Experience of Islam in India

Some excerpts from M. A. Khan's book, Islamic Jihad, A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism and Slavery, may give additional insight to the aims of Hamas and their associates. Here is the first section of excerpts.

In light of the evidence presented above, the question should not be how some 80 percent of the Indians remained non-Muslims after so many centuries of Muslim rule. Instead it should be asked, why and how as many as 20 percent of the Indians became Muslim despite their defiant resistance against Islam. How could the Muslim population swell when Hindus found Islam so repugnant, as attested by the records of many Muslim chroniclers and rulers.

In the first successful encroachment into India, Muhammad bin Qasim put large numbers of men to death in Debal, Brahmanabad and Multan. It appears that the adult men of weapon bearing age, who fell within the reach of the Muslim army in the course of the assaults, were ruthlessly slaughtered. Undoubtedly, many of the grown-up men fled in all directions to escape the sword, leaving the vulnerable women and children behind, who were carried away as slaves. Chachnama records that Qasim's on Rawar yielded 60,000 slaves. In the final stages of his conquest of Sindh, says Chachnama, about 100,000 women and children were enslaved.

The number of women and children enslaved by Muslim invaders has not been recorded systematically for all the campaigns. It can be surmised that each of Qasim's major assaults in Schwanm, Dhalila, Brahmanabad and Multan yielded similar numbers of captives. His brief exploit of three years in the Sindh frontier of India (712-15) had likely yielded a few hundred thousand slaves. He always forwarded one-fifth of the captives and other spoils - the share of the state, according to Quran [8:41], propetic traditions and Sharia - to the caliph in Damascus and distributed the rest amongst his soldiers. These slave women and children became the property of Muslims and entered the house of Islam by default. When those children grew up to be adult Muslims in a few years, the males were drafted into the Muslim army for waging new holy wars against the Hindus, who had been their kinfolk and coreligionists a few years earlier. In other words, in the short time span of a decade, these captured children had become the weapon for the Muslim state to wage new Jihad expeditions for extending the domain of Islam, for converting the vanquished infidel, for enslaving their women and children, and for plundering their wealth. Even during the upheaval of the Partition of India (1946-47), some 100,000 Hindu and Sikh women were enslaved, carried away and married off to Muslims (Chapter VI).

The female captives, in compliance with Quranic sanctions and prophetic traditions, were used as sex-slaves by their Muslim masters (see Chapter VII on Slavery). Therefore, they did not only add to the growing Muslim population, but also became valuable tools for expanding the Muslim populace through procreation. When those women, especially the ones of childbearing age, were taken away, the Hindu men, who had fled, came back to find their women and children gone. As a result, they did not have sufficient partners for [the] procreation. That means, wherever Muslims made a successful assault, procreation in the Hindu community dropped sharply. On the other hand, the few thousand Muslim soldiers who came to India with Muhammad bin Qasim had plenty of sex-partners for reproduction to the maximum capacity. Even Emperor Akbar had amassed 5,000 beautiful women in his harem. Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco (r. 1672-1727) had sired about 1,200 children through his 2,000-4,000 [...] wives and sex-slaves. The extensive enslavement of the vanquished Hindus, particularly the women - who were engaged in the breeding of Muslim children - helped the rapid growth of the Muslim populace.

Therefore, whenever Muslims made successful inroads, they reduced the Hindu population directly by slaughtering the men in large numbers and taking away the women and children as captives. It indirectly reduced the Hindu populace by rendering the remnant Hindu men unprocreative by denying them of childbearing female partners. Since those women became the vehicle for breeding Muslin offspring instead, the final result was the reduction of the Hindu populace and a sharp rise in the numbers of Muslims. The growing Muslim population was to be maintained by the toiling of the vanquished Hindus, subjected to grinding taxes. This is roughly the same protocol, which the Prophet Muhammad had applied to the Jews of Banu Qurayza and Khaybar. ...

More excerpts.

