Read Before Writing: Hmm. I had never seen this article before

» pseudoerasmus - Hmm. I had never seen this article before

Hmm. I had never seen this article before, or else I would have commented upon it. I have to agree Nuz. I'm not sure where Maria Christenson got the idea that Shah Jahan was intolerant, for he was unlike his son Aurangzeb known as among the more tolerant Mughal rulers. Shah Jahan, being a strict Muslim in his personal life, never got the reputation for tolerance that Akbar and Jahangir got. (In the case of Akbar,

As for the Taj Mahal "controversy", Nuz is right: it doesn't exist, at least among serious scholars. Innocent as she apparently is of contemporary subcontinental politics, Maria Christenson has yielded to the temptation for providing a spurious balance and includes one of the wilder claims of Hindu fundamentalist pseudoscholarship that is now proliferating on the Web and elsewhere.

Besides the patently preposterous notion that the Taj Mahal was once a Hindu temple, she'll be able to find other crank claims by Hindu fundamentalist pseudoscholars, such as that (1) the Aryan invasions of India never took place and the linguistic/anthropological division between Aryans and Dravidians is a Western lie; (2) the linguistic category called Dravidian languages is a Western lie, and Tamil, Kannada, etc. are descended from Sanskrit just as much as Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali; (3) Urdu and Hindi have different roots; and (4) the Pythagorean theorem (along with countless other mathematical and scientific discoveries ordinarily attributed to Arabs or Greeks) was actually discovered and proven by ancient Hindus.

There are many many such crank claims, wholly dismissed by reputable scholars in the field.

-- posted by pseudoerasmus