Talk:Harsha of Kashmir

Removed quotes[edit]

I removed these quotes as I found them non-notable:

In the case of their purely concocted grand theory of pre-Muslim persecution of Buddhism by Hindus, we see our leftist historians throw all standards of source criticism to the wind. Such is their eagerness to uphold this convenient hypothesis, and their care not to endanger what little supportive testimony there is. After all, from the millennia of pre-Muslim religious pluralism in India, there are not even five testimonies of such persecution, so these few should be scrupulously kept away from criticism....The allegation is simply repeated, and amplified, in all secularist history-books.....Incidentally, Hsuen Tsang's statement that his patron, king Harsha, worshipped both Buddha and the Hindu goods, is always carefully kept out of secularists' invocations of Hsuen Tsang's authority, as it is one more blow to the myth of Hindu-Buddhist struggle.
- Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Another incident of intra-Hindu persecution quoted from Kalhana's Rajatarangini, is "an earlier persecution of Buddhists in Kashmir and the wilful destruction of a vihara, again by a Shaivite king". There is an interesting little tailpiece to this incident: "But on this occasion the king repented and built a new monastery for the Buddhist monks". This proves that a substantial number, if not all, of the monks had survived the persecution. But more importantly, it highlights something completely unknown in the long history of Islamic fanaticism: remorse. This Shaivite king knew at heart that intolerance was wrong, and when he had regained his self-control, he made up for his misdeed. Such a thing has never been done by Mohammed, or by Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb. If any proof was neded for the radical difference between the systematic persecutions by the Muslims and the rare abberation into isolated acts of intolerance by Hindus, Prof. Romila Thapar has just given it.
- Elst, Koenraad Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992