In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, you will meet a hero of Islamic history, Muhammad Ghori, who in 1191 and 1192 twice defeated a force of Rajputs led by the Hindu commander Prithviraj Chauhan in northern India. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Hasan Nizami noted that a primary objective of the jihad remained the destruction of Hindu “idolatry”: the destruction of Hindu temples and the construction of Islamic edifices on the sites where they had been. He also records matter-of-factly an appalling large massacre of Hindus by Muslims:
The army of Islam was completely victorious, and a hundred thousand groveling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell…. He destroyed [at Ajmer] the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam and the customs of the law were divulged and established.