#Temples destroyed by Muslims

[ramanan50]

Qutub Minar Built on Hindu Temple, Archeological Survey of India 1871 Report

I had published articles on Mughals contribution to India . List of temples destroyed by Islam in India. Vishnu’s Feet in Humayun’s Tomb. How , in Malabar, Brahmins were massacred by Tipu Sultan and how they were forced to eat meat and converted to Islam. Massacre of Brahmins of Mandya, Karnataka,India on Depavali and they do not celebrate Depavali,an important festival of Hindus. How…

[snekdood]

i just kinda feel like if you asked ram he'd tell you he doesnt rly give a huge fuck about all this like yall do lmao

[inklingm8]

@elenajones23 first of all, who are you, a non Jew to lecture me about what my religion does or doesn’t allow? Who are you to tell me, as someone who doesn't practice the same religion, that I can or cannot do things?

The Torah isn’t a simple set of guidelines and commands, it’s far more complex than that. It has different interpritations, so saying the torah doesn't allow it is blatantly false. The name "Zion" (Promised land) is mentioned 154 times.

“It isn’t your land and it never was your land” bullshit.

We absolutely do have a land, if we don't, then why do we have holy sights in Jerusalem? Why are names like "Jaffa" and "Haifa" Hebrew?

The land of Israel is where my ancestors came from, it is where they lived, it is where they had a connection to, and it is where they suffered under the romans and were exiled.

We were never welcomed in Europe, we were never welcomed in the rest of the middle east.

These are ancient scrolls called the "Dead sea scrolls" which are a set of ancient Jewish writings dating from the 3rd century BCE.

This is all of what remains of our ancient temple, this is what it once was:

The first temple is Solomon's temple, the second one is Herod's temple, which was destroyed in 70CE by the romans. centuries later, the Muslim caliphates built the Al Aqsa mosque which was built on top of our temple mount. Today, the west wall is all we have left of this historic holy place.

The name "Palestine" was given to the land of Israel by roman colonisers who exiled most of us from the land of Israel, took many of us slaves, and scattered everyone else through western Europe (Some moved further east).

Now about the Nazis = Zionist argument. The Nazis originally made a deal with German Zionist Jews (The Haavara agreement) to bring about a mass migration from Germany to Israel, it should be mentioned that this was because Hitler and the Nazis wanted a Jew-Free Europe, not because the Nazis supported Zionism.

This deal was criticized by both Nazis and Zionists. Zionist criticised it because it made a deal with the devil, and the Nazis criticised it because it went against their philosophy.

The Nazis were extremely antizionist, the belief that they were Zionists is soviet cold war propaganda to demonise the state of Israel and the broader Jewish community. They believed that Jews were biologically incapable of running their own state and were too inferior. Hitler had a "Palestinian" friend (Amin al-Husseini) who campaigned in Berlin, fought for a Palestinian state, and even CONTRIBUTED TO THE HOLOCAUST. They also lead a boycott of Jewish businesses in "Palestine".

So, you're wrong. So very very wrong. You can try to lecture me about the history of my own people and religion all you want, but you're wrong.

Please, kindly fuck off and read a history book. Please attend a Synagogue service and learn more about our religion before you come spewing false bullshit about it.

[h0bg0blin-meat]

Idk who needs to hear this but removing Mughal history from history textbooks completely to the point that the future generations wouldn't even KNOW who the Mughals were, is not the way to go.

You can't just distort history and remove a chunk of it. That's a very biased way of viewing something that actually happened not even 500 years ago. History is not fiction. You can't remove the existence of real people.

When you remove Mughal history, you also remove the good and bad they did. You remove the reason behind the beautiful blend of Indo-Islamic architecture, culture and art we see today, few of the things that have implied towards a sense of harmony amidst the religious chaos that reeked back in the day. But with that, you ALSO remove the massive destruction and looting of thousands of temples, the inhumane measures, laws and punishments they put up against non-Muslims, the struggles and sacrifices of the Hindus and other oppressed groups who protested against these atrocities oh-so-courageously. You remove their cries, their brave stories. You remove the valiant fights Shivaji, Maharana Pratap and their likes put up against these people. You remove the martyrs of the several genocides these guys (especially Babur) caused. You remove them all, because once there's no Mughals, who did these brave souls fight against?

Also why only Mughals? What about the Khaljis, Mamluks, Tughlaqs, Ghaznis and others? They committed way worse atrocities than the Mughals did tbh. So with that logic all of their histories should be wiped out? But that's almost like a 700-800-year-history-wipeout we're talking about (the dates might not be accurate). And that's not how it works.

Here's a better idea. Just... show their good and their bad, and just don't glorify them and their tyranny. We keep the struggles and the sour lives the suppressed groups lived under the rule of these dynasties, and maybe glorify the brave souls who fought selflessly against them. We show how they plundered any place of worship that wasn't a mosque (or Islamic in general), and treated the idols of these religions post-destruction. We can also include the non-Islamic kingdoms and kingdoms that stood still and strong despite the invasions, like the many Hindu kingdoms in the south, then the Ahom dynasty and a few other small kingdoms in the northeast, etc. We can bring lesser-known and highly underrated non-Islamic kingdoms into light too in this process, and how they dealt with these invaders. (Half of these points are already depicted in the existing textbooks, or... atleast the textbooks *I* studied back in school, but I think they get kinda overshadowed by the subtle glorification of these invaders)

These are the solutions I'd provide. If anyone has anything to add, please do, or if yall have better solutions, pls lmk. But removing a huge chunk of history just out of pure hate and revenge like this is NOT the way to go about in the field of history LMFAO. It's the same as how that one biased historian recently claimed that no Hindu temples were destroyed by the Islamic invaders.

[a-queer-seminarian]

Gaza's Gethsemane

Today is Maundy Thursday, when Christians remember Jesus’s Last Supper, his final meal with his closest friends before his arrest and execution by the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, right now, in Jesus’ own homeland, millions suffer starvation and terror, displacement and death under Western-funded Israeli colonialism and continued military assault. Israel blocks food from reaching them, leaving Palestinians in fear that any "supper" they can scrounge up might be their last.

