भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

be denied that they made the conversion of the Muslims to Hinduism, absolutely impossible. 394. Before they came to India, the Arabians and other Muslims forced the millions of Christian, Jewish and Persian populations of Iran, Turan, the kingdoms of the middle Asia and Africa, right from Egypt to Spain, to give up their own religious faiths and accept Islam at the point of the sword. But these various European and Afro-Asian people never for a moment thought themelves to be polluted, nor that their own original religion was lost to them, simply because they took food or drink with the Muslims. The Muslim rulers had to keep their swords constantly hanging over their heads to enforce their allegiance to Islam, and to ensure from them the strict observance of the Muslim religious rites and duties, for centuries together. If, by chance, the Muslim power at any place was uprooted and completely effaced, the forcibly converted Christians or Persians and others went over to their original religions en masse, throwing away to the winds the green Muslim shred of a flag and proudly fluttering their own in its stead. As such, it was very difficult for even the Muslim powers there to keep these unwilling converts tied to the Islamic faith, the Muslim armed soldiers had to keep a vigilant eye on these foreign converts and to see every time if their faith in Islam was shaken even a bit or whether they did not foment any agitation to go back to their own religion. 395-396. On the contrary, in Spain, Greece, Serbia and other countries, where the Muslims in their turn were forced to forsake Islam and court Christianity on pain of death, the Christian rulers there had to keep a similar strict watch on these Muslim converts. For the Muslims, too, never thought that they were anyway defiled because of any food they ate from the Christians or because they had marital or extramarital relations with them. These forcibly converted Muslims were on the alert, to see if the ruling power became weak at any place and immediately revolted, hoisting any green cloth that they could catch hold of as their flag and re-entered the Muslim fold. They would even compel, if possible, the Christians themselves to accept Islam, and thus avenge the wrong done to them. This experience elsewhere made the early Arabian and other Muslim invaders of India fear at least for a century or two, that they would be obliged to use military force alone to keep the newly converted Hindus tied down to the Islamic faith.