HINDU TEMPLES: WHAT HAPPENED to THEM? (Volume II - the Islamic Evidence) (Second Enlarged Edition)
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HINDU TEMPLES: WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? (Volume II - The Islamic Evidence) (Second Enlarged Edition) Sita Ram Goel Voice of India New Delhi CONTENTS PREFACE SECTION I: THE TIP OF AN ICEBERG 1. The Dispute at Sidhpur 2. The Story of Rudramahalay 3. Muslim Response to Hindu Protection SECTION II: SUPPRESSIO VERI SUGGESTIO FALSI 4. The Marxist Historians 5. Spreading the Big Lie SECTION III: FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH 6. The Epigraphic Evidence 7. The Literary Evidence 8. Summing up SECTION IV: ISLAMIC THEOLOGY OF ICONOCLASM 9. Theology of Monotheism 10. The Pre-Islamic Arabs 11. Religion of Pagan Arabia 12. Monotheism Spreads to Arabia 13. Meaning of Monotheism 14. The Bible Appears in Arabic 15. Muhammad and the Meccans 16. The Prophet Destroys Pagan Temples SECTION V: APPENDICES 1. Muslim Dynasties in India’s History 2. Was the Kaba a Siva Temple? 3. Meaning of the Word “Hindu” 4. Questionnaire for the Marxist Professors Bibliography PREFACE A court order in 1986 threw open for Hindu worship the gates of the temple-turned-mosque at the Ramjanmabhumi at Ayodhya. Hindus were overjoyed, and started looking forward to the coming up of a grand Ram Mandir at the sacred site. But they were counting without the stalwarts of Secularism in the Nehruvian establishment. It was not long before a hysterical cry was heard – “Secularism in danger!” The Marxist-Muslim combine launched a two-pronged campaign. On the one hand, they proclaimed that Muslims had destroyed no Hindu temples except those few which were stinking with hoarded wealth or had become centres of local rebellions, and that Islam as a religion was never involved in iconoclasm. On the other hand, they accused the Hindus of destroying any number of Buddhist, Jain and Animist shrines in the pre-Islamic days. As a student of India’s history, ancient as well as medieval, I could see quite clearly that they were playing the Goebbelsian game of the Big Lie. But they could not be countered because they had come to dominate the academia and control the mass media during the heyday of the Nehru dynasty. Most of the prestigious press was owned by Hindu moneybags. But they had placed their papers in the hands of the most brazen-faced Hindu-baiters. The unkindest cut of all, however, came from the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party. They were doing nothing towards debunking Secularist lies about Hinduism vis-à-vis Buddhism and Jainism. But they were trumpeting from the house-tops that Islam did not permit the destruction of other people’s places of worship, and that namaz offered in a mosque built on the site of a temple was not acceptable to Allah! They were laying the blame for the destruction of the Ram Mandir not on Islam as an ideology of terror, but on Babur as a foreign invader! The only ray of light in this encircling gloom was Arun Shourie, the veteran journalist and the chief editor of the Indian Express at that time. On February 5, 1989, he front- paged an article, Hideaway Communalism, showing that while the Urdu version of a book by Maulana Hakim Sayid Abdul Hai of the Nadwatul-Ulama at Lucknow had admitted that seven famous mosques had been built on the sites of Hindu temples, the English translation published by the Maulana’s son, Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (Ali Mian) had eschewed the “controversial evidence”. He also published in the Indian Express three articles written by me on the subject of Islamic iconoclasm. This was a very courageous defiance of the ban imposed by Islam and administered by Secularism, namely, that crimes committed by Islam cannot even be whispered in private, not to speak of being proclaimed in public. Finally, VOICE OF INDIA published in April, 1991 Volume I of a projected series – ‘Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them’. It was a collection of relevant articles by Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi, Ram Swarup, and myself. An important part of the volume was a list of 2000 Muslim monuments built on the sites and/or with the materials of Hindu temples. This list became famous all over the country as soon as it came out. Meanwhile, the evidence I had collected regarding Islamic iconoclasm could already cover several and much bigger volumes. VOICE OF INDIA published in May, 1991 Volume II of the series. It was devoted exclusively to Islamic evidence, historical as well theological. It was received very well, particularly by the world of scholarship. Only the prestigious newspapers and periodicals in this country ignored it completely; they did not even acknowledge it in their “Books Received” column. But an extensive review written by the Belgian scholar, Koenraad Elst, was published by VOICE OF INDIA in 1992 under the title ‘Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam’. This second edition of Volume II is a thoroughly revised and