12-25-2007, 02:04 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-25-2007, 02:08 AM by Bharatvarsh.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->THE MYTH OF AKBAR
It is curious but true that the very historians who refuse to see the pre-Akbar period of Muslim rule as a nightmare for Hindus, hail Akbar as the harbinger of a dazzling dawn for the same Hindus. They point out as to how Akbar abolished the pilgrim tax and the jizyah, how he appointed Hindus to high positions, and how he extended to them this or that concession which they had not enjoyed earlier. One may very well ask these worthies that if these discriminatory taxes and disabilities did not exist earlier, how come you find Akbar freeing the Hindus from them? All that one is bound to get by way of an answer will be another bundle of casuistry.
There is no dearth of Hindu historians who heap Akbar with the choicest encomiums. Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava is a typical example. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru goes much further and proclaims Akbar as the father of Indian nationalism. A Hindu who takes all these high-sounding stories with a pinch of salt, is rather rare nowadays.
On the other hand, most Muslim historians and theologians frown upon Akbar as a villain in the history of Islam in India. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi who believes that Hindus were far more happy under Muslim rule than under that of their own princes, accuses Akbar of jeopardising Pax Moslemaica by tempering with the established tenets of Muslim polity. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad has written that if Ahmad Sirhindi had not come to the rescue, Akbar had almost finished Islam in India. It is only in post-Independence India that some Muslim historians have come forward to present Akbar as the pioneer of Secularism in this country. But we know what Secularism means in Muslim mouths, particularly if the Muslim happens to be a Marxist as well. For them, Akbar is no more than a Muslim hero for Hindu consumption.
One has, therefore, to go to the original sources in order to find the truth about Akbar. The story which these sources tell can be summed up as follows:
1. There was nothing Indian about Akbar except that he lived his life in India, fought his wars in India, built his empire in India, and dragged many Indian women into his harem. He knew nothing about India�s spiritual traditions, or India�s history, or India�s culture except for what he heard from some native sycophants who visited his court for very mundane reasons. No Hindu saint or scholar worth his salt cared to meet or educate him about things Indian. It was only some Jain munis who came close to him. But then Jain munis have always been in search of royal patronage like the Christian missionaries. Moreover, Akbar used these munis for influencing some Rajput princes who would have otherwise remained recalcitrant.
2. Akbar was every inch an Islamic bandit from abroad who conquered a large part of India mainly on the strength of Muslim swordsmen imported from Central Asia and Persia. He took great pride in proclaiming that he was a descendant of Taimur and Babur, and longed to recover the homelands of his forefathers in Transoxiana. He continued to decorate his name with the Islamic honorific ghãzî which he had acquired at the commencement of his reign by beheading the half-dead Himu. The wars he waged against the only resistant Hindu kingdoms - Mewar and Gondwana - had all the characteristics of classic jihãd. Whenever he wanted to celebrate some happy event or seek blessing for some great undertaking - which was quite often - he went on a pilgrimage to the dargah of Muinuddin Chishti, the foremost symbol of Islam�s ceaseless war on Hindus and Hinduism. He sent rich gifts to many centres of Muslim pilgrimage including Mecca and Medina, and carried on negotiations with the Portuguese so that voyages by Muslim pilgrims could be facilitated. In his letters to the Sharifs of Mecca and the Uzbek king of Bukhara, he protested that he was not only a good Muslim but also a champion of Islam, and that the orthodox Ulama who harboured doubts about him did not understand his game of consolidating a strong and durable Islamic empire in India.
3. The concessions which Akbar made to Hindus were not motivated by any benevolence towards Hindus or Hinduism on his part. He was out to win Hindu support in his fight with two inveterate foes of every Muslim empire-builder - the Muslim chieftains and the die-hard Ulama. Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq had faced the same foes earlier, but failed to overcome them because they could not break out of the closed circle of the foreign Muslim fraternity in India. Akbar succeeded in fixing both the foes because he tried a new method, and discovered very soon that it worked. He fixed the Muslim chieftains with the help of Rajput princes and their retinues. He fixed the Ulama partly by making them fall foul of each other in the Ibadat Khana, and partly by flirting with jogis and Jains munis and Christian missionaries in order to frighten them. They had nothing except royal patronage to fatten upon. There is no evidence that Akbar�s association with some spokesmen of rival religions was inspired by any sincere seeking on his part, or that the association improved his mind in any way. He remained a prisoner of Islamic thought-categories to the end of his days.
