I never contested man's inhumanity to man (and woman), but the
very large number you presented still seems high.
I agree that the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam) are all incredibly bloodthirsty and have killed off millions of
humans.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 9/7/05 10:16 PM, "Cliff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > You disapoint me, Vaj, with the transparency of your fabrication. I thought
> > you had more integrity than that. It would have been completely
> > acceptable to me if you'd said you had heard these figures, but really
> > had nothing to back them up. It's clear you're just bullshitting now.
> >
> > As I said, disappointing...
>
>
> Hi Cliff:
>
> Here is one of the articles I had read.
>
> -V.
>
>
>
> Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
> by Dr. Koenraad Elst
>
>
> "The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu pamphlets
> concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political embodiment in the
> Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such language warranted, or is it a
> ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
>
> To give an idea of the context of this question, we must note that the term
> "genocide" is used very loosely these days. One of the charges by a Spanish
> judge against Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet, so as to get him extradited from
> Great Britain in autumn 1998, was "genocide". This was his way of making
> Pinochet internationally accountable for having killed a few Spanish
> citizens: alleging a crime serious enough to overrule normal constraints
> based on diplomatic immunity and national sovereignty. Yet, whatever
> Pinochet's crimes, it is simply ridiculous to charge that he ever intended
> to exterminate the Spanish nation. In the current competition for victim
> status, all kinds of interest groups are blatantly overbidding in order to
> get their piece of the entitlement to attention and solidarity.
>
> The Nazi Holocaust killed the majority of European Jewry (an estimated 5.1
> million according to Raul Hilberg, 5.27 million according to the
> Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and about 30% of the Jewish people
> worldwide. How many victim groups can say as much? The Partition pogroms
> killed hardly 0.3% of the Hindus, and though it annihilated the Hindu
> presence in all the provinces of Pakistan except for parts of Sindh and East
> Bengal, it did so mostly by putting the Hindus to flight (at least seven
> million) rather than by killing them (probably half a million). Likewise,
> the ethnic cleansing of a quarter million Hindus from Kashmir in 1990
> followed the strategy of "killing one to expel a hundred", which is not the
> same thing as killing them all; in practice, about 1,500 were killed.
> Partition featured some local massacres of genocidal type, with the Sikhs as
> the most wanted victims, but in relative as well as absolute figures, this
> does not match the Holocaust.
>
> Among genocides, the Holocaust was a very special case (e.g. the attempt to
> carry it out in secrecy is unique), and it serves no good purpose to blur
> that specificity by extending the term to all genocides in general. The term
> ³Holocaust², though first used in a genocidal sense to describe the Armenian
> genocide of 1915, is now in effect synonymous with the specifically Jewish
> experience at the hands of the Nazis in 1941-45. But does even the more
> general term "genocide" apply to what Hinduism suffered at the hands of
> Islam?
>
>
> Complete genocide
>
> "Genocide" means the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic community, or
> by extension any community constituted by bonds of kinship, of common
> religion or ideology, of common socio-economic position, or of common race.
> The pure form is the complete extermination of every man, woman and child of
> the group. Examples include the complete extermination of the native
> Tasmanians and many Amerindian nations from Patagonia to Canada by European
> settlers in the 16th-19th century. The most notorious attempt was the Nazi
> "final solution of the Jewish question" in 1941-45. In April-May 1994, Hutu
> militias in Rwanda went about slaughtering the Tutsi minority, killing ca.
> 800,000, in anticipation of the conquest of their country by a Uganda-based
> Tutsi army. Though improvised and executed with primitive weapons, the
> Rwandan genocide made more victims per day than the Holocaust.
>
> Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when
> the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as their most
> wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most writing about
> Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of its serious
> implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu death toll in 1971
> makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of Hindu-Muslim violence in
> the post-colonial period. It is significant that no serious count or
> religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted: the Indian,
> Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed
> Hindu grievances against Muslims.
