Mahmud of Ghazni

Source

By late 10th century the Muslim presence in Sindh had deteriorated to two insignificant families in control of Multan and Mansurah. Kabul and surrounding neighborhood was under the control of Hindu kings from the middle of 9th century. A dynasty called the Shahis flourished here and extended their kingdom up to Punjab in the east. Then in the year 870 Kabul was lost to invading Muslims. A Turkic slave, Aptigin by name, had amassed power and occupied Ghazni, an important town on the Kabul-Kandahar road, in the year 963. Aptigin’s son Sabuktigin succeeded him in the year 977. He was anxious for religious war with the Hindus and ravaged the provinces of Kabul and Punjab.

Shahi dynasty under King Jayapala still controlled the area west of Jalalabad and thus part of what is known as Kabul valley. He resisted the onslaught gallantly but had to sue for peace when the weather turned hostile during the treacherous winter of Afghanistan. Sabuktigin with his later to be infamous son, Mahmud, gorged on the Hindu population with butchery and sorcery, the likes of which had not been seen before in the subcontinent. Jayapala gathered a large army with the help of neighboring kingdoms and mounted a counter attack. The Ghazni forces were more mobile and superior riders compared to the slower elephant-mounted Indians. They were routed and the Khyber Pass and countless number of elephants and other booty fell into the hands of Sabuktigin. The invaders had a foothold on the Indian soil and controlled the gateway, the Khyber Pass, to the vast Indian subcontinent.

After the death of Sabuktigin his son, Mahmud succeeded him. He was to be to India what a Satan was to Islam. Grotesquely ugly in appearance Mahmud controlled a vast empire and had ambitions of expanding further east into the heartland of India. With the god given right of every Muslim to root out idolatry as an excuse, he started his assault into India. He resolved on a pattern of yearly incursion into India with the charade of spreading Islam to the infidels. However, he had heard of the fabled wealth of India and was in dire need of capital to maintain his large armed forces and entourage.

The religious mission quickly changed to indiscriminate looting and murdering of Hindus with large caravans of bounty marching back to Ghazni after each monsoon. The first assault was on November 27, 1001. A concurrent, though biased, account of the assault was kept by his faithful secretary al-Utbi and later a more reliable account was given by historian Ferishta. It was during his second invasion near Peshawar the much-weakened King Jayapala suffered a crushing defeat of enormous proportions. Following this the proud king abdicated his throne to his son Anandapala and committed suicide by climbing onto his own funeral pyre.

Mahmud continued his raid into India on a regular basis (a total of seventeen times over twenty-seven years, from 1001-1027) and the Shahis were the only kings to oppose him, but with little success. Large assortments of loot including precious jewels and pearls, tons of gold and silver were hoarded on thousands of elephants and transported to Ghazni. The Indians headed for the hills with the sound of advancing troops of the Muslim army and there was no significant opposition to the ugly marauder. City after city, year after year felt the wrath of Ghaznivads. Pillaging of the cities was invariably followed by rape and murder.

Then in the year 1008 it was the turn of Mathura with its well-endowed temple of Lord Krishna. Before razing it to the ground and plundering it, Mahmud is said to have marveled at the sheer beauty of the architecture and imagined it would take him two hundred years to build a similar magnificent mosque. However, he had no difficulty in desecrating and looting the temple of tons of gold, silver and precious stones before burning it. The taste of blood and booty had practically blinded him so much so that even the Muslim sympathetic, sycophant historians felt uncomfortable writing about his ruthless murderous rampage.

The Shiva temple of Somnath was one of his last targets. Somnath in Gujarat (Saurashtra) had a fortified temple with its most sacred and celebrated lingam. The people, however, were pacifists and defenseless. In 1025, Mahmud with only cavalry and camels crossed the Thar Desert and surprised the residents of Somnath. When the soldiers scaled the walls with ladders all they found inside were defenseless worshippers. Fifty thousand devotees praying to the lingam and weeping passionately with hands clasped around their necks were massacred in cold blood. The marauders looted twenty million dirhams-worth of gold and silver. Mahmud himself took great pleasure in destroying the stone lingam, after stripping it off its gold ornaments. Bits of the lingam were sent back to Ghazni and incorporated into the steps of its new mosque to be trampled and perpetually defiled by the faithful.

Eventually Anandapala’s empire shrank to a small part of northeast Punjab. His son Trilochanapala even lost that last bit of land and became a refugee in Kashmir. In his zeal to accumulate wealth, Mahmud neglected to administer to the lands he had conquered. He finally died in the year 1030 but not before he transformed Ghazni into a worthy capital from the looted wealth. India breathed a collective sigh of relief. Mahmud had two sons born on the same day to two different wives and a dispute ensued after his death. This manner of horrific bloodbath and murderous plots before each succession was to become common practice among the Muslim rulers of India for the rest of their history. The reign of Masud was insignificant and eventually the Ghaznivads lost their famed capital of Ghazni to invading Turks. Lahore served as their capital for next several decades.