User:Fowler&fowler/Muhammad of Ghor

Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, also Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori, also Ghūri (1144 – March 15, 1206), commonly known as Muhammad of Ghor, also Ghūr,  or Muhammad Ghori, also Ghūri, was a ruler from the Ghurid dynasty based in Ghor in what is today west-central Afghanistan who ruled from 1173 CE to 1206 CE. Until the death of his elder brother, Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, also known as Ghiyath al-Din Ghori, in 1203, he was the junior ruling partner in a diarchy, with Ghiyath al-Din governing the western regions from his capital in Firozkoh and he, Mu'izz ad-Din, or Muhammad of Ghor, the eastern ones. Muhammad of Ghur eventually extended Islamic rule into South Asia, as far east as the Ganges delta in Bengal and regions to the north in Bihar. Under evolving Muslim dynasties, Islamic rule was to extend during the next half millennium to many parts of South Asia.

The brothers belonged to a family of unenslaved, tribal chiefs, or warlords, in a culturally uncharted region of the mountains of west-central Afghanistan. This region was populated by nomadic people practising pastoralism. The brothers' family had converted to Islam a few generations before. They spoke an eastern Iranian dialect of the Persian language, but one quite distinct from the mainstream Persian of the time. In 1173, the brothers captured Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan from the Ghaznavid Empire. After Ghazni, they proceeded to acquire territory to the west in Khurasan: they captured the city of Herat from the Seljuqs in 1175. Their hold on cities farther west was brief: Merv, Tus and Nishapur were captured in 1199–1200, but lost within six months, and Herat the following year, as were most lands to the west after 1204. To the east, Muhammad of Ghor used Ghazni as a base to launch attacks into the plains of the Punjab region in what is today Pakistan. In 1175 Muhammad of Ghor entered Punjab through an intermediate pass between the Khyber Pass in the north and the Bolan Pass in the south, crossing the Indus River, and attacking the Isma'ili-community in the city of Multan in the mid-river valley, and later the city of Uch. In 1176, Muhammad of Ghor captured the city of Peshawar in the far northwest of the subcontinent and secured the adjoining Khyber Pass, the traditional route of entry for invading armies. A southern route in 1179 took him into Gujarat in what is today western India, plundering the Śiva temple at Kiradu. In this, he was following a century-and-half-old strategy of Mahmud of Ghazni of using the proceeds of plunder in the eastern regions to finance imperial aspirations in the western. In 1181 when he attacked Lahore the capital of the last Ghaznavid sultan Khusrau Malik, in the valley of Ravi, this strategy had changed to one of holding the captured regions. Although Muhammad of Ghor was not successful, the next year he followed a southerly arc to the port city of Debal on the Arabian Sea coast of Sindh, thereby securing the regions in the lower Indus valley. The success enabled him in 1186 to attack Lahore again and displace the Ghaznavids' from their last stronghold.

Extending his ambition further eastwards, in 1191, Muhammad of Ghor met the Chahamana ruler Prithviraj III, at Tarain, 120 km north of Delhi, the latter location then a minor fort on the northernmost spurs of the Aravalli Hills. He suffered his first defeat at Tarain and also an injury from an enemy spear. He returned to Ghazni, recuperated, and trained his swift-horse cavalry to more effectively attack war elephants, the mainstay of Prithviraj III's army. In a return engagement at Tarain in 1192, Muhammad of Ghor won, his opponent's slow-moving elephants were not effective against Central Asian mounted archers shooting arrows at full gallop from both flanks. Prithviraj III was captured and executed soon after. Muhammad of Ghur spent the next 10 years capturing the major political centres of north India: Meerut, Hansi, Delhi, Kol (modern Aligarh), Benares, Ajmer, Bayana, Ujjain, Badaun, Kanauj, Gwalior and Kalinjar. The Ghurid brothers&mdash;having mutated rapidly from a marginalized pastoral chieftaincy in west-central Afghanistan to the control of large regions in north India, Afghanistan and Khurasan&mdash; now adopted the outward characteristics of a Persianate bureaucratic and centralized state. Muhammad of Ghor began to style himself as "the great sultan" (sultan al- mu‘azzam). By plundering the temples favoured by Hindu royalty, capturing their treasures, and exacting tributes from the rulers he had subjugated, as well as land-tax from their landed elites, Muhammad of Ghor was able to extract unprecedented revenue. but he also sought to minimize the disruption by making pragmatic accommodations with landed elites and the leading political figures and allowing them to stay in place  Prithviraj III's son became a tributary king to the Ghurids, ruling both from Ajmer and the Ranthambore fort. The changes Muhammad of Ghor brought about were not primarily religious, nor were conversions to Islam involved. Although temple desecration was practised, it typically occurred in the context of a moving frontier of conflict as the means for showing down the royal sponsor, more for plunder than for iconoclastic destruction. Whereas royal temples were raided and brought down, the ones attended by ordinary people were often left undisturbed. The more salient change was military: horse cavalry came to gradually replace war elephants in South Asia. In 1199 the two Sultans became Sunni Muslims, ending their earlier allegiance to a provincial Islamic tradition.

In 1196 Muhammad Ghuri returned to Afghanistan, deputing the political and military operations in South Asia to a handful of elite slave commanders. He joined his elder brother in military campaigns in Afghanistan and Khurasan and became the supreme sultan upon Ghiyath al-Din's death in 1203. The following year, he suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of his Turkish rivals in Khurasan, and Ghurid power there quickly died out, and soon after in Afghanistan itself. In 1206, the sultan was assassinated while offering evening prayers. A protracted civil war broke out among his commanders, including Qutb ud-Din Aibak in Delhi, Nasir ad-Din Qabacha in Sindh; Baha al-Din Tughril in Bayana (in eastern Rajasthan) and in the zone between Ghazni and the Indus valley, Taj al-Din Yildiz. All his slave commanders had become legally free, or manumitted, upon their master’s death. It would be some time before Delhi, under Aibek would emerge as South Asia's major capital, and the Delhi sultanate as the region's dominant state.