CHAPTER 17 - The Shadow of Allah

Summary

The ancient city of Lahore has no buildings or large monuments that pre-date 1241. In that year, the Mongols massacred its inhabitants and levelled the city. The cities of North India faced a similar fate but they were saved by the Turkish slave general, Balban, who halted the Mongol advance into India and pushed them out of Punjab. In South Delhi, the ruined tomb of Balban lies close to the tomb of his master, Iltutmish. The arched entrances to the square building open to the sky are the first examples in Indian architecture of the use of scientifically designed wedge shaped stones to create a stable arch.

By the thirteenth century, Islam had a five hundred year history of relentless expansion. A stream of plunder taken from the non-believers helped sustain a fl ourishing Islamic civilization. North India was the most recent conquest of the Muslim armies. Suddenly, the fortunes of Islam were reversed when the Muslims became the prey of an adversary more ferocious than them—the Mongols.

In a period of less than fifty years, the Mongols killed more Muslims than the number of non-believers killed by Muslims in the preceding five hundred years. The accumulated wealth of Persia, Iraq and Syria was either taken back to Mongolia or destroyed. The Mongols struck at the heart of the Islamic civilization and almost snuffed it out. Islam was saved by two Turkic Slave Sultans at the periphery of the Muslim world—Sultan Qutuz of Egypt who defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut in Palestine and Sultan Balban of Delhi who halted the advance of the Mongol armies into India.

In 1216, Genghis Khan, the ruler of the Mongols, was nearly sixty years old. He had united the nomadic tribes of Mongolia and controlled territory that stretched from Central Asia to North China. Juvaini, the Muslim historian, describes the condition of these lands:

“He [Genghis] had brought about complete peace and quiet, and security and tranquillity, and had achieved the extreme of prosperity and well-being; the roads were secure and disturbances allayed.”