Luxor4u

I managed to leave my Kindle in London and am bereft of reading matter until my next visit. The 3 John Grishams I picked up at the airport will only last a few days. Accordingly I have been turning to my laptop for entertainment and found a fascinating video of the history of the Mughals. I was only vaguely aware of these characters - Babur, Akhbar , Jahangir, Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) etc. An empire of fabulous wealth who have left incredible monuments in Pakistan & India.

The YouTube video has Bamber Gascoine as presenter.



The Mughals were originally muslim raiders from Afghanistan, descendants of Ghengis Khan and , at its height, their empire ruled much of modern day Pakistan & India. It was apparent they were confronted by both muslim & hindu opposition which led me to investigate how islam reached India in the first place.

Apparently the muslim conquest of the sub-continent took place between the 8th and 13th centuries AD....the mughals arrived in the 16th century AD.

One snippet which stuck in my mind was the wholesale slaughter carried out by the islamic armies when they first arrived from the west. Estimates put the number of men put to the sword at 80 million.....more than the rest of the wars and genocidal massacres the world has seen since put together! The women and children of the infidel were carried off into slavery. The invaders built huge towers of human skulls. This is all documented in the manuscripts left by these early followers of the Prophet.

A statistic to bear in mind if you get involved in a discussion about the comparative brutality of religions.

That seems quite a lot, one fifth of the worlds population and time wise I would of thought many decades to complete such a grand scale of wholesale slaughter. I doubt even the Nazi death machines could of done it quicker up to present times if it was still in operation.

The genocide took place over several centuries an, in the absence of censuses, there are varying estimates of the death toll.

"Muslim historian Firishta [full name Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah, born in 1560 and died in 1620], the author of the Tarikh-i Firishta and the Gulshan-i Ibrahim, was the first to give an idea to the medieval bloodbath that was India during Muslim rule, when he declared that over 400 million Hindus got slaughtered during Muslim invasion and occupation of India. Survivors got enslaved and castrated. India’s population is said to have been around 600 million at the time of Muslim invasion. By the mid 1500’s the Hindu population was 200 million."

https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/20 ... n-history/

Others postulate more modest numbers....only tens of millions.

Bear in mind that the population tended to retreat into great walled fortresses which, when subsequently sieged and breached, resulted in the wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants....often well over 100,000 souls. Sometimes, the women burned themselves rather than face degradation & slavery.

One of the hotels I stayed at in Rajasthan was an ancient hill fort. If those walls could have talked! We were told how women would throw their children and themselves from the highest point into the cisterns, preferring death to capture. Some of the cisterns would be filled with oil and set alight first.

A fact that was in more recent history. When the Americans finely got a foothold on the Pacific islands and their invasion of Iwo Jima in WW11, thousands of women, with their children, threw themselves off cliffs because they believed that the Americans would do many bad things to them if captured, including eating them, but when captured, including the Japanese solders, were surprised when they were treated with compassion.

Dusak, there is actually a short clip from the 'World at War' series that shows that particular event taking place.

Dusak wrote:A fact that was in more recent history. When the Americans finely got a foothold on the Pacific islands and their invasion of Iwo Jima in WW11, thousands of women, with their children, threw themselves off cliffs because they believed that the Americans would do many bad things to them if captured, including eating them, but when captured, including the Japanese solders, were surprised when they were treated with compassion.

That wasn't always the case Dusak there were many Army and Marine units which made it policy that they shot surrendering Japanese soldiers out of hand because of the Japs propensity for pulling the pins on grenades once they had "surrendered". It was a different case with civilians though. I can remember seeing an interview with an elderly Japanese man who lived on Okinawa during the battle for the island, (who believing the military propaganda that if his mother fell into the hands of the Americans she would be raped and murdered), together with his sibling beat her to death.

I think this is one of the most astonishing clips from the Pacific war.

Yes, I have heard and seen that, the shoot on sight policy towards Japanese solders, and given their track record, who would blame them. To his dying days my father still hated the ''Japs,'' having spent a short period in Burma in WW11.

Man to man combat in WWI & WWII, Vietnam etc. was truly barbaric...with atrocities committed by all sides.

Nowadays a hellfire missile fired from a drone controlled by guys in a glorified amusement arcade in the Nevada desert can wipe out dozens of the enemy half a world away....with a bit of 'collateral damage' from time to time.

Much more 'civilised'.

Maybe so, but you can't help but marvel at today's technology, no matter how its used. An interesting observation using such tech was the discovery the other day that a trillion tonnes iceberg had broken free from the Antarctic ice flow. That's quite a few gin and tonics. Wonder how long it will take to melt, what direction it will take and would it affect the sea levels?