Tipu Sultan (Rahimahullah)

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Pen Is In The Hands Of Enemy

 

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Once Hazrat Mufti Mehmoodul Hassan Mas’udi sahib DB said that the pen is in the hands of our enemy who has changed image of the history, completely. In the eyes of common Muslims, Sultan Tipu RhA’s image is like that of a Fasiq with long moustache and shaved beard similar to that shown in dramas. Although in reality he was a scholar ibn scholar, and was ba shara’ and very pious. Source

 

 

 

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It is mentioned in some historical narrations that when this Masjid (masjid a’alaa built by Sultan Tipu RhA) was built, it was settled that the Imamat of first salah will be done by someone who will be sahib e tarteeb, i.e. there should be no Qadha Salah upon him. There were many scholars and pious present at the masjid’s inauguration. But no one was in the position of saying with confidence that he is sahibe tarteeb. Atlast Sultan Tipu RhA told that he was sahibe tarteeb, and then he leaded the prayer. After that Sultan Tipu used to offer all his prayers in that masjid, and also on the day of shahadat he offered fajr salah in that masjid. (Safr dr safr by Hazrat Mufti Taqi Usmani sahb DB)

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Fatah Tipu Ali Sultan (RA) was born on a Saturday 20th Dhul Hijjah 1163 A.H. (10th November 1750) in a village 33 km north of Bangalore. His father was Haydar Ali and his mother, Fatima Begum, (better known as ‘Fakhrun Nisaa’) was from the Quraysh. Between the age of five and nineteen, he memorised the Qur'aan and mastered the sciences of Deen as well as military training. He displayed great valour as a soldier and became known as Fatah Ali Khan Bahaadur. When the enemy launched an attack in the year 1767 A.D., Tipu Sultan (RA) faced them with an army of seven thousand and captured the impregnable fortress of Mangalore. The sacrifices of Haydar Ali Khan and Tipu Sultan (RA) can never be forgotten in the fight for freedom in which Tipu Sultan (RA) eventually gave his blood and was martyred on the 4th of May 1799 A.D.

 

Tipu Sultan (RA) was a true patriot to his land and a king who treated all subjects equally. Together with ensuring that the Muslims obeyed the laws of the Shari'ah, he allowed people of other faiths to practice freely. He was a pious and modest man who was particular about fasting and Salaah, especially the Tahajjud Salaah. He was an authority in Deeni knowledge and he himself wrote many books. He established a university called Jaami’ul Umoor which taught both Deeni and secular sciences. He also instructed scholars to establish Madrasahs in the Masaajid to teach children. When opening the Jaami Masjid in Mysore, he announced in the crowd of eminent scholars, “Only that person should open the Masjid who has never missed a single Fardh Salaah.” When no one stepped forward, Tipu Sultan (RA) himself went forward to lead the Salaah, saying, “By the grace of Allaah, I have never once missed a Fardh Salaah.” It is tragic that the sterling attributes of a just and pious king such as Tipu Sultan (RA) are concealed and historians depict him in a negative light.

 

When Tipu Sultan (RA) was about to fight his last battle, his secretary Habibullaah said, “Sir! It is time that you should have mercy on yourself and that your princes should become orphans.” To this Tipu Sultan (RA) replied, “I have already decided that my family and I should be sacrificed for the Deen of Muhammad (Sallallahu Alaihi Wa Sallam).” When the enemy gained entry into the fortress through the betrayal of Mir Saadiq, Abdul Ghaffaar the faithful general of Tipu Sultan (RA) was martyred. Tipu Sultan (RA) was about to eat a morsel of food when he heard the news. He then said, “Our days are also numbered.” He then jumped into the thick of the battle and fought for a long while. When the fortress fell to the enemy, his deceitful slave Rajah Khan bade him to surrender himself. In anger he replied, “A single day in the life of a lion is better than a thousand days in the life of a jackal.” Despite several bullet wounds, he continued fighting until the evening but eventually fell to a hail of bullets from every direction when a traitor gave his position away to an enemy officer. When he fell, one of the enemy soldiers tried to snatch his jewel-encrusted sword from him. Despite the bullet to his chest, he fought the soldier off and managed to dispatch him to Jahannam. A bullet in his head finally killed him and he drank from the goblet of martyrdom on the 4th of May 1799 A.D. He was given a royal funeral the following day and buried by the side of his father Haydar Ali.

 

Madrasah in Just 5 Minutes

Mufti A.H.Elias-May Allaah protect him

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An essay in imperial villain-making

William Dalrymple

 

By the end of the 90s, the hardliners calling for regime change in the east found that they had a powerful ally in government. This new president was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the west.

 

There was no doubt who would be the first to be targeted: a Muslim dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources, this chief of state was an "intolerant bigot", a "furious fanatic" with a "rooted and inveterate hatred of Europeans", who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of jihad". He was also deemed to be "oppressive and unjust ... [a] sanguinary tyrant, [and a] perfidious negotiator".

 

It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The president of the board of control, Henry Dundas, the minister who oversaw the East India Company, had just the man for the job. Richard Wellesley was sent out to India in 1798 as governor general with specific instructions to effect regime change in Mysore and replace Tipu with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley and Dundas had to justify to the British public a policy whose outcome had long been decided in private.

 

Wellesley therefore began a campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as an aggressive Muslim monster who divided his time between oppressing his subjects and planning to drive the British into the sea. This essay in imperial villain-making opened the way for a lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable regime that would, in the words of Wellesley, allow the British to give the impression they were handing the country back to its rightful owners while in reality maintaining firm control.

