"I had not intended Islamic antisemitism to be the subject of my second book. After finishing my book on the Jihad, I wanted to do a book about all the subject peoples under Islam—what Bat Ye'or has accurately called the “civilization of dhimmitude.” So I began analyzing writings about the condition of Hindus and Buddhists subjugated by Jihad on the Indian subcontinent. I looked at the relatively progressive period, under the Mughul ruler Akbar the Great. He began as a pious Jihadist and waged very bloody campaigns against the Hindus, but something changed in the course of his rule.18 He became much more tolerant of Hindus, abolished the jizya (the Koranic poll-tax, as per Koran 9:29; jizya means, “the tax paid in lieu of being slain”), appointed Hindus to administrative positions, and seems to have become a Muslim-Hindu syncretist in his personal religious beliefs.20 This led to a brief flowering of Hindu society. His reforms were violently opposed by the Muslim ulema, and I was reading an anti-Hindu tract by an Indian Sufi Muslim theologian named Sirhindi who died in 1624. The tract contained a line that just jumped out at me. “Whenever a Jew is killed it is for the benefit of Islam.” I tried to get whatever biographical materials I could on Sirhindi and I could find no evidence that he had had any physical contact with Jews. This astonished me."