I think one has to define or expand here what edge of the sword means
Does it only just means to directly threaten one to convert to Islam or die? It may have been done but that may have been small portion of the persecution. But there may have been other types of "sword" which are not very obvious or direct
1) Persecution of non-Muslims using money as a weapon - Imposing jizya and higher duties on non-Muslims. This would have compelled non-muslims to covert to Islam to avoid losing their hard earned money
2) Destruction of temples, looting the treasures from the temples and building Mosques in their places - This meant the priests and administrators of these temples would have lost their money & jobs unless they converted to Islam and start preaching Islam instead at the same location. The Hindu devotees who were emotionally attached to those priests and administration would have also covered to Islam to support their families and community at large. This may have given birth of Sufism in the subcontinent.
3) Every time a non-islamic ruler lost, the royal women were married by the new Islamic rulers and their children became slaves, had the women and Children not already committed suicide (Jauhar). The non-Islamic generals and administration also would have got replaced by the Islamic ones. This again meant losing their jobs. So many would have converted to Islam to avoid losing their jobs.
Obviously not everyone gave up the fight against all these types of persecution. In fact many did not give up to these types of threats, pressures and persecutions and that is the reason why Hinduism still survives in India while the native religions just disappeared into thin air in regions like Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Indonesia etc.
Now the subcontinent Muslims have hard time accepting this fact as accepting this would mean that their forefathers were weaker and they did not stand & fight along side with the forefathers of current day Hindus. Hence, the easier route would be to
1) Malign Hinduism to show that the conversion of their forefathers was not due to their weakness but due to their persecution under Hinduism. Now this reasoning falls flat for few reasons
a) The people who got converted to Islam in the regions of Pakistan & Afghanistan were not Hindus but rather Buddhists. Buddhism completely did away with caste system.
b) Most of the Hindus who got converted were Kshatriya, Brahman and Viasyas which meant they did not convert due to any persecution in Hinduism. Only Sudras who converted to Islam could claim this. Are Pakistanis willing to accept that most of their forefathers were Sudras? Certainly not! if reading the posts on PDF where people keep claiming about their manly physique & fairness of their skin and how they are superior to the dark, black and short Indian Hindus.
2) The alternate route is to claim that they are decedents of Arabs or Turks.This would mean they can steer clear of anyone questioning why their forefathers had to convert to Islam and avoid giving any justification. Genetics and DNA results be damned..
My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab
Nadeem F. ParachaPublished Jul 28, 2013 09:59am
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In 1973, my paternal grandparents visited Makkah to perform the first of their two Hajj pilgrimages.
With them were two of my grandmother’s sisters and their respective husbands.
Upon reaching Jeddah, they hailed a taxi from the airport and headed for their designated hotel.
The driver of the taxi was a Sudanese man. As my grandparents and one of my grandmother’s sisters settled themselves in the taxi, the driver leisurely began driving towards the hotel and on the way inserted a cassette of Arabic songs into the car’s Japanese cassette-player.
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My grandfather who was seated in the front seat beside the driver noticed that the man kept glancing at the rear view mirror, and every time he did that, one of his eyebrows would rise.
Curious, my grandfather turned his head to see exactly what was it about the women seated in the back seat that the taxi driver found so amusing.
This was what he discovered: As my grandmother was trying to take a quick nap, her sister too had her eyes closed, but her head was gently swinging from left to right to the beat of the music and she kept whispering (as if in quiet spiritual ecstasy) the Arabic expression Subhanallah, subhanallah …’
My grandfather knew enough Arabic to realise that the song to which my grandmother’s sister was swinging and praising the Almighty for was about an (Egyptian) Romeo who was lamenting his past as a heart-breaking flirt.
After giving a sideways glance to the driver to make sure he didn’t understand Punjabi, my grandfather politely asked my grandmother’s sister: ‘I didn’t know you were so much into music.’
‘Allah be praised, brother,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
The chatter woke my grandmother up: ‘What is so wonderful?’ She asked. ‘This,’ said her sister, pointing at one of the stereo speakers behind her. ‘So peaceful and spiritual …’
My grandfather let off a sudden burst of an albeit shy and muffled laughter. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘the singer is not singing holy verses. He is singing about his romantic past.’
My grandmother started to laugh as well. Her sister’s spiritual smile was at once replaced by an utterly confused look: ‘What …?’
‘Sister,’ my grandfather explained, ‘Arabs don’t go around chanting spiritual and holy verses. Do you think they quote a verse from the holy book when, for example, they go to a fruit shop to buy fruit or want toothpaste?’
I’m sure my grandmother’s sister got the point. Not everything Arabic is holy.
Even though I was only a small child then I clearly remember my grandfather relating the episode with great relish. Though he was an extremely conservative and religious man and twice performed the Hajj, he refused to sport a beard, and wasn’t much of a fan of the Arabs (especially the monarchical kind).
He was proud of the fact that he was born in a small town in north Punjab that before 1947 was part of India.
In the early 1980s when Saudi money and influence truly began to take hold on the culture and politics of Pakistan, there were many families (especially from the Punjab) that actually began to rewrite their histories.
For example, families and clans that had emerged from within the South Asian region began to claim that their ancestors actually came from Arabia.
Something like this happened within the Paracha clan as well. In 1982 a book (authored by one of my grandfather’s many cousins) claimed that the Paracha clan originally appeared in Yemen and was converted to Islam during the time of the Holy Prophet (Pbuh).
The truth, however, was that like a majority of Pakistanis, Parachas too were once either Hindus or Buddhists who were converted to Islam by Sufi saints between the 11th and 15th centuries.