After their meal, Jesus led his friends into the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed in anguish, fearing all he was about to endure: criminalization, torture, and a painful public death.

Jesus begs his friends to “stay awake” as he wrestles — just to be present, to make him feel a little less alone. How do we respond to Jesus’ plea by “staying awake” to Palestine’s current agony?

"Cry" (2016) by Mohammed Almadhoun.

That question also leads me to ponder another: how does God join Palestinians in their agony? Where is God in their suffering?

Palestinian Christian Mitri Raheb seeks to answer this question of where God is in his 2015 book Faith in the Face of Empire.

Raheb looks at the history of the Palestinian region, from ancient times to today, as a long chain of different empires — from the Assyrians to the Romans, Ottomans to Western-funded modern Israel.

He says that this long history of occupation is what gave Palestinians the ability to notice God where those in power do not: among the powerless. It is this revelation, Raheb declares, that has empowered Palestinians — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — to survive and resist Empire again and again.

Raheb writes about how in ancient times, the divine was made

“...visible and omnipresent in the empire with shrines and temples that represented not only his glory but also that of the empire. God’s omnipotence and that of the empire were almost interchangeable. He was a victorious God, a fitting deity for a victorious empire. At the other end of the spectrum there was the God of the people of Palestine, whose tiny territory resembled a corridor in Middle Eastern geography. ...This God was a loser. He lost almost all wars, and his people were forced to pay the price of those defeats. In short, this God did not appear to be up to the challenge of the various empires. His people in Palestine were forced to hear the mocking voices of their neighbors who taunted them, 'Where is your God?' (Ps 42: 3, 10). The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see him. When his people were driven as slaves into Babylon, they witnessed him accompanying them. When his capital, Jerusalem, was destroyed and his temple plundered, they saw him there. When his people were defeated, he was also present. The salient feature of this God was that he didn’t run away when his people faced their destiny but remained with them, showing solidarity and choosing to share their destiny. Consequently and ultimately, Jesus revealed this God on the cross, in a situation of terrible agony and pain, when he was brutally crushed by the empire and hung like a rebellious freedom fighter. The people of Palestine could then say with great certainty [that their God] ‘in every respect has been tested as we are’ (Heb 4:15). For the people of Palestine this meant that defeat in the face of the empire was not an ultimate defeat. It meant that after the country was devastated by the Babylonians, when everything seemed to be lost, a new beginning was possible. Even when the dwelling place of God was destroyed, God survived that destruction, developing in response a dwelling that was indestructible. And when Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), that soul-rending plea was just the prelude to the resurrection…”

It is this revelation that God sides against empire, Raheb continues, that keeps the Palestinian spirit alive through horrible oppression. Though the world may call such faith foolish — how can you believe God is with you and that God will have the final say, when all evidence points to your abandonment and defeat? — it is wisdom to the oppressed. Raheb describes how this wisdom feeds Palestinian resistance, over and over across the millennia:

The art of survival and starting anew is a highly developed form of expression in Palestine, and one I see daily. People’s lives, businesses, and education are interrupted by wars and the aftermath of wars over and over again, and yet I witness people refusing to give up, taking a deep breath, and beginning again. Logically, it is foolish, and yet there is deep wisdom in such a course of action. I’m often asked by visitors how I can keep going. Everything seems to be lost, the land “settled” by Israel, the wall suffocating Palestinian land and spirit, the world silent, and hope almost gone.”

Raheb's answer to them is that God’s presence in and among the suffering, and God’s promised resurrection, of renewal in the face of all terror and death, is what keeps him and his people going.

As we enter into these final days of Lent, I pray for hearts and minds opened to witnessing God’s solidarity with and resurrection for Palestinians suffering imperial brutality. I pray that the Palestinians will survive as they always have — “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8–9).

[euph0synee]

bro oh my god it's so fucking frustrating how everyone even the many hindus themselves have forgotten the actual torture and horrors inflicted on Hindus by the islamic invaders.

like genuinely why? if people's hate towards Israel for what it's doing to Palestine and Jews hate for N*zis Justified then why is Hindu people's hate and dislike for islam gets everyone squirming in their seats?

like Israel deserves hate because they're so cruel and bad !! N*zis deserve hate for what they did to Jews because it was cruel and bad !!

and just like that Mughals deserve hate for the oppression, torture and horrors they inflicted on hindus for more than 500+ years right? RIGHT? wrong because the moment a Hindu or anyone for a matter of fact raises this issue and expresses their dislike they get absolutely teared down to shreds by others as if he has committed the biggest sin. why? why are we not allowed to hate islam and islamic invaders when they had quite literally forcefully entered India, Killed hindu men, kidnapped their wives and r*ped them making them their sex slaves not even leaving a corpse alone and it got so bad that hindu women had to start Jauhar/sati and chose to burn themselves just to be safe from these disgusting pigs, slaughtered cows in front of temples, destroyed hindu temples and idols then stepped on it, forcefully converted the hindus, fed hindus beef forcefully, killed so many you g hindu kings and princes and so much more and this horrendous torture continued till the last reigning mughal emperor.

and after all of this i still see so many muslims cursing hindu gods in the most nasty way possible and saying such disgusting things it makes me shivers and let's not forget about the hindus that are being killed in Pakistan and Kashmir and all of this why? just because hindus started doing exactly what muslims were doing to them? just because they started fighting back?

so tell me why? why is the hatred and dislike of hindus not justified but the hatred of muslims is justified? tell me why even so many hindus are protesting for palestine and standing against Israel but the moment a hindu says anything about islam these same people along with muslims and all start attacking them cancelling them but they go quiet when a muslim does the same thing?

it is a genuine question. i just want to know why do people still defend mughals while throwing the sacrifice and torture hindus had to go through under the bus?

