Why do you think that the claims of Qutub Minar and Taj Mahal pre-existing are absurd just because they do not meet your world view? Even I reacted by thinking that these are ridiculous claims but now have come around to the fact that there is a strong case for these buildings pre-existing the Islamic invasions. There is no Islamic compulsion for destroying any temple and building a new building (right from the days of Ka’aba). It is entirely possible that most of the monuments in north India/Pakistan were pre-existing and their name plates changed and Quranic Inscriptions done later on. The dome architecture became associated with mosque/tomb architecture and now it’s even unthinkable to think of a mosque/tomb without a dome where as they could have been pre-existing buddhist stupas or temples. A lot of Indian history has been distorted and needs to be corrected in the right climate. Read up on Sofia Hagia in Istanbul and Cordoba in Spain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upQ1hLHvUAI&feature=related

Peshwa behaviour in regards to temple/mosque destruction arguably represents the orthodox Hindu stand on this matter.

Temple destructions were certainly topical throughout Maratha period. (Kashi Vishwanath by Aurangzeb, Tulzapur by Afzal Khan). Marathas had ample opportunities to destroy mosques (and also temples – considering the apparent Hindu custom of destroying enemy temples) – starting from the early days of Maratha sovereignty.

The same can be said of Ranjit Singh, although that is admittedly a later date and sensibilities may have changed by then.

It ought to be a simple matter to do a count. For extra credit one can throw in the contemporaneous record of the Portuguese in Goa, Daman etc.

I do agree on the wider point, which is why I had said earlier that the “difference” between (e.g.) Hinduism and Islam means that certain kinds of violence are less likely in the former than the latter. I tried to be careful: i.e. I think in popular discourse a lot of folks make the leap that ALL kinds of violence are more likely under one system than under the other, but that’s only so if we are trying to think this difference in order to rank religions/belief systems, rather than try and think the differences/points of contacts. [e.g. destruction of places of worship is unquestionably more likely under the signs of Islam than under the signs of Hindu belief systems; but daily ritual humiliations -- such as requiring Dalits to carry their own spittoons and jhaadus so that they not spit on the street and sweep away their own footprints; as was implemented by the Maratthas in the 18th century -- are more likely under the caste Hindu belief systems.] Obviously, it’s possible to say that certain ideologies are in some grand sense more violent than others — and among the most violent of all is the creation of a centralized bureaucratic nation-state in a milieu that has not previously known it; as the popular legends of Ashoka demonstrate, empire-building is bloody business.

I think more than one historian has noted (claimed?) that the wars of the period were far less “total” than our own modern wars for the most part. This isn’t of course to romanticize the past (Thirty Years’ War, anyone? The last 25-30 years of the deccan wars towards the end of aurangzeb’s reign’ and the last conflcits in South India during the second half of the 18th century appear to have been catastrophically wide-ranging), and perhaps modern wars are simply the product of the sort of technology/destructive potential we now have — but it should, I think, give “us moderns” pause. The American Civil War is in many ways a useful cusp: despite years of (perhaps more “traditional”) warfare, people clearly seem to have been stunned by (what we now recognize as the harbinger of) more modern warfare of the war’s final phases, Sherman’s march to the sea, etc…. [I suppose Arendt offers a useful corrective in some ways, with her suggestion that the "total wars" of modern times were prefigured in the colonial conflicts of the 19th century, and simply represented a wider application of the same sort of (especially in Africa) increasingly exterminatory war...]

Meant to write: “This IMO would be over-stating the case, if by “politics” one imagines a secular space “unsullied” by religious considerations.”

This IMO would be over-stating the case. I do not know of large-scale mosque destructions by Muslim rulers, although mosques were not spared pillage when during the sacks of Malwa and Golconda. The reverse — mosque destruction by Hindu rulers — is a trickier question, because Hindu rulers during much of the last millenium did not have the same opportunities along those lines. In the Deccan, where such opportunities were presented to “both sides”, there most certainly are instances of mosque destruction by Vijaynagar forces (as there are of the reverse; the long conflict has of course been over-shadowed by the denouement: the complete destruction of Vijaynagar in one of the most catastrophic acts of vandalism in the sub-continent during the last millenium).