Sex Slavery and Concubinage p. 235

The female slaves worked as domestic maids and in the backyards, while the young and pretty ones also had to provide sex to their masters. Thus, they not only provided menial services and pleasure to masters, but also helped swell the Muslim populace through procreation. Sex-slavery is not a negligible institution in Islam; Allah has shown utmost seriousness about its practice by repeatedly reminding Muslims about it in the Quran. Prophet Muhammad himself had taken at least three slave-girls as his concubines ... . From his large share of captives, he also distributed slave-girls among his companions for keeping as concubines. ... In explaining the institution of slavery on the basis of Quranic verses 23:5-6, brilliant Islamic scholar Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (d. 1979) wrote:

“Two categories of women have been excluded from the general command of guarding the private parts: (a) wives, (b) women who are legally in one’s possession, i.e. slave-girls. Thus the verse [Quran 23:5-6] clearly lays down the law that one is allowed to have sexual relations with one’s slave-girl as with one’s wife, the basis being possession and not marriage. If marriage had been the condition, the slave-girl would have also been included among the wives, and there was no need to mention them separately.”

In agreement with the institution of sex-slavery in Islam and its above mentioned purpose, the Hedayah states that the object of owning female slaves is “cohabitation and generation of children.”

...

Using the female slaves for sex - a norm and a widespread practice throughout the history of Islam - is clearly sanctioned in the Quran, the Sunnah, and the Sharia. It has, therefore, received unabashed and overt approval of Islamic jurists, imams and scholars well into the modern age. Apart from the lure of booty, the greed for capturing the women for using as sex-slaves became a significant motivating factor for Muslim Jihadis to take part in holy wars since Muhammad’s time. According to Islamic laws, the slayer becomes owner of the victim’s wife, children and properties. Sir William Muir thought that the sanction of sex-slavery in Islam acted ‘as an inducement to fight in the hope of capturing the females who would then be lawful concubines as ‘that their right hand possessed.’’

From Muhammad’s own practice of slave-concubinage, it flourished into a widely practiced institution in later periods as captives became numerous. Islam puts no limit on the number of sex-slaves Muslim men can keep; ‘there is absolutely no limit to the number of slave girls with whom a Muhammadan may cohabit, and it is the consecration of this illimitable indulgence which so popularizes the Mohammadan religion amongst the uncivilized nations and so popularizes slavery in the Muslim religion,’ writes Thomas Hughes. Accordingly, writes Lewis, ‘The slave women of every ethnic origin were acquired in great numbers to staff the harems of the Islamic world - as concubines or menials, the two functions not always clearly differentiated ...’. Ronald Segal also affirms this in saying: ‘... The harems of rulers could be enormous. The harem of Abd al-Rahman III (d. 961) in Cordoba contained over 6,000 concubines; and the one in the Fatamid palace in Cairo had twice as many.’ Muslim rulers of India did not lag behind either; even enlightened Akbar had 5,000 women in his harem, while Jahangir and Shah Jahan had 5,000 to 6,000 each. In the eighteenth century, Sultan Moulay Ismail had 4,000 concubines in his harem.

Clearly Muslim rulers - from Africa to Europe, from the Middle East to India had accumulated sex-slaves in their thousands. In the heyday of Islam, court officials, nobles, high-ranking generals and provincial governors had dozens to hundreds and even thousands of slaves. Even the poor Muslim households or common shopkeepers used to have many slaves, as recorded by Muslim chroniclers. In general, the young female slaves in all households had to provide sex to their masters as demanded. It appears that capturing the women for keeping as concubines was a major focus of Islamic slave-trading; because, for every male slave, two females were captured in Africa for transporting to the Muslim world. And for those transported by Europeans to the new world, there were two males for every female.

Niccolao Manucci, who lived in India during Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign, observed of the Muslim infatuation with women and sex that ‘all Mohammedans are fond of women, who are their principal relaxation and almost their only pleasure.’ ...
...

In sum, slave-concubinage - the most degrading and dehumanizing form of prostitution - became a prominent hallmark of Islamic tradition well into the modern age. ... In the princely state of Bahawalpur in Sindh, first to be conquered by Muslim invaders - the last Nawab, who ruled until 1954 before its incorporation into Pakistan, ‘had more than three hundred and ninety women’ in his harem. ...

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