[bfpnola]

definitely a longer piece so these excerpts are far from showcasing everything this piece has to offer! read the whole thing on your own time, and in general, just check out jewish currents, an educational, leftist, anti-zionist jewish magazine!

Every August, the township of Edison, New Jersey—where one in five residents is of Indian origin—holds a parade to celebrate India’s Independence Day. In 2022, a long line of floats rolled through the streets, decked out in images of Hindu deities and colorful advertisements for local businesses. People cheered from the sidelines or joined the cavalcade, dancing to pulsing Bollywood music. In the middle of the procession came another kind of vehicle: A wheel loader, which looks like a small bulldozer, rumbled along the route bearing an image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi aloft in its bucket. For South Asian Muslims, the meaning of the addition was hard to miss. A few months earlier, during the month of Ramadan, Indian government officials had sent bulldozers into Delhi’s Muslim neighborhoods, where they damaged a mosque and leveled homes and storefronts. The Washington Post called the bulldozer “a polarizing symbol of state power under Narendra Modi,” whose ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is increasingly enacting a program of Hindu supremacy and Muslim subjugation. In the weeks after the parade, one Muslim resident of Edison, who is of Indian origin, told The New York Times that he understood the bulldozer much as Jews would a swastika or Black Americans would a Klansman’s hood. Its inclusion underscored the parade’s other nods to the ideology known as Hindutva, which seeks to transform India into an ethnonationalist Hindu state. The event’s grand marshal was the BJP’s national spokesperson, Sambit Patra, who flew in from India. Other invitees were affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international arm of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary force Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Modi is a longtime member.

...

On December 6th, 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindus, many of whom were affiliated with the paramilitary group the RSS, gathered at the Babri Masjid, a centuries-old mosque that is one of the most contested sacred sites in the world. Over the preceding century, far-right Hindus had claimed that the mosque, located in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, was built not only upon the site where the Hindu deity Ram was born but atop the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. The RSS and its affiliates had been campaigning to, in the words of a BJP minister, correct the “historical mistake” of the mosque’s existence, a task the mob completed that December afternoon. “They climbed on top of the domes and tombs,” one witness told NPR. “They were carrying hammers and these three-pronged spears from Hindu scripture. They started hacking at the mosque. By night, it was destroyed.” The demolition sparked riots that lasted months and killed an estimated 2,000 people across the country.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was arguably Hindu nationalism’s greatest triumph to date. Since its establishment in 1925, the RSS—whose founders sought what one of them called a “military regeneration of the Hindus,” inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride”—had been a marginal presence in India: Its members held no elected office, and it was temporarily designated a terrorist organization after one of its affiliates shot and killed Mohandas Gandhi in 1948. But the leveling of the Babri Masjid activated a virulently ethnonationalist base and paved the way for three decades of Hindutva ascendance. In 1998, the BJP formed a government for the first time; in 2014, it returned to power, winning a staggering 282 out of 543 seats in parliament and propelling Modi into India’s highest office. Since then, journalist Samanth Subramanian notes, all of the country’s governmental and civil society institutions “have been pressured to fall in line” with a Hindutva agenda—a phenomenon on full display in 2019, when the Supreme Court of India awarded the land where the Babri Masjid once stood to a government run by the very Hindu nationalists who illegally destroyed it. (Modi has since laid a foundation stone for a new Ram temple in Ayodhya, an event that a prominent RSS activist celebrated with a billboard in Times Square.) The Ayodhya verdict came in the same year that Modi stripped constitutional protections from residents of the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir and passed a law that creates a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants, laying the groundwork for a religious test for Indian nationality. Under Modi, “the Hinduization of India is almost complete,” as journalist Yasmeen Serhan has written in The Atlantic.

To achieve its goals, the RSS has worked via a dense network of organizations that call themselves the “Sangh Parivar” (“joint family”) of Hindu nationalism. The BJP, which holds more seats in the Indian parliament than every other party combined, is the Sangh’s electoral face. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the movement’s cultural wing, responsible for “Hinduizing” Indian society at the grassroots level. The Bajrang Dal is the project’s militant arm, which enforces Hindu supremacy through violence. Dozens of other organizations contribute money and platforms to the Sangh. The sheer number of groups affords the Sangh what human rights activist Pranay Somayajula has referred to as a “tactical politics of plausible deniability,” in which the many degrees of separation between the governing elements and their vigilante partners shields the former from backlash. This explains how, until 2018, the CIA could describe the VHP and Bajrang Dal as “militant religious organizations”—a designation that applies to non-electoral groups exerting political pressure—even as successive US governments have maintained a warm relationship with their parliamentary counterpart, the BJP.

...

The most extreme figures in the Hindu nationalist and Zionist movements were especially frank about the nature of their partnership: “Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans, or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam,” Bajrang Dal affiliate Rohit Vyasmaan told The New York Times of his friendly relationship with Mike Guzofsky, a member of a violent militant group connected to the infamous Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane’s Kach Party.

...

In 2003, Gary Ackerman—a Jewish former congressman who was awarded India’s third-highest civilian honor for helping to found the Congressional Caucus on India—told a gathering of AJC and AIPAC representatives and their Indian counterparts that “Israel [is] surrounded by 120 million Muslims,” while “India has 120 million [within].” Tom Lantos, another Jewish member of the caucus, likewise enjoined the two communities to collaborate: “We are drawn together by mindless, vicious, fanatic, Islamic terrorism.”

[forgotten-bharat]

Let's talk about the idolized Aurangzeb. What he did and why is he considered great?

We will be focusing on the destruction of temples and hindu genocide done by him to debunk claims deny that this.

By the order of Aurangzeb (1645 AD) according to Mirãt-i-Ahmadî, Temple of Chintaman situated close to Sarashpur (Gujarat) and built by Sitaldas jeweller was converted into a mosque named Quwwat-ul-lslam (might of Islam) (1645 AD.) A cow was slaughtered to 'solemnize' the 'ceremony'.

