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They find that every political change, in these terrible times, is to the prejudice of Islam, one Moslim people after another losing its independent existence; and they regard it as equally dangerous that Moslim princes are induced to accommodate their policy and government to new international ideas of individual freedom, which threaten the very life of Islam.
But when they raised the cloth which covered the corpse, they found underneath it only a heap of flowers. So the Hindus took part and burnt them at Benares and the Moslims buried the rest at Maghar. His grave there is still in Moslim keeping. In teaching Kabir stands midway between the two religions, but leaning to the side of Hinduism.
A Western state that admits any authority of a khalif over its Mohammedan subjects, thus acknowledges, not the authority of a pope of the Moslim Church, but in simple ignorance is feeding political programs, which, however vain, always have the power of stirring Mohammedan masses to confusion and excitement.
Sects arise which show the influence of Mohammedanism, sometimes to such an extent that it is hard to say whether they should be classed as Hindu or Moslim, and many teachers repudiate caste. Also, whereas in the previous centuries the centre of religious feeling lay in the south, it now shifts to the north.
Law and religion are inextricably mixed in it and a Moslim, more than the most superstitious of Buddhists or Christians, is bound by a vast number of ties and observances which have nothing to do with religion. It is in avoiding these trammels that the superior religious instinct of Gotama shows itself. He was aided in this by the temper of his times.
Hence Buddhism suffered far more from these invasions than Hinduism but still vestiges of it lingered long and exist even now in Orissa. Târanâtha says that the immediate result of the Moslim conquest was the dispersal of the surviving teachers and this may explain the sporadic occurrence of late Buddhist inscriptions in other parts of India.
We cannot within the small compass of these lectures consider the excrescences of the normal Islam, the Shi'itic ultras, who venerated certain descendants of Mohammed as infallible rulers of the world, Ishma'ilites, Qarmatians, Assassins; nor the modern bastards of Islam, such as the Sheikhites, the Babi's, the Beha'is who have found some adherents in America and other sects, which indeed sprang up on Moslim soil, but deliberately turned to non-Mohammedan sources for their inspirations.
The Moslim invaders of India started from principalities founded by these tribes near the north-western frontier with a military population of mixed blood and a veneer of Perso-Arabic civilization, and apart from the greater invasions, there were incursions and settlements of Turkis, Afghans and Mongols. The whole period was troublous and distracted.
Drinking wine or other intoxicating drinks, taking interest on money, gambling including even insurance contracts according to the stricter interpretation are things which a Moslim may abstain from without hindering non-Mohammedans; or which in our days he may do, notwithstanding the prohibition of divine law, even without losing his good name.
The first serious Moslim incursions were those of Mahmud of Ghazni, who between 997 and 1030 made many raids in which he sacked Kanauj, Muttra, Somnath and many other places but without acquiring them as permanent possessions. Only the Panjab became a Moslim province.
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