>
> Nandan Vyas ("Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan", Young India, January 1995)
> has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the 1971
> genocide was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In comparing the
> population figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the observed natural growth
> rhythm into account, Vyas finds that the Hindu population has remained
> stable at 9.5 million when it should have increased to nearly 13 million
> (13.23 million if the same growth rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for
> Muslims). Of the missing 3.5 million people (if not more), 1.1 million can
> be explained: it is the number of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to
> the genocide. The Hindu refugees at the time of the genocide, about 8
> million, all went back after the ordeal, partly because the Indian
> government forced them to it, partly because the new state of Bangladesh was
> conceived as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu refugees into India only
> resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards islamization of the polity
> were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus to be explained. Taking
> into account a number of Hindu children born to refugees in India rather
> than in Bangladesh, and a possible settlement of 1971 refugees in India, it
> is fair to estimate the disappeared Hindus at about 2 million.
>
> While India-watchers wax indignant about communal riots in India killing up
> to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of three Muslims to
> one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-Independence Hindu-Muslim
> conflict is that in the subcontinent as a whole, the overwhelming majority
> of the victims have been Hindus. Even apart from the 1971 genocide,
> "ordinary" pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than
> the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.
>
>
> Selective genocide
>
> A second, less extreme type of genocide consists in killing a sufficient
> number who form the backbone of the group's collective identity, and
> assimilating the leaderless masses into the dominant community. This has
> been the Chinese policy in Tibet, killing over a million Tibetans while
> assimilating the survivors into Chinese culture by flooding their country
> with Chinese settlers. It was also Stalin's policy in eastern Poland and the
> Baltic states after they fell into his hands under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin
> Pact, exemplified by the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in
> Katyn. Stalin's policies combining murder of the elites, deportation of
> entire ethnic groups and ruthless oppression of the survivors was prefigured
> in antiquity by the Assyrians, whose deportation of the ten northern (now
> "lost") tribes of Israel is attested in the Bible.
>
> During the Islamic conquests in India, it was a typical policy to single
> out the Brahmins for slaughter, after the Hindu warrior class had been bled
> on the battlefield. Even the Portuguese in Malabar and Goa followed this
> policy in the 16th century, as can be deduced from Hindu-Portuguese treaty
> clauses prohibiting the Portuguese from killing Brahmins.
>
> In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for
> slaughter and the women and children for slavery or concubinage. Thus, in
> 416 BCE, the Athenians were angered at the Melians' reluctance to join the
> war against Sparta, and to set an example for other client states, Athens
> had Melos repopulated with Athenian colonists after killing its men and
> enslaving its women. Another example would be the slaughter of the Jews of
> Medina by Mohammed in 626 CE: after expelling two Jewish tribes, the third
> one, the Banu Quraiza, were exterminated: all the ca. 700 men were beheaded,
> while the women and children were sold into slavery, with the Prophet
> keeping the most beautiful woman as his concubine (she refused to marry
> him).
>
> Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic conquerors,
> e.g. when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in 712 CE.
> Thus, in Multan, according to the Chach-Nama, "six thousand warriors were
> put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves".
> This is why Rajput women committed mass suicide to save their honour in the
> face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women
> immolated themselves during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where
> this most enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants). During the
> Partition pogroms and the East Bengali genocide, mass rape of Hindu women
> after the slaughter of their fathers and husbands was a frequent event.
>
> At this point, however, we should not overlook a puzzling episode in Hindu
> legend which describes a similar behaviour by a Hindu conqueror:
> Parashurama, deified as the 6th incarnation of Vishnu, killed all the adult
> male Kshatriyas for several generations, until only women were left, and
> then had Brahmins father a new generation upon them. Just a story, or
> reference to a historic genocide?