Slaughtering a cow was a heinous choice, cow being one of the holiest animal in Hinduism. As well as, Hinduism prohibits animal slaughter, to do it right where their place of worship used to be where now stands a Mosque was simply to mock and destroy the souls of the indigenous population. The Pandits and Cows were always their main targets.

This was done before he even became the king, he was just a prince at this point.

When he became the king he sent Mir Jumla on an expedition to Cooch Bihar. Mir Jumla demolished ALL temples in that city and erected mosques in their stead. The general himself wielded a battle-axe to break the image of Narayana.

Mirãt-i-Ahmadî continues, In 1666 AD, he ordered the faujdar of Mathura to remove a stone railing which had been presented by Dara Shukoh to the temples of Keshav Rai. He explained: “In the Muslim faith it is a sin even to look at a temple and this Dara had restored a railing in a temple!”

You can still argue that Islamic Colonization simply had a political motif and not a religious one, if that would have been the case, none of the indigenous people would have been harmed, none of them would have been forcefully converted, their heritage would not have been destroyed right in front of their eyes, their schools and texts would have been burned. This is downright evil and was done in the name of Allah by all the Mughal tyrants.

“The richly jewelled idols taken from the infidel temples were transferred to Agra and placed beneath the steps leading to the Nawab Begum Sahib's (Jahanara's) mosque in order that they might be “pressed under foot by the true believers”. Mathura changed its name into Islamabad and was thus called in all official documents.”

In the same year, Sita Ram ji temple at Soron was destroyed as also the shrine of Devi Patan at Gonda. News came from Malwa also that the local governor had sent 400 troopers to destroy all temples around Ujjain.

According to Muraqat-i-Abul Hasan, civil officers, agents of jagirdars, karoris and amlas from Cuttack in Orissa to Medinipur in Bengal were instructed as follows:

“Every idol house built during the last 10 or 12 years' should be demolished without delay. Also, do not allow the crushed Hindus and despicable infidels to repair their old temples. Reports of the destruction of temples should be sent to the court under the seal of the qazis and attested by pious Shaikhs.”

(1672 AD) several thousand Satnamis were slaughtered near Narnaul in Mewat for which act of 'heroism' Radandaz Khan was tided Shuja'at Khan with the mansab of 3000 and 2000 horse.

(1675 AD) Guru Tegh Bahadur was tortured to death for his resistance against the forcible conversion of the Hindus of Kashmir. The destruction of gurudwaras thereafter is a well-known story which our secularists have succeeded in suppressing because the Akali brand Sikhs have been forging ties of friendship with Islam as against their parent faith, Hindu Dharma.

Mirãt-i-Ahmadî goes ahead: “On 6th January 1680 A.D. Prince Mohammad Azam and Khan Jahan Bahadur obtained permission to visit Udaipur. Ruhullah Khan and Yakkattaz Khan also proceeded thither to effect the destruction of the temples of the idolators. These edifices situated in the vicinity of the Rana's palace were among the wonders of the age, and had been erected by the infidels to the ruin of their souls and the loss of their wealth”. Pioneers destroyed the images. On 24th January the king visited the tank of Udayasagar.

His Majesty ordered all three of the Hindu temples to be levelled with the ground. On 29th January Hasan AN Khan made his appearance' and stated that “172 temples in the neighbouring districts had been destroyed.” His Majesty proceeded to Chitor on 22nd February.

Temples to the number of 63 were destroyed. Abu Tarab who had been commissioned to effect the destruction of idol temples of Amber, reported in person on 10th August that 66 temples had been levelled to the ground.’ The temple of Someshwar in western Mewar was also destroyed at a later date in the same year. It may be mentioned that unlike Jodhpur and Udaipur, Amber was the capital of a state loyal to the Mughal emperor.

Khafi Khan records in his Muntakhab-ul-Lubab: ‘On the capture of Golconda, the Emperor appointed Abdur Rahim Khan as censor of the city of Haiderabad with orders to put down infidel practices and innovations, and destroy the temples and build mosques on the sites.’ That was in 1687 AD. In 1690 AD, he ordered destruction of temples at Ellora, Trimbakeshwar, Narasinghpur, and Pandharpur.

Aurangzeb also destroyed, Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Kashi, Uttar Pradesh - which considered as the most scared hindu temple and land.

In 1698 AD, the story was repeated at Bijapur. According to Mirat-i-AhmadT: 'Hamidud-din Khan Bahadur who had been deputed to destroy the temples of Bijapur and build mosques there, returned to court after carrying out the order and was praised by the Emperor.' As late as 1705 AD, two years before he died, 'the emperor, summoning Muhammad Khalil and Khidmat Rai, the darogha of hatchet-men' ordered them to demolish the temple of Pandharpur, and to take the butchers of the camp there and slaughter cows in the temple.' Cow-slaughter at a temple site was a safeguard against Hindus rebuilding it on the same spot.

The saddest part is, all of this information, the bloodiest part of Indian History is never shown to the people, they grow up learning, Mughals were great emperors that built great things. When none of that holds any ounce of truth. It should be said without any censorship, these tyrants destroyed the culture, tradition and religions of India.

With all this information, if you're still defending these tyrants, if you still "want them around", if you still insist "it wasn't that bad", you absolutely do not care about "human rights", every activism you take part in is just performative. And I do not respect you or your opinion on any social issue.

[incorrectmahabharatquotes]

History denial (yes we were definitely colonized by the Muslim invaders who broke and looted our temples and forcefully converted and massacred many of our people, taking our temples back is a decolonization movement as pointed out by that other anon). Then Kashmir is an integral part of India denial... how can you even say that.

I'm myself a Hindu and a queer, and reading your views came as an unpleasant surprise. Please go do some reading, and educate yourself about how reclaiming temples isn't about hating other communities. Muslims and other minorities can and have been living in peace with Hindus for centuries. What the invaders did was wrong, and acknowledging that doesn't make Hindus Muslim haters.

You answered that other anon with no reasoning, just that whatever happened, happened before your time. All vibes no research or learning.