somewhat enlarged version of the first edition. Its main merit is that the lengthy chapters in the earlier edition have been divided into smaller ones, and placed under several well-defined sections. A new Appendix on the meaning of the word “Hindu” has been added. And the Appendix which carries the ‘Questionnaire For the Marxist Professors’ has been considerably expanded by inclusion of correspondence between myself and Professor Romila Thapar, the doyen of Marxist historians. I take this opportunity to point out that the subject of this volume is not so much the destruction of Hindu temples as the character of Islam -an imperialist ideology of terrorism and genocide masquerading as a religion- in fact, as the only true religion. It is high time for Hindus to see Islam not with its own eyes but from the viewpoint of the great spiritual vision which is their inheritance. New Delhi Sita Ram Goel 25 March 1993 SECTION I THE TIP OF AN ICEBERG CHAPTER ONE THE DISPUTE AT SIDHPUR The Fourth Annual Report of the Minorities’ Commission submitted to the President of India through the Ministry of Home Affairs on April 19, 1983 carries an account of a dispute over the Jami Masjid at Sidhpur in the Mehsana District of Gujarat. The account raises some significant questions about certain aspects of Islam as a religion and the character of Muslim rule in medieval India. We have to go to primary source materials in order to find satisfactory answers to these questions. Sidhpur is a Taluka town, sixty-four miles north of Ahmadabad. It is situated on the left bank of the river Saraswati, fifteen miles upstream of Anhilwad Patan, the old capital of Gujarat before Ahmadabad was founded in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. “In a part of the town,” says the Commission’s Report, “is located what is known as Rudramahalay complex. This complex was built by Siddharaj Jaysimha in the 12th century… This temple seems to have been destroyed partly by Ulugh Khan in AD 1297-98 and partly by Ahmedshah in AD 1415. Some of the cubicles and a number of pillars on the Western side of the temple, it would appear, were later converted into a mosque.”1 At the dawn of independence in 1947, Sidhpur was in the territory of Baroda, the princely state ruled by the Maratha house of the Gaikwads. “The princely state of Baroda,” proceeds the Report, “had treated the complex consisting of the mosque and the remnants of the temple as a monument of historical importance. Subsequently, by virtue of an agreement between the Trustees and the Archaeological Survey of India on 31st March, 1954, the mosque was declared as a national monument and its maintenance and protection were taken over by the Archaeological Survey of India. One of the terms of this agreement was that the mosque would continue to be used by the Muslims for offering prayers.”2 The Trustees of the Jami Masjid, however, became dissatisfied with the Archaeological Survey which, they complained, was not doing its duty towards maintenance of the mosque. “Subsequently,” continues the Report, “a dispute arose between the Trustees of the mosque and the officials of the Archaeological Department with regard to the maintenance of the mosque as, according to the Trustees, necessary repairs to the mosque were not being carried out by the Archaeological Department and the mosque was in danger of falling down. These disputes led to some litigation in the High Court which, however, ended in a compromise. An undertaking was given by the Archaeological Department in terms of the compromise that they would carry out the necessary repairs to the mosque. It is alleged that the undertaking was not given effect to and this resulted in further litigation which again ended in a compromise. Under the fresh compromise terms, the Archaeological Department again gave an undertaking to carry out the repairs of the mosque and also to lay out a garden in the courtyard of the mosque. Unfortunately, this compromise again did not bring about a final settlement between the Trustees of the mosque and the Archaeological Department. According to the Muslims, the Archaeological Survey of India, instead of carrying out repairs to the mosque, started digging operations which exposed the relics of the temples and also the rich sculptural carvings on the two wings of the mosque. These exposures appear to have attracted the attention of the Hindus and they demanded that not only should these ancient temple relics be preserved but that the mosque should also no longer be used by the Muslims for offering prayers or they may also be allowed to worship the Siva Linga discovered during the excavations within the premises of the mosque.”3 The Minorities’ Commission came into the picture on October 4, 1979 when it received a letter from the Trustees of the mosque, “conveying the apprehensions of the Muslims of Sidhpur that the Hindus were trying to usurp the Jama Masjid.”4 The letter from the Trustees reported: “On the 6th September 1979, one Yogeshwar Dutt had illegally led a huge crowd into the mosque and instigated them to usurp it.