Islam tolerated in India as well

Submitted by Jack Swagger (Singapore), Jul 8, 2010 at 10:03

You are correct Jews and Christians have lived in peace in ancient India under Hindus. It must be noted however that Muslims as well lived in relative peace with Hindus until recent times with certain individuals being able to spread their anti-islam and anti-Hindu agendas easily via the internet. The conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in the past were mainly because India and some countries in the middle east fought over land. The middle eastern countries were predominantly muslim while the indian kingdoms were mainly hindu.Religion was sometimes used as an excuse to justify their actions. Later in Indian history various kingdoms(hindu and muslim) fought over what was supposedly religion. It was once again for land , power and wealth with religion being used to unite smaller kingdoms to attack more powerful kingdoms. If invading Muslim kings had forced the people of the land he had conquered to convert to Islam, it had nothing to do with Islam but was rather for political reasons - to gain the support of future generations of that land and to unite them with his other territories against the rest of hindu India. If you look at both Islam and Hinduism, Islam preaches love and tolerance and the quran is against forced conversion while Hinduism preaches that all paths lead to god. Religious wars really have nothing to do with religion. They are solely due to the fact that man by nature discriminates against people of different races and religion and that this weakness could be exploited to further one's ambition.

In conclusion, your friend is a clown and it is people like him who give a religion as beautiful as Islam a bad name. Also, being an expert on islamic studies means that he only knows about Islam. Whatever little he knows about Hinduism is very likely what he heard from other clowns.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".