Unfollowing. I can make Mahabharat quotes myself.

Tipu Sultan famously destroyed temples as well as donated heavily to temples.

You tell me what to think of that.

Temples have been the site of politics since time immemorial. They were the storehouses of public engagement. And that's why they were attacked. And if we draw this logic to today: Religion is in itself politics. You cannot seperate your celebration of the Ram temple from what it really signifies: The destruction of what is presumed to be a mark of colonization.

Agreed, Muslim rulers did demolish temples. But you take one look at the bulldozer politics of today and tell me: Who is being held accountable here? Are the poor Pasmanda and lower caste muslims, who barely have enough space for themselves to live the descendants of Mahmud of Ghazni? Did they inherit the wealth of whatever was looted from the Somnath temple?

Also tell me one thing: why did the Supreme court not conclude on whether there was a temple structure under the mosque, and still give the go signal? Why was the government assigned priest murdered for stating that the Ram Mandir was purely political? Why were there many 'Ram Janmabhoomi' sites before the Babri Masjid issue? And this is not ancient history, dear anon, this was hardly a generation back.

All I ask of you is to engage critically with the world around you. Yes, celebrate Ram within your house, Mod S and I will not break into your house and laugh at you. But take one look around you as to how your celebrations are actually built on others' misery.

Oh, and by the way: if we as a nation were really decolonising.......why are massive corporations kicking Adivasis of their lands in Aarey, Hasdeo (where our dear Adani is trying to 'develop' coal mines), Gadchiroli, and many many many many places where displacement happens through casteist Panchayat meetings which are held under the supervision of the State (which are not done in the presence of the people actually affected by such projects).

In my head it means one thing: The Ram Mandir is only a carrot waved in front of us to distract us from the real State Violence that goes on. And personally, I think that's a very disrespectful way of using a god. Its actually.....saddening.

Thank you for protecting your peace and unfollowing us, though! I wish you farewell on your internet journey

-Mod G

---------

Hello, Anon-Who-Is Unfollowing-And-Have-Decided-to-Announce-Your-Departure-Because-You-Wanted-Our-Attention,

Well, you have my attention. But it seems like I don't have yours because you have somehow managed to only read one paragraph selectively and completely gloss over everything else.

If you had read what I said clearly, you would have clearly seen the part where I said that the political majority CANNOT claim reclamation because YOU ARE NOT OPPRESSED. YOU HAVE ALL THE POWER. Do you understand this? Or has any hint of nuance completely managed to escape you? YOU, AS A SELF-PROFESSED HINDU, ARE NOT BEING OPPRESSED FOR YOUR HINDU IDENTITY IN THIS COUNTRY. YOU IN NO WAY ARE EVEN A LITTLE BIT HARMED BY A TEMPLE BEING DESTROYED CENTURIES AGO.

You want to talk about decolonisation? Let's talk about how the term "Hindu" that you're so proud of is actually a very recent term and is actually only a thing because the European colonisers just wanted an easy religious box to put us all in. If you're really so gung-ho about decolonisation, please decolonize yourself fully and throw away this term too. While we're at it, let's also examine why your decolonisation efforts are so selective?

"I'm myself a Hindu and a queer". I notice you conveniently skipped over the "dalit" part of my identity that actually might have led to a massive difference in lived experience in this country. I also talked about reparation to the "lower" castes. You skipped that too.

What the invaders did was wrong, and what you're doing is wrong too. Their wrongs don't mean that you are automatically right.

I gave you all my reasoning, told you everything. You skimmed through them and paid attention to the only part that you wanted to focus on.

Thank you for unfollowing, I hope you have a good day.

-Mod S

[shehzadi]

hindutva are celebrating the construction of a temple today (22.01.24) in ayodhya, uttar pradesh on the ruins of babri masjid, a mosque they destroyed in 1992. one of the common disputes around it is the existence of a temple before the masjid. the most extreme hindu nationalists don’t care either way because they just want mosques destroyed. the more liberal types dig up ‘proof’ of temple remains as if that justifies the violence muslims are facing centuries later.

[eretzyisrael]

by Benny Morris

The drift of the Times article is that the innocent Arabs of Palestine just sat back and watched, as suffering victims, as the Zionists, Israel, and some international actors, principally Great Britain, did their worst.

This is pure nonsense.

Throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, Palestine’s Arabs consistently rejected all proposals for a political compromise and flatly demanded all of Palestine, “from the river to the sea.” And they did not restrict their activities to roundtable discussions. In April 1920, May 1921, and August 1929, Arab mobs, whose passions had been whipped up by religious and political leaders, attacked their Jewish neighbours and passers-by in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Safad, killing dozens in what amounted to a succession of pogroms. (The New York Times studiously avoids this word, referring to them only as “assaults.”)

Emily Bazelon informs readers that the first bout of violence took place when the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem “turned into a deadly riot,” in which “five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed.” Neither she nor any of the panellists mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted “nashrab dam al-yahud” (‘we will drink the blood of the Jews’). Nor does she tell us that the crowd shouted, “Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword,” according to eyewitness Khalil al Sakakini, a Christian Arab educator. After three days of rampage and despoliation, British mandate security forces finally restored order, killing all or most of the four Arabs Bazelon mentions in the process. The findings of the subsequent British investigation are included in the July 1920 Palin Report, which states: “All the evidence goes to show that these [Arab] attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children—frequently in the back.”

During the May 1921 pogroms, which encompassed Jaffa, Hadera, Rehovot, and Petah Tikva, dozens of Jews were killed, and women were raped. In the efforts to restore peace, British security forces killed dozens of the attackers. Leading contemporary Zionist journalist Itamar Ben-Avi wrote: “The Islamic wave and stormy seas will eventually break loose and if we don’t set a dike … they will flood us with their wrath … Tel Aviv, in all her splendour … will be wiped out.” 