4. Nor did he have to pay a heavy price for Hindu support. Fortunately for him, he started functioning at a time when Hindu resistance to Islamic imperialism stood at a low ebb except in small pockets like Mewar and Gondwana. Hindu resistance had been led so far by the Rajput princes. But numerous wars fought by them with Muslim marauders for several centuries had exhausted their manpower as well as material resources. Akbar discovered it very soon that he could buy Rajput help in exchange for a few gestures which might have sounded ominous to orthodox Islam at that time but which proved only superficial in the long run. In fact, when one comes to think of it all, Hindus had to pay a very heavy price for those gestures from Akbar. He demanded Hindu princesses for his harem, which meant surrender of Hindu honour. He employed Hindu warriors not only against Muslim rebels but also against Hindu freedom fighters, which meant prostitution of Hindu heroism. For all practical purposes, he made the Hindus wield the sword of Islam not only in his own lifetime but right upto our own times. The pecuniary loss suffered by the Islamic state due to abolition of the pilgrim tax and the jizyah was compensated more than many times by the consolidation of an Islamic empire with a streamlined revenue system such as extracted from the Hindu masses, particularly the peasantry, the heavy cost of extending that empire by means of numerous wars, maintaining Mughal pomp and pageantry, and building monuments like the Taj. By the end of the Mughal empire, Hindu masses stood reduced to the subsistence level.
5. It was during the reign of Akbar that Muslim adventurers from many Islamic countries abroad started flocking towards India on an unprecedented scale, and made the Islamic establishment in the country stronger than ever before. They occupied all the top positions in the army as well as the administration of the Mughal empire. Statistics may be marshalled in order to show that Hindu share in government posts went on increasing till the time of Aurangzeb. But there is no gainsaying the fact that Hindu say in the policies of the Mughal empire went on decreasing from the days of Akbar�s immediate successor onwards. Even during the reign of Akbar, Muslim functionaries at the lower levels did not stop molesting Hindus in various ways normal to Islam. Many instances can be cited. Many a magnate in Akbar�s court were in close contact with the orthodox Ulama and Sufis led by Shykh Ahmad Sirhindi who went about saying publicly that Hindu should either be made to embrace Islam or treated like dogs. They came out into the open as soon as Akbar was dead, and their progeny continued to progress towards renewed power and prestige from the reign of Jahangir onwards till they again rose to the top under Aurangzeb.
It is true that the main fault lay with the Hindus for not being able to see through Akbar�s camouflage, and for helping him in consolidating an imperial power which Islam had never known in India in the pre-Akbar period of Muslim rule. But the fact remains that but for Akbar laying the firm foundations, there would have been no sadist scoundrel like Jahangir, no abominable criminal like Shah Jahan, and no Islamic monster like Aurangzeb for heaping endless torments and humiliations on Hindus. Let there be no doubt that far from being a dazzling dawn, the reign of Akbar was only the beginning of a darker night which continues till today in the form of Nehruvian Secularism.
http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/siii/ch10.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When Akbar had Rajput armies fight his Rajput enemies, he rejoiced at the sight of "Hindus wielding the sword of Islam".� When his archers could not distinguish between the Rajput mercenaries and the Rajput freedom-fighters, he told them that it didn't matter, since anyone killed would be a Kafir anyway.� India's greatest Moghul is often mindlessly lauded by Hindus as a "secular" ruler, but while he should be credited with a certain wisdom, he was and remained an enemy of the Infidels.� Unlike the Delhi sultans, who constantly provoked Hindu uprisings with their cruel politics of jihad (apart from weakening themselves with their internecine fighting), Akbar managed to consolidate a Muslim empire by incorporating a sufficient number of Hindus in his apparatus.�
Thus, his abolition of the jizya (which could seldom be collected in rural areas where most Hindus lived) need not be read as a gesture of communal amity, but rather as a clever way of opening new tax channels to the rural masses through mostly Hindu tax collectors.� He extracted a much larger revenue from Hindu tax-payers in the form of land tax or other secular formulas, than his predecessors had managed to do through the jizya.� And it is through Akbar's tax collecting system that Aurangzeb would later collect his re-instituted jizya.
http://www.bharatvani.org/books/bjp/section18.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is curious but true that the very historians who refuse to see the pre-Akbar period of Muslim rule as a nightmare for Hindus, hail Akbar as the harbinger of a dazzling dawn for the same Hindus. They point out as to how Akbar abolished the pilgrim tax and the jizyah, how he appointed Hindus to high positions, and how he extended to them this or that concession which they had not enjoyed earlier. One may very well ask these worthies that if these discriminatory taxes and disabilities did not exist earlier, how come you find Akbar freeing the Hindus from them? All that one is bound to get by way of an answer will be another bundle of casuistry.
