Apprehensively Optimistic

Published on Brown Pundits - May 28, 2014

This brief article was published as the Modi government took power in India. In Pakistan, politics at the time was being rocked by a very public rift between the Army and Geo TV, which had implicitly blamed secret military agencies for an assassination attempt on its star anchor, Hamid Mir.

It is interesting and depressing to note that, though much has happened since then, India and Pakistan are still caught up in the same vicious cycle of mutual mistrust, hidden agendas, media jingoism and conspiracist mindsets.

Here's how the post ended:

"A friend asked me how I felt about the outcome of the Indian elections. My answer was "apprehensively optimistic". That's where we are today. May the apprehensions diminish and the optimism grow!"

The whole can be read here.

Under the Magic Tube-Light: A Fantasia

Published on Brown Pundits - Feb 18, 2014

This is a satirical piece about the dysfunctional politics of Pakistan. It will be meaningful only to those familiar with that endless theatrical production...

Excerpt:

"The other day, having just watched the last episode of Sherlock, I dozed off on the couch and found myself transported to the land of fantasy where most of Pakistan’s elite dwells. There, under a flickering fluorescent light outside a pub somewhere between Badshahi Masjid and Mazar-e-Quaid (hey, this is fantasy, y’all), I heard a voice within the tavern cry out something that Sherlock Holmes once told Dr. Watson: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This revelation re-awakened that ancient part of my brain that had been pickled for many years in Pakistan Studies, and the natural urge to explain the absurd behavior of Pakistani political leadership through serial conspiracy theories became irresistible. After all, conspiracy theories are cheaper in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world, except when Shireen Mazari dines alone at a bistro in Manhattan during her periodic fundraising visits to the Land of Yahood-o-Nasaara. So why not indulge a bit in the national pastime?"

Read the full piece here. 

Can Sindh Save Pakistan

Published on Brown Pundits - Feb 7, 2014

This piece was written just prior to a festival celebrating the culture of Sindh. The piece is really about the need for a reorientation in Pakistani society. Now, almost two years later, the jury is still out on whether positive change will eventually take root.

Excerpt:

"Pakistan is a region rich in history. Unfortunately, most Pakistanis are only familiar with its cartoon version. They do not know of all the great civilizations – Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim – that rose and fell in the area over three thousand years. Of the even older Indus Valley civilization, they know only the words “Moenjodaro” and “Harappa”. They are not aware that Alexander’s armies sailed down the Indus; that Iranian kings ruled over Sindh; that Sialkot was the capital of King Menander; that major international trade routes ran through Sindh and Baluchistan two thousand years ago; that whole new schools of Hindu and Buddhist and Muslim thought developed in places where gas stations stand today. But history never truly dies; it lives in the traditions of the people, in their art, in their languages. If a leader should rise to reclaim all that history, to revive the arts of the people, to welcome people of all creeds, to celebrate the open-minded ethos of Sufi Islam and its poets, and to do it in a broad, national and inclusive way, he or she could truly begin to turn back the tide of obscurantism that is engulfing Pakistan. It will take years, perhaps decades. And it will be dangerous. It will require not only the use of the creative arts but also the exercise of military power, because people with guns cannot be defeated with just songs and Sufism. But the process will begin, and people will have something to stand for, not just against."

Read the full article here.

A Time for Reform

Published on chowk.com shortly after 9/11/2001

The first piece I am linking here is one I wrote for chowk.com in the aftermath of 9-11 - I believe in mid-2002. As many will recall, it was a time of extreme anxiety and change - the fruits of which we are beginning to see. It is remarkable that today - 13 years later - I still agree almost completely with all the things I had written then. Indeed, it is embarrassing to note that perhaps I expressed these thoughts better then compared to my more recent writings. Call it the "Facebook effect", where immediacy is valued more than expression. Of course, a lot has changed in the context too, and we are all thinking more complicated thoughts today.

After publication on chowk,com, this piece was included in the book "Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith", edited by Michael Wolfe and published by Rodale Books in 2004.