The August 1929 riots were deliberately incited by the mufti of Jerusalem, the country’s senior Muslim cleric, Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, who was soon to emerge as the leader of the Palestine Arab national movement. He and his aides told the Arab masses that the Jews intended to destroy Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and build a (third) Jewish temple on the site, and that they had “violated the honour of Islam and raped the women and murdered widows and babies.” The resultant riots started in Jerusalem and quickly spread throughout Palestine. Dozens of Jews were massacred, and many Jewish women were raped, in the area around Jerusalem, and in Hebron and Safad. The British High Commissioner, John Chancellor, condemned “the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evildoers … upon defenceless members of the Jewish population [with] … acts of unspeakable savagery.” The British Shaw Commission, which investigated the multiple pogroms, concurred.Israel’s Perilous Moment, Then and NowHerf tells the complicated and often surprising story of the internal political struggles in Western capitals, as well as in the halls of the United Nations, that erupted at the end of the Second World War.QuilletteSol Stern

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the “Palestinians rebelled” against the British and “violence first broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.” (Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out,” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad). The Canadian Derek Penslar of Harvard University, one of the three Jewish panellists, explains that “Muslims thought … that the Jews were planning to take over the Temple Mount” and recommends to readers Israeli historian Hillel Cohen’s book Year Zero of the Arab–Israeli Conflict: 1929, which argues that the Jews and the Arabs were equally to blame for the violence of that year. Indeed, Cohen writes that Jews—not Arabs—initiated the cycle of murders in Jerusalem that set off the countrywide violence. Penslar’s sympathies seem clear here and elsewhere—as when he remarks that “Many Zionists wanted to believe that they represented progress,” the implication being that he thinks otherwise.

[tanadrin]

More notes from Stephen Shoemaker's Creating the Quran: A Historical-Critical Study:

Virtually complete silence from any source on Mecca and Yathrib (Medina) in the early 7th century; these settlements were probably not significant to the wider world at the time.

The prominence of the idea of Mecca as an important center of the spice trade in historical Islamic studies is due mostly to Henri Lammens and Mongtomery Watt, early historians of Islam, which are basically just summaries of (much later) Islamic hagiography.

In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Patricia Crone debunks the myth of Mecca as a wealthy hub of the international spice trade; other scholars have attempted to argue Mecca was indeed wealthy and important based on other economic activity, like mining precious metals, but there isn't evidence for this either, really.

There certainly isn't evidence of the kind of literacy rates we would expect to see in a place carrying out complex financial transactions. Its economy was largely pastoralist (the landscape could support little else), with only a small local trade network, and its population was small--perhaps around 500, with 130 free adult men.

Pre-Islamic Mecca as an important place of pilgrimage is also not substantiated. The most important elements of the hajj are at sites located well outside the ancient city, and discussions of ancient pilgrimages have Mecca itself as an afterthought. Mecca as a component of these pilgrimages seems to be a later development that was part of the Islamicization of these practices. The Ka'ba itself is unfortunately not only off limits to investigation, but was destroyed and rebuilt twice near the end of the 7th century, and is the product of competing interests in the second Islamic civil war.

Whether the shrine of Mecca (if it existed) was pagan or not is unknown. It is nevertheless unlikely to have been of significance to anyone outside Mecca itself. The "masjid al-haram" of the Quran is hard to identify clearly; tradition associates it with the space around the Ka'ba, but Mecca as a haram, a sacred space, is unlikely, and this term may have been associated with the nearby sites of Mina or Arafat, or somewhere else.

"Nor can we even say with any certainty that the Kaʿba and the House of the Qur’an refer to a shrine in Mecca. After all, the Qur’an explicitly identifies the location of the House as “Bakka” rather than Mecca (3:96). Judging on the basis of the Qur’an itself, and not the later Islamic tradition, Bakka clearly seems to be a different place from Mecca. The Islamic tradition is of course desperate to identify this Bakka and its sanctuary with the Meccan shrine still revered by Muslims today. Therefore, in order to remedy the Qur’an’s highly inconvenient location of its shrine in Bakka, many later Islamic scholars simply decided, without any actual historical basis, that either Bakka is an older name for Mecca or else Bakka refers specifically to the Kaʿba itself and its immediate surrounding in Mecca. There is, however, no justification for identifying Bakka with Mecca either in whole or in part other than a determined need to bring the Qur’an fully into agreement with the Islamic tradition.60 Nothing allows us to assume that when the Qur’an says Bakka it means Mecca, particularly since it correctly names Mecca elsewhere." This may in fact be an intertextual reference to Psalg 84:6-7, which places Jerusalem's Holy House in a place named Baka, said to be where pilgrims gathered to make their ascent to the Temple Mount. Early Islam was certainly interested in Jerusalem; early Muslims are said to have prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, and were interested in restoring worship and dignity to the temple there.

Yathrib was likewise small; a collection of settlements around an oasis, where dates and possibly some limited amounts of grain could be grown. It would have been bigger than Mecca, but not dramatically so--maybe a thousand inhabitants in twenty square miles, and the scale of its economy would still have been very small, with very limited trade--the real trade routes of the era were on the Red Sea by ship, not inland through places like Yathrib.

The Quran itself "clearly demands" an audience well-versed in Biblical and post-Biblical traditions; it presupposes familiarity with tropes of that tradition, and opaquely references things it assumes its audience knows well. It is unlikely that the background culture of Muhammad's day in Mecca or the Yathrib oasis was familiar with this literature, and "it seems far more reasonable" to assume extensive contact between Muhammad's early followers and these traditions took place outside the central inland Hijaz. This is in facy why Cook, Crone, et al. locate the beginnings of Islam further north (but this maybe mistakes a later process of cultural contact that was read back into Islam's beginnings as being there from the start. Mecca and Medina were important political centers of Islam from very early on, so if Islam didn't arise there, it would be weird for these small towns to suddenly become important later).

