From How 'Gandhara' became 'Kandahar'
http://rajivmalhotra.sulekha.com/blog/post/2001/12/how-gandhara-became-kandahar.htm
'Kandahar', made infamous by the Taliban. The earlier name of the city was 'Quandhar', derived from the name of the region of Gandhara. Erstwhile home to Al-Qaeda today, it was always a strategic site, being on main Persian routes to Central Asia and India. Hence, it has a long history of conquests. Kandahar was taken by Alexander in 329 B.C.E., was surrendered by the Greek to Chandragupta in 305 B.C.E., and is dignified by a rock inscription of Asoka. It fell under Arab rule in the 7th century C.E., and under the Ghaznavids in the 10th. Kandahar was destroyed by Genghis Khan and again by the Turkic conqueror Timur, after which it was held by the Mughals. Mughal Emperor Babur built 40 giant steps up a hill, cut out of the solid limestone, leading to inscriptions recording details of his proud conquests. In 1747 it became the first capital of a unified Afghanistan.
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Gandhara was the trade crossroad and cultural meeting place between India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Buddhist writings mention Gandhara (which included Peshawar, Swat and Kabul Valleys) as one of the 16 major states of northern India at the time. It was a province of the Persian king Darius I in the fifth century B.C.E. After conquering it in the 4th century B.C.E., Alexander encountered the vast army of the Nandas in the Punjab, and his soldiers mutinied causing him to leave India.
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[Killing Hindus for "Allah"]
Genocide Part 1: The Conquest of Sind
. . . Asia's civilization, changed forever with the bloody plunder of Sind by the Arabs starting in the 7th century:
“In 653-4, …a force of 6000 Arabs penetrated… To the shrine of Zun. The general broke off a hand from the idol and plucked out the rubies which were its eyes… The Arabs were now able to mount frequent plunder and slave expeditions as far as Ghazna, Kabul and Bamiyan… Arab raiding continued and was aimed at exacting tribute, plunder and slaves …Slaves and beasts remained the principal booty of the raids, and these were sent to the caliphate court in a steady stream.”10
Andre Wink describes that this aspiration to conquer India had existed since the time of the Prophet, as is evidenced by the sacred texts:
“… in the hadith collections the prophet Muhammad himself is credited with the aspiration of conquering India. Participants in the holy war against al-Hind [the Hindus] are promised to be saved from hell-fire… Thus also an eschatological work which is called the Kitab al-Fitan ('Book of Trials') credits Muhammad with saying that God will forgive the sins of the members of the Muslim army which will attack al-Hind, and give them victory.”11
The plunder was also achieved by an ingenious system of leaving the prosperous population alone, so that they would continue to bring donations to the temples, and then the Muslims would loot these temples. In order to save their temple from destruction, many Hindu warriors refused to fight:
“An even greater part of the revenue of these rulers was derived from the gifts donated by pilgrims who came from all over Sind and Hind to the great idol (sanam) of the sun-temple at Multan… When Muhammad al-Qasim* conquered Multan, he quickly discovered that it was this temple which was one of the main reasons for the great wealth of the town. He 'made captives of the custodians of the budd, numbering 6000' and confiscated its wealth, but not the idol itself – which was made of wood, covered with red leather and two red rubies for its eyes and wearing a crown of gold inlaid with gems --, 'thinking it best to leave the idol where it was, but hanging a piece of cow's flesh on its neck by way of mockery'. AI-Qasim built his mosque in the same place, in the most crowded bazaar in the center of the town. The possession of the sun-temple -- rather than the mosque -- is what in later times the geographers see as the reason why the local governors or rulers could hold out against the neighboring Hindu powers. Whenever an 'infidel king' marched against Multan and the Muslims found it difficult to offer adequate resistance, they threatened to break the idol or mutilate it, and this, allegedly, made the enemy withdraw. In the late tenth century however the Isma'ilis who occupied Multan broke the idol into pieces and killed its priests. A new mosque was then erected on its site…”12
Genocide Part 2: Mahmud of Ghazni
The founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty was a former Turkish slave, recognized by the Iranian Muslims as governor of Ghazni (a town near Kandahar). His son Mahmud (ruled in 998-1030) expanded the empire further into India. A devout Muslim, Mahmud converted the Ghaznavids into Islam, thus bringing Islam into the sub-continent's local population. In the 11th century, he made Ghazni the capital of the vast empire of the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan's first Muslim dynasty. The atrocities by Mahmud of Ghazni makes the Taliban look benign by comparison. Will Durant explains:13
“The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within… For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.”