Unfortunately, chowk.com has gone dark, but the article was picked up by another website called The American Muslim. While I am unfamiliar with this site, it does give me the opportunity to post a link to my old article here.

First, an excerpt:

In combination with the socioeconomic failure of almost all Muslim nations, this vision of Islam (which is partly responsible for the failure) has created a pervasive culture of grievance in the Muslim world. It is a culture that sees all problems afflicting Muslims as the result of a vast conspiracy—- variously orchestrated by the “usual suspects”: Jews, Christians, Hindus, ethnic Chinese, even Muslims of other sects. It takes real but mundane disputes over land, water, language, ethnicity and oil, and turns them into millennial confrontations. In this apocalyptic world-view, Osama bin Laden makes perfect sense. Without changing this mind-set, no amount of military action will rid the world of Islamic militants. The swamp that must be drained is not in the mountains of Afghanistan, but in the minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims. It is time for a new synthesis in Islam, and it can only be done from within by enlightened, informed, and faithful Muslims. The West, with all its cruise missiles and smart bombs, can only make things worse in the long run.

The crisis of September 11 has brought the Muslim world to a point of great opportunity. As the rest of the world discovers Islam, let it discover a progressive, enlightened, and dynamic faith suitable for the future, rather than an orthodoxy created by traditionalists still hankering for the past.

The full article is here.

Recap and Reset

Since its inception in 2010, this blog has seen very few postings for several connected reasons. I tried to limit the blog to finished articles of a certain type, but a lot of my thoughts over the years have been expressed in active discussions on more interactive forums such as Facebook or Twitter. Also, I began to write actively on two other blogs - Brown Pundits and 3 Quarks Daily - leaving very little time or motivation to write finished articles for this blog.

Now, as a new year starts, I am going to make some changes, and use this blog in a more traditional way to express thoughts, propose ideas and invite discussions on an ongoing basis. Since I will still continue to be active on Facebook, Twitter and the other blogs, I will also use barbarikon as a place to consolidate what I'm writing elsewhere - of course, in addition to things written only for this blog. For example, if I post something that I consider significant on Facebook, I may also post it here. Interesting discussions on other forums may get summarized as well. And, of course, there will be links to interesting pieces published elsewhere.

The topics of this blog will come from the sciences, engineering, history, politics, literature, art, music and sports. The focus, of course, will still be on the themes that are of special interest to me: complex systems and networks, physics and cosmology, the sciences of the mind, artificial intelligence, the origin and nature of life, evolutionary biology, genetic history, archaeology, social and cultural dynamics, ancient history, religion, poetry (English, Urdu, Farsi, Hindi, and occasionally others), painting (mainly Western, Islamic and Indian), the history of Islam, political Islam, Sufism, esoteric religious sects, conspiracy theories, South Asia, the Middle East, American politics, books of certain types, ancient coins (mainly Islamic and South Asian, because that's what I collect), cricket, and many more. I hope it will turn out to be an interesting mix.

As a first step, I am going to try and find the articles I have posted elsewhere over the years, and post links to them here. In the case of a few especially interesting Facebook posts, I may post the entire piece verbatim. Some of my articles from sites such as chowk.com and Brown Pundits seem to be lost irretrievably, and that is no great loss!

So, dear Reader, here's to the future. Happy New Year!

Understanding (Artificial) Intelligence

 This piece in the Atlantic from a few months ago is a wonderful profile of Douglas Hofstadter and a timely exposition of an issue at the core of the artificial intelligence enterprise today.

I read Doug Hofstadter's great book, Goedel, Escher, Bach (or GEB, as everyone calls it) in 1988 as a graduate student working in artificial intelligence - and, as with most people who read that book, it was a transformative experience. Without doubt, Hofstadter is one of the most profound thinkers of our time, even if he chooses to express himself in unconventional ways. This piece captures both the depth and tragedy of his work. It is the tragedy of the epicurean in a fast food world, of a philosopher among philistines. At a time when most people working in artificial intelligence have moved on to the "practical and possible" (i.e., where the money is), Hofstadter doggedly sticks with the "practically impossible", in the belief that his ideas and his approach will eventually recalibrate the calculus of possibility. The reference to Einstein at the end of the piece it truly telling.

