It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his … - Sita Ram Goel
" "It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his policy of sulh-i-kul, at least among the learned Hindus. It is no more remembered that to start with he was also a pious Muslim who had viewed as jihãd his sack of Chittor. Nor is it understood by the learned Hindus that his policy of sulh-i-kul was motivated mainly by his bid to free himself from the stranglehold of the orthodox ‘Ulamã, and that any benefit which Hindus derived from it was no more than a by-product. Akbar never failed to demand daughters of the Rajput kings for his harem. Moreover, as our citations show, he was not able to control the religious zeal of his functionaries at the lower levels so far as Hindu temples were concerned. Jahãngîr, like many other Muslim kings, was essentially a pleasure-seeking person. He, however, became a pious Muslim when it came to Hindu temples of which he destroyed quite a few. Shãh Jahãn did not hide what he wanted to do to the Hindus and their places of worship. His Islamic record on this score was much better than that of Jahãngîr. The reversal of Akbar’s policy thus started by his two immediate successors reached its apotheosis in the reign of Aurangzeb, the paragon of Islamic piety in the minds of India’s Muslims. What is more significant, Akbar has never been forgiven by those who have regarded themselves as custodians of Islam, right upto our own times; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is a typical example. In any case one swallow has never made a summer.
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About Sita Ram Goel
Sita Ram Goel (Devanāgarī: सीता राम गोयल, Sītā Rām Goyal) (16 October 1921 – 3 December 2003) was an Indian historian, author and publisher.
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Additional quotes by Sita Ram Goel
I have never read Max Weber and do not know how he has arrived at the conclusion that “more tribals joined the Hindu mainstream as a result of the Muslim shock than the number of Hindus who were converted to Islam”. Perhaps he had in mind the people of Assam whom Bakhtyar Khalji and a few other Muslim invaders tried to subjugate, or the hill people all over our northern borders whom Muhammad Tughlaq tried to conquer but failed, or the Gonds who fought Akbar under Maharani Durgavati, or the Bhils who fought for freedom under Maharana Pratap, or the Mavlas who joined Shivaji at a later date. But the very fact that these so-called “tribals” fought spontaneously against the Muslim marauders rather than walk over to the winning side goes to prove that they shared a common culture with the rest of the natives.
Allãh of the Qur’ãn now throws away the mask he has worn in order to pass as Allãh of the pagan Arabs. He comes out in his true colours. He is no other than the old Jehovah of the Bible, the hardened gangster we have met in the earlier section. And like his earlier incarnation, he, too, is a denizen of the dark depths in human nature. Only the situation in which Jehovah alias Allãh intends to operate this time is totally different. (Vol II, chapter 14)
Kautilya has elaborated in his Arthashastra the psychological principles which alienate some people from their own society, and lead them straight into the lap of those who are out to subvert that society. The first group of people who can be alienated are the maneevarga, that is, those who are conceited and complain that they have been denied what is their due on account of birth, brains or qualities of character. (...) the Church was instinctively employing the psychological principles propounded by Kautilya. ...Christian missionaries could find quite a few and easy converts amongst these upper classes precisely because the Church had declared war on their society. ... By the time the French, the British and the Dutch appeared on the Eastern scene, Christianity had been found out in the West for what it had always been in facto power-hungry politics masquerading as religion. The later-day European imperialists, therefore, had only a marginal use for the Christian missionary. He could be used to beguile the natives. But he could not be allowed to dictate the parallel politics of imperialism. ... The field for the Christian politics of conversion has become considerably smaller in Asia due to the resurgence of Islam, and the triumph of Communism... It is only in India, Ceylon and Japan that the missionary continues to practice his profession effectively.
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