Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/29

 without burdening themselves with such an enterprise as the conquest of India. The first and only Arab invasion of the land of the Ganges coincided in date with two other signal successes of Mohammedan arms in distant parts of the globe. Gothic Spain was shattered at the battle of the Guada- lete in 710; the standards of Islam were carried from Samarkand to Kashghar in 711-14; and the valley of the Indus was invaded in 712. These three steps mark the zenith of the power of the Omayyad caliphate, and coincide with the administration of one of the ablest and most relentless of all Moslem statesmen. Al-Hajjaj, the governor of Chaldaea, sent Kutaiba north to spread Islam over the borders of Tartary, and at the same time despatched his own cousin, Mohammad ibn Kasim, to India. The reigning caliph consented unwillingly; he dreaded the distance, the cost, the loss of life. Even in those days, to adapt modern phrases, there were the opposing policies of " Little Arabians " and " Imperial- ists." Al-Hajjaj was imperialist to the core, and to him the Arabs owed the impulse which gave them all they ever won in India. The story of Mohammad ibn Kasim 's adventures is one of the romances of history. He was but seventeen, and he was venturing into a region scarcely touched as yet by Saracen spears, a land inhabited by warlike races, possessed of an ancient and deeply rooted civili- zationthere to found a government which, however successful, would be the loneliest in the whole vast Mo- hammedan empire, a province cut off by sea, by moun-