It is only when we come to Islamic invaders of India that we have voluminous historical materials collected and compiled by hundreds of Muslim chroniclers. These materials have been carefully collated, compared, edited, annotated, and translated by a band of Western and Indian scholars. No one who is familiar with the results of this scholarship and wants to be fair can fail to vouchsafe that the scholars concerned have been, by and large, scrupulous and painstaking. It will be difficult to find significant instances of distortion and misrepresentation in this great endeavour, except when we come to the Stalinist �historians� like Mohammad Habib and Romila Thapar, to name only two from a fraternity which has multiplied fast under Nehruvian Secularism. It is not the fault of modern scholarship if the histories written by medieval Muslim historians are so damaging to the democratic, equalitarian, humanistic, and religious pretensions which Islam puts forth at present. The scholars have not invented any of the stories which sound so monstrous even after plenty of pruning away of what may be honestly held as poetic exaggeration.
Some other scholars have gone further and tried to find out if the monstrous deeds from which most Muslim monarchs, mullahs, and sufis derived such great satisfaction, are sanctioned by the basic tenets of Islam as expounded in the Quran, the Sunnah of the Prophet, and the sayings and doings of the first four pious caliphs. They have confirmed, more or less unanimously, that the enormities are enjoined by the scriptures of Islam in such an unequivocal language as leaves no scope for any misunderstanding whatsoever. The heroes of Islam can take legitimate pride that they have literally and very faithfully followed the teachings of Islam, and the legacy left by the Prophet and the pious caliphs.
A healthy and humanitarian system of education would have placed all these facts before our young men and women coming from the Muslim community, and put to them the following proposition: These are the words and deeds credited to Muslim kings, saints, and theologians by the historians of Islam in medieval India; these words and deeds compare very well with the words and deeds of Islamic kings, saints, and theologians in all other lands swept over by the armies of Islam; these words and deeds also conform quite closely to the tenets of Islam as expounded in the Quran and the Sunnah and the Shariat; we do not want you to evaluate these words and deeds and tenets in terms of any non-Islamic religion or culture; our only appeal to you is to evaluate them in terms of natural human reason, man�s natural moral sense, and elementary principles of human brotherhood without resort to the casuistry marshalled by the mullahs and sufis, or the apologetics propped up by the Aligarh and Stalinist schools of historians; you have in you as much of the rational and the moral in human nature as the young men and women belonging to any other community; we wait for your verdict.
I am quite hopeful that approached in this manner most Muslim young men and women are likely to respond in a positive manner. At least a good beginning would have been made in opening up the minds and hearts of these young people to normal human values, and leading them out of the prison-house of Islam in which most Muslims have lived over the past so many centuries. Muslims in India as elsewhere have been living in a Dark Age ever since they were forced or lured into the fold of Islam, the same way as the Christians in the West had lived during the medieval period presided over by the Catholic Church. Christians in the West experienced an Age of Reason and Renaissance when they processed Christian doctrines and history in terms of rationalism and humanism, and reawakened to some extent to their ancient pagan heritage. There is no reason why the Muslims in India and elsewhere should not experience the same reawakening, once they recover the ancient cultural traditions of their respective countries, and start standing by rationalism and humanism.
