Images of Islam
Due to association of Islam with politics and aggression Islam is quite often misunderstood. No wonder a sociologist like Max Weber has been highly dismissive of Islam and says that Islam is interested only in conversion of people belonging to other faiths to Islam. What happens to them after conversion is not very important for them.
To quote Said:
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Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the “Ottoman peril” lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated the peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices as something woven into the fabric of life. In Renaissance England alone, as Samuel Chew recounts in his classic study The Crescent and the Rose, “a man of average education and intelligence” had at his fingertips, and could watch on the London stage, a relatively large number of detailed events in the history of Ottoman Islam and its encroachments upon Christian Europe. |
We find that there are multiple images of Islam in India. There is one image (you may call it a bad image) that in India Islam was spread “through sword”. During centuries of Muslim invasions Hindus were killed and their temples were destroyed and looted by invaders. There is evidence to support this image. Yet, it is difficult to analyze to what extent this happened due to a distinctive religious ideology and to what extent this (killings and destructions) was a normal feature of any invasions in those days.
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