I was listening to a lecture by the Saudi shaykh Muhammad b. Musa al-Shareef, who supervises the Al-Tareekh (The History) website. He has a beautiful and inspiring series of arabic audio lectures called Great People from the Lands of Islam, and among those is the one I was listening about, the Mughal ruler of the Indian subcontinent, Aurangzeb, who succeeded his father Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal.

Before getting to Aurangzeb, al-Shareef makes this very thought-provoking remark,

“Here appeared the Mughal state with the appearance of a man called Babur… And this Babur came, he used to rule from Kabul…[and took Delhi] and sat on its thrown the year 933 A.H. (1526 CE), almost 500 years ago. He was able to take Delhi and establish a huge kingdom that lasted for three centuries, and it is the Mughal sultanate, that controlled the entire Indian subcontinent from the Bengal to the Punjab on the borders of Iran, and from Ghazna (Afghanistan) to the Indian Ocean- an enormous and magnificent state. And we have lost this state with our hands- a precious possession, we lost. The Muslims cry over al-Andalus, but al-Andalus would not even make a province, not even 1/100th of the area of India. And if the Muslims cry over Cordoba and Alhambra, then they have lost [in India] colossal palaces with which the castles of Cordoba, Alhambra, and Grenada cannot be even weighed or compared. And if they cried over a few thousands Muslims who died as martyrs in al-Andalus, then in India millions of Muslims have died. There is not even one inch of the Indian lands, almost, except that on it is pure Muslim blood, and upon which the adhaan was heard loud and clear for hundreds of years. Yet we cry over al-Andalus and forget India- thus the Muslims forget their history. They do not know their history in India, and it is a bright and radiant history- great, grand, and beautiful.”