PART I

Chapter 8

EXTRA-IDEOLOGICAL METHODS

Much against the culture of disinterested and dispassionate historians, Bamzai, Bazaz and their tribe did not scratch and probe deeper to know that willing conversions in societies are a possibility where converts were mentally and intellectually backward and primitive and had registered no significant and worthwhile advances in the realms of culture and civilization and had proved incapable of evolving a world-view of their own to suit their cultural needs and yearnings or where they conspicuously felt and discernibly realised a proximity to tile outlook they were accepting and adopting to graft it on to the tree of their thought. As is widely known that Kashmir as a vital and distinctive strand of the Indian cultural mosaic had a fully spelt-out world-view, a philosophy and a well-founded leviathan of culture and civilization. Muslim religious tendencies including its Persian variant of prophetic mysticism is at variance with and antithetical to the Indian world-view and failed to register any impact on it. That is why Islam found few ready recruits in India and Kashmir and hence, it had to take resort to extra-ideological methods of forcible conversions and whole sale spoliation and destruction of the relics of Kashmir culture and civilization.