[homochadensistm]

Oh my god what fucking crack is anon on??? Since when did talking about indian history become agreeing with its government or promoting hindutva??? Besides its not just hindu temples, jain temples were targeted too. Do they have any fucking idea how it's like to stand inside the ruins of a temple and wonder what it would be like if it hadnt been destroyed in religious conquests? (and i'm not even religious, i'm only there for the architecture) If anon thinks the only way to prove muslims do belong in india is by historical revisionism then maybe they should consider why

Islamic radicals as soon as u mention Arab imperialism and colonialism:

[phenakistoskope]

The first step towards the crystallisation of what we today call Hinduism was born in the consciousness of being the amorphous, subordinate, other. In a sense this was a reversal of roles. Earlier the term mleccha had been used by the upper caste Hindus to refer to the impure, amorphous rest. For the upper castes, Muslims and especially those not indigenous to India, were treated as mleccha since they did not observe the dharma and were debarred from entering the sanctum of the temple and the home. Indigenous converts to Islam also came under this category but their caste origins would have set them apart initially from the amorphous Muslim. Now the upper and lower castes were clubbed together under the label of ‘Hindu’, a new experience for the upper castes.

This in part accounts for the belief among many upper caste Hindus today that Hinduism in the last one thousand years has been through the most severe persecution that any religion in the world has ever undergone. The need to exaggerate the persecution at the hands of the Muslim is required to justify the inculcation of anti-Muslim sentiments among the Hindus of today. Such statements brush aside the fact that there were various expressions of religious persecution in India prior to the coming of the Muslims and particularly between the Śaiva and the Buddhist and Jaina sects and that at one level, the persistence of untouchability was also a form of religious intolerance. The authors of such statements conveniently forget that the last thousand years in the history of Hinduism have witnessed the establishment of the powerful Śankarācārya maṭhas, āśramas, and similar institutions attempting to provide an ecclesiastical structure to strengthen Brahmanism and conservatism; the powerful Daśanāmi and Bairāgi religious orders of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava origin, vying for patronage and frequently in confrontation; the popular cults of the Nāthapanthis; the significant sects of the Bhakti traditions which are to be found in every corner of the subcontinent; and more recently a number of socio-religious reform movements which have been aimed at reforming and strengthening Hinduism. It was also the period which saw the expansion of the cults of Kṛṣṇa and Rāma with their own mythologies, literatures, rituals and circuits of pilgrimage. What defines many Hindus today has roots in the period of Muslim rule. Facets of belief and ritual regarded as essential to Hinduism belong to more recent times. The establishment of the sects which accompanied these developments often derived from wealthy patronage including that of both Hindu and Muslim rulers, which accounted for the prosperity of temples and institutions associated with these sects. The more innovative sects were in part the result of extensive dialogues between gurus, sādhus, pīrs and Sufis, a dialogue which was sometimes confrontational and sometimes conciliatory.  The last thousand years have seen the most assertive thrust of many Hindu sects. If by persecution is meant the conversion of Hindus to Islam and Christianity, then it should be kept in mind that the majority of conversions were from the lower castes and this is more a reflection on Hindu society than on persecution. Upper caste conversions were more frequently activated by factors such as political alliances and marriage circuits and here the conversion was hardly due to persecution. Tragically for those that converted on the assumption that there would be social equality in the new religion, this was never the case and the lower castes remained low in social ranking and carried their caste identities into the new religions.

When the destroying of temples and the breaking of images by Muslim iconoclasts is mentioned—and quite correctly so—it should however at the same time be stated that there were also many Muslim rulers, not excluding Aurangzeb, who gave substantial donations to Hindu sects and to individual brāhmaṇas. There was obviously more than just religious bigotry or religious tolerance involved in these actions. The relationship for example between the Mughal rulers and the Bundela rājās, which involved temple destruction among other things, and veered from close alliances to fierce hostility, was the product not merely of religious loyalties or differences, but the play of power and political negotiation. Nor should it be forgotten that the temple as a source of wealth was exploited even by Hindu rulers such as Harṣadeva of Kashmir who looted temples when he faced a fiscal crisis, or the Paramāra ruler who destroyed temples in the Caulukya kingdom, or the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king who tore up the temple courtyard of the Pratihāra ruler after a victorious campaign. Given the opulence of large temples, the wealth stored in them required protection, but the temple was also a statement of political authority when built by a ruler.

The European adoption of the term ‘Hindu’ gave it further currency as also the attempts of Catholic and Protestant Christian missionaries to convert the Gentoo/Hindu to Christianity. The pressure to convert, initially disassociated with European commercial activity, changed with the coming of British colonial power when, by the early nineteenth century, missionary activities were either surreptitiously or overtly, according to context, encouraged by the colonial authority. The impact both of missionary activity and Christian colonial power resulted in considerable soul searching on the part of those Indians who were close to this new historical experience. One result was the emergence of a number of groups such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Prathana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Theosophical Society, the Divine Life Society, the Swaminarayan movement, et al., which gave greater currency to the term Hinduism. There was much more dialogue of upper caste Hindus with Christians than there had been with Muslims, partly because for the coloniser power also lay in controlling knowledge about the colonised and partly because there were far fewer Hindus converting to Christianity than had converted to Islam. Some of the neo-Hindu sects as they have come to be called, were influenced by Christianity and some reacted against it; but even the latter were not immune from its imprint. This was inevitable given that it was the religion of the coloniser.

The challenge from Christian missionaries was not merely at the level of conversions and religious debates. The more subtle form was through educational institutions necessary to the emerging Indian middle class. Many who were attracted to these neo-Hindu groups had at some point of their lives experienced Christian education and were thereafter familiar with Christian ideas. The Christian missionary model played an important part, as for example in the institutions of the Arya Samaj. The Shaiva Siddhanta Samaj was inspired by Arumuga Navalar, who was roused to reinterpret Śaivism after translating the Bible into Tamil. The movement attracted middle-class Tamils seeking a cultural self-assertion. Added to this was the contribution of some Orientalist scholars who interpreted the religious texts to further their notions of how Hinduism should be constructed. The impact of Orientalism in creating the image of Indian, and particularly Hindu culture, as projected in the nineteenth century, was considerable.