There is no dearth of Hindu historians who heap Akbar with the choicest encomiums. Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava is a typical example. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru goes much further and proclaims Akbar as the father of Indian nationalism. A Hindu who takes all these high-sounding stories with a pinch of salt, is rather rare nowadays.
On the other hand, most Muslim historians and theologians frown upon Akbar as a villain in the history of Islam in India. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi who believes that Hindus were far more happy under Muslim rule than under that of their own princes, accuses Akbar of jeopardising Pax Moslemaica by tempering with the established tenets of Muslim polity. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad has written that if Ahmad Sirhindi had not come to the rescue, Akbar had almost finished Islam in India. It is only in post-Independence India that some Muslim historians have come forward to present Akbar as the pioneer of Secularism in this country. But we know what Secularism means in Muslim mouths, particularly if the Muslim happens to be a Marxist as well. For them, Akbar is no more than a Muslim hero for Hindu consumption.
One has, therefore, to go to the original sources in order to find the truth about Akbar. The story which these sources tell can be summed up as follows:
1. There was nothing Indian about Akbar except that he lived his life in India, fought his wars in India, built his empire in India, and dragged many Indian women into his harem. He knew nothing about India�s spiritual traditions, or India�s history, or India�s culture except for what he heard from some native sycophants who visited his court for very mundane reasons. No Hindu saint or scholar worth his salt cared to meet or educate him about things Indian. It was only some Jain munis who came close to him. But then Jain munis have always been in search of royal patronage like the Christian missionaries. Moreover, Akbar used these munis for influencing some Rajput princes who would have otherwise remained recalcitrant.
2. Akbar was every inch an Islamic bandit from abroad who conquered a large part of India mainly on the strength of Muslim swordsmen imported from Central Asia and Persia. He took great pride in proclaiming that he was a descendant of Taimur and Babur, and longed to recover the homelands of his forefathers in Transoxiana. He continued to decorate his name with the Islamic honorific ghãzî which he had acquired at the commencement of his reign by beheading the half-dead Himu. The wars he waged against the only resistant Hindu kingdoms - Mewar and Gondwana - had all the characteristics of classic jihãd. Whenever he wanted to celebrate some happy event or seek blessing for some great undertaking - which was quite often - he went on a pilgrimage to the dargah of Muinuddin Chishti, the foremost symbol of Islam�s ceaseless war on Hindus and Hinduism. He sent rich gifts to many centres of Muslim pilgrimage including Mecca and Medina, and carried on negotiations with the Portuguese so that voyages by Muslim pilgrims could be facilitated. In his letters to the Sharifs of Mecca and the Uzbek king of Bukhara, he protested that he was not only a good Muslim but also a champion of Islam, and that the orthodox Ulama who harboured doubts about him did not understand his game of consolidating a strong and durable Islamic empire in India.
3. The concessions which Akbar made to Hindus were not motivated by any benevolence towards Hindus or Hinduism on his part. He was out to win Hindu support in his fight with two inveterate foes of every Muslim empire-builder - the Muslim chieftains and the die-hard Ulama. Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq had faced the same foes earlier, but failed to overcome them because they could not break out of the closed circle of the foreign Muslim fraternity in India. Akbar succeeded in fixing both the foes because he tried a new method, and discovered very soon that it worked. He fixed the Muslim chieftains with the help of Rajput princes and their retinues. He fixed the Ulama partly by making them fall foul of each other in the Ibadat Khana, and partly by flirting with jogis and Jains munis and Christian missionaries in order to frighten them. They had nothing except royal patronage to fatten upon. There is no evidence that Akbar�s association with some spokesmen of rival religions was inspired by any sincere seeking on his part, or that the association improved his mind in any way. He remained a prisoner of Islamic thought-categories to the end of his days.