>
>
> Genocide in the Bible
>
> For full-blooded genocide, however, the book to consult is the Bible, which
> describes cases of both partial and complete genocide. The first modest
> attempt was the killing by Jacob's sons of all the males in the Canaanite
> tribe of Shekhem, the fiancé of their own sister Dina. The motive was pride
> of pedigree: having immigrated from the civilizational centre of Ur in
> Mesopotamia, Abraham's tribe refused all intermarriage with the native
> people of Canaan (thus, Rebecca favoured Jacob over Esau because Jacob
> married his nieces while Esau married local women).
>
> Full-scale genocide was ordered by God, and executed by his faithful,
> during the conquest of Canaan by Moses and Joshua. In the defeated cities
> outside the Promised Land, they had to kill all the men but keep the women
> as slaves or concubines. Inside the Promised Land, by contrast, the
> conquerors were ordered to kill every single man, woman and child. All the
> Canaanites and Amalekites were killed. Here, the stated reason was that God
> wanted to prevent the coexistence of His people with Pagans, which would
> result in religious syncretism and the restoration of polytheism.
>
> As we only have a literary record of this genocide, liberal theologians
> uncomfortable with a genocidal God have argued that this Canaanite genocide
> was only fiction. To be sure, genocide fiction exists, e.g. the Biblical
> story that the Egyptians had all newborn male Israelites killed is
> inconsistent with all other data in the Biblical narrative itself (as well
> as unattested in the numerous and detailed Egyptian inscriptions), and
> apparently only served to underpin the story of Moses' arrival in the
> Pharaoh's court in a basket on the river, a story modelled on the
> then-popular life story of Sargon of Akkad. Yet, the narrative of the
> conquest of Canaan is full of military detail uncommon in fiction; unlike
> other parts of the Bible, it is almost without any miracles, factual through
> and through.
>
> And even if we suppose that the story is fictional, what would it say about
> the editors that they attributed genocidal intentions and injunctions to
> their God? If He was non-genocidal and good in reality, why turn him into a
> genocidal and prima facie evil Being? On balance, it is slightly more
> comforting to accept that the Bible editors described a genocide because
> they wanted to be truthful and relate real events. After all, the great and
> outstanding thing about the Bible narrative is its realism, its refusal to
> idealize its heroes. We get to see Jacob deceiving Isaac and Esau, then
> Laban deceiving Jacob; David's heroism and ingenuity in battle, but also his
> treachery in making Bathseba his own, and later his descent into senility;
> Salomon's palace intrigues in the war of succession along with his pearls of
> wisdom. Against that background, it would be inconsistent to censor the
> Canaanite genocide as merely a fictional interpolation.
>
> Indirect genocide
>
> A third type of genocide consists in preventing procreation among a
> targeted population. Till recently, it was US policy to promote
> sterilization among Native American women, even applying it secretly during
> postnatal care or other operations. The Tibetans too have been subjected to
> this treatment. In the Muslim world, male slaves were often castrated, which
> partly explains why Iraq has no Black population even though it once had
> hundreds of thousands of Black slaves. The practice also existed in India on
> a smaller scale, though the much-maligned Moghul emperor Aurangzeb tried to
> put an end to it, mainly because eunuchs brought endless corruption in the
> court. The hijra community is a left-over of this Islamic institution (in
> ancient India, harems were tended by old men or naturally napunsak/impotent
> men, tested by having to spend the night with a prostitute without showing
> signs of virile excitement).
>
> A fourth type of genocide is when mass killing takes place unintentionally,
> as collateral damage of foolish policies, e.g. Chairman Mao's Great Leap
> Forward inducing the greatest man-made mass starvation killing 20 million or
> more, or the British war requisitions causing the Bengal famine of 1943
> killing some 3 million; or as collateral damage of other forms of
> oppression. Unlike the deliberate genocide of Native Americans in parts of
> the USA or Argentina, the death of millions of Natives in Central America
> after the first Spanish conquests was at least partly the unintended
> side-effect of the hardships of forced labour and the contact with new
> diseases brought by the Europeans. In contrast with Nazi and Soviet work
> camps, where forced labour had the dual purpose of economic profit and a
> slow but sure death of the inmates, there is no evidence that the Spanish
> wanted their Native labourers to die. After all, their replacement with
> African slaves required a large extra investment.
