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The year 1095 AD was a defining one in the Christian world in many ways as it changed the course of history not only in Europe but also in the Middle East. It laid a permanent foundation of hatred and acrimony between Muslims and Christians on the question of suzerainty over Jerusalem, and also between eastern and western churches in Christianity itself. Followers of Christianity who dwelt in a vast geographical swath from Syria to Constantinople and from Italy to Scandinavia were split. The winds of discord swept over continents but the storm was essentially about a divide along sectarian lines and did not disturb national boundaries. In fact, it created two power centres for Christianity: one in Rome and the other in Constantinople, which vied with each other in whipping up crusader zeal and resultant devastation to prove their leadership. On the other hand, it also opened a great but sinister schism between the two faiths. That rift has now become irreconcilable between the two major Abrahamic religions as also within Christianity itself.
There may have been other underlying causes but what really kicked off the tragic run of events was the unilateral and quite inexplicable decision by Seljuk conquerors to stop Christian pilgrims from visiting holy sites in Jerusalem just as it came under their watch. This decision fails to make any military, economic or religious sense except a terrible political shortsightedness and an ill considered attempt to subvert the history of relations between the two major faiths in a core region central to both. We have an indigenous reflection of this inauspicious development in South Asia, precisely in the Indian subcontinent but with a difference. While it did not set off powerful sentiment for any crusade like a religious war, it did sow the deep seed for a seemingly lasting belligerence between the two otherwise homogenised peoples of Hindu and Muslim faiths and also drastically altered borders.
It was the year 700 AD and, thereabouts, the Umayyad Empire was ruling almost the whole of the Middle East, Iran, Iberia, Caucasus and parts of North Africa from Damascus, the largest kingdom of the time. They had successfully annihilated and suppressed rival claims to rule. However, groaning dissent lingered on and was being actively nursed by disaffected elements within the Umayyad caliphate. Their relentless persecution pushed dissenters to far-flung territories, one of which was India and, in that, the powerful and independent Rajput kingdom of Debul in Sind. This kingdom was conveniently close for a jump off base and sufficiently powerful to resist Umayyad military and diplomatic pressures. Simultaneously, the kingdom controlled the hub of the lucrative North Indian land and sea trade, and threatened not only the strategic flank of the Muslim empire but also tended to disrupt at will her highly profitable sea trade with the Far East. Thus, the kingdom was an eminent objective to be secured as early as was militarily possible. Before Mohammad Bin Qasim, a number of military campaigns had already failed to subdue Debul.
Starting from Bin Qasim’s successful military campaign in 712, a series of Muslim armies from Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan invaded and ravaged the subcontinent right up to and beyond Delhi. None had any pretensions of being the committed missionaries of Islam; they were focused on annexing fertile territories, enriching their treasuries and setting up new dynasties. The spread of Islam was mainly incidental and not by any state design. It was latter day Muslim historians, mullahs and folklorist writers who romanticised these traditionally expansionist, treasure seeking military campaigners into Muslim missionaries. This collective fictionalisation and falsification of history not only by Muslim penmanship but also corresponding demonisation by opposing writers did enormous disservice to the harmony and balance in a multi-religious society like India.
Ahmad Shah Abdali is portrayed as a great deliverer by Muslim historians but they fail to mention his needless desecration of the Golden Temple after one of his invasions. That mindless defilement set up a lasting sentiment of deadly animosity among Sikhs against Afghans and eventually was partly responsible for the elimination of their suzerainty by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Punjab, Kashmir and Northwest Frontier. Similarly, it is still to be discovered what Islamic injunction authorised Sultan Mehmood Ghaznavi to destroy the Temple of Somnath besides his infamous 17 invasions, except for the plunder of the huge booty the temple was reputed to contain. As a cumulative effect of most damaging intellectual subjectivity, conqueror injudiciousness and fudging of history, communal cracks began to appear in the Indian socio-religious structure here and there but were duly repaired by a rare class of refreshingly egalitarian Muslim and non-Muslim rulers of the time, big and small alike. In that, Mughals like Emperor Akbar are credited the most with promoting communal harmony and preserving a pluralistic and philosophically composite civilisation in India.
However, this rare balance and admirably composite nature of Indian society was mindlessly destroyed by the British after the fall of Delhi in 1857. Typically, the British never realised the esteem and legitimacy the Mughal court enjoyed across India regardless of the fact that its writ had pitifully shriveled to Delhi and its immediate suburbs by that time. In their overwhelming spite against widespread atrocities during the course of the uprising, they could not really rationalise why a powerful Sikh military contingent and mutinying Hindu soldiers were fighting side by side with the Muslim sepoys to defend Delhi during the siege in 1857. Why did rich Hindu moneylenders continue to advance loans to the Mughal court for war expenses? They failed to detect a strong bond that all shades of Indians felt towards their common struggle against foreign occupation. They also failed to learn from the Sikh revolt in Multan (1849) under Mool Raj against forcibly thrust British overlordship. A huge number of Baloch, Pathan and Punjabi Muslims had rallied to Mool Raj’s banner to defend the last bastion of the Sikh kingdom in Punjab. It was also unthinkable for them to admit that, despite his abject dependence on British stipends and protection since 1818, the Mughal emperor was still respectfully held in popular esteem as a symbol of the sovereignty of India.
The revolt of 1857 came as a rude shock to the complacent British but more shocking was the fact that it was led by the high caste Hindu soldiery that began to concentrate in Delhi under the reluctant command of the senile Mughal emperor. As the burning fringe of rebellion expanded, Muslim, Sikh and other sepoys also revolted and joined their comrades in Delhi in their thousands. As the Mughal capital fell, the British were at a loss to tag this massive revolt right across religious lines in any rational manner. It was considered convenient to pin it on the Muslims as they were the ones who were ruling Delhi. They never realised that, long ago, the nature of the Mughal empire in India had transformed into a national, indigenous rule countenanced by its subjects, no longer viewed as a Muslim occupation. It was their own sense of impropriety that drove them to single out a defeated people as scapegoats. British improbity lay in the fact that they were legally not the rulers of India but assignees of the Mughal ruler to collect taxes and administer certain territories on his behalf. Therefore, there was no question of a mutiny against them or trials thereafter.
However, they went on to compound their mistake and persisted in their faulty strategic direction. They first presumed quite illogically that the Mughal emperor was at the centre of the revolt and then went on an insane spree of vengefully persecuting Muslims who were either found in any manner linked to the Mughal court or even remotely concerned with any aspect of the sepoy uprising anywhere. There were mass hangings and the rest were blown to pieces by cannon. That irrational approach created a void that was filled, naturally, by non-Muslims, Hindus being in majority and a choice by design. This design was the precursor of their emerging policy to divide their Indian subjects along communal lines in order to secure their future rule, but that was not to be. This extremely shortsighted policy led to two major consequences. The most tragic had been the assiduously sown seed of a lasting animus and needless vertical divide between Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent. The other was the loss of the British Indian empire within 90 years.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com