FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLDLanka) sent some women, born in his realm as Muslims, to }:Iajjaj.
Their fathers were traders and had died there. The intention was to
gain the favor of l;Iajjaj. The ship in which they were sailing was cap-
tured by the Mid people of Daybul, who sail on bawarii (pirate ships).
One of the women from Bani Yarbu cried Ya Ifajjai! (Oh l;Iajjaj!) and
when he heard of this, he said Ya Labaik (I come). He sent a letter to
Dahar for the release of the women. He replied: "They were captured
by pirates, whom I do not control." l;Iajjaj sent 'Ubaidullah bin
Nabhan to Daybul, but he was killed. Then he wrote to Budail bin
Tahfah, who was in Oman, and told him to go against Daybul. But
when he faced the enemy, his horse bucked and he was killed by the
enemies. Some say he was killed by the Jat people of the Buddhists.^4137
It is important to note here that Baladhuri places this account more
than a decade before the campaign of Muhammad bin Qasim and
during an already forty-year-old effort to placate the frontier of Makran.
Yet this account of the "abduction of Muslim women" dramatically
reverberates in historiography and popular imagination to this day. It
is an incredibly potent account: a helpless Muslim woman and her cry
for help galvanizing a distant empire into a rescue mission. To the nov-
elists, dramatists, and political commentators, it provides endless per-
mutations of history's silenced voices and the glory of Islam's heroic
past. Even scholars have rather uncritically embraced this episode as
the rationale for invasion. Writes Wink, "During Hajjaj's governorship
it was the 'Mids of Debal' who kidnapped Muslim women who were
traveling from Sri Lanka to Arabia, providing the occasion for the
Arabs to declare the holy war on Sind and Hind."^42 Yet we cannot take
at face value the historiographic significance attached to this account.
In chapter 6, I will return to this account and show how it emerged in
historiography. It is enough at the moment to recognize that Balad-
huri placed it about a decade before the expedition of Muhammad bin
Qasim.
Judging from Baladhuri's reconstruction of late-seventh-century
and early-~ghth-century Muslim campaigns in Sind, we can conclucJe
that the Umayyad State was interested in the region for several reasons:
to secure a frontier region against rebels, to address the financial af-
fairs of the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad, and to consolidate mer-
cantile routes.