My main concern, however, is the deeper point made in the Atlantic article: The degree to which the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has abandoned its original mission of replicating human intelligence and swerved towards more "practical" applications based on "Big Data". This point was raised vociferously by Fredrik deBoer in a recent piece, and much of this post is a response to his critique of the current state of AI.

deBoer begins with a simplistic dichotomy between what he terms the "cognitive" and the "probabilistic" models of intelligence. The former, studied by neuroscientists and psychologists - grouped together under the term "cognitive scientists" - was the original concern of AI, which sought to first understand and then replicate human intelligence. Instead, what dominates today is the latter approach which seeks to achieve practical capabilities such as machine translation, text analysis, recommendation, etc., through the application of statistics to large amounts of data without any attempt to "understand" the processes in cognitive terms. deBoer sees this as a retreat for AI from its original lofty goals to mere praxis driven, in his opinion, by the utter failure of cognitive science to elucidate how real intelligence works.

The high visibility of the statistics-based "machine learning" approach is real enough. To a large degree, it is a matter of what is possible and lucrative. In its formative decades, AI developed a lot of computational tools that were theoretically promising but could not be applied for the lack of computational power and sufficient data. Today, thanks to Moore's Law and the Internet, we lack for neither, and the same statistical analysis that seemed so impossible twenty years ago now powers search engines, recommendation systems and the occasional winner of Jeopardy. However, the critique of AI and its failures by deBoer and others is profoundly misplaced as I will try to argue below.

The main problem with the critique (and others like it) lies in its definition of "intelligence". Intelligence isn't something explicit that dwells in the brain and must be explained in terms of simpler primitives; it is an attribute that we assign to behavior that is sufficiently productive or complex. There is no "there" there other than this attribute, and the main issue in both understanding and replicating intelligence is to focus on the embodied behavior rather than on some disembodied Platonic essence called "intelligence". Once this is done, the dichotomy between the cognitive and probabilistic views disappears.

The idea that "true understanding" of intelligence must go beyond "mere statistics" is nothing more than crypto-dualism hiding behind statements of principle. Dualism is the notion that the "mind" has an essence beyond the material composition of the "body" - the two comprising a mind-body duality. This belief is, of course, virtually identical with the belief in a "soul", "spirit", "psyche", etc., and is profoundly rejected by modern science. Most of those who study mental phenomena today - neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers of mind, and, yes, AI researchers - believe that the mind is a product of the physical body, much as life itself is. Just as the physical phenomena affecting the body - notably disease - that were once ascribed to divine providence are now understood exclusively in material terms, so are mental phenomena - perception, cognition, awareness, memory, thought - being moved ever so slowly away from immaterial explanations to material ones, with a corresponding increase in possibilities of intervention and artificial replication. Though the tools for doing so are still very primitive and a full understanding of how the mind emerges from the body is still a distant goal, a lot of progress has been made - deBoer and others notwithstanding. The anatomical connectivity within the brain and with the body has been studied for more than a century, and is now clearer than ever before. But there has also been a remarkable revolution in understanding the functional connectivity of the system and its underlying mechanisms. Reports on this are widespread in the scientific literature, but many of the most exciting results are summarized in a wonderfully readable new book by Stanislas Dehaene called Consciousness and the Brain (yes, he uses the "C-word" and lives!). Through such research, it has become increasingly clear that the mind - including whatever we may term intelligence - arises from the dynamics of the multi-scale complex network called the body; that ultimately, all percepts, thoughts, memories and choices correspond to ever-changing patterns of activity over hundreds of billions of cells - in the brain and the rest of the body - and that "understanding" these phenomena is a task for physics and chemistry rather than philosophy. The question, then, is this: What is the most appropriate quantitative framework in which to study these physical phenomena? And this is where AI finds itself.

