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Mohammad Ghazni and the Destruction of the Somnath Temple

Dr. M. V. Kamath

My dear Gauri,

The name of Mohammad of Ghajni will go down in India as a desecrator of all that Hindus held in reverence. Shockingly, he was an ideal whom Aurangzeb (1658-1707), the last of the great Mughal emperors, Shah Wali-ullah, the great 18th century Muslim theologian and some others like them, invoked in seeking solutions to the social and political problems of their times.

Mohammad Ghajni had heard of Somnath. Somnath was reputed to be one of the richest temples of India. His one desire was to sack the temple and smash the lingam. And he accomplished it.

We have an account of Mohammad’s first foray from a Muslim historian Quasim Hindushah Firishta. According to Firishta, Mohammad entered Somnath, accompanied by his sons and a few of his nobles and principal attendants. By then he had fought a war in which many thousands had died on both sides. Mohammad Ghajni now prepared to do what he had sought to do. As he approached the temple he saw before him “a superb edifice built of hewn stone”. In the centre was the lingam (Firishta describes it as an idol) “five yards in height, two of which were sunk in the ground”. Mohammad approached it, raised his mace and struck at it. He ordered two pieces to be broken off and sent to Ghazni, “that one might be thrown at the threshold of the public mosque and the other at the court doors of his own palace”. Two more fragments were reserved to be sent to Mecca and Medina.

When Mohammad was thus engaged, a crowd of Brahmins petitioned his attendants and offered a quantity of gold if the king would desist from further mutilation of the lingam. His officers endeavoured to persuade him to accept the gold for they said that breaking one ‘idol’ would not do away with idolatry altogether and that, therefore, it could serve no useful purpose to destroy the ‘image’ entirely. The king acknowledged that there might be reason in what his attendants said, but replied that if he should consent to receiving money he might go down to posterity as Mohammad the Idol Seller when he wanted to be known as Mohammad the Idol Breaker. He therefore ordered his troops to proceed with their work of destroying the temple.

Mohammad Ghzni was a barbarian and did not understand what Hinduism was or what he was planning to do. He returned to Somnath again and again with the same set purpose. The temple was left in ruins and no one bothered to rebuild it.

It was only after India became independent that Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi decided that the temple should be rebuilt and dedicated to Somnath. His call for support received enthusiastic response from Hindus who donated money liberally. The temple was rebuilt almost exactly as it was when first demolished and it was consecrated in the presence of the first President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad.

Mohammad never understood India, nor did he understand Hinduism. His chronicler, Alberuni, wrote:

The Hindus totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing which they believe, and vice verse. On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves. At the utmost they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy. On the contrary, all their fanaticism is directed against those who do not belong to them- against all foreigners. They call them mlechcha (impure) and forbid any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating and drinking with them, because thereby, they think, they would be polluted… They are not allowed to receive anybody who does not belong to them, even if he wished it. Besides, they never desire that a thing which once has been polluted should be purified and then recovered… This renders any connection with them quite impossible and constitutes the widest gulf between us and them.

Alberuni rightly guessed the hatred that Hindus had towards the mlechchas or foreigners was not because they were Muslims or foreigners, but because they were destroyers. He wrote that “Mohammad utterly ruined the prosperity of the country”, scattering Hindus “like atoms of dust”. And he went on: “Their (the Hindus’) scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims. This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us and have fled to places which our hand cannot reach…”

The first reaction of the Hindus to the occupation of North India by conquerors professing Islam was one of great horror, in the face of cruelties they had never before experienced on so vast a scale. Killing took place on an immense scale, and civilian populations were massacred. Women and girls were dragged into harems. Slave trade was introduced in which thousands of people were sold. A German diplomat-historian, Wilhelm von Pochhammer, has written: “All these generated a hatred for foreigners, the like of which had never been felt by Indians before. The hatred was increased by the shameless way in which the foreigners destroyed holy places after first having defiled them in a senseless way. And finally there came economic distress as a result of the plundering and exploitation of the people.”

The new rulers gave the Hindus the choice between ‘Islam and death’. Pochhammer says that this was the method “used most widely in India”. The other choice was asking men to buy their freedom of sticking to their old religion by paying a special tax, ‘the jiziya’ after which they were suffered to live. During Islamic rule in India, some rulers used the milder method of levying the tax. But, adds Pochhammer: “After having paid the jiziya with a right to live in their own home, they found, however, that they were only suffered to live there [as] less than people of the second class. They were absolutely without any rights and were treated like slaves.”

It is interesting to compare the Muslim rule in India and the Spanish rule in South America. Like the Muslim rulers, the Spaniards also tried to destroy the cultures of the Aztecs and the Incas. While the Muslims failed, the Spaniards succeeded. Their chief motive was acquiring wealth, like that of Mohammad Ghajni. But among the South American tribes was one Las Casas who complained to the Spanish king about his soldiers. Pochchmmer writes: “Did the Moslems of India bring forth a Las Casas, a protector of the human conscience? One thinks of the holy Sidi Maula who had the courage to criticize the first Khilji. This Khilji had the unwelcome adviser trampled to death by an elephant. Islamic priests raised their voices against these practices but nobody ever listened to them. The highly civilized Ibn Batuta who visited the country as a traveler was genuinely horrified at this misrule of Islam”.

In my next letter I will tell you about the interaction between Islam and Hinduism.

Your loving,

Ajja