slain. Budail who followed him met the same fate.
Hajjaj was deeply affected by these two failures sent his cousin and son-in-law Mohammed bin Qasim. Soon, Port of Debul fell to his armies in 711 A.D. due to a treachery by a Brahman of Debul Port. What followed next was plunder and destruction of temples of Debul.
Qasim proceeded to reach Nirun, (75 miles north-east of Hyderabad, in modern Pakistan) and captured it in early 712 A.D. In accordance with the orders received from Hajjaj, Qasim the moved towards Bahmanabad, where Dahir was prepared to oppose his further advance into the country. In June 712 A.D., Qasim crossed the Indus river. Dahir had meanwhile assembled an army consisting of 50,000 horses and marched from Bahmanabad to Rawar to meet the invader. The armies lay opposite to one another during which some skirmishes took place and on June 20, Dahir mounted his elephant and advanced to the attack.
The battle was sustained with great valor by the Dahir's men. Eventually however, Dahir fell, after being hit by an arrow. A section of the remaining Dahir's army led by Jai Singh fled towards Bahmanabad while Dahir's wife Rani Bai and her handmaids immolated themselves at Rawar.
After Raja Dahir was killed, one of his sons, Jai Singh resisted Muhammad bin Qasim at the Battle of Bahmanabad, but he too was defeated and had to flee. MuhammAd bin Qasim founded a new city near the present city of Karachi, built a mosque there and advanced northwards to western Punjab. Multan was his target. Gour Singh was the Raja of Multan. His large army was reinforced by contingents from neighboring rajas. The Indians excelled in static warfare with armored elephants and foot soldiers but these were no match against swift, hard hitting cavalry. Realizing the advantage enjoyed by Muhammed bin Qasim's cavalry in mobile warfare, the Raja locked himself in the fort of Multan. A siege ensued. Once again the technology of minjaniques proved decisive. The heavy machines destroyed the fort and the raja surrendered. Multan was added to the Arab empire in the year 713.
The conquest of Sindh brought Islamic civilization face to face with the ancient Vedic civilization of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. In later centuries, there was much that Muslim scholarship would learn from India; mathematics, astronomy, iron smelting-to name but a few subjects.
Jaisingha, the crown prince, offered some resistance at the fort of Bahmanabad, but was forced to flee. Muhammad also captured Alor and a few other forts which completed the Arab conquest of Sindh. After conquering Sindh, Muhammad proceeded to attack Multan in 713 AD. The subsequent recall and execution of Muhammad made Jaisingha to reoccupy Bahmanabad. But Junaid, the new Arab governor of Sindh, defeated and executed Jaisingha. Later, Junaid sent several expeditions to the interior of India, but all of them proved to be unsuccessful. The Indian kings who are said to be mainly responsible for their failure, were Pratihara Nagabhatta I and Chalukya Vikramaditya II.
In the meanwhile, the powers of the Abbasid khalifas began to decline, and consequently, they failed to keep control over their distant provinces. Sindh became free from the control of the khalifas in 871 AD. But even then, the Arabs in Sindh failed to unite themselves, and their kingdom came to be divided into two parts, lower and upper Sindh, with Mansura and Multan respectively, as their capitals. Thus, there were two Arab kingdoms in Sindh till the invasions of Muhammad of Ghazni.
2.2 Its significance
The Arab invasion of sindh had a very limited effect on the politics of India. The Arabs did not break the military strength of India, and therefore, could not pave the way for the conquest of India by Islam. But they did draw the Indians and the Arabs closer to each other. The Arabs were the first to establish an Islamic state in India, and their administration of Sindh brought about a novelty in the history of Islam. Islam divided all non-Muslim into two categories. The people belonging to the first category were called zimmis and were allowed to live under the protection of an Islamic ruler after payment of a religious tax called the jizya. And the people belonging to the second category were called kafirs. The kafirs were not allowed to live in an Islamic state, and had to choose between two alternatives - conversion or death. Hindus came under the category of the kafirs. When Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, he found it impractical to either convert all Hindus to Islam or put them to death. Therefore, with the permission of the khalifa, he accepted Hindus as zimmis. The Turks could find a ready made solution thus; with the Arab conquest of Sindh, a new age began in the policy of the Islamic states towards the non-Muslims. The Arab conquest also led to the transmission of Indian culture to the Islamic world, and from there to Europe through the Arabs. The Arabs learnt what now goes by the name of 'Arabic numerical' from the Indians. The Arabs also profited from astrology and science of medicine of the Indians.
