The Power of the Islamic Sword in Narrating the Death of Indian Buddhism

Abstract

Brahmanism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders could look to the rulers for support and sustenance and get it. Buddhism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders had no such hope. It was an uncared for orphan and it withered in the cold blast of the native rulers and was consumed in the fire lit up by the conquerors. (BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR) 1 Scholarship on Buddhist and Muslim interactions has long featured a particular story about Islam's central role in Indian Buddhism's decline. This narrative can be summarized in a single sentence: iconoclastic Muslims invaded India, attacked Buddhist monasteries and institutions of higher learning, and in so doing destroyed the foothold of Buddhism on the subcontinent. It is hard to overstate the potency and prevalence of this story line. As Johan Elverskog has put it, "Whenever the topic of Buddhism and Islam is ever mentioned it almost invariably revolves around the Muslim destruction of the Dharma." 2 Modern academics often shy away from the more sensational descriptions of this alleged apocalyptic clash that characterized earlier, pop

Qur’ānic imaginations in the making: New religious movements in Mughal‐era Islam

“…In the development of Tamil literature, for example, Vasudha Narayanan has shown us descriptions of Muḥammad as an avatar and the Qur’ān as a veda (Narayanan, 2003). Even more strikingly, Torsten Tschacher has analyzed a Tamil interpretation of Sūra al‐Fātiḥa (the first sūra of the Qur’ān) in which the concluding line is not a prayer to God to spare us from “the path of those who go astray” but rather from “the path of those who miss your way without perceiving the lights inside the om ” (Tschacher, 2014, p. 201). All of these examples collectively chip away at any notion of a reified Islam in Mughal India and present instead an exceedingly porous and dynamic tangle of practices and forms.…”

“…As Badā’ūnī’s book of sins suggests, the terms “new” and “innovation” ( bid'a ) – let alone combinatory and syncretic – are not innocent terms but are fraught with ethical, political, and social consequence. “New” was repulsive for Badā’ūnī, and “new” remains dangerous today as Islamophobic discourses represent the religion as a “new” and invasive presence in the United States and India (e.g., Eaton, 2000; Green, 2019; Truschke, 2018). An unexamined use of “new” smuggles a host of assumptions on temporality, religion, and progress that reflects a contemporary secularist metaphysics of history rather than emic conceptions of the past and one's relationship to it (Mahmood, 2015, Chapter 5).…”