10. "The Shariat does not allow Temple Demolition"

Soft-line Hindu nationalists like K. R. Malkani, along with some secularists and Muslims, have often tried to convince us that Islam itself opposes the demolition of non-Muslim places of worship. They even argue that a mosque built on a demolished Hindu temple would be unlawful under Islamic law. The authority claimed as basis for this offer is the injunction in the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri (Aurangzeb's codex of applied Islamic jurisprudence): "It is not permissible to build a mosque on unlawfully acquired land. There may be many forms of unlawful acquisition. For instance, if some people forcibly take somebody's house and build a mosque or even a jama masjid on it, then namaz in such a mosque will be against shari'at."

Without reference to the context, this might be read as a prohibition on forcibly replacing Hindu temples as mosques. Sushil Srivastava has even used this injunction as "proof" that mosques simply cannot have been built in forcible replacement of temples. He writes that "the Quran clearly states that prayers offered in a contentious place will not be accepted (*) Thus, the whole purpose of constructing a masjid on the site of a mandir would be self-defeating (*) it is highly unlikely that even the contentious mosques in Varanasi and Mathura are located on the exact sites of temples."[62]

The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi is very certainly located on the exact site of the Vishvanath temple, and visibly includes remains of the old temple walls. Numerous other examples can be cited from inside and outside of India, and more cases keep on being discovered."[63] To mention two less-known cases from Iran, the Masjid-I-Birun in Abarquh and the Jami Masjid of Aqda (still a Zoroastrian center of pilgrimage with a shrine in use on a mountain outside the town), "whose origin may be traced back to fire-temples" of the Zoroastrians.[64] The author reporting on them correctly introduces his finding thus: "In the Islamic world many places of worship belonging to earlier religion have been converted to mosques."

As is clear from the Islamic law books, as Prof. Harsh Narain has shown, the injunction against building mosques on unlawfully acquired land only applies to inter-Muslim disputes, because it was quite lawful and in fact also quite common to have mosques built on temple sites grabbed from Hindus and other heathens.[65] Indeed, the forcible takeover of non-Muslim religious places is a practice initiated by Prophet Mohammed himself. The best example of the practice is the Kaaba itself, a Pagan shrine forcibly transformed into the central mosque of Islam.

11. Tampering with the Evidence

In its presentation of evidence in the Government-sponsored scholars' debate in December 1990, the VHP scholars have pointed out 4 cases of attempted fraud by their opponents, attempts by BMAC sympathizers to conceal, obliterate or change evidence: removing old books from libraries, adding words on an old map. Recent editions of Urdu books (by Maulvi Abdul Karim and by Shaikh Md. Azamat Ali Nami) have suppressed chapters or passages relating the temple destruction on Ramkot hill which were present in earlier editions or in the manuscript. In an English translation of a book by Maulana Hakim Saiyid Abdul Hai, the relevant passages present in the Urdu original had been censored out, and an effort was discovered to remove all the copies of the Urdu original from the libraries.

On maps included in the Settlement Record of 1861, which describe the disputed area as Janamsthan, "birthplace", someone had added "Babari Masjid"; the interpolation was obvious after comparison with a copy of the document kept in another office. The fact that this official document could be tampered with, may well be related to the fact that the then Revenue Minister of Uttar Pradesh was an office-bearer of the BMAC.

In my opinion, these petty and clumsy attempts to tamper with the corpus of evidence, are child's play compared with the concealment of evidence by professional scholars sympathetic to the Babri Masjid cause. In their publications on this dispute, A. A. Engineer and Prof. S. Gopal have simply kept out all inconvenient (mainly pre-British) testimonies out of the picture and have just acted as if these did not exist. In his reply to The Political Abuse of History by 25 historians of JNU, Prof. A. R. Khan shows grounds to accuse the eminent JNU historians of "not only concealment but also distortion of evidence."[66]

It is not unfair to conclude that some of the pro-BMAC authors have committed serious breaches of academic deontology. For me personally, seeing this shameless overruling of historical evidence with a high-handed use of academic and media power, was the immediate reason to involve myself in this controversial question.

When A. K. Chatterjee had presented the testimony by 18^th century traveler Father Teiffenthaler as evidence, Syed Shahabuddin revealed in his reply that he possessed a copy of this text (in German translation) and that he was thoroughly familiar with the text.[67] This seems to imply that while he was challenging his opponents to come up with any pre-British evidence, he was fully aware that such evidence did exist (or at the very least a document which might reasonably be claimed to contain such evidence, even if one were to be persuaded by Shahabuddin's extremely contrived attempt to explain it away), but remained sitting on top of it in the hope that nobody would discover it.

The above are cases where the attempts to suppress evidence have failed. It is quite probable that other attempts have succeeded. There may well be documents containing pertinent information, particularly about the site's history during the Sultanate period (1206 - 1525), which have escaped the notice of Prof. Harsh Narain (the only scholar of Persian and Arabic in the VHP team) because they had been removed in time from the places where they could normally be found. Such documents would mostly be in Persian and available only in the libraries of Muslim institutions. In some of these, Prof. Harsh Narain has effectively been denied access as soon as his involvement in the Ayodhya argument became known. How many pieces of pertinent material have been concealed, removed, destroyed or altered is anybody's guess.