AI, invented by computer scientists, lived long with the conceit that the mind was "just computation" - and failed miserably. This was not because the idea was fundamentally erroneous, but because "computation" was defined too narrowly. Brilliant people spent lifetimes attempting to write programs and encode rules underlying aspects of intelligence, believing that it was the algorithm that mattered rather than the physics that instantiated it. This turned out to be a mistake. Yes, intelligence is computation, but only in the broad sense that all informative physical interactions are computation - the kind of "computation" performed by muscles in the body, cells in the bloodstream, people in societies and bees in a hive. It is a computation where there is no distinction between hardware and software, between data and program; where results emerge from the flow of physical signals through physical structures in real-time rather than from abstract calculations; where the computation continually reconfigures the computer on which it is occurring (an idea central to GEB!) The plodding, sequential, careful step-by-step algorithms of classical AI stood no chance of capturing this maelstrom of profusion, but that does not mean that it cannot be captured! The fundamental insights that have powered the recent renaissance of artificial intelligence - and yes, there is one - are that:

• Mental capabilities from simple pattern recognition to intelligence arise through an evolving, growing and learning networked complex system (i.e., the embodied animal) interacting continually with its environment.

• These mental capabilities are meaningful only in the context of a specific body embedded in a specific environment, and not as general, disembodied abstractions.

In this view, the physical form of the body, along with all its capacity for change, endows it with the capability to support perception, cognition and intelligent autonomous behavior when it interacts with its environment. This happens, not through the instantiation of abstractions but through the continual flow of information (in material form - ions and molecules) through the cellular network of the body, which is continually reconfigured by this flow, thus shaping flows in the future. And while the flow of information is from the past to the future on the physical scale, mental phenomena are sufficiently slow that the linear causality of the "sense-think-act" sequence is replaced by a circular causality where perception, thought and action all influence each other in the course of any single mental event such as making a choice or recalling a memory. Today, brain imaging technologies allow us to see these flows in progress, albeit very imperfectly and in ways that are difficult to interpret. As the technologies improve, however, these functional networks of the brain and the body will become ever more visible.

 This "embodied" view of the mind has several important consequences. One of these is to revoke the idea of "intelligence" as a specific and special capability that resides in human minds. Rather, intelligence is just an attribute of animal bodies with nervous systems: The hunting behavior of the spider, the mating song of the bird and the solution of a crossword puzzle by a human are all examples of intelligence in action, differing not in their essence but only in the degree of their complexity, which reflects the differences in the complexity of the respective animals involved. And just as there is a continuum of complexity in animal forms, there is a corresponding continuum of complexity in intelligence. The quest for artificial intelligence is not to build artificial minds that can solve puzzles or write poetry, but to create artificial living systems that can run and fly, build nests, hunt prey, seek mates, form social structures, develop strategies, and, yes, eventually solve puzzles and write poetry. The first successes of AI will not be Supermind or Commander Data, but artificial flies and fish and rats, and thence to humans - as happened in the real world! And it will be done not just by building smarter computer programs but by building smarter bodies capable of learning ever more complex behavior just as an animal does in the course of development from infancy to adulthood. Artificial intelligence would then already have been achieved without anyone "understanding" it.

To decide whether progress is being made in artificial intelligence, the place to look is not in the theories of cognitive scientists but in the practice of neuroengineers.  Remarkable advances are occurring in using the information within the nervous system to control prosthetics and in replacing parts of the nervous system with artificial circuits. While those trapped in an older view of AI may fail to see it, these advances are the most concrete instances of artificial intelligence. The classical view is clouded by a distinction between "thought" and "action" - again, rooted in the dualism-that-will-not-die. But once it is recognized that perception, thought and action are all fundamentally manifestations of the same basic phenomenon - patterns of activity over complex biological networks - it becomes clear that there is no essential difference in the brain generating a pattern of nerve signals to control an artificial hand and the brain generating a pattern of nerve signals corresponding to a thought or a memory. The error lies in insisting that these processes have pre-specified forms that must fit our algorithms. The body demands no such thing - it just learns to generate the most fortuitous patterns of activity across its networks and lives (or dies) with the consequences. The wisdom encoded in its DNA by four billion years of evolution, in its structure by years of development from a single cell to a full-grown individual, and in its cellular networks by years of learning enables the body to be right more often than wrong, and more right the longer it survives. Statistics are just a way to capture this wisdom. The body does so without math; we do it with math. But there is no essential difference.

