When they conquered India, Muslims were benevolent and tolerant, right? That’s what Rutgers Newark professor Audrey Truschke would have you believe.

Ramadan Day 14 thought for the day from my new book The History of Jihad:

“When Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony,” by Aijaz Zaka Syed, Saudi Gazette, August 19, 2017:

AT a time when the Muslims are being hunted like animals on the benign watch of the BJP, two brave new books revisit a time when they ruled the country. The Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony under Muslim rulers, including under the powerful Moguls, argues Audrey Truschke of Stanford University, an authority on South Asian culture and history. In her fascinating book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, Truschke suggests that the heyday of Muslim rule, from the 16th to 18th centuries, had been one of “tremendous cross-cultural respect and fertilization and not religious or cultural conflict.”… The ‘Culture of Encounters’ was followed by another groundbreaking tome on perhaps the most controversial figure in Indian history. Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth is another brave attempt to understand the life and times of the last great Mogul emperor who ruled for nearly half a century and whose reign covered the length and breadth of India including Afghanistan and parts of Mynamar. “The Aurangzeb of popular memory bears only a faint resemblance to the historical emperor,” notes Truschke as she seeks to clear the cobwebs that have always clouded his image. She sifts fact from fiction and the man from the many myths that have grown around him over the centuries, thanks to biased telling of history as part of the British colonial project. She dismisses the myth that Aurangzeb had been driven by religious zeal and his rule was defined by the oppression of Hindus….

In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, I introduce you to the real Aurangzeb, beyond these ridiculous academic myths, in his own words and the words of eyewitnesses to his deeds. Aurangzeb in 1670 issued this decree: “Every idol-house built during the last 10 or 12 years, whether with brick or clay, should be demolished without delay. Also, do not allow the crushed Hindus and despicable infidels to repair their old temples.”

A Muslim historian, Saqa Mustad Khan, writing just after Aurangzeb died in 1707, reported that in January 1680, Aurangzeb “went to view lake Udaisagar, constructed by the Rana, and ordered all the three temples on its banks to be demolished.” The following day, “Hasan Ali Khan brought to the Emperor twenty camel-loads of tents and other things captured from the Rana’s palace and reported that one hundred and seventy-two other temples in the environs of Udaipur had been destroyed.” Later that year, “Abu Turab, who had been sent to demolish the temples of Amber, returned to Court…and reported that he had pulled down sixty-six temples.”

Bakhtawar Khan, a nobleman during Aurangzeb’s reign, was also pleased, noting that “Hindu writers have been entirely excluded from holding public offices, and all the worshipping places of the infidels and great temples of these infamous people have been thrown down and destroyed in a manner which excites astonishment at the successful completion of so difficult a task.”

You won’t learn all this at Rutgers, or most any other American university. They’re too busy teaching academic fictions such as those retailed here by Audrey Truschke, and warning their students about “Islamophobia.” But you can get the truth in The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS: click here to preorder. The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS is the only comprehensive one-volume history of jihad in the English language, including not just the jihad in Europe but in India, Africa and elsewhere, drawing primarily on accounts of eyewitnesses and contemporary chroniclers. Arm yourself with the truth against the prevailing disinformation. Preorder here now.