4. Nor did he have to pay a heavy price for Hindu support. Fortunately for him, he started functioning at a time when Hindu resistance to Islamic imperialism stood at a low ebb except in small pockets like Mewar and Gondwana. Hindu resistance had been led so far by the Rajput princes. But numerous wars fought by them with Muslim marauders for several centuries had exhausted their manpower as well as material resources. Akbar discovered it very soon that he could buy Rajput help in exchange for a few gestures which might have sounded ominous to orthodox Islam at that time but which proved only superficial in the long run. In fact, when one comes to think of it all, Hindus had to pay a very heavy price for those gestures from Akbar. He demanded Hindu princesses for his harem, which meant surrender of Hindu honour. He employed Hindu warriors not only against Muslim rebels but also against Hindu freedom fighters, which meant prostitution of Hindu heroism. For all practical purposes, he made the Hindus wield the sword of Islam not only in his own lifetime but right upto our own times. The pecuniary loss suffered by the Islamic state due to abolition of the pilgrim tax and the jizyah was compensated more than many times by the consolidation of an Islamic empire with a streamlined revenue system such as extracted from the Hindu masses, particularly the peasantry, the heavy cost of extending that empire by means of numerous wars, maintaining Mughal pomp and pageantry, and building monuments like the Taj. By the end of the Mughal empire, Hindu masses stood reduced to the subsistence level.
5. It was during the reign of Akbar that Muslim adventurers from many Islamic countries abroad started flocking towards India on an unprecedented scale, and made the Islamic establishment in the country stronger than ever before. They occupied all the top positions in the army as well as the administration of the Mughal empire. Statistics may be marshalled in order to show that Hindu share in government posts went on increasing till the time of Aurangzeb. But there is no gainsaying the fact that Hindu say in the policies of the Mughal empire went on decreasing from the days of Akbar�s immediate successor onwards. Even during the reign of Akbar, Muslim functionaries at the lower levels did not stop molesting Hindus in various ways normal to Islam. Many instances can be cited. Many a magnate in Akbar�s court were in close contact with the orthodox Ulama and Sufis led by Shykh Ahmad Sirhindi who went about saying publicly that Hindu should either be made to embrace Islam or treated like dogs. They came out into the open as soon as Akbar was dead, and their progeny continued to progress towards renewed power and prestige from the reign of Jahangir onwards till they again rose to the top under Aurangzeb.
It is true that the main fault lay with the Hindus for not being able to see through Akbar�s camouflage, and for helping him in consolidating an imperial power which Islam had never known in India in the pre-Akbar period of Muslim rule. But the fact remains that but for Akbar laying the firm foundations, there would have been no sadist scoundrel like Jahangir, no abominable criminal like Shah Jahan, and no Islamic monster like Aurangzeb for heaping endless torments and humiliations on Hindus. Let there be no doubt that far from being a dazzling dawn, the reign of Akbar was only the beginning of a darker night which continues till today in the form of Nehruvian Secularism.
http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/siii/ch10.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When Akbar had Rajput armies fight his Rajput enemies, he rejoiced at the sight of "Hindus wielding the sword of Islam".� When his archers could not distinguish between the Rajput mercenaries and the Rajput freedom-fighters, he told them that it didn't matter, since anyone killed would be a Kafir anyway.� India's greatest Moghul is often mindlessly lauded by Hindus as a "secular" ruler, but while he should be credited with a certain wisdom, he was and remained an enemy of the Infidels.� Unlike the Delhi sultans, who constantly provoked Hindu uprisings with their cruel politics of jihad (apart from weakening themselves with their internecine fighting), Akbar managed to consolidate a Muslim empire by incorporating a sufficient number of Hindus in his apparatus.�
Thus, his abolition of the jizya (which could seldom be collected in rural areas where most Hindus lived) need not be read as a gesture of communal amity, but rather as a clever way of opening new tax channels to the rural masses through mostly Hindu tax collectors.� He extracted a much larger revenue from Hindu tax-payers in the form of land tax or other secular formulas, than his predecessors had managed to do through the jizya.� And it is through Akbar's tax collecting system that Aurangzeb would later collect his re-instituted jizya.
http://www.bharatvani.org/books/bjp/section18.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->