“In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and un-bored pearls and rubies shinning like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.””
“Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied it coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naptha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known.”
“Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few schillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.”
Genocide Part 3: Post-Ghazni Invaders.
Mahmud of Ghazni set the stage for other Muslim invaders in their orgy of plunder and brutality, as Will Durant explains: 14
“In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan invaded India, captured the city of Delhi destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi -- an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind -- fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””
“Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi.”
“When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conquerer of Chitor) had all the males -- from fifteen to thirty thousand of them -- slaughtered in one day.”
“Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel's wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were weaned out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert…."”
“Firoz Shah invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age or eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.”
“These rulers… were armed with a religion militaristic in operation… [and made] the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans -- usually of Hindu origin -- to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs: some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse historians, poets and scientists.”
“The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straight-forward robbery…”
“The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up "rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion." Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver… or of any superfluity was to be seen… Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.”"
“…Timur-i-lang -- a Turk who had accepted Islam as an admirable weapon… feeling the need of more gold, it dawned upon him that India was still full of infidels… Mullahs learned in the Koran decided the matter by quoting an inspiring verse: “Oh Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity.” Thereupon, Timur crossed the Indus in 1398, massacred or enslaved such of the inhabitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with multitude of women and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake,”
“This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations… The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”
During these genocides for centuries, a certain portion of the fleeing Hindus reached Europe. Today's Roma people of Europe (popularly called the 'gypsies', a term that they regard as a pejorative) are of Indian origin and have lived as wanderers in Europe for nearly a thousand years. It is believed that they originated in Northwest India, in a region including Gandhara, Punjab, and Rajasthan. In Europe, they survived by being musicians and performers, because European society did not assimilate them even after a thousand years. They have accepted their plight as street people without a 'home' as such. Their history in Europe is filled with attempts to eradicate them in various ways.15 (There is much justified criticism of India's caste system as a way by which diverse ethnicities dealt with each other. However, I have yet to see a comparison with the fact that Europeans dealt with non-European ethnicities using genocide (as in America), or by attempted genocide as in the case of the Roma.)
These are excerpts--read the whole thing at
http://rajivmalhotra.sulekha.com/blog/post/2001/12/how-gandhara-became-kandahar.htm
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* How Islam came to India and why now it needs to go from India -2
This reference relates how Muhammad al-Qasim was recalled by the Caliph:
Muhammad bin Qasim remained in Sind for a little over three years after which Islamic chroniclers say he was suddenly recalled and summarily executed, probably by being sewn in an animal hide and then pierced with iron nails, on the charge of deflowering two Sindhi princesses meant for the bed of the Caliph. [The overzealous among Muslim ranks can remember the other famous instances such as the early Islamic commanders in Spain. It is also interesting to note that the story comes from Islamic pens, which explicitly describes how the Caliph, the supposed spiritual leader of all Islam is murderously concerned about the virginity of maidens he wants to bed himself - an indication of the generic insecurity of Islam's roots whose core religious texts show an overwhelming concern with womens' sexual purity and the predilection towards consummating marriages with child-brides]
After Qasim’s departure the Arab power in Sind declined rapidly with a majority of the newly converted returned back to their former religions. According to Denison Ross after the recall of Muhammad bin Qasim, the Muslims retained some foothold on the west bank of the river Indus, but they were in such small number that they gradually merged into Hindu population. In Mansura (the Muslim capital of Sind) they actually adopted Hinduism
Another version has it
circa 731 A.D. when Mohammed Bin Kasim (Muhammad al-Qasim) attacked Chittor. Bappa Rawal defeated the Arabs and drove them out of the country.