>
> The Atlantic slave trade itself caused mass death among the transported
> slaves, just as in the already long-standing Arab slave trade, but it is
> obvious that purely for the sake of profit, the slave-traders preferred as
> many slaves as possible to arrive at the slave markets alive. Likewise, the
> Christian c.q. Islamic contempt for Pagans made them rather careless with
> the lives of Native Americans, Africans or Hindus, so that millions of them
> were killed, and yet this was not deliberate genocide. Of course they wanted
> to annihilate Pagan religions like Hinduism, but in principle, the
> missionary religions wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred not to
> kill them unless this was necessary for establishing the power of the True
> Faith.
>
> That is why the mass killing of Hindus by Muslims rarely took place in
> peacetime, but typically in the fervour immediately following military
> victories, e.g. the fall of the metropolis of Vijayanagar in 1565 was
> "celebrated" with a general massacre and arson. Once Muslim power was
> established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate rather than kill
> the Hindus, and discourage rebellion by making some sort of compromise. Not
> that peacetime was all that peaceful, for as Fernand Braudel wrote in A
> History of Civilizations (Penguin 1988/1963, p.232-236), Islamic rule in
> India as a "colonial experiment" was "extremely violent", and "the Muslims
> could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm
> -- burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive
> tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion
> there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was
> instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was
> laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves."
>
> Though all these small acts of terror added up to a death toll of genocidal
> proportions, no organized genocide of the Holocaust type took place. One
> constraint on Muslim zeal for Holy War was the endemic inter-Muslim warfare
> and intrigue (no history of a royal house was bloodier than that of the
> Delhi Sultanate 1206-1525), another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of
> Islamic law in India. This is the only one among the four law schools in
> Sunni Islam which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, dis-empowered
> third-class citizens paying a special tax for the favour of being tolerated;
> the other three schools of jurisprudence ruled that Pagans, as opposed to
> Christians and Jews, had to be given a choice between Islam and death.
>
> Staggering numbers also died as collateral damage of the deliberate
> impoverishment by Sultans like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir. As Braudel put
> it: "The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest
> was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million
> people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the
> conquerors' opulence."
>
>
> Genocide by any other name
>
> In some cases, terminological purists object to mass murder being described
> as "genocide", viz. when it targets groups defined by other criteria than
> ethnicity. Stalin's "genocide" through organized famine in Ukraine killed
> some 7 million people (lowest estimate is 4 million) in 1931-33, the
> largest-ever deliberate mass murder in peacetime, but its victims were
> targeted because of their economic and political positions, not because of
> their nationhood. Though it makes no difference to the victims, this was not
> strictly genocide or "nation murder", but "class murder". Likewise, the
> killing of perhaps two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge was not an
> attempt to destroy the Cambodian nation; it was rather an attempt to
> "purify" the nation of its bourgeois class.
>
> The killing of large groups of ideological dissenters is a constant in the
> history of the monotheistic faiths, of which Marxism has been termed a
> modern offshoot, starting with the killing of some polytheistic priests by
> Pharaoh Akhenaton and, shortly after, the treacherous killing of 3,000
> worshippers of the Golden Calf by Moses (they had been encouraged to come
> out in the open by Moses' brother Aaron, not unlike Chairman Mao's "hundred
> flowers" campaign which encouraged dissenters to speak freely, all the
> better to eliminate them later). Mass killing accompanied the
> christianization of Saxony by Charlemagne (ca. 800 CE) and of East Prussia
> by the Teutonic Knights (13th century). In 1209-29, French Catholics
> massacred the heretical Cathars. Wars between Muslims and Christians, and
> between Catholics and Protestants, killed millions both in deliberate
> massacres and as collateral damage, e.g. seven million Germans in 1618-48.
