The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India cover
Author	Sita Ram Goel
Country	India
Language	English
Publisher	Voice of India
Publication date	1982, 1994
Media type	Book
Pages	126
ISBN
OCLC	312349192
LC Class	DS452 .G63 1982

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India is a book that was published by publisher and historian Sita Ram Goel under his Voice of India imprint in 1982. The second revised edition was published in 1994.

Goel describes the history of the Islamic invasions of India, and its role in contemporary Indian politics. The book also gives background to what he calls dhimmitude (dhimmitude is a neologism first found in French denoting an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands) in India.

The book claims that South Asia was as not "as easily conquered" by "the Muslims" as North Africa or Spain. "Reviewed as a whole, the period between the last decade of the 12th century and the first quarter of the 18th - the period which is supposed to be the period of Muslim empire in India - is nothing more than a period of long-drawn-out war between Hindu freedom fighters and the Muslim invaders." In two chapters, he describes atrocities that he attributes to some Muslim invaders and rulers like Mahmud of Ghazni or Aurangzeb.

Goel claims in the book that there was a "systematic distortion" of India's history which the Marxist historians of Aligarh and the JNU had undertaken. In particular, he claims that the history of medieval India and the Islamic invasions is being rewritten. He described it as an "experiment with Untruth" and an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi. According to him, the Ministry of Education has extended this experiment to school-level text-books of history. Goel called it "an insidious attempt at thought-control and brainwashing" and argued that the NCERT guidelines are "recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all."

Despite his criticism of Islam, Goel writes that he is not opposed "to an understanding and reconciliation between the two communities. All I want to say is that no significant synthesis or assimilation took place in the past, and history should not be distorted and falsified to serve the political purposes of a Hindu-baiting herd." He argues that the Muslims should evaluate the Islamic history and doctrines in terms of rationalism and humanism "without resort to the casuistry marshalled by the mullahs and sufis, or the apologetics propped up by the Aligarh and Stalinist schools of historians", just as the European Christians did centuries earlier with Christianity.