For critics such as deBoer, statistics and understanding are dichotomous. If and when a function of intelligence - say, facial recognition - is replicated through statistical methods, these critics declare that the computer does not "truly understand"; it is doing "mere statistics". What they fail to acknowledge is the possibility that this may be exactly what brains and bodies are doing too!

The statistical engines that power Google and Amazon may not fit our stereotypes of intelligence, but at an essential level, they are doing what animals do: Capturing the statistics of their environment and adjusting the statistics of their own bodies to thrive in that environment. The real task for those studying intelligence is to understand the physical mechanisms by which this occurs. This is where the action really is in the study of intelligence, and this is where is has been since seminal thinkers like  Donald Hebb and Horace Barlow first began to theorize about how the mind might arise from the body. And, far from being mired in failure, this enterprise is making progress every day.

Jab We Met: Encounters between Islam and Hinduism in Early-Medieval Punjab

If the exhortation to pity the nation that forgets is own history is taken seriously, few nations are more pitiable than Pakistan today. Occupying one of the most historically rich pieces of land on the planet, modern Pakistanis go about their business oblivious to the echoes of the past that swirl all around them and the layers of history that lie buried under their feet. And more’s the pity for a better understanding of this historical past could explain a lot of the present and its problems, and perhaps even help solve them.

One of the most interesting and least understood periods in the history of the region is the time between 711 CE and 1200 CE, i.e., from the time when the first Arab conquerors under Muhammad bin Qasim established the so-called Emirate of Sind to the end of Ghaznavid rule in Punjab. One reason why this period is of special significance is that it represents the first extended encounter between Islam and the religious traditions of India, notably Hinduism (Buddhism too, but more on that another time). Given how the interaction and conflict between these two traditions has shaped – and continues to shape – the history of the region, looking back to the earliest encounters is especially important.

Though not studied as intensely as some other periods, the history of the early medieval period in Northwestern India has attracted its share of scholarship, from the contemporary writings of Al-Biruni, Al-Maqdisi and Ibn Hawqal to the work of modern historians such as Romilla Thapar¹, Finbarr Flood^2,3 and Derryl MacLean⁴. These works describe a fascinating process of interaction, integration and antagonism between two great cultures in an ancient land. In this piece, I will only consider a narrow but interesting set of issues, motivated, as often, by a coin in my collection – a bilingual Ghaznavid dirham circa. 1028 CE, shown below.

                                            

The silver coin was minted in the name of the greatest ruler of the Ghaznavid dynasty, Mahmud, who is famous – at least in South Asia – for his repeated attacks on India and his destruction of the great temple at Somnath in 1024. While his attacks ranged over large parts of northern India, Mahmud annexed only regions that lie in modern Pakistan. The coin was struck in 419 AH (1028 CE) at Lahore, which was then known as Mahmudpur – itself an interesting bit of historical information (the name “Mahmudpur” can be read clearly in the margin of the image on top at the 6 o’clock position). The complete inscription in the margin reads (as far as I can reconstruct it from this and other similar coins): bismillāh duriba hādha-al dirham mahmudpur tis’a ‘ashra wa arba’ mi’ah (In the name of Allah. This dirham struck at Mahmudpur 419). The central text on this side of the coin reads: lā-ilāha ill-allāh / muhammad rasūl-ullāh / yamīn-ud dawlah / wa amīn-ul millah Mahmud (There is no God but Allah / Muhammad is His messenger / protector of the state / and custodian of the community Mahmud). The inscriptions at the 12 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions together read al-qādir billah, which was the name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, to whom Mahmud nominally professed allegiance (more on this below).