3.0 The Ghaznavids
For a century after Bin Qasim's conquest, from Karachi to Multan, the Arabs were repeatedly repulsed by the local rulers, their most notable defeat being in the Battle of Rajasthan (738 AD) by a coalition of the Pratihara king Nagabhata, Jaysimha Varman of the Chalukya empire, and Bappa Rawal of the Mewar kingdom of Rajasthan. The Arabs in Sindh had taken a beating. Another attempt of invasion in the early 9th century was defeated by the Hindu coalition, after which Arab chroniclers record that Caliph Mahdi, "gave up the project of conquering any part of India".
For 400 years, the Arabs had lived relatively peacefully in Sind, their breakaway principalities paying tribute to the Gurjara Pratiharas and had traded further down the coast of Malabar. But the Arabs were soon superseded the Turks of Central Asia.
Mahmud's invasions of India commenced in AD 1000, when he captured some forts near Lamghan. In 1001 he defeated Jayapala, the Hindu Shahi ruler, in a battle near Peshawar. Jayapala was succeeded by his son, Anandapala. After eight years Mahmud crossed the Indus again and defeated Anandapala, Jayapala's successor, at Waihind in 1009. Mahmud's repeated invasions of the Punjab and eastern Rajasthan destroyed Rajput resistance. In 1025-26 he set out on his famous expedition to Somanatha in Gujarat. Bhima I, the Chalukya ruler of Anhilwara, offered no resistance, and the temple was looted.
Mahmud was extremely generous to only those poets who composed glowing eulogies on him, but other learned men were given a raw deal. Scientists in particular, such as Al-Beruni who was taken captive after the fall of Khwarazmshah in 1017, were given little encouragement. Even Firdausi, who completed the Shah Namah in 1010, was not adequately rewarded.
3.1 Mahmud's background and his life
Subuktagin (a Turkish slave from Central Asia) had seized on the decline of the realm of the Saminides to conquer in 977 AD a large territory which covered most of Central Persia and had its eastern boundary at the Indus. His capital was at Ghazni to the south of Kabul. When Mahmud succeeded his father at the age of 27, he already possessed an enormous power base which he then extended very rapidly. Mahmud succeeded his father in 997 and extended his patrimonial ambition in all directions.
He conquered Afghanistan and Persia, obtained the title Yamin al-Daula (Right Hand of the State) from the Caliph, and took tribute from local rulers in seventeen raids across India. Mahmud defeated Hindu Sahis; then he sacked Mathura and Kanyakubja; and, in 1025-26, he sacked the Somanatha temple in Gujarat. His deeds became notoriously legendary. They were memorialised, often fancifully, by generations of admirers and detractors who bestowed upon him everlasting fame for his pillage, plunder, and murder of heretics and infidels, including Muslims and non-Muslims. He became symbolic in cultural politics.
In the fourteenth century, two Sunni authors, Barani and Isami - writing in Delhi and in the Deccan Bahmani kingdom, respectively - praised Mahmud as an ideal Muslim ruler because he persecuted rival Muslim sects of Shias and Ismailis, as well as non-believers. Mahmud of Ghazni also used some of his wealth to support Al-Biruni, the master geographer, who compiled a brilliant account of medieval India using material provided by his Ghaznavi patrons.
3.2 Course of Mahmud's campaigns
Mahmud's Indian campaigns invariably began in the dry season; his return to Afghanistan was always made before the monsoon rains filled the rivers of the Punjab, which would have cut off his route while his troops were loaded with loot. In the year 1000 AD, the more or less subtle balance of power in northern India was shattered when Mahmud of Ghazni waged a war of destruction and plunder against India. From that date until 1025 AD, he launched a total of 17 campaigns of this sort and captured places as far distant as Kannauj and Saurashtra. The Hindushahi dynasty ruling the territory around the Hindukush mountains was the first to feel the pressure of the Ghaznavides whilst still ruled by Mahmud's father. But the kings of this dynasty managed to resist for about 25 years. Finally, however, they succumbed. Soon, the once so powerful Gurjara Pratiharas of Kannauj shared their fate. The Chandellas of Khajuraho and the Rajput rulers of Gwalior were also defeated and their treasures looted. Mahmud did not hesitate to mete out the same treatment to the Muslim ruler of Multan, whose territory blocked his way. The Hindus were particularly affected by the destruction and looting of their holy places at Thaneshwar, Mathura and Kanauj. The climax of these systematic campaigns was Mahmud's attack on the famous Shiva temple at Somnath on the southern coast of Kathiawar in Gujarat. After a daring expedition across the desert, Mahmud reached this temple in 1025 AD. Chronicles report that about 50,000 Hindus lost their lives in defending the temple. Mahmud destroyed the Shiva lingam with his own hands and then, is said to have returned through the desert with booty of about 20 million gold dinars (about 6.5 tons of gold). Many of his troops did not survive the journey.
