Guru Arjan dev ji was arrested, imprisoned and tortured to renounce his teachings, and executed when he refused. His son, Guru Hargobind responded by calling upon Sikhs to arm themselves, and introduced the concept of Miri-Piri to Sikhism, carrying two swords, one signifying authority in the material realm, the other in the spiritual realm. Thence began the armed battles between the Sikhs and Muslims, starting with the Battle of Amritsar in Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of Kashmir, faced intense religious persecution from Muslim rulers.
Under pressure to convert to Islam, they approached Guru Tegh Bahadur for help. The Guru challenged Aurangzeb and was arrested, tortured and pressured to convert to Islam. He refused to convert. His companions who had been arrested with him were tortured and killed in front of his eyes, even as his own torture to pressure him to convert continued.
His son, Guru Gobind Singh, took his place. He raised the Khalsa, the community of Sikh warriors, identified by the visible markers of Sikh Identity: Unshorn Hair and beards, kirpans, metal bracelet. His objective in this was to make the Sikhs bound by honor to valor and justice, to stand and fight against unbearable odds, to defend the weak and fight the unjust, to be known by all for that character, and to never be able to refuse or hide, for the honor of the Sikh roop could never be besmirched.
Till today, Sikhs live and die by honor and cannot bear the shame of running from a fight, cannot bear accusations of injustice or brutality against the weak, of not having stood up for those who needed them.
It is their honor, their duty, their spirit. It is their eternal obligation and honor bestowed upon them by Dasve Patshah the 10 th Guru , to give them character, strength, purpose, resolution in the face of the unending, implacable hostility of Islam and its offer of conversion or death to infidels. His younger two sons, just children, were captured and bricked alive into walls by the governor of Sirhind.
Sikhs till today feel agony at the cruelty of the Mughals that spared not even the young children of the Guru. Banda Singh Bahadur, a disciple of Guru Gobind Singh, led a fearsome campaign of retribution and struck terror in the hearts of the Mughals, until he too was captured and taken to Delhi with thousands of decapitated Sikh heads on spears and in carts.
In prison, he was pressured to convert to Islam. He refused, and over a period of days his men were slaughtered in public. Eventually, his eyed were gouged out, his limbs cut off, and he was skinned alive.
In , Muslims slaughtered the inhabitants of Sikh villages in what is now Pakistan, triggering the worst civil bloodletting in human history. The Sikhs, outnumbered by Muslims by perhaps 4 to 1, none the less reacted with a horrifying ferocity that left the number of dead greater on the Muslim side. These are just the highlights.
In every gurudwara around the world, every day, at every wedding, at every funeral, during the Ardas, the recitation of hymns, Sikhs remember their martyrs, recounting those who endured torture, having their bodies torn apart, were beheaded but did not give up their faith.
The journey of Sikhs from peaceable devotees who sang hymns, to the martial race they became and remain, is the story of Sikhs refusing to convert to Islam, fighting as ferociously as necessary and against all odds, and in peace directing that power towards justice, humility and service of humanity. But this narrative does not suit anyone who seeks to appease Muslims. Nehru and Maulana Azad left the entire history between Sikhs and Muslims out of the textbooks of newly independent India.
Hardly anyone one in India is aware of the fight that Sikhs put up against Muslims determined to convert Indic peoples to Islam, the consequences of it for the preservation of Indic religions, and the religious freedoms we enjoy today. Hardly anyone knows that Kashmir, so precious to India, would have been in Afghanistan not India, were it not for Maharaja Ranjit Singh having captured it from the Durani Afghans in and included it into his empire. Virtually no Indian knew till recently of the Battle of Saragarhi, or any others like it, won or lost, in which Sikh valor proved decisive against Muslim armies.
Baba Nanak, while on pilgrimage, dressed like a pilgrim, carried with him a stick, Quran, a prayer mat and a water jug for performing ablution.
Even his first four successors are represented in pictures as Muslims, carrying rosaries in their hands. Guru Nanak also married in a Muslim family.
This point is very important because no respectable Muslim family would have taken Nanak as a son-in-law, unless he was known to be a Muslim. Nanak lived in a country under Muslim rule where the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim would on no account be tolerated. This clearly indicates that Guru Nanak was accepted as a Muslim by his contemporaries. This is a cloak which Nanak wore in his life-time and it is considered so sacred that his immediate followers took every care to keep it safe.
The regard and reverence rendered to the Chola by the Sikh community is a testimony to the authenticity of the cloak. The words of Guru Nanak as contained in the Guru Granth Sahib Sikh scriptures were not collected until the time of Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Guru, and therefore cannot be relied upon as accurate particularly as Sikhism had by that time assumed an attitude of hostility towards Islam.
But the Chola is clear from this charge, because it was handed down by Nanak himself and has come down to our times in its original condition. It is commonly alleged that verses from different scriptures in different languages are written on the Chola. But this is not true. The verses chosen for writing on the Chola are quotations from the Holy Quran as revealed by photographs recently taken.
The religion followed by the man can be none other than Islam. But strangely, the misconception has gained upper hand in the case of Chola as in the case with teachings of Baba Nanak, which, in spite of being purely Islamic, came by and by to be looked upon as a compromise between Hinduism and Islam.
The congruence of the teachings of Baba Nanak with those of the Holy Quran is so perfect that one cannot escape the conclusion that the Guru had accepted Islam as his religion. He declared that there was One God and He was the same for all and that He was formless. There is none else who is equal to Him. He is the sole Creator of this Universe. Everything is created by Him. He is the ultimate determinant in terms of all forms of His creation.
Sikhism believes in a one and formless God and it does not believe in idol worship. According to it, idol worship promotes attachment of God with something other than God and God cannot limit Himself in the form of an idol or a stone.
He is beyond everything and in everything at the same time. Sikhism does not believe in Avatar, i. God descending on earth to protect humanity. On the other hand, it believes that there are men who are spiritual to the highest degree, are blessed souls and therefore are assigned the duty to liberate humanity from its continual suffering. It is true that in Janam Sakhi one finds much fiction mixed with facts.
As such any statement contained in Janam Sakhi in favour of Islam has the weight of a hostile witness. On page of Janam Sakhi, we read, The Quran is divided into thirty sections, proclaim thou, this Quran in the four comers of this world.
Declare the glory of one name only for none other is an associate with me. An autonomous state which existed for half a century until the British decided to annex it.
In , the British slaughter Sikh adepts in the Golden Temple putting an end to their mutual cooperation. The number of persecutions increased during the Indian independence war: many Sikhs were killed, imprisoned or tortured.
When, eventually, India became independent in , the partition did not take into account the Sikh territory as Punjabi was divided between India and Pakistan. As soon as , Indian Punjabi was again divided into three parts: Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Punjabi — where a majority of Sikhs still live today. Independence claims from fundamentalist Sikh movements led, in , to a violent and bloody repression from the Indian army in the Golden Temple.
Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister, was killed, in an act of revenge, by two Sikh bodyguards. Four days of massacre followed in Delhi where more than died. Sikhism is closer to Hinduism than Islam as it retains Hindi theories of karma and reincarnation, even though Sikhism foundations are closer to Islam as it advocates monotheism.
To believe in a unique God who represents the Truth, learn to read and understand the Gurmukhi or protect the poors, the weak and the oppressed by opposing injustice are strong principles of the Sikh religion.
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