Opinion | Jizya Under Shah Jahan And The Pious Service Of Kavindra |
When the Arab marauder Tariq landed on the shores of Spain in 711 CE, he burned the ship that had carried his holy army of Islamic warriors. His alarmed soldiers asked him how they would return. But Tariq had no intention of returning. His response was fully rooted in the core tenets of Islam:
“Har mulk mulk-i mâ’st ki mulk-î Khuda-i mâ’st": All land belongs to us, because it belongs to our God.
One simply can’t argue with this kind of “logic."
Indeed, Tariq’s terse response was a plain delineation of a commentary on Jihad. Every Arab and Turkish Muslim invader from the earliest times has used a variant of Tariq’s dictum.
From Mahmud of Ghazni’s infamous vow of “waging a Holy War against Hindustan every year" to Tipu Sultan’s bigoted letters to alien Muslim rulers like Zaman Shah inviting him to establish the empire of Islam in this Kaffir land, this pattern has been consistent.
From one view, the majority of later Muslim theology and religious literature is simply a voluminous mass of Jihad-justification. We can hear it from the mouth of the 14th-century Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyyah:
“Jihad merely restores land to the Muslims who enjoy a divine right over these lands."
When we contemplate its complete implications, we observe how the consistency of the behaviour pattern remains unchanged.
However, a deeper investigation into the fundamentals reveals a more chilling fact.........