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" "India is yet another major victim of Islam. The day Muhammad bin Qasim, entered Sindh as a conqueror, must rank as the most ominous, odious and outrageous moment in the history of India, whose proud, pious and powerful traditions have been the torch-bearer of world civilisation. The Indians, used to enjoying the warmth of ahinsa, were stunned by the violence that the Arab raiders displayed in robbing the rich and seducing the indigenous damsels. Yet the irony was that they did all this in the name of the Most Compassionate and Just Allah, who counts these felonies as acts of fairness when they are committed to torture the unbelievers. Then, this land that had become indifferent to the vicissitudes of history owing to a very long period of prosperity and plentitude, was attracted by more Islamic predators, who rushed in through the Khaiber Pass to loot her wealth, dishonour her daughters and crush her ethos that had stood the test of time despite its proneness to physical comforts and spiritual mirages such as ahinsa.
Anirudh Gyan Shikha (1 June 1928 – 25 November 2006; popularly known as Anwar Shaikh) was a Pakistani-born British author residing in Cardiff, Wales.
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It was during the first week of August 1947, when I was an accounts clerk in the railway office in Lahore, that I saw a train pull in from East Punjab. It was full of mutilated bodies of Muslims: men, women, and children. It had a terrific, horrendous effect on me. When I went home I prayed to the Lord asking him not to forget my share of houris and boys. Now this is true. I actually prayed and then I took up a club and a long knife, and I went out in search of non-Muslims. Those days were remembered for the curfew orders and everybody seemed terrified of everybody else. I found two men, Sikhs, a father and son. The father was perhaps not more than fifty, perhaps younger, and his young son. I killed both of them. Next day I did not go to work. I felt nauseated, but I wanted to kill some more non-Muslims. I encountered another Sikh at Darabi Road and I killed him too. Often memories of those terrible days haunt my mind; I feel ashamed and many times have I shed tears of remorse. If it had not been for my fanaticism, engendered by the Islamic traditions, those people might have been alive even today. And I might not have felt the guilt, which I still do.
I regret to say that 1947 was the darkest period of my life. We were told that murdering the non-Muslims, seducing their wives, and burning their properties, was an act of jihad, that is, holy war. And jihad is the most sacred duty of a Muslim because it guarantees him a safe passage to paradise where no fewer than seventy-two houris, that is the most beautiful virgins, and pearl-like boys wait for him. Such a reward is a great temptation!
His prose is repetitive and, on occasion, an incoherence seeps into his argument, but this can be effective if written for an audience used to reli- gious texts and sermons that are always repetitive and incoherent. His books and pamphlets circulate throughout the Muslim communities in Western Europe and Pakistan like sanuzdats in the former Soviet Union or Aaron MacGruder's cartoons in the post-September United States. They are read, copied, passed on, endlessly discussed. It is this that makes Shaikh a danger�ous opponent of orthodoxy. He is the enemy within. When I finally met up with him, I was taken aback by his self-confidence: They will never succeed in gagging my mouth, because I speak for millions of silent Muslims.'