Mahmud of Ghazni’s raid on Somnath

According to Ibn al-Athir, Mahmud heard that the Hindus explained his destruction of so many idols by Somnath’s displeasure with them, and resolved to destroy Somnath itself. He left Ghazni on 18 October 1025 with 30,000 regular cavalry and many volunteers, and from Multan struck across the desert, each trooper carrying water on two camels. He took the fort of Lodurva and at the end of December reached Anhilwara, the capital of the Chaulukya king Bhima I, who fled to the fort of Kanthkot in Kutch. A Hindu force said to number 20,000 was scattered at Mundher (Modhera), Delvada was taken, and on 6 January 1026 the army reached Somnath, a fortress on the shore. On the next day the attackers scaled the walls but were driven back by defenders who rushed out of the temple; on 8 January they broke in and fought their way to the gates of the shrine. The chroniclers speak of no fewer than 50,000 dead and, in Ibn al-Athir’s account, of spoils worth twenty million dinars, and, they add, the temple was burnt.

Al-Biruni, writing a few years later, records that Mahmud had the upper part of the linga broken and the rest taken to Ghazni with its coverings of gold, jewels and embroidered cloth: one part lay in the hippodrome of the town, another before the door of the mosque, where people wiped their feet on it. He explains Somnath’s fame by its harbour, a station for seafarers sailing between Sufala in the land of the Zanj — East Africa — and China, and notes that the fortress was only about a hundred years old. Fearing the Hindu chiefs gathering under Paramadeva of Abu, Mahmud returned through Kutch and Sind, losing men in the desert and to the attacks of the Jats, and reached Ghazni on 2 April 1026. The caliph al-Qadir congratulated him and conferred new titles on him, his sons and his brother; Indian kings later rebuilt the temple more than once.

As A. K. Majumdar noted in 1956, Indian sources say nothing of the raid, and every detail comes from Muslim authors; Romila Thapar (2005) examined how its many and contradictory accounts were shaped and reshaped over the centuries, and some historians point out that records of a pilgrimage to the temple in 1038 do not mention any damage. The dates follow M. Nazim (1931), who converted the Hijri dates of the chronicles; D. C. Ganguly in the History and Culture of the Indian People dated the sack to January 1025, while al-Biruni himself gives the year 416 of the Hijra, which began in March 1025.