Even more interesting is the reverse side of the coin, shown on the bottom. The text is in Sanskrit, written using the Sharada script, which was used throughout the region at the time and is the ancestor of the Gurmukhi and Kashmiri scripts. The text in the margin declares that the “tanka” – the Indian equivalent of the dirham – was struck in Mahmudpur on the given date, but it is the central inscription that is most interesting. The text reads: avyaktam ekaṃ, muhamadaḥ avatāraḥ, nrpatiḥ mahamudah. This translates as: The Invisible is one; Muhammad is His manifestation (avatar); Mahmud is the king. The margin also has a Sanskrit translation of the statement about the mint and date, including the Arabic bismillāh (in the name of Allah) translated as avyaktīya nāme (in the name of the Invisible). I rely on the reading reported by Flood in Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter³ (with citations to several other works),  but also given by Thapar in Somnatha: The Many Voices of History¹, and other sources, such as the entry for coin number 39207 in the Zeno Oriental Coins database and CoinIndia.

This inscription, which is the first known “official” translation of the Muslim declaration of the creed (shahada) into Sanskrit, is interesting for three reasons. First, the very fact of putting a Sanskrit version of the shahada on a coin signals a certain outreach to the conquered Hindu population. After all, they were the only ones who would be expected to read the Sanskrit version. Perhaps there was also an element of proselytization in the move, trying to acquaint Hindus with the basis of Muslim belief. In any case, it was a remarkable acknowledgement of the need to communicate across communal lines. Second, the exclusive Islamic declaration, “There is no God but Allah” is translated as “The Invisible is one” (or sometimes as “the Unmanifest is one”), which excludes nothing. Indeed, it is best read as an affirmative statement declaring the unity of all that is ineffable and immaterial – the great world spirit, so to speak. For Hindus who believed in the undefinable, unchangeable reality – Brahman – at the core of everything, this would not have been a stretch at all. This is especially so if MacLean is correct and the major form of Hinduism prevalent in the area was Pasupata Saivism with its strongly monotheistic beliefs. Finally, the most remarkable aspect of the translation is the declaration that the Prophet Muhammad is a manifestation (avatar) of God – not a messenger, as Muslims believe.  From an orthodox Islamic viewpoint, this is a heretical statement, but there it was on the coins of that most pious protector of Islamic orthodoxy, Mahmud “the idol-breaker”!

It is worth noting that, as far as is known, these bilingual coins were issued only at Lahore, and only for two years (418 and 419 AH). In an end note, Flood (p. 279) quotes Tye and Tye ⁵, as suggesting that these might have been fiduciary coins for local use. Nevertheless, given the importance of Lahore to the empire – it was virtually a joint capital with Ghazni – and the fact that in 1028 (when the coins were issued), it was governed by Mahmud’s hand-picked governor, Malik Ayaz (of Mahmud-o-Ayaz fame), the issuance of the bilingual coins and the text of the Sanskrit inscription cannot be dismissed as an anomaly. Clearly, there was an explicit and official attempt to reach across the communal divide, not only in form but also in ideas – perhaps to promote a version of the Islamic creed that would win greater acceptance among the Hindu populace. Nor was this the only such example. Mahmud’s son, Mas’ud I, also issued coins depicting Hindu iconography, including an image of Nandi, the bull of Shiva, which had been a prevalent motif in the Hindu Shahi coinage before the Ghaznavids. Indeed, these Hindu motifs continued to be used on Ghaznavid coins by Mahmud’s successors in clear contravention of the orthodox Islamic proscription against images. Some coins also used Sharada inscriptions naming the king and occasionally invoking Hindu deities. These iconographic practices persisted into the Ghorid dynasty as well.

But the history of bilingual coinage and syncretism between Islam and Hinduism in the region goes back somewhat further, and has some ironic twists.

