Forget everything your textbook told you about Islam’s “golden age of tolerance” in India. Forget the Sufi poetry, the spice-route romance, the multicultural Mughal miniature paintings hanging in museums funded to whitewash the brutal Islamic conquest. None of that built the second-largest Muslim population on Earth out of a subcontinent that was overwhelmingly Hindu, Buddhist, and animist for thousands of years before a single Arab horse crossed the Indus. The sword did, sieges did, mass executions did, burned and beheaded idols did, a poll tax engineered to starve the infidel into submission did.
Historians who launder Islamic barbarity into a story about traders and intermarriage are fraudsters.
