"These are the phenomena that account for the enormous increase in the number of those whom we today know of as Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Hardly any Muslim chronicler and historian of the period asserts that the ‘lower castes’ were embracing Islam because some high caste was oppressing them. On the contrary several of them record how different castes lived together, and peaceably. One after the other among them pours special venom on the ‘lower castes’ for being the most determined resisters to the spread of Islam. All this is evident from the memoirs of the emperors themselves, from the accounts of Islamic historians themselves. Yet, our judges repeat the cliches. Nor is it the case that Islam enabled those who converted to enter some egalitarian Utopia. Quite the contrary. And we do not have to look farther than the judgments themselves. What is the ‘reason’ these very judgments give for extending reservations to Muslims, for instance? What is the reason they give for overturning so central a theme of the Constitution and its maker – that such concessions shall not be given along communal fault lines? The ‘reason’ the judges give is that castes continue among Muslims to this day. Is this also because of Hinduism? Or because, as K.S. Lal shows, Islamic rule never aimed to, nor did it in fact, catapult people into some egalitarian Utopia?"