Those among these groups influenced by Christianity, attempted to defend, redefine and create Hinduism on the model of Christianity. They sought for the equivalent of a monotheistic God, a Book, a Prophet or a Founder and congregational worship with an institutional organization supporting it. The implicit intention was again of defining ‘the Hindu’ as a reaction to being ‘the other’; the subconscious model was the Semitic religion. The monotheistic God was sought in the abstract notion of Brahman, the Absolute of the Upaniṣads with which the individual Ātman seeks unity in the process of mokṣa; or else with the interpretation of the term deva which was translated as God, suggesting a monotheistic God. The worship of a single deity among many others is not strictly speaking monotheism, although attempts have been made by modern commentators to argue this. Unlike many of the earlier sects which were associated with a particular deity, some of these groups claimed to transcend deity and reach out to the Absolute, Infinite, the Brahman. This was an attempt to transcend segmentary interests in an effort to attain a universalistic identity, but in social customs and ritual, caste identities and distinctions between high and low continued to be maintained.

— Romila Thapar, Syndicated Hinduism.

[i-cant-sing]

from the way India is getting terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Muslims murdering Hindu girls and cutting them into pieces in India

I can definitely say I am scared of Muslims as a Hindu

So.... you're saying.... the Hindus... never hurt Muslims? Never killed them? As a religious majority in India, Hindus never hurt minorities???

Yeah, as someone with common sense- I can smell the Islamophobia from a mile.

And I never even got the whole "India is better than Pakistan", or "Pakistan is better than India", stfu- yall came from the subcontinent, got colonised and shit.

And as far as I know, most Indians don't even hate Muslims/Pakistanis. Or at least, the literate ones don't. This just feels like propaganda.

The only time I've ever seen India and Pakistani people be hating each other is during cricket. And yes, while India is the better team- the Pakistan cricket players are 😍🥰🤍

I'm not even up to date on the news BUT DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE WHOLE BAN ON HIJAB/BURQA and not to mention didn't the BJP just destroy a mosque to build a temple?????

[hussyknee]

sad how these "freedom for..." posts never include xinjiang because people aren't willing to take a stand against islam the way they are christianity. uygurs are facing genocide on two fronts - from the ccp and from islamists. there's only one uygur temple still standing - all the others have been demolished by muslim extremists. abrahamic religions colonising the world and brutally oppressing native religions and cultures is a tale as old as time, but people are stuck in the weird mindset that abrahamic religions are deserving of respect.

Idk what temples you're talking about, but "Uyghurs are actually a multi-faith society that was forcibly converted to Islam" is CCP propaganda to lie about the fact that they're genociding the Uyghurs for being Turkic Muslims and destroying their mosques and shrines.

I'm just going to lay aside the world-ending irony of accusing "Islamists" (whatever the fuck that is) of colonizing and forcibly converting a people...who live on top of China. I mean I tried to figure out which stage of Chinese history you're trying to erase to get here, but the answer can only be "all of it". China apparently both exists and doesn't exist for you. But Schroedinger's geo-politics or not, I can't let the "Abrahamic religions" bit stand because this horseshit is gaining way too much traction in South Asia.

Judaism, the world's oldest religion, being an upstart colonizing force is a frankly wild thing to say. I even tried to find mention of any colonization by Jews before Palestine and only found a couple of dynasties and vassal states under Ancient Rome. If you're talking about the Khazars in the sixth century, the rulers converted to Judaism voluntarily and there's no evidence it was either imposed or predominant among the rest of the population. Otoh, Jews have been repeatedly expelled, colonized and subjugated by Christians and Muslims (which is why most of their holidays are just "Yay We Didn't All Die"), and Muslims have suffered under Christian colonization for the last two hundred years along with the rest of us, and a lot longer in Europe. Islamic Empires rarely forced conversions (and in fact didn't like having too many Muslim subjects because non-Muslims were made to pay them taxes) and because of that were generally more tolerant than Christian ones, especially of Jews and Christians whom they considered "People of the Book". I mean persecution and ethnic cleansings did happen, depending on who was in charge (the Almohad Empire was particularly awful, which maybe explains the Catholic violence of Spain and Portugal), but in general, mass conversion wasn't the point of colonization. Among the Turkic peoples especially it was trade that spread Islam, not war or colonization, unlike shit-ass Portuguese traders who said, "We come in search of Christians and spices" and proceeded to kill and colonize everyone and torture them into converting. No fucking way you're lumping all of them in one "Abrahamic" colonial basket.

And the Christian legacies that endure in colonized societies are still as legitimate and integral part of their cultural identities. Once something is absorbed into a culture, the way it's shaped and used is unique to that society. Culture is a living, growing thing, like tree roots. It absorbs, merges, winds itself around generational traumas and obstacles and evolves in new trajectories. Whether or not you approve of the contortions of its survival and whether it looks different at the tip than at the root, it's still the same tree. That's why all religions deserve respect. You can't extricate or pathologize them apart from the individuality of the billions of human beings they shape. And all human beings share the same capacity for violence. Ideology has always been a rationalization for the violence we already want to commit. What motivates violence is power, not ideology, which is why we say "history repeats itself"—the dynamics of power are universal and consistent throughout history.

All our civilizations and cultures are as shaped by violent contact as by peaceful ones; ascribing the violence and impact of colonization only to Christian and Islamic empires completely erases thousands of years of histories all over the world (you know, like Imperial China???) Religions don't grow out of the ground; they were always evolved and spread among peoples along the lines of trade, migration, war, annexation, assimilation and resistance. Considering the religious identities of some people (always minorities too—isn't that weird?) inferior or illegitimate because they were "external impositions", and advocating a "return" to a "pure and untouched" past that never existed is the rhetoric of ethnosupremacy, colonization and manifest destiny—in short the language of genocide. I should know, I hear this crap out of fundamentalist Hindus and Buddhists in South Asia all the time. That's why I'm protective of Muslims. Because they're vulnerable to pieces of racist shit like you.