As far as is known, the first bilingual coins by any Muslim rulers in India were struck in Multan by the Sāmid Amirs who reigned there in the 10^th century. Multan was then the capital of what is sometimes called “Northern Sindh”. After the initial Arab conquest in 711, Sindh was rules by a succession of governors appointed by the Umayyad administration, and then by the Abbasids after they took over in 750 CE. However, the hold of the caliphate on Sind became increasingly tenuous, and by the early tenth century, the region had split into a southern part, ruled from Mansurah by descendants of ‘Umar bin ‘Abd-ul-‘Aziz al-Habbāri, and a northern part, ruled from Multan by the descendants of Sāmah bin Lu’ayy. Both dynasties were of Qurayshi Arab origin, and professed nominal allegiance to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Multan, at the time, was famous for its magnificent Sun Temple, which was a major center of Hindu pilgrimage. The Sāmid rulers seem to have supported the temple and a tolerant, perhaps syncretic version of Islam. However, sometime in the mid-tenth century, the rulers of Multan converted to Ismai’ili Islam, and transferred their allegiance from the Abbasids to the Fatimid caliph in Cairo, who was also the Isma’ili imam. Initially, the Isma’ili religious leadership in Multan appears to have continued on a tolerant course, but this aroused the wrath of the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Mu’izz, who sent a new preacher (dā’i), Jalam bin Shayban, insisting that the Isma’ili Amir of Multan purify the local religious practice (per Isma’ili doctrine, of course), and end support of “idol worship”. In a famous incident, the Caliph, hearing that a major local idol had been destroyed by the new preacher, asked that the head be sent to him as proof of destruction. It has been believed, on the authority of Al-Biruni, no less, that this refers to the destruction of the Sun Temple and its idol, but other evidence, summarized by MacLean, suggests that it was probably another, lesser idol. Nevertheless, it is ironic that the first recorded instance in Punjab of systematic idol-breaking in the name of Islamic purity came from Isma’ilis rather than orthodox Sunnis. A second irony is that it was the Isma’ili presence in Multan that attracted the most famous of “idol-breakers”, Mahmud, to attack Multan in 1010 CE, depose its Isma’ili ruler whom he regarded as an apostate, and annex the province into the Ghaznavid empire. Apart from his religious objections, Mahmud may also have been motivated to punish the rulers of Multan for transferring their allegiance away from the Abbasid caliph, to whom Mahmud pledged nominal fealty.

 

The bilingual coins are thought to be from the early Isma’ili period Multan around 965 CE. As shown in the examples from my collection (above), the text on these very small coins is usually hard to read. However, one side had the name of the ruler in Arabic (top panel) while the other often had a Sanskrit word, written in the Sharada script, with Hindu religious significance (bottom panel). According to Flood³, four distinct Sanskrit inscriptions have been identified – two referring to Vishnu, one to Lakshmi, and the fourth to “Madhumadi”, which is regarded as the Sanskritized version of “Muhammad” (also used elsewhere in India at the time). If this is true, the coins represent an attempt to insert the Prophet of Islam into the Hindu pantheon. Perhaps it was such practices that raised the ire of al-Mu’izz and motivated him to send a “purifier”.

To summarize the sequential ironies of the situation: First, Isma’ili Muslim rulers in Multan attempted to create a syncretic culture among the Hindus and Muslims of their emirate; then they were chastised by an Isma’ili Caliph in Egypt who ordered them to destroy idols and temples – which they did; but their Isma’ili faith was still seen as heretical by the pious Sunni king, Mahmud, who invaded and annexed their kingdom; and then, Mahmud’s own hand-picked governor in the region made another similar effort at syncretic outreach, minting coins with statements that orthodox Muslims would have regarded as heretical – but only in Sanskrit!

History is a lot more complicated than we think!

References:

1.       1. R. Thapar (2005) Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History. Verso.

2.       2. F.B. Flood (2011) Conflict and Cosmopolitanism in “Arab” Sind. In: A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, R.M. Brown & D.S. Hutton (eds), pp 365-397. Blackwell.

3.       3. F.B. Flood (2009) Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter. Princeton University Press.

4.       4. D.N. McLean (1989) Religion and Society in Arab Sind, Brill.

5.       5. J. Tye and M. Tye (1995) Jitals: A Catalogue and Account of the Coin Denomination of Daily Use in Medieval Afghanistan and North West India. John Tye.