"The urge among Muslims to justify to their non-Muslim contemporaries (and indeed to themselves) the historical record of their community in South Asia is evident in such works of the nineteen- twenties and nineteen-thirties as Professor Muhammad Habib’s Mahmud of Ghaznin (1927)... In the first, Professor Habib attempts to correct what he says was a then recent tendency among Muslims of the sub-continent to adore Sultan Mahmid as a saint. The sultan is rather to be regarded as a foreigner to India and as an imperialist, not as a mujahid."