When the cousin gifted his book to my grandfather, he rubbished the claim and told him that he might attract Saudi Riyals with the book but zero historical credibility.
But historical accuracy and credibility does not pan well in an insecure country like Pakistan whose state and people, even after six decades of existence, are yet to clearly define exactly what constitutes their nationalistic and cultural identity.
After the complete fall of the Mughal Empire in the 19th century till about the late 1960s, Pakistanis (post-1947), attempted to separate themselves from other religious communities of the region by identifying with those Persian cultural aspects that had reigned supreme in Muslim royal courts in India, especially during the Mughal era.
However, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the state with the help of conservative historians and ulema made a conscious effort to divorce Pakistan’s history from its Hindu and Persian past and enact a project to bond this history with a largely mythical and superficial link with Arabia.
The project began to evolve at a much more rapid pace from the 1980s onwards. The streaming in of the ‘Petro Dollars’ from oil-rich monarchies and the Pakistanis’ increasing interaction with their Arab employers in these countries, turned Pakistan’s historical identity on its head.
In other words, instead of investing intellectual resources to develop a nationalism that was grounded and rooted in the more historically accurate sociology and politics of the Muslims of the region, a reactive attempt was made to dislodge one form of ‘cultural imperialism’ and import by adopting another.
For example, attempts were made to dislodge ‘Hindu and Western cultural influences’ in the Pakistani society by adopting Arabic cultural hegemony that came as a pre-requisite and condition with the Arabian Petro Dollar.
The point is, instead of assimilating the finer points of the diverse religious and ethnic cultures that our history is made of and synthesise them to form a more convincing and grounded nationalism and cultural identity, we have decided to reject our diverse and pluralistic past and instead adopt cultural dimensions of a people who, ironically, still consider non-Arabs like Pakistanis as second-class Muslims.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1032519
THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE >
OPINION
Arab origins
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Arab origins
By
Salman Rashid
Published: January 6, 2012
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The writer is author, most recently of, “The Apricot Road to Yarkand” (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society
salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
Every single Muslim in the subcontinent believes s/he is of Arab descent. If not direct Arab descent, then the illustrious ancestor had come from either Iran or Bukhara. Interestingly, the ancestor is always a great general or a saint. Never ever have we heard anyone boasting of an intellectual for a forebear. We hear of the progeny of savage robber kings, but there is no one who claims
Abu Rehan Al-Beruni or Ibn Rushd as a distant sire.
Arab origin is the favourite fiction of all subcontinental Muslims. Most claim their ancestor arrived in Sindh with the army under
Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ). But, I have heard of lineages reaching back to Old Testament prophets as well. An elderly Janjua (Rajput), from the Salt Range told me of a forefather named Ar, a son of the Prophet Isaac. Ar, he said, was the ancestor of the races that spoke the Aryan tongue!
Touted as a local intellectual, this worthy was unmindful of the fact that Aryan was not a tribal name but a linguistic classification. Neither could he tell me how the name Ar, not being in the Old Testament, had reached him. He insisted this name headed his family tree and was, therefore true. The chart, written on a piece of rather newish paper had been, the Janjua insisted, copied from an old original. The original was of course destroyed after the copy was made.
The Arains flaunt Salim al Raee as their father — the clan being called after his surname. A great and valiant general in the army of MbQ, this man was from an agricultural family of Syria, so the
Tarikh-e-Araiantells us. Closer to our times, the Arains are indeed acclaimed for their green thumb for which reason Shah Jehan relocated a large bunch of them to mind the newly laid out Shalimar Garden of Lahore. Today, they are a very rich clan in Baghbanpura.
The
Tarikh expounds on this fictional ancestor’s noble background and courage in battle to the extent that he almost outshines MbQ. But it does not give us any source or reference for the rubbish that sullies its pages. There are two authentic histories of the Arab conquest of Sindh. Ahmad Al Biladhuri’s
Futuh ul Buladan (written circa 860) and Hamid bin Ali Kufi’s
Tarikh-e-Hind wa Sindh, translated first into the Persian as
Fatehnama Sindh and then into Sindhi as the
Chachnama (written circa 1200).
There are dozens of names sprinkled across the pages of both works, but no mention is made of a blue-blooded warrior called Salim al Raee. There are other histories besides these two works which also disregard this name for the only reason that such a man never existed.
The Awans, similarly, have a fictional ancestor called Qutb Shah from the line of the last caliph of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs. My friend Kaiser Tufail, an Arain, has had himself genetically tested from the US. He has no trace of Arab blood. His line comes from what is now Uzbekistan and has lived from early historic times in the subcontinent. The rest of us of this clan will see similar results should we go through this exercise. Kaiser had his son-in-law, an Awan, also tested. He, too, is singularly clean of Arab genes.
Most of us are the progeny of converts. In their need to escape the discrimination of the so-called higher castes, our ancestors converted to a religion that in theory claimed to profess human equality regardless of colour or caste. I use the words ‘in theory’ because even as the Arabs converted our ancestors to Islam, they discriminated against them for being “Hindis” as we learn this from Ibn Batuta’s own prejudices. And he is not alone.
Consequently, even after conversion, my ancestors, poor agriculturists, were looked down upon by the Arabs and even those who had converted earlier the same way as they were by the Brahmans when they professed their Vedic belief. Within a generation or two, those early converts began the great lie of Arab ancestry to be equal to other converts and the Arabs. This became universal with time.
The challenge then is for all those, Baloch,
Pathan, Punjabi et al, who have invented illegitimate fathers for ourselves to get ourselves tested and know the bitter truth.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 7th, 2012.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/317619/arab-origins/
You didn't ruled us...you were one of us..and your forefathers are hindu convert...