Bappa Rawal played an important role in the Battle of Rajasthan, a series of wars fought in the 8th century AD between the regional rulers of North-Western India and the Arabs of Sindh, where the latters had a sounding defeat.In order to face of Muslim invasions across the western borders of Rajputana, Bappa united the smaller states of Ajmer and Jaisalmer to repel the invaders. During the next 800 years, Chittor becomes the symbol of Hindu resistance in western India.
http://www.indiasite.com/rajasthan/chittorgarh/history.html
Besides being a brave warrior who lead his army to great victories, Bappa Rawal was also known to be a just ruler. After having ruled his kingdom for a long time he abdicated the throne in favour of his son he himself turned into Siva upasaka ( worshiper of Shiva ) and became a Yati ( an ascetic who has full control over his passions ).
References
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or the Central and Western Rajput States (Hardcover) by James Tod. Edited by William Crooke. 3 volumes, hardcover. Publisher: Trans-Atl (1994) ISBN 81-7069-128-1
http://www.mmcfindia.org/Bappa_Rawal.asp
Guru Gorkhanath had a Rajput Prince-disciple, the legendary Bappa Rawal, born Prince Kalbhoj/Prince Shailadhish, founder of the Royal house of Mewar, who became the first Gurkha (Gorkha The word Gorkha is derived from the prakrit words "go rakkha" (Sanskrit gau-rakṣa, literally "cow-protector"). This was used by Guru Gorakhnath, the spiritual leader of the Gorkhas, the name given to his disciples. ) and is said to be the ancestor of the present Royal family of Nepal. Bappa Rawal, became a disciple of warrior-saint Guru Gorakhnath Later descendants of Bappa Rawal moved further east to found the house of Gorkha, which in turn founded the Kingdom of Nepal. Gorkha is one of the 75 districts of modern Nepal.
[edit] See also
List of Rajputs
Dhangar
Gurkha
Mewar
Rajput
Jay Chittod - A Gujarati novel exploring lifespan and works of Bappa Rawal
The Gorkha war cry is "Jai Mahakali, Ayo Gorkhali" which literally translates to "Glory be to the Goddess of War, here come the Gorkhas!"
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bappa_Rawal"
Bappa Rawal had an arrogant streak, and the nobles didn’t see eye to eye with him. So they decided to desert him and form their own fiefs. But that was not to be, for now invaders appeared from Afghanistan, forcing the Rajputs to ally themselves to retain their lands and their honour. Who exactly was the commander of the Afghan army is a bit mysterious, but in the battle he was certainly defeated. Driven by this victory Bappa Rawal proceeded to his old home in Gajni and overthrew Salim, the Muslim ruler. This went down very well with the nobles who were disgruntled earlier and they lent Bappa their support in taking Chittor from the Mori ruler.
The legend states that Bappa Rawal was a teenager in hiding, when he came upon the warrior saint while on a hunting expedition with friends in the jungles of Rajasthan. Bappa Rawal chose to stay behind, and care for the warrior saint, who was in deep meditation. When Guru Gorkhanath awoke, he was pleased with the devotion of Bappa Rawal. The Guru gave him the Kukri (Khukuri) knife, the famous curved blade of the present day Gurkhas.[6] The legend continues that he told Bappa that he and his people would henceforth be called Gurkhas, the disciples of the Guru Gorkhanath, and their bravery would become world famous. He then instructed Bappa Rawal, and his Gorkhas to stop the advance of the Muslims, who were invading Afghanistan (which at that time was a Hindu/Buddhist nation). Bappa Rawal took his Gurkhas and liberated Afghanistan – originally named Gandhara, from which the present day Kandahar derives its name. He and his Gorkhas stopped the initial Islamic advance of the 8th century in the Indian subcontinent.
http://badnewsbarnes666.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/liveleak-com-gurkhas-on-duty-in-afghanistan/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurkha#cite_ref-Chauhan2830_0-1
Second Chapter Of Chandogya Upanishad - Importance - Contents
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The second chapter of the Chāndogya Upanishad is crucial for its
exploration of meditative practices, particularly on the saman chants, as
well as its symb...
