Enslaved women as reproduction tools during the Muslim Conquest of India

Atrocities on Hindu Women during the Muslim Conquest of India

Page 75 MA : The female captives, in compliance with Quranic sanctions and prophetic traditions, were used as sex-slaves by their Muslim masters (see Chapter VII on Slavery).

Therefore, they did not only add to the growing Muslim population, but also became valuable tools for expanding the Muslim populace through procreation. When those women, especially the ones of childbearing age, were taken away, the Hindu men, who had fled, came back to find that their women and children gone. As a result, they did not have sufficient partners for the procreation.

That means, wherever Muslims made a successful assault, procreation in the Hindu community dropped sharply. On the other hand, the few thousand Muslim soldiers who came to India with Muhammad bin Qasim had plenty of sex-partners for reproduction to the maximum capacity. Even Emperor Akbar had amassed 5,000 beautiful women in his harem. Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco (r. 1672–1727) had sired about 1,200 children through his 2,000–4,000 thousand wives and sex-slaves.

The extensive enslavement of the vanquished Hindus, particularly the women—who were engaged in the breeding of Muslim children—helped the rapid growth of the Muslim populace. Therefore, wherever Muslims made successful inroads, they reduced the Hindu population directly by slaughtering the men in large numbers and taking away the women and children as captives. It indirectly reduced the Hindu populace by rendering the remnant Hindu men unprocreative by depriving them of childbearing female partners.

Since those women became the vehicle for breeding Muslim offspring instead, the final result was a reduction of the Hindu populace and a sharp rise in the number of Muslims. The growing Muslim population was to be maintained by the toiling of the vanquished Hindus, subjected to grinding taxes. This is roughly the same protocol, which was applied on the Jews of Banu Qurayza and Khaybar. Qasim’s three-year-long exploits in India, therefore, not only added a few hundred thousand Hindus to the fold of Islam instantly through enslavement, but the enslaved women also acted as the vehicle of reproduction, swelling the Muslim populace in lips and bounds.

This protocol was applied by Muslim invaders and rulers everywhere; in India, Emperor Akbar banned the practice in 1564 although rather unsuccessfully. In his expeditions to India, Sultan Mahmud slaughtered the men in large numbers and carried away a great multitude of mainly women and children as slaves. Al-Utbi records that Sultan Mahmud had taken 500,000 people captives in his campaign of 1001–02. In his assault in Ninduna (Punjab), he captured so many slaves that ‘they became very cheap...,’ wrote an elated al-Utbi. In Thanesar (Haryana), Mahmud enslaved 200,000 and returned with 53,000 slaves in 1019.

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