The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history...The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 AD). Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next three centuries, with the result that the Moslems established themselves in the Indus Valley about the same time that their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours (732 AD) for the mastery of Europe...In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain...swept across the [Indian] frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries...Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill...he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine [at Mathura on the Jumna], judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni...The first of [the] bloody sultans [of the Sultanate of Delhi] was a normal specimen of his kind -- fanatical, ferocious, and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, "were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands." Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak...killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, "there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging" the victims "and putting them to death in crowds."..His successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves...Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand...The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up "rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus..." Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the [Islamic] government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. "No Hindu," says a Moslem historian, "could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver...or of any superfluity was to be seen...Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment."
"The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history..." -- Will Durant on page 459, Volume 1, of his eight volume Story of Civilization
Here are a few excerpts from pages 459-462 of the same volume:
