Evolution of Islam in India

Historically, we go back to the seventh century. This is the period where Islam first encountered western India sin and particularly the province of sin where the Indus River empties into the Arabian Sea. It happened in 711 when Mohammed Bin Kasim, who was a general, conquered the lower in this area, which is now Karachi areas in southern Pakistan.

Brahmins, the priests of India were reconfirmed as the elite community by Mohammed bin Kasim. And so, there was no effort, in other words, to upset or transform the social order rather, the first Muslims in India who were there understood their mission was to confirm the existing social order, which is to say to confirm the caste system.

The real encounter with Islam and India happened not by Arabs but by Turkish groups who had been migrating from East Asia into the west along the Silk Road connecting China with the eastern Mediterranean. The area of interest was the horn of sun and Central Asia which in the 10th and 11th centuries was undergoing a dramatic cultural Renaissance, in the sense that the Iranian people had been conquered by the Arabs in the mid-seventh century.  The KF of Islam became progressively weaker in the 10^th, 11th and 12th centuries and as that happened, the sultan replaced the KF at least as a political leader and this was important because the idea of the sultan acquired a certain notion of someone who’s above religion.

About 300 years after the Arab conquest of Iran which resulted to the fall of the empire of Sasanian or Iran in 651 and finally the declining of the region of Zoroastrian, the synthesis of Arabic and Persian took place and then Turks began to move into North India and they carried their hybrid culture with them. With a Turkish kind of Muslim population migrating into India, Delhi became filled up with populations of transplanted immigrants who are fleeing the terror of the Mongol invasions of Central Asia. The Turks ruled North India in the 13th century where they established the Delhi Sultana. The Delhi Sultana was the first ruling House of North India.

The Mongol empire was founded in 1206 by Genghis Khan. It originated from the Mongo heartland located in the Steppe of Central Asia and it was the largest empire in history. The fact that the Mongols were unable to conquer India meant that India became understood by all these migrants who were pushed out of Central Asia fleeing the Mongol terror. They began to see India as the true heartland of Islam especially after the Mongols proceeded to demolish Baghdad and overthrow the Caliph, indeed abolish the caliphate. The Sultan of India became the focus of many pious Muslims who were not looking for spiritual direction even though the soul time didn’t have a spiritual bone in his body. Most of these people were Turkish slaves. For those people who were fleeing the Mongols, India became a refuge zone. For them, pagan did not really mean Hindu, it meant Mongol and all the rhetorics in early Hindu Muslim literature of the 13th or 14th century were inspired by the fact that it is the Mongols who were the true pagans. It was in the 13^th century that Delhi was made the capital of India.

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