Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/385

354 all their treasure. Then the conqueror took Brahmanābād by storm, and having made terms with Rōr, crossed the Bayās and invested Al-Multān, which after a prolonged siege, the water having failed, surrendered at discretion. The fighting men were put to the sword, and their families, with the crowd of attendants on the shrine of Buddha, made captive. Al-Multān was then a centre of pilgrimage, people coming from all quarters to worship the idol. It was "the Gateway of India and the House of Gold." The spoil was incredible, and double the whole cost of the expedition, which was estimated by Al-Ḥajjāj at sixty million pieces. While Ibn al-Ḳāsim rested here, enjoying the fruits of his splendid conquests, tidings of Al-Welīd's decease arrested his further progress eastward. He was recalled to Al-ʿIrāḳ, where, with certain other adherents of Al-Ḥajjāj, he was put to the torture and died.

With Ibn al-Athīr, we may here anticipate a few years further the Muslim rule in India. Ḥabīb, one of Al-Muhallab's family (on which now shone the sun of courtly favour), as governor of Sind, fixed his court at Rōr, and allowed the princes displaced by Ibn al-Ḳāsim to return, as protected, to their several States. The pious ʿOmar II. summoned them to embrace Islām, on which they received Arabian names. In the days of Hishām, a little later, Juneid pushed the Muslim bounds still farther east. But the prestige of Islām again waned for a time. Most of the princes relapsed into heathenism, and to hold them in check, the fortified camp Al-Maḥfūẓa (the Protected) was founded, from which expeditions, both naval and military, were sent forth. "Things, however," says our Historian, "remained in India on a weak and feeble footing until the blessed accession of the ʿAbbāsids."

It should be noted here that in India there was an altogether new departure in the treatment of the subject races. Idolatry was tolerated. Temples were left standing, and their worship not disallowed. By Moḥammadan law, Jews and Christians might continue to profess their faith under Muslim rule; and even Parsees were, by a