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Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by Ahmd72 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @08:24AM (#24407696)
His creation of his own religion might be the reason that tensions still exist in that region or maybe its just people. Interestingly, he was a brilliant commander even though people call him illiterate, he preferred his own way of studying which meant understanding topics at his own pace instead of cramming. Just shows us how only education has nothing to do with being tolerant or being brilliant.
Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by keiferski on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @08:52AM (#24407874)
Tensions mostly exist in the region because of colonialism and the poorly-managed independence of India and subsequently of Pakistan. If, nonetheless, you wanted to pin the blame for modern religious issues in South Asia on a Mughal, it would probably be Aurangzeb, Akbar’s great-grandson, who was definitely not tolerant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurangzeb

Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by Ahmd72 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @04:09PM (#24412582)
Its funny how you mentioned only India and Pakistan and completely forgot about Bangladesh. There were three entities that came out of that partition, not two. These tensions are mostly man-made and not even related to independence, its mostly about India's claim that the two countries should be united and the people living there are similar to them while on the other hand Pakistan claims, they are different, Factually speaking, the Western part of Pakistan is more similar to Afghanistan and Iran, the Northern to China and only the East has some similarities with Northern India, not even the whole. Then there is Kashmir, should we blame that on the poorly-managed independence too? What about the province of Hyderabad or cities of Junagadh? Did the rulers there wanted to join India? It's not a competition about who is tolerant or not, its more about how to play this tolerance game so that they can rule easily and sadly only the common man suffers.
Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by keiferski on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @04:22PM (#24412817)
Well, I couldn’t include the entire history of India in a HN comment. I didn’t include Bangladesh as the initial question was related to regional tensions and Indian-Bangladeshi relations are pretty good, as compared to Indian-Pakistani ones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh–India_relations

I also said mostly which most commenters seem to be missing. In any case, I only made the comment to point out Aurangzeb, not engage in a debate on British India.

Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by Ahmd72 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @04:41PM (#24413080)
Fair enough but there is no "mostly" and Bangladesh used to be part of Pakistan before its independence so I am not sure how well relations actually are.
Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by barry-cotter on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:21AM (#24409291)
The British did not create the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent. They papered over them for a long time but the big question of who’s going to be in charge once they left was not one they were in a position to dictate the answer to.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/03/01/the-blood-on-brown...

> Since I am not Pakistani I did not know what the “Two-Nation Theory” (TNT) was before I ran the Brown Pundits weblog. Basically, this is the idea that the Indian subcontinent has within it two religious nations, the Hindu and Muslim. This is not a theological assertion as much as an ethno-sectarian one. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was not a devout Muslim. His personal mores were more that of an upper-class Brit (he enjoyed his whiskey). But, his ethnocultural identity was clearly that of an upper-class Muslim. As a lawyer, he defended a man who killed a Hindu who the man believed had blasphemed against Islam. Jinnah’s defense was motivated by his communal loyalty. Even if he himself was not pious, the offense was against the Muslim nation, and he stood with the Muslim nation.

...

> If you had asked me at a younger age my unconsidered opinion would have been that India should have stayed united to avert the bloodiness of the partition, whose death toll is estimated from the hundreds of thousands to millions. But upon further reflection and thought, I think the TNT captures the essential fact that the Muslim upper-class of Northern India would never be able to reconcile itself well with secondary status within the state, and, with ~25% of the population being Muslim, would always have a huge vote bank so that they could not be ignored. Perhaps a confessional state with a divided balance of power such as Lebanon could have been attempted, but I doubt the Lebanese solution would scale to a polity which covered the whole Indian subcontinent. A more feasible scenario might be a confederation.

Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by srean on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:35AM (#24409427)
> The British did not create the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent.

You will have a hard time justifying that.

[dead]
Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by dang on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:14PM (#24416609)
Please stop using throwaway accounts in ways that break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by keiferski on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @10:05AM (#24408458)
I'm sorry, but I don't really understand your comment. Certainly history has been filled with violent conquest, but the question was about contemporary religious tensions in South Asia, most of which are traceable to British colonialism and the breakup of India and Pakistan. But yes, religious tensions have existed between peoples for millennia. I am actually working on a startup to help alleviate this problem, so it's something I'm intimately familiar with.

Your narrative is also rather misleading; Islam has been in India since just after Muhammad and many early Muslims were traders, not conquering armies. "Islamic colonization" is a meaningless phrase here, as most of the "conquest" was done by Central Asian tribes with non-religious motives. It's pretty easy to draw a line from the Mongols to the Mughals (after all, Mughal is a Persian-Arabic derivation of Mongol) and the Mongols certainly weren't on a religious crusade.

Otherwise, it is an immensely complex story and situation and one-line summary rebuttals aren't exactly helpful. I'm not an expert on Indian history, but to paint it as a straightforward narrative is unquestionably false.

Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by drieddust on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @10:26AM (#24408695)
Wrong, India survived because Hindus fought very hard. Entire Arabia, Iraq, and Persia fell within 30 years. Yet Islam couldn't reach even central India until 13th century not because invaders were tolerant. It was because they met resistance. Read [1] and watch [2]

[1]https://archive.org/details/HeroicHinduResistanceToMuslimInv...

[2] https://youtu.be/9HfPzUr-IKw

Re:How Akbar came to love books despite never learning to re... by saiya-jin on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:31AM (#24408138)
How could religion that died +-with him 400 years ago and nobody worships anymore could have any effect on tensions these days? People even today are often primitive when it comes to handling their emotions, generally easy to manipulate and so on. Those are more sources of issues