ByWaheeduddin
Ahmed
"In
the year 997, a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the
little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan India India , filled his treasure chest with spoils,
and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill: -----Six years later
he sacked another opulent city of India Bombay India India
On the
other hand, synchronous historical narratives are more likely to have
originated in Khurasan where Firdausi was writing Shahnameh and such giants of
science and literature were at work as Al-Biruni and Bayhaqi. Small wonder
therefore that Mahmud, a patron of arts, science, literature and architecture
was capable of such extraordinary cruelty as has been depicted! This is not to
say that the Invaders' incursion into India
was benign and they came to India Mathura
So, what is
history? Some historiographers divide it into two categories: Speculative and
Analytical. Analytical history is philosophy, whose greatest exponent was Ibn
Khaldun. He changed the often superstitious, unrestricted acceptance of
historical data and introduced "the scientific method".
An ancient
as well as medieval concept of history was that it is cyclical: "History
repeats itself". This concept prevailed even up to the time of historian
Spengler. Later, in the age of Enlightenment, history began to be seen as
linear rather than cyclical. Axioms such as: "History was
irreversible". "You cannot step into the same waters twice in a
flowing stream", began to define the irreversible march of events.
The most
talked about concept of history however, is that of Hegel. He proposed that
history evolves due to contradiction between two systems: old and new, through
a process of thesis and antithesis, known as Dialectics. Marx illustrates the
process by the example of French Revolution. He points out that in the
Eighteenth century France
In our own
times, Samuel Huntington predicted culture wars between Muslims and Christians
in post-cold war period and infamously called them "Clash of
Civilizations", a bitterly toxic viewpoint, which has already been
invalidated. Naef Al-Rodhan, an American neurosurgeon and philosopher of Saudi
origin has repudiated this theory by asserting that civilization should not be
thought of as consisting of different competing civilizations but an ocean into
which all the sub-cultures flow.
History can
be classified into two groups by virtue of how it is looked at by a narrator:
from bird's-eye view or from worm's-eye view. A philosopher of history, like
Ibn Khaldun looks at history from the bird's-eye view and sees its trajectory,
its dynamics, its twists and turns, the causality of events and the factors
which drive its engine. He gives more importance to the nature of governance
than the relationships between Mahmud and Ayaz; Raja Bhoj and Gangu Teli and
Akbar and Birbal.
The
worm's-eye view however, is more down-to-earth. Its scope has small dimensions
of time and space. Most of the history of India India India India
in 1017 A.D. from the south coast of the Caspian Sea ,
was a contemporary of Mahmud Ghaznawi, and wrote "Tarikh-al-Hind".
Firishta, who came from the south coast of the Caspian Sea
to the Deccan Sultanates, wrote treatises about Muslim India and its rulers.
The chronicles that these visitors wrote and from which our knowledge ensues,
are limited to their own experiences in the company of their patrons and
mentors and must be thought of as worm-like intrusions into the body politic of
the Indian society.
It is
imperative that we view the arrival of Islam in the subcontinent of India in the light of the Philosophy of History,
whether the carriers were the horsemen of Mohammad Bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghaznawi;
the cargo boats, which landed at the Malabar coast
or the Sufis, who followed the trails of the conquerors. It must be understood
that history rolls under its own weight, driven by "pressure
differentials". These differentials are generated by military, political and social imbalances as
well as by the dynamics of opportunism. Winds of conquests have blown from the
nomadic cultures to the sedentary cultures, from riders on horses' backs to the
unsuspecting people at ease in their civic dwellings, from the deficient to the
sufficient, from the austere to the opulent and from high density areas to the
low density areas. When the storm settles and the curtain is lifted, new vistas
open in the aftermath and new social dynamics unfold. New history begins; the
Old becomes irrelevant and the New becomes a starting point of another era.
Such is the linearity of history's progression. If you try to regress it,
history fights back, causing physical and social destruction.
In the
Indian subcontinent, the two-nation theory is attributed to Mohammad Ali
Jinnah. This is like saying that the heliocentric solar system is the invention
of Copernicus. The reality is that it has always been so. If you follow
Hinduism or you follow Islam, you fall into two distinct belief systems and
cultures but are they two different nations? That depends on how you define
nations. Switzerland Afghanistan Pakistan India
The RSS and
its Hindu nationalist forerunners like the Hindu Mahasabha preexisted the Nehru
Report of 1928 in the All India Congress Committee, proposing outlines of a
constitution for the future independent India
Muslims in India Pakistan
and Brazil and yet they form
a minority of only 16% in India
So, where
do we go from here? I gave the example of two countries above: Switzerland and Afghanistan Ajanta ;
I built the Taj Mahal. You gave the world Buddha and the sophistication of
philosophy contained in Geeta and Upanishads. I brought the spices and gave you
the cuisines you love. We both brought India