On “early Hinduism” as with Judaism, the record is too sparse, although, depending on which “origin narrative” one subscribes to, violence, displacement/subordination can certainly be gleaned (both from the record and from foundational texts). Extermination of unbelief is definitely not a relevant category where the Hindu belief systems are concerned, but the connection of that with polities being less warlike/expansionist is not borne out by the historical record (although it does mean that certain kinds of violence would be ruled out)…

This is exactly what I’m talking about: without any evidence, you are willing to assimilate Shah Jahan to the same paradigm as Mahmud of Ghazni or _____ simply because “he still was a Muslim” (and of course, if “Islam by definition is still important” then pillage of kafirs and eradication of kufr has to be uppermost in one’s mind). By this logic, one would never need to look at the evidence of the actual historical record — after all, that record “could” only show differences in degree; the only thing we would have to determine is whether or not someone were Muslim — for if one were, the almost mechanistic drive would automatically manifest itself in some way shape or form no matter what.

I find it especially galling that you should be suggesting that it is I who am drawing a “rigid difference between wars “waged by Muslims and “Islamic wars” ” — I am doing no such thing. It is you who repeatedly insinuate that there is no real distinction between the two, and I have disagreed with that position. Rather than cite any evidence to support your position, you set up straw men by writing as if disagreement with that position was endorsement of an “opposite” untenable position (namely that there is rigid difference/absolute demarcation; you did it earlier in this thread also when you responded to claims that there were important distinctions to be drawn between different periods/Islam-in-different-places/times, by suggesting that it was wrong to say they were “completely different”, even though no one had said as much).

To be blunt, your comments on this and other threads suggest to me that you are not interested in history per se as much as in locating a rule/master-key for history; and there seems to be a default rule — of the Muslim polity as primarily engaged in living out its fate and destiny as a warrior against unbelief — in place. To that end, all counter-evidence (to your default rule) is disregarded as aberrant and/or marginal, while everything that remains is strung together — I mean, are you seriously suggesting that the Mughal conquest of the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan was the result of a desire to combat Shiism? You mean, as opposed to Sunni obstacles to imperial expansion that would have been dealt with differently? To say things like that Shah Jahan “probably” had “more complicated motivations” (than the primal, savage, monolithic ones we may otherwise ascribe to Muslim rulers — they are, after all, Muslim) betrays the un-historical nature of the enterprise you are engaged in. In case my point is unclear, let me stress that an examination of the (e.g.) destructive impact of the Central Asian/Muslim conquests of North India would be a serious historical endeavor; here, however, all that is apparent to me is the desire to set up a formula, with “Islam” as the irredeemable virus that manifests itself in pretty much the same way wherever the conditions exist.

I find this argument of there being a precise and rigid difference between wars “waged by Muslims and “Islamic wars” to be illogical. Implicit in this conception is that whereas “Islamic wars” were genuine holy wars, “wars by Muslims” however were I suppose “strictly political” as if somehow there was a very fine grained view among pre-modern/medieval Muslims and political actors of all kinds in general during this time period of the strict separation of political and religious modes of thinking and action; that they were rights bearing individuals conscious of their subjectivity, no more constrained in their mentalities by frameworks and structures of religion and culture than actors of the modern world. I suppose on what evidentiary grounds are you positing to know that medieval Muslims were self-conscious of their motivations in their actions in a compartmentalized fashion such as “pure looting and plunder in the siege of this city” here, “revenge for interfering and meddling in my kingdom there”, and ” slaying the kafir for the greater glory of Allah and vanquishing infidelity”; it is no contradiction to say all could have been constitutive at the same time and and the debate therefore being which motives were primary for certain actors. Mahmud of Ghazni, “pure looting and plunder” was a probably a factor and being a dutiful and righteous ghazi was nonetheless primary is uncontroversial, I hope. Shah Jahan motivations were probably a bit more complicated than that but still he was a Muslim and therefore Islam by definition still important. This whole line of critique applies even more urgently to the artificial distinction between the political and religious modes of actions in Eaton’s apologetics for Islamic iconoclasm since his whole damn argument is predicated on just that false binary. Same goes for the entire “secular school” of Indian historiography with all their baffling anachronisms. (Also for whats its worth, wasn’t the Qutb Shah kingdom Shia? you know “heretics” and all that jazz…)