Indians may recall that such death sentences against people who have insulted the Prophet, have been carried out earlier this century: against Arya S… - Koenraad Elst

The site [at Ayodhya] is venerated as Ram’s birthplace, and therefore deserves protection by a state that calls itself secular, not because something happened there hundreds of years ago, but because this belief is alive right now. (Ch 8)

We are foregoing consideration of the more fundamental question as to which is more fanatical: to demand back the sacred places which are those of your own religion, dedicated to your own gods..., or to wilfully remain sitting on someone else's sacred sites, and knowing fully well that you yourself would not allow anyone to touch your own sacred sites.

In his seminal book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, independent Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel has listed two thousand cases where a mosque was built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. Not one of these verifiable items has been proven false, not by Sikand nor by Eaton or other eminent historians. It is also instructive to see for oneself what Eaton's purported eighty cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton's list, we find Delhi under Mohammed Ghori's onslaught, 1193, or Benares under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb's temple-destruction campaign, 1669. On each of these three occasions, literally hundreds of temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble. At this rate, Eaton's eighty instances easily match Goel's two thousand, perhaps even the unnamed Hindutva author's sixty thousand.