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a politician in search of a war is not over-scrupulous with matters of fact. Until recently, the British propaganda offensive against Tipu has determined the way that we - and many Indians - remember him. But, as with more recent dossiers produced to justify pre-emptive military action against mineral-rich Muslim states, the evidence reveals far more about the desires of the attacker than it does about the reality of the attacked.

 

Recent work by scholars has succeeded in reconstructing a very different Tipu to the one-dimensional fanatic invented by Wellesley. Tipu, it is now clear, was one of the most innovative and far-sighted rulers of the pre-colonial period. He tried to warn other Indian rulers of the dangers of an increasingly arrogant and aggressive west. "Know you not the custom of the English?" he wrote in vain to the nizam of Hyderabad in 1796. "Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs."

 

What really worried the British was less that Tipu was a Muslim fanatic, something strange and alien, but that he was frighteningly familiar: a modernising technocrat who used the weapons of the west against their inventors. Indeed, in many ways, he beat them at their own game: the Mysore sepoy's flintlocks - as the examples for sale in an auction of Tipu memorabilia at Sotheby's tomorrow demonstrate - were based on the latest French designs, and were much superior to the company's old matchlocks.

 

Tipu also tried to import industrial technology through French engineers, and experimented with harnessing water-power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore - an innovation that still enriches the region today. More remarkably, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories dotted across the Gulf. British propaganda might portray Tipu as a savage barbarian, but he was something of a connoisseur, with a library of about 2,000 volumes in several languages.

 

Moreover, contrary to the propaganda of the British, Tipu - far from being some sort of fundamentalist - continued the Indo-Islamic tradition of syncretism. He certainly destroyed temples in Hindu states that he conquered in war, but temples lying within his domains were viewed as protected state property and generously supported with lands and gifts of money and even padshah lingams - a unique case of a Muslim sultan facilitating the Shaivite phallus veneration. When the great Sringeri temple was destroyed by a Maratha raiding party, Tipu sent funds for its rebuilding. "People who have sinned against such a holy place," wrote a solicitous Tipu, "are sure soon to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds."

 

Tipu knew what he was risking when he took on the British, but he said, "I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep." As the objects in tomorrow's sale show, the culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by the Islamophobic propaganda of the British - and the startling inaccuracy of Wellesley's "dodgy dossier" of 1799. The fanatical bigot and savage was in fact an intellectual.

 

The whole episode is a sobering reminder of the degree to which old-style imperialism has made a comeback under Bush and Blair. There is nothing new about the neocons. Not only are westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by western garrisons, for their own political and economic ends but, more alarmingly, the intellectual attitudes that buttressed and sustained such imperial adventures remain intact.

 

Despite over 25 years of assault by Edward Said and his followers, old-style Orientalism is alive and kicking, its prejudices intact, with columnists such as Mark Steyn and Andrew Sullivan in the role of the new Mills and Macaulays. Through their pens - blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of the Muslim world - the old colonial idea of the Islamic ruler as the decadent, destructive, degenerate Oriental despot lives on and, as before, it is effortlessly projected on a credulous public by western warmongers in order to justify their own imperial projects. Dundas and Wellesley were certainly more intelligent and articulate than Bush or Rumsfeld, but they were no less cynical in their aims, nor less ruthless in the means they employed to effect them.

 

William Dalrymple is the author of White Mughals

theguardian

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From "Muslim Inventions"

 

Iron-cased and metal-cylinder rocket artillery:

 

The first iron-cased and metal-cylinder rocket artillery were developed by Tipu Sultan, a Muslim ruler of the South Indian Kingdom of Mysore, and his father Hyder Ali, in the 1780s. He successfully used these metal-cylinder rockets against the larger forces of the British East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. The Mysore rockets of this period were much more advanced than what the British had seen, chiefly because of the use of iron tubes for holding the propellant; this enabled higher thrust and longer range for the missile (up to 2 km range). After Tipu's eventual defeat in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and the capture of the Mysore iron rockets, they were influential in British rocket development, inspiring the Congreve rocket, which was soon put into use in the Napoleonic Wars.

 

According to Stephen Oliver Fought and John F. Guilmartin, Jr. in Encyclopedia Britannica (2008): "Hyder Ali, prince of Mysore, developed war rockets with an important change: the use of metal cylinders to contain the combustion powder. Although the hammered soft iron he used was crude, the bursting strength of the container of black powder was much higher than the earlier paper construction. Thus a greater internal pressure was possible, with a resultant greater thrust of the propulsive jet. The rocket body was lashed with leather thongs to a long bamboo stick. Range was perhaps up to three-quarters of a mile (more than a kilometre). Although individually these rockets were not accurate, dispersion error became less important when large numbers were fired rapidly in mass attacks. They were particularly effective against cavalry and were hurled into the air, after lighting, or skimmed along the hard dry ground. Hyder Ali's son, Tippu Sultan, continued to develop and expand the use of rocket weapons, reportedly increasing the number of rocket troops from 1,200 to a corps of 5,000. In battles at Seringapatam in 1792 and 1799 these rockets were used with considerable effect against the British." Tippu Sultan wrote a military manual on his rocket artillery, the Fathul Mujahidin.

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Hazrat Tippu Sultan Shaheed Rahmatullah-Alaiy Part A

Maulana Anzar Shah Qasmi

 

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