I just received this message from Andrew Bostom, editor of [1] The Legacy of Jihad:

I listened to [2] Dinesh D’Souza’s comments about the Jews of late 15th century Spain and their “rescue” by the noble Ottomans, as well as his description of “tolerant Muslim rule in India”, especially under the Mughals. As D’Souza’s very flawed understanding of these examples has been packaged into ahistorical tropes that he discusses repeatedly, the larger historical context merits examination.

The Nexus Between the Jews of Spain and the Ottoman Empire

The (Berber Muslim) Almohads (1130-1232) wrought tremendous destruction upon both the Jewish and Christian populations in Spain and North Africa. This devastation—massacre, captivity, and forced conversion—was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews:

..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they…

These brutal, discriminatory practices resulted in a massive emigration of Jews and Jewish converts to Islam to the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, from both Muslim-controlled Al-Aandalus and the North African Maghreb. During the first half of the 13th century, Jaime the I of Aragon, in particular, advanced policies of protecting Jews within his territories, granting safe-conduct and letters of naturalization to all Jews who made their way by land or sea, and established themselves in the states of Majorca, Catalonia, and Valencia. Jewish converts to Islam were permitted to return to Judaism if they wished so. Within 250 years, however, the descendants of these Jews who had escaped the Muslim Almohad depredations would be subjected to the fanatical rage of the Spanish Inquisition, and some of them would find refuge under the suzerainty of the Muslim Ottoman empire, especially in the region of Salonika, at the end of the 15th century. To complete this morose cycle of persecution, the vacuum filled by Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition was created when their co-religionist counterparts -- the Jews living under Byzantine (and Venetian) rule in Thrace -- were subjected to massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation by these same Ottoman conquerors, during their jihad campaigns of the early to mid-15th century.

Jihad Against the Hindus & Their Condition in the Delhi Sultanate and Under the Mughals

K.S. Lal analyzed Indian demography for the period between 1000-1525, from Mahmud of Ghazni, through the end of the Delhi Sultanate. This half millennium was an era of Islamic invasion and rule during which endless jihad campaigns were waged by Muslim leaders (see here, pp. 77-85; 433-461; 631-653)—including Qutbuddin Aibak, Alauddin Khalji, Muhammad and Firoz Tughlaq, and of course Amir Timur—all of whom were celebrated in Muslim chronicles as “killers of lakhs” (each lakh= 100,000) of Hindus. Lal estimates that the numbers of Hindus who perished as a result of these campaigns was approximately 80 million—which far exceeds the toll of internecine violence between Muslims for this, or any other historical period.

The imposition of Islamic law upon the Hindu populations of India, i.e., their relegation to dhimmi status, beginning with the advent of Muslim rule in 8th century Sindh, had predictable consequences during both the Delhi Sultanate period (1206-1526 C.E.), and the Mughal Empire (1526-1707 C.E.). A.L. Srivastava highlights these germane features of Hindu status during the Delhi Sultanate:

Throughout the period of the Sultanate of Delhi, Islam was the religion of the State. It was considered to be the duty of the Sultan and his government to defend and uphold the principles of this religion and to propagate them among the masses…even the most enlightened among them [the Sultans], like Muhammad bin Tughlaq, upheld the principles of their faith and refused permission to repair Hindu (or Buddhist) temples…Thus even during the reign of the so-called liberal-minded Sultans, the Hindus had no permission to build new temples or to repair old ones. Throughout the period, they were known as dhimmis, that is, people living under guarantee, and the guarantee was that they would enjoy restricted freedom in following their religion if they paid the jizya. The dhimmis were not to celebrate their religious rites openly…and never to do any propaganda on behalf of their religion. A number of disabilities were imposed upon them in matters of State employment and enjoyment of civic rights…It was a practice with the Sultans to destroy the Hindu temples and images therein. Firoz Tughlaq and Sikander Lodi prohibited Hindus from bathing at the ghats [river bank steps for ritual bathers] in the sacred rivers, and encouraged them in every possible way to embrace the Muslim religion. The converts were exempted from the jizya and given posts in the State service and even granted rewards in cash, or by grant of land. In short, there was not only no real freedom for the Hindus to follow their religion, but the state followed a policy of intolerance and persecution. The contemporary Muslim chronicles abound in detailed descriptions of desecration of images and destruction of temples and of the conversion of hundreds and thousands of the Hindus. [Hindu] religious buildings and places bear witness to the iconoclastic zeal of the Sultans and their followers. One has only to visit Ajmer, Mathura, Ayodhya, Banaras and other holy cities to see the half broken temples and images of those times with their heads, faces, hands and feet defaced and demolished.

Majumdar sees a continuum between the Delhi Sultanate and the subsequent Mughal Empire, regarding the status of the Hindus:

So far as the Hindus were concerned, there was no improvement either in their material and moral conditions or in their relations with the Muslims. With the sole exception of Akbar, who sought to conciliate the Hindus by removing some of the glaring evils to which they were subjected, almost all other Mughal Emperors were notorious for their religious bigotry. The Muslim law which imposed many disabilities and indignities upon the Hindus…and thereby definitely gave them an inferior social and political status, as compared to the Muslims, was followed by these Mughal Emperors (and other Muslim rulers) with as much zeal as was displayed by their predecessors, the Sultans of Delhi. The climax was reached during the reign of Aurangzeb, who deliberately pursued the policy of destroying and desecrating Hindu temples and idols with a thoroughness unknown before or since.

Majumdar also makes this interesting juxtaposition of Hindu cultural advancement under the lengthy period of Muslim colonial rule, compared to the much shorter interval of British colonial rule:

Judged by a similar standard, the patronage and cultivation of Hindu learning by the Muslims, or their contribution to the development of Hindu culture during their rule…pales into insignificance when compared with the achievements of the British rule…It is only by instituting such comparison that we can make an objective study of the condition of the Hindus under Muslim rule, and view it in its true perspective.