Parodite wrote:Nonc Hilaire wrote:Paying taxes for religious support, military protection and civil order is not such a strange thing, especially in the relatively wild Arabia of Muhammad.
In 17th century England Catholics and Reformed church members were required to not only pay tithes to the Church of England, but also to attend Anglican services every Sunday - a type of Christian dhimmitude.
I really don't understand why this historical jizya business causes such rancor when ancient tax schemes were rarely fair or honest. At least they weren’t entrapping camel caravans with red light cameras.
Maybe the rancor had more to do with
how those non-Muslims were brought under Islamic rule, sometimes brutally?
Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent
[...]
Timur
Tīmūr bin Taraghay Barlas, known in the West as Tamerlane or "Timur the lame", was a 14th century warlord of Turco-Mongol descent,[21][22][23][24] conqueror of much of western and central Asia, and founder of the Timurid Empire and Timurid dynasty (1370–1405) in Central Asia, which survived until 1857 as the Mughal dynasty of India.
[...]
Timur himself recorded the invasions in his memoirs, collectively known as Tuzk-i-Timuri.[21][21][25][27][28] In them, he vividly described the massacre at Delhi:
In a short space of time all the people in the [New Delhi] fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects, the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers. They set fire to the houses and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to the ground....All these infidel Hindus were slain, their women and children, and their property and goods became the spoil of the victors. I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death.
One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a counselor and man of learning, who, in all his life, had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives....on the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty...no other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword.[29]
Hindus don't seem particularly positive about their encounters with Islamic expansion and rule.
History of Islam in India
by Dr. Neria H. Hebbar
Introduction
‘Islamization’ of India did not occur as a result of mass conversions. The process took several centuries. Though the province of Sindh was conquered in early 8th century it was not until the incursions of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor that serious settlement of the subcontinent with Muslims took place. Even then contrary to belief it was not the forced conversions that increased the number of Muslims in India. Of course, the unfair taxes called jizya of all non-Muslims had an effect. Many Hindus were forced to convert to Islam to escape from the punishing taxes. The invading sultans like Qutb ud-din Aibak and Ala-ud-din Khilji often offered clemency to the enemy after their defeat if they converted to Islam. Many of these local rulers switched back to Hinduism as soon as the sultans turned their backs and returned to Delhi. The major reason for mass settlement of India by Muslims was the invasion of Mongols into central Asia. Genghis Khan, his grandsons and later Timurlane wreaked havoc in the Central Asian countries causing migration of countless number of people seeking refuge in the relative safety of India.
Just how disastrous Muslim conquest was for India and how much resistance had been offered to preserve its heritage by Hindu rulers are controversial subjects. Much of the history was written by Muslim historians and could be biased. The little history documented by Indians was also written with an eye towards glorifying their kings. These as well could be simply exaggerations. Hindu writers write about countless accounts of heroism by their warrior, some of them mere boys in their teens. Some of the fiercest resistance probably came from lesser tribes and simply went undocumented. However, it is clear that the Muslim conquest of India took several centuries. Idolatry was condemned but many sultans simply ignored the practice by the Hindus and did not impose Islam on them forcibly. Better results were obtained by imposing taxes on non-Muslims, although the Brahmins and some Buddhists were exempt form it until the rule of Feroz Shah Tughlaq in the latter half of 14th century. When the Mughals established their empire, the whole of India was almost completely under the Muslim rule, especially during the rule of Aurangazeb. Religious fanaticism of Aurangazeb, unlike his ancestor Mughals finally led to the cessation of Muslim control of India. As a consequence of his intolerance, the Mughal Empire weakened precipitously after his death and steadily shrank in size over the next century and a half, to finally be taken over by another foreign force in the nineteenth century, the British. What Akbar had achieved with tolerance and reconciliation was reversed by Aurangzeb’s zeal to force Islam on Hindus.
The religion of Islam stormed into India in a similar manner as it did in the Arabian countries. Powerful regimes succumbed to the religion at a remarkably fast pace as evidenced by the fact that within a century after its inception, it had spread to the entire Middle East and Northern Africa. But in India, Islam had a more difficult time to insinuate into the Hindu and Buddhist societies. Even then, ‘Islamization’ of India took several centuries and was never complete. The barbaric nature of the sultanates rule and the invasion of Mongols may have had a negative effect on the Hindu practitioners. The earlier Mughals had breeched the division somewhat, but Aurangzeb in his zeal to turn India into an Islamic nation alienated all other religions. From then onward ‘moderate Muslim rule’ was an oxymoron. It is also apparent that the Hindus revered their idols much more than the Muslim conquerors estimated. A sweep of India never occurred and India remained predominantly Hindu, with only about twenty percent of its population as Muslims, at any given time in its history.
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Those Persian Monguls who conquired India and forced Islam on India ,
neither represented Pomegranates
nor Islam
they were sons of Tchingiz Khan .. vicious Mongols that had killed millions of Pomegranates and now
were taking over India
People, either with evil intention, or, due to sheer illiteracy, when talking about historical fact, Islam or Christianity or Judaism, forget that key in all this event are the people doing it and not the "ism"
Not Islam did those things to Persia .. but the Bedouins from Arabia
Not Islam did those things to India .. but the Mongol sons of Tchingiz khan
Not the Nazi did those things to European/Russian Jews , but Europeans
Not the Catholics/Christians did those things to Jews in Spain, but the Spanish people
Not Judaism is doing those things to Palestinians in Palestine, but the European/western converts
Did Christianity wipe out the indigini of north and south America ? ?
NO
Europeans did it
and and and
people do things and not "ism"
in that sense .. all of you badmouthing any "ism" or "religion" etc, you trying to fool Joe
Notion, some species came from Mars, called NAZI, and did all those things, just to fool and fabricate history .. no such thing as NAZI (NAZI was European mindset) .. British, Germans, French, Russians and and and were the culprit
Debating Islam (or any other "ism", communism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, fascism, etc etc, whether good or bad, whether worst or better than the others .. must be done on
social, theological, philosophical level and not personal
Saying communism did not work must explain the shortcoming of communism ideology and not debating Russian imperialism, USSR
.