"During the past one hundred years not fewer than 51 outbreaks of Moplahz fanaticism have been recorded. The West Coast Spectator3 of July 6, 1922, prints part of a song which is sung by Moplah braves. It describes in detail the loveliness of the houris (virgins) that wait with caparisoned horses to take straight to heaven all those faithful that die in battle, and it is said that every Moplah on the warpath carried with him a copy of this song. ... The nature of these outbreaks has been well summed up in a decision of the three judges that sat on the Special Tribunal, Calicut, to try some of the principal offenders. They say in part, For the last hundred years at least, the Moplah community has been disgraced from time to time by murderous outrages. In the past these have been due to fanaticism. They generally blazed out in the Ernad Taluk (county), where the Moplahs were ... their untutored minds were particularly susceptible to the inflammatory teachings that Paradise was to be gained by killing Kafirs. They would go out on the warpath, killing Hindus, no matter whom ... no grievance seems to have been necessary to start them on their wild careers.... Their intention was, absurd as it may seem, to subvert the British Government, and substitute a Khalifate Government by force of arms. ... In the rebellion of 1921 it was certainly not agrarian troubles that started them on their mad career. The evidence now clearly shows that the Khalifate and Non-Cooperation agitation must be given credit for having inflamed the minds of the Moplahs with a vain hope of swaraj (self-rule) and eternal bliss.... There are no doubt agrarian difficulties in Malabar as there are serious tenancy difficulties, but from personal observation, I would say that the Hindu coolies of the Mohammedan tenants of the Brahmin and Nair landlords are worse off than their employers. ... [T]he Hindu population fell easy prey to their (i.e., the Molpah) rage and the atrocities committed defy description.... The tale of atrocities committed makes sad reading indeed. A memorial submitted by women of Malabar to Her Excellency the Countess of Reading mentions such crimes as wells filled with mutilated bodies, pregnant women cut to pieces, children torn from mother's arms and killed, husbands and fathers tortured, flayed, and burned alive before the eyes of their wives and daughters; women forcibly carried off and outraged; homes destroyed; temples desecrated ... not less than 100 Hindu temples were destroyed or desecrated; cattle slaughtered in temples and their entrails placed around the necks of the idols in place of garlands of flowers; and wholesale looting. No fiendish act seems to have been too vile for them to perpetrate. ... There were, during the rebellion, many cases of forced conversion from Hinduism to Mohammedanism. There was a double difficulty about restoring these people to their old faith. In the first place there is a severe penalty resting on any Mohammedan that perverts ... and in the second place there is really no door save birth into Hinduism.""
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Original Language: English
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Sources
J. J. Banninga, "The Moplah Rebellion of 1921," Moslem World 13 (1923): 379-87, excerpts from pp. 379-80, 382-84, 386. quoted in Bostom, A. G. M. D., & Bostom, A. G. (2010). The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus.
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