The Mirror of the Excellences of Islam — Page 501
500 Ā'ĪNA-E-KAMĀLĀT-E-ISLĀM―DĀFI‘UL-WASĀWIS with the filth of this mundane existence and negligent of the afterlife, neither striving for it nor seeking it. Thus, Divine wisdom demanded they be warned. Accordingly, He willed to strip them of their sover- eignty and grant it to a people—an offshoot from the idolaters [i. e. Hindus] who called themselves Khālṣah [Sikh]. They were an illit- erate, ignorant, and unwise people. Thereafter, Allah stirred up strange happenings for their succour and glory and for the annihilation and the uprooting of the tree of the Muslims, so that they might know that they had disobeyed their Lord and were transgressors. Thus, Sikhs stood up with full effort and vigour in order to extirpate the Muslims and capture their kingdom. Allah helped them in strange ways, and thus they emerged victorious in every battle. In those times, my ancestors had also been victim to various calamities and afflictions. The Sikhs seized their lands and entered into their towns and usurped their properties and state, captured them by their hands, plundered their possessions, ruined their buildings, scattered their progeny, and burnt their libraries, including five hundred copies of the Holy Quran. The Muslims helplessly looked on, crying as they turned their mosques into temples for their idols, slaughtered a great many of our people with their swords, and degraded our noblest into the lowest, to the extent that the agony reached a degree of extremity. My ancestors were overwhelmed with grief and sorrow, and the earth—with all its vastness became too strait for them; they were expelled from their estates in troops along with their brothers, maids, and servants and they kept wandering about in the land. The disbelievers showcased the characteristics of their disbelief in their cities, eradicating all signs of Islam and rendering them as rubbish. All the pre-existent affairs were overturned, and this was their conduct. In those times, the Muslims were inflicted with such a great calam- ity and widespread catastrophe that they were not allowed to raise the Call to Prayer in the mosques, nor to recite the Quran aloud, nor to bring any Hindu into the religion of Islam, nor to slaughter a cow. All these acts were punishable with death and plunder. If this [punishment]