174 A CONQUEST OF PASTS
The Marxist historian Mohammad Habib (1895-1971) opened his
1929 essay "Arab Conquest of Sind" with a broad differentiation be-
tween the ethics of a faith and the practitioners of that faith. Habib then
tied the conquest of Sind to a longer history of movement between Arabia
and India. When introducing Chachnama, he insisted that the text was
to be seen as a whole-though he too categorized it as an account of the
eighth century. In response to the colonial historiography that depicted
Qasim as a temple destroyer and a despot, Habib sought to rehabilitate
the figure of Muhammad Qasim as an ethical and brave commander:
In the course of three years he had advanced from Daybul to the Hi-
malayas. Could not another three years take him to the border of
China? He had carefully studied the religion and the customs of the
country and understood to perfection the policy that divided his en-
emies and increased his friends. His army, far from being weary of
its work, longed for more victories. Moreover, it was the Hindus who
had helped him to his greatest victories of peace and war, and so long
as he adhered to his policy of toleration, there was every reason to
expect their support.^60Habib asserted that Muhammad bin Qasim "alone had a conscience,
the instincts and feelings of a gentleman."^61 Habib's broader response
hinted at the· historiographic way out of the bind that the descendants
of Dow placed upon the Muslims of India (that the Muslims would re-
main foreign to India and that their history was a history of domina-
tion arid destruction). Habib's account was thus a rehabilitation of early
Muslims and a placement of Muslim history within a framework larger
than conquest-such as class, trade networks, migration, and settle-
ment. He argued that Muslim "rule" in India was a misnomer: Muslim
kingships were ecumenical, and Muslims received no special favors.
Habib excavated the past not to fuel sectarian difference in the present
but to assert a historically sound vision of the Indic Muslim past that
countered the British account.
While these historians changed the tenor of the debate about the
text, they did not shift the grounds: that Chachnama could be read
only as a text marking the eighth-century origins of Islam in India and
that it was filled with superfluol,\S stories, tales, and romantic asides. It
was not read as a political theory of the thirteenth century, and it was