Of all the great religions that have shaped and are still shaping the destinies of the human race, Islam alone was borne forth into the world on a great wave of forceful conquest. Out of the sun-scorched deserts of Arabia, with the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other, the followers of Mahomed swept eastward to the confines of China, northward through Asia Minor into Eastern Europe, and westward through Africa into Spain, and even into the heart of medieval France. But it was not till the beginning of the eleventh century that the Mahomedan flood began to roll down into India from the north with the overwhelming momentum of fierce fanaticism and primitive cupidity behind it--at first mere short but furious irruptions, like the seventeen raids of Mahmud of Ghazni between 1001 and 1026, then a more settled tide of conquest, now and again checked for a time by dissensions amongst the conquerors quite as much as by some brilliant rally of Hindu religious and patriotic fervour, but sweeping on again with a fresh impetus until the flood had spread itself over the whole of the vast peninsula, except the extreme south. For three centuries one wave of invasion followed another, one dynasty of conquerors displaced another, but whether under Turki or Afghan rulers, under Slave kings or under the house of Tughluk, there was seldom a pause in the consolidation of Mahomedan power, seldom a break in the long-drawn tale of plunder and carnage, cruelty and lust, unfolded in the annals of the earlier Mahomedan dynasties that ruled at Delhi. One notable victory Prithvi Raja, the forlorn hope of Hindu chivalry, won at Thanesvar in 1192 over the Afghan hordes that had already driven the last of the Ghaznis from Lahore and were sweeping down upon Delhi, but in the following year the gallant young Rajput was crushingly defeated, captured, and done to death by a ruthless foe. Then Delhi fell, and Kutub-ed-Din, in turn the favourite slave, the trusted lieutenant and the deputed viceroy of the Afghan conqueror, growing tired of serving an absent master, within a few years threw off his allegiance. In 1206 he proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi. That the Slave Dynasty which he founded was in one respect at least not unworthy of empire, in spite of the stigma attaching to its worse than servile origin, the Kutub Minar and the splendid mosque of which it forms part are there to show. The great minaret, which was begun by Kutub-ed-Din himself, upon whose name it has conferred an enduring lustre not otherwise deserved, is beyond comparison the loftiest and the noblest from which the Musulman call to prayer has ever gone forth, nor is the mosque which it overlooks unworthy to have been called _Kuwwet-el-Islam_, the Might of Islam. To make room for it the Hindu temples, erected by the Rajput builders of the Red Fort, were torn down, and the half-effaced figures on the columns of the mosque, and many other conventional designs peculiar to Hindu architecture, betray