3.3 Purpose and nature of his campaigns
Historians normally find it difficult to explain his deeds - especially as he did not show the slightest intention of establishing an empire in India, although, given his valour and resourcefulness, he could easily have done so. Some historians suggest that he might have used India as a treasure trove in order to acquire the means for consolidating his Central Asian empire- but he regarded that with as much indifference as he did India and only paid it attention at times of unrest. His capital, Ghazni, was the only place which definitely profited from his enormous loot. He made it one of the finest cities of the day. Many scholars and poets surrounded him at his court, among them Firdausi, the author of the famous historical work Shahnama, and Al-beruni, who composed the most comprehensive account of India ever written by a foreigner before the advent f the Europeans. Mahmud's fanaticism was not directed exclusively against the Hindus and other infidels; he attacked Muslim heretics with equal ferocity. Thus, he twice waged hostilities against Multan, whose ruler, Daud, was an Ismaili. During his second onslaught on Multan, he killed many local Muslims because they had not kept their promise of returning to orthodox Islam.
3.4 Impact of his campaigns
Whatever one may think of Mahmud, he was one of the few people who made a lasting (negative) impact on Indian history. His military successes were, however, not entirely due to his own skill and valour. The political situation in Northern India around 1000 AD was very favourable to a determined invader. The perpetual triangular contest between the powers of Northern, Eastern and Central India had weakened all of them. It had particularly sapped the strength of the Gurjara Pratiharas and no leading power had arisen in early eleventh-century Northern India to take their place in defending the Northern plains against Mahmud's incursions. The greatest Indian dynasty of that time, the Cholas, were so remote from the scene of Mahmud's exploits that they hardly noted them. After Mahmud's death, India gained a respite of more than a century before new invaders once more descended upon the plains from Afghanistan. The Indian rulers had not taken advantage of this reprieve to mend their fences.
3.5 Al-Beruni's India
Al Beruni wrote his monumental Kitab Fi tahqiq ma lil-Hind in order to acquaint his Ghaznavid ruler with Hinduism. Though he stayed in Ghazni and never visited centres of Brahmanic scholarship like Kannauj, Varanasi and Kashmir, he had informants in the form of a few Sanskrit scholars and educated merchants. He also quotes from Patanjaii's Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita and the Samkhya Karika to substantiate his assertions. Apart from providing a penetrating study of human relationships and cultural complexities in various faiths, he defines the Hindu colour divisions as tabaqat (classes) and the castes (jats) as birth divisions (nasab). According to him, below the Shudras were the antyaja or casteless, who were divided into eight guilds: fullers, shoemakers, jugglers, basket and shield makers, sailors, fishermen, hunters and weavers. The Hadi, Doma and Chandala, who did the cleaning and scavenging, were outcastes. Finally, foreigners were regarded as mlechchhas or unclean.
Al-Biruni always used to accompany Mahmud of Ghazni on military and plunder campaigns. Apart from being a scientist, mathematician and astronomer, Al-Biruni also distinguished himself as a historian and linguist, with knowledge of Persian, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. In 1017, he travelled to the Indian subcontinent, where he had long sojourns, mastering Sanskrit and Hindu literature, scientific and religious texts, and doing a study of Hindu civilisation and society, which he has recorded in his famous work, Tahkik-i-Hind (An Enquiry of India). He is actually the first intellectual bridge between India and the Islamic world, and is rightly called the "founder of Indology".
Al-Biruni, though he does not explicitly denounce the barbaric plunder of Mathura and Somnath by his master, certainly betrays acute lament about it in his writings. What he does explicitly state is that Mahmud "utterly ruined the prosperity of the country", created a hatred of Muslims among the locals, and caused the Hindu sciences to retreat "far away from those parts of the country conquered by us" to places "where our hands cannot yet reach".
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