He went from east to west subduing all who were not obedient; the elephants were not unharnessed, nor the soldiers unhelmeted. - Harsha of Kashmir

What distinguishes the Hindu rulers of Kashmir from Hindu rulers elsewhere is that they continued to recruit in their army Turks from Central Asia without realizing that the Turks had become Islamicized and as such were no longer mere wage earners. One of Kashmir's Hindu rulers Harsha (1089-1101 CE) was persuaded by his Muslim favourites to plunder temple properties and melt down icons made of precious metal. Apologists of Islam have been highlighting this isolated incident in order to cover up the iconoclastic record of Islam not only in Kashmir but also in the rest of Bharatvarsha. At the same time they conceal the fact that Kashmir passed under the heel of Islam not as a result of the labours of its missionaries but due to a coup staged by an Islamicised army.

In Kashmir, the kings Shankaravarman (883-902) and Harsha (1089-1101) acquired iconoclastic reputations. But Shankaravarman merely confiscated treasure and lands of temples; the temples themselves he left intact, with their icons. In Harsha's case, statues of gods were defiled by 'naked mendicants whose noses, feet and hands had rotted away', and these were dragged along the streets 'with ropes around their ankles, with spittings instead of flowers' . There was hardly a temple in Kashmir whose images were not despoiled by this king, and reconverted into treasure. But in all likelihood, Harsha-who employed Turkish officers in his army-had followed the Muslim example, as the epithet applied to him, Harsharajatu-rushka, seems to indicate.

The general data on 11th-century Kashmir already militate against treating him as a typical Hindu king who did on purely Hindu grounds what Muslim kings also did, viz. to destroy the places of worship of rival religions.... Harsha was a fellow-traveller: not yet a full convert to Islam... but quite adapted to the Islamic ways, for “he ever fostered with money the Turks, who were his centurions”... All temples in his kingdom except four (two of them Buddhist)14 were damaged. This behaviour was so un-Hindu and so characteristically Islamic that Kalhana reports: “In the village, the town or in Srinagara there was not one temple which was not despoiled by the Turk king Harsha.”