In recent years, ever since the campaign to destroy the Babri Masjid was launched, people in India have been fed with the constant propaganda that the destruction of places of worship was a fine art that Muslims, fired with an irrepressible iconoclastic zeal, had mastered. Historical records show that some Muslim kings did indeed destroy Hindu temples, something Muslims themselves would hardly dispute. In assessing the historical record, however, it is important to draw a distinction between Islamic commandments and the acts of individual Muslims. The Qur'an in no way sanctions the destruction of the places of worship of people of other faiths.
For the most part, Muslims have abided by the Qur'anic injunction that 'There is no compulsion in religion'. For instance, after Muhammad bin Qasim, leading the first Muslim army to India, had subdued Sind, he granted the local Hindus and Buddhists full religious freedom and guaranteed the protection of their shrines. When Sultan Sikander of Kashmir, egged on by his Brahmin prime minister, Suha Bhat, set about pulling down temples on a large scale, the leading Kashmiri Muslim Sufi, Hazrat Nuruddin Nurani, bitterly protested, arguing that Islam did not sanction this. This opinion was shared by several other Muslim 'ulama and sufis. Thus, the Tabaqat-I Akbari tells us that when they heard that Sultan Sikander Lodi (r. 1489-1517) was planning to destroy some temples, a group of high-ranking 'ulama protested, saying, 'It is not lawful to lay waste ancient idol temples'.
Caution must be exercised in accepting the narratives provided by medieval writers about the exploits of kings, including their 'feats' of temple destruction. Most historians were employees of the royal courts, and they tended to exaggerate the 'exploits' of the kings in order to present them as great champions of Islam, an image that hardly fits the facts that we know about them. Thus, for instance, the author of the late eighteenth century Riyad ul-Salatin claimed that Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji demolished several temples in Bengal when he captured the province in 1204, although there is no evidence to suggest that this had indeed been the case. In his book Essays on Islam and Indian History, the well-known historian Richard Eaton points out that of the sixty thousand-odd cases of temple destruction by Muslim rulers cited by contemporary Hindutva sources one may identify only eighty instances 'whose historicity appears to be reasonably certain'. Eaton clearly shows that cases of destruction of places of worship were not restricted to Muslim rulers alone. He recounts numerous instances of Hindu kings having torn down Hindu temples, in addition to Jain and Buddhist shrines. He says that these must be seen as, above all, powerful politically symbolic acts.
Typically, cases of shrine destruction are reported in the wake of the overthrow of a powerful enemy and the annexation of his territory. The royal temple of the enemy was often pulled down to symbolize the enemy's defeat. Thus, for instance, the historical records speak of the seventh century Hindu Pallava king Narasimhavarman I, who looted an idol of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later, the Hindu Chalukyan army brought back with them idols of Ganga and Jamuna, looted from temples of their fellow Hindu enemies to the north. In the eighth century, a Bengali Hindu army is said to have destroyed an idol of Vishnu belonging to their imperial foe, the Hindu king Lalitaditya of Kashmir. In the tenth century, the Hindu Pratihara king Herambapala defeated the Hindu Shahi king of Kangra and looted a solid gold idol of Vishnu from the Kangra royal temple. In the eleventh century, the Chola ruler Rajendra I furnished his capital with idols of Hindu deities that he had captured from his enemies, the Chalukyas, the Palas and the Kalingas. The sixteenth century Vijaynagara ruler, Krishna Deva Raya, is reported to have looted an idol of Krishna from Udaygiri after inflicting on it a crushing defeat. He is also said to have looted a Vittala idol from the famous Pandharpur temple.