Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigfella
Persecution was a 2 way street Sniper. Buddhist kingdoms persecuted Hindu ones, Hindu ones persecuted Buddhist ones, Buddhist persecuted Buddhist & different Muslim kingdoms fought both of the above.
The destruction of temples at Ayutthaya, for example, was done to Thai Buddhists by Burmese ones. Similar story for the ancient Khmer capotiol north of Phnom Penh, trashed by Thais.
Some would argue that these wars were not 'religious'. These things are always a matter of interpretation, but in an era when Kings were literally gods & religious buildings were particularly targetted the interpretation fits, especially when compared to definitions used to list sins supposedly committed by 'Islam' (people on these threads actually use crimes committed by Ba'athist & other avowedly secular regimes as proof of Islam's general nastiness).
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Bigfella, I don't think a lot of the wars were religious. Even the Islamic invasions into South Asia had more to do with political expansion then religion. However, you must look at the treatment of religions
after the wars. All Mughal kings were not religious fanatics; some even founded their own religion to compensate for the difference of beliefs among their subjects. But the fanatics did rule and the persecution which all religions suffered under certain fanatic Islamic rule is incomparable to anything alike suffered by the populace there in the past. Imagine the extent to which the persecution must have been that it united all the different schools of religious thought in the Asian subcontinent to look out after each other. Now this is not to say that persecution of religions was a constant event; throughout history, many Muslim, Hindu and Sikh kingdoms were in bed with each other.