> Though the Turkish government which ordered the killing of a million
> Armenians in 1915 was motivated by a mixture of purely military,
> secular-nationalistic and Islamic considerations, the fervour with which the
> local Turks and Kurds participated in the slaughter was clearly due to their
> Islamic conditioning of hatred against non-Muslims.
>
> This ideological killing could be distinguished from genocide in the strict
> sense, because ethnicity was not the reason for the slaughter. While this
> caution may complicate matters for the Ukrainians or Cambodians, it does not
> apply to the case of Hinduism: like the Jews, the Hindus have historically
> been both a religion and a nation (or at least, casteists might argue, a
> conglomerate of nations). Attempts to kill all Hindus of a given region may
> legitimately be termed genocide.
>
> For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its
> occasional (though not continuous) intention to exterminate entire Hindu
> communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was never fully
> called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, can without
> exaggeration be termed genocide. To quote Will Durant's famous line: "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 of order and freedom, culture and
> peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without
> or multiplying within." (Story of Civilization, vol.1, Our Oriental
> Heritage, New York 1972, p.459)
>
>
>
> Hinduism's losses
>
> There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the
> hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim
> chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the
> Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6
> million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani
> sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which
> they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus;
> and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters
> took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the
> actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192
> ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-1857),
> even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison.
> Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50
> million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate;
> research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start
> in right earnest.
>
> Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian schoolbooks and
> the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British
> period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the
> primary sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called
> negationism. The really daring negationists don't just deny the crimes
> against Hindus, they invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves.
> Thus, it is routinely alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism;
> in reality, Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu
> rule, but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.
>
> Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of
> enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in
> Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of
> hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian mountain", was renamed
> Hindu Kush, "Hindu-killer", when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk
> (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to
> Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he
> recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the
> Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each".
> Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained
> their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a
> cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were
> partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam.
>
>
> Karma
>
> The Hindu notion of Karma has come under fire from Christian and secularist
> polemicists as part of the current backlash against New Age thinking.
> Allegedly, the doctrine of Karma implies that the victims of the Holocaust
> and other massacres had deserved their fate. A naive understanding of Karma,
> divorced from its Hindu context, could indeed lead to such ideas. Worse, it
> could be said that the Jews as a nation had incurred genocidal karma by the
> genocide which their ancestors committed on the Canaanites. Likewise, it
> could be argued that the Native Americans had it coming: recent research (by
> Walter Neves from Brazil as well as by US scientists) has shown that in ca.
> 8000 BC, the Mongoloid Native American populations replaced an earlier
> American population closely resembling the Australian Aborigines -- the
> first American genocide?
>
> More generally, if Karma explains suffering and "apparent" injustice as a
> profound form of justice, a way of reaping the karmic rewards of one's own
> actions, are we not perversely justifying every injustice? These questions
> should not be taken lightly. However, the Hindu understanding of
> reincarnation militates against the doctrine of genocidal "group karma"
> outlined above. An individual can incarnate in any community, even in other
> species, and need not be reborn among his own progeny. If Canaanites killed
> by the Israelites have indeed reincarnated, some may have been Nazi camp
> guards and others Jewish Holocaust victims. There is no reason to assume
> that the members of today's victim group are the reincarnated souls of the
> bullies of yesteryear, returning to suffer their due punishment. That is the
> difference between karma and genetics: karma is taken along by the
> individual soul, not passed on in the family line.
>
> More fundamentally, we should outgrow this childish (and in this case,
> downright embarrassing) view of karma as a matter of reward and punishment.
> Does the killer of a million people return a million times as a murder
> victim to suffer the full measure of his deserved punishment? Rather, karma
> is a law of conservation: you are reborn with the basic pattern of desires
> and conditionings which characterized you when you died last time around.
