UPSC ONLINE ACADEMY

You are Visitor Number:

2 3 1 1 5 2

Arab Invasion Of Sindh :

 

The rise of Islam is one of the marvels of history. In the summer of AD 622 a prophet, without honor in his own country, fled from his native city to seek an asylum in the town of Yathrib, since known as Madinat-un-Nabi, ‘the Prophet’s City’, rather more than two hundred miles north of Mecca, the town which had cast him out.
Little more than a century later the successors and followers of the fugitive were ruling an empire which extended from the Atlantic to the Indus and from the Caspian to the cataracts of the Nile, and included Spain and Portugal, some of the most fertile regions of southern France, the whole of the northern coast of Africa, Upper and Lower Egypt, their own native Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Transoxiana.
They threatened Christendom almost simultaneously from the east and the west, besieging Constantinople three times and advancing into the heart of France, and but for the decisive victory of Theodosius III before the imperial city in 716 and the crushing defeat inflicted on them near Tours in 732 by Charles the Hammer, the whole of Europe would have passed under their sway.
The battle of Poitiers decided whether the Christians’ bell or the muezzin’s cry should sound over Rome, Paris and London, whether the subtleties of the schoolmen and later, the philosophy of Greece, or the theology and jurisprudence of the Koran and the Traditions should be studied at Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.
By the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian era the Arabs had carried their arms as far as the western confines of India and bore sway in Mekran, the ancient Gedrosia, that torrid region extending inland from the northern shore of the Sea of Oman. Immediately to the east of this province lay the kingdom of Sind, ruled by Dahir, son of the usurping Brahman Chach.
An act of piracy or brigandage, the circumstances of which are variously related, brought Dahir into conflict with his formidable neighbors.
The King of Ceylon was sending to Hajjaj, viceroy of the eastern provinces of the caliphate, the orphan daughters of Muslim merchants who had died in his dominions, and his vessels were attacked and plundered by pirates of the coast of Sind.
According to a less probable account, the King of Ceylon had himself accepted Islam, and was sending tribute to the Commander of the Faithful.
Another author writes that Abdul Malik, the fifth Umayyad, and father of Walid, the reigning Caliph, had sent agents to India to purchase female slaves and other commodities, and that these agents, on reaching Debul, Dahir’s principal seaport, had been attacked and plundered by brigands.
Hajjaj sent a letter through Muhammad bin Harun, governor of Mekran, demanding reparation, but Dahir replied that the aggressors were beyond his control, and that he was powerless to punish them.
Hajjaj then obtained from Walid permission to send an expedition into Sind and dispatched Ubaidullah against Debul, but he was defeated and slain and Budail, who followed him, shared his fate.
Hajjaj, deeply affected by these two failures, fitted out a third expedition, at the head of which he placed his cousin and son-in-law, Imaduddin Muhammad, son of Qasim, a youth of seventeen years of age.