THE MUHAMMADAN RELIGION.
LIST OF THE MOGUL EMPERORS FROM
HUMAYUN TO AURANGZEB.
| Humayun | 1530-1540 |
| 1555-1556 | |
| Akbar | 1556-1605 |
| Jehangir | 1605-1627 |
| Shah Jahan | 1627-1658 |
| Aurangzeb | 1658-1707 |
|1.
Map of Northern India.| Once more we look at the map of Northern India. We realise the great mountain wall of the Himalayas, four and five miles high, curving through fifteen hundred miles along the northeast frontier of the Indian lowland. Behind the Himalayas is the Tibetan plateau, three miles in average elevation. Northwestward of India there is another plateau, but a lower one than Tibet, and the mountain ranges which divide it from the Indian plain are lower than the Himalayas. Observe the great series of streams which emerge from the Himalayas, and gather on the one hand into the Indus River, flowing southwestward, and on the other hand into the Ganges, flowing southeastward. See the position of the Indian desert and the Aravalli Hills, and note the exact spot where stands the city of Delhi.
|2.
Map of the neighborhood of Delhi.| We turn now to a map on a larger scale of the region round Delhi. We see the Himalaya mountains, the Aravalli hills, and the Indian Desert. We see the streams of the Indus and Ganges systems turning away from one another, and we see Simla, the summer capital of India, high on a spur of the Himalayas, above the divide between the Indus and the Ganges tributaries. Just north of Simla is the valley of the Sutlej, tributary to the Indus, and where the Sutlej issues from the mountains we note the off-take of a great system of irrigation canals. It is true that the lowland northwestward of Delhi is not quite desert. Nevertheless it has but a sparse rainfall, and the result of the construction of the irrigation canals derived from the Himalayan waters is that great colonies have been established in this region, and wheat is grown on thousands of square miles that were formerly waste. India has a great population, but with modern methods of water supply, and more advanced methods of cultivation, there is still ample room for settlement within its boundaries. We see on the map that there are other irrigation canals derived from the Ganges where it emerges from the mountains at Hardwar, and from the Jumna.
Delhi is the Musulman capital of India. What Benares and Patna and Gaya were and are to the Brahman and Buddhist civilisations native to India, what Calcutta and Madras and Bombay and Karachi are to the English from over the seas, that are Delhi and Agra to the Musulmans entering India from the northwest. The Musulmans were not the first to come this way into India. The oldest of the sacred books of the Hindus tell of a people who came from the northwest and apparently founded the Hindu religion, accepting no doubt some of the religious beliefs of the earlier, the Dravidian, population. From these Aryan invaders, speaking Sanskrit, have been derived the languages of the peoples of Northern India. Southeastward, southward, and southwestward from Delhi as far as the centre of India, there spread the Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi languages, as evidence of the effective conquest made by those remote invaders entering through the Delhi passage between the desert and the mountains. So far, however, as their language was concerned, they failed to establish themselves in the Dravidian south. Long afterwards, but still some three hundred years before the Christian era, the Greeks under Alexander the Great traversed Persia and Turkestan and came over the Hindu Kush, the mountain backbone of what is now Afghanistan, down into the plains of the Punjab. Alexander advanced across the rivers of the Punjab, tributary to the Indus, apparently as far as the Sutlej, and then turned southward and followed the Indus to its mouth. Part of his troops returned through the Persian Gulf on board the fleet, and part he led back with great loss along the barren northern shore of the Arabian Sea. Alexander and the Greeks came therefore to the very threshold of India, and then turned aside towards the sea, leaving the desert of Rajputana between them and the great prize of the conqueror.
In the seventh century of the Christian era there arose in Arabia the prophet Muhammad, who in his youth had been influenced both by Christian and Hebrew teaching. He preached to the Arabs that there was but one God, and that Muhammad was his prophet.