> The concrete experiences and actions which shaped that pattern, however, are
> history: they only survive insofar as they have shaped your psychic karma
> pattern, not as a precise account of merits and demerits to be paid off by
> corresponding amounts of suffering and pleasure.
>
> One lesson to be learned from genocide history pertains to Karma, the law
> of cause and effect, in a more down-to-earth sense: suffering genocide is
> the karmic reward of weakness. That is one conclusion which the Jews have
> drawn from their genocide experience: they created a modern and militarily
> strong state. Even more importantly, they helped foster an awareness of the
> history of their persecution among their former persecutors, the Christians,
> which makes it unlikely that Christians will target them again. In this
> respect, the Hindus have so far failed completely. With numerous Holocaust
> memorials already functioning, one more memorial is being built in Berlin by
> the heirs of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; but there is not even one
> memorial to the Hindu genocide, because even the victim community doesn't
> bother, let alone the perpetrators.
>
> This different treatment of the past has implications for the future. Thus,
> Israel's nuclear programme is accepted as a matter of course, justified by
> the country's genuine security concerns; but when India, which has equally
> legitimate security concerns, conducted nuclear tests, it provoked American
> sanctions. If the world ignores Hindu security concerns, one of the reasons
> is that Hindus have never bothered to tell the world how many Hindus have
> been killed already.
>
>
> Healing
>
> What should Hindus say to Muslims when they consider the record of Islam in
> Hindu lands? It is first of all very important not to allot guilt wrongly.
> Notions of collective or hereditary guilt should be avoided. Today's Muslims
> cannot help it that other Muslims did certain things in 712 or 1565 or 1971.
> One thing they can do, however, is to critically reread their scripture to
> discern the doctrinal factors of Muslim violence against Hindus and
> Hinduism. Of course, even without scriptural injunction, people get violent
> and wage wars; if Mahmud Ghaznavi hadn't come, some of the people he killed
> would have died in other, non-religious conflicts. But the basic Quranic
> doctrine of hatred against the unbelievers has also encouraged many
> good-natured and pious people to take up the sword against Hindus and other
> Pagans, not because they couldn't control their aggressive instincts, but
> because they had been told that killing unbelievers was a meritorious act.
> Good people have perpetrated evil because religious authorities had depicted
> it as good.
>
> This is material for a no-nonsense dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. But
> before Hindus address Muslims about this, it is imperative that they inform
> themselves about this painful history. Apart from unreflected grievances,
> Hindus have so far not developed a serious critique of Islam's doctrine and
> historical record. Often practising very sentimental, un-philosophical
> varieties of their own religion, most Hindus have very sketchy and distorted
> images of rival religions. Thus, they say that Mohammed was an Avatar of
> Vishnu, and then think that they have cleverly solved the Hindu-Muslim
> conflict by flattering the Prophet (in fact, it is an insult to basic Muslim
> beliefs, which reject divine incarnation, apart from indirectly associating
> the Prophet with Vishnu's incarnation as a pig). Instead of the silly sop
> stories which pass as conducive to secularism, Hindus should acquaint
> themselves with real history and real religious doctrines.
>
> Another thing which we should not forget is that Islam is ultimately rooted
> in human nature. We need not believe the Muslim claim that the Quran is of
> divine origin; but then it is not of diabolical origin either, it is a human
> document. The Quran is in all respects the product of a 7th-century Arab
> businessman vaguely acquainted with Judeo-Christian notions of monotheism
> and prophetism, and the good and evil elements in it are very human. Even
> its negative elements appealed to human instincts, e.g. when Mohammed
> promised a share in the booty of the caravans he robbed, numerous Arab
> Pagans took the bait and joined him. The undesirable elements in Islamic
> doctrine stem from human nature, and can in essence be found elsewhere as
> well. Keeping that in mind, it should be possible to make a fair evaluation
> of Islam's career in India on the basis of factual history.
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