Encyclopedia of Islam

India

  

351  J

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Although the Arabs may have maritime con-

nections with India prior to the appearance of 

Islam, the first recorded contact between Arab 

Muslims and the people of the Indus Valley did 

not occur until the campaign led by Muham-

mad ibn Qasim al-Thaqafi (d. 715), who invaded 

Sind on behalf of the U

mayyad

  c

aliphate

 in 711 

and reached as far north as the city of Multan. 

Although maligned by later British historians and 

Indian nationalists, the only early Islamic account 

indicates that the raid was prompted by an attack 

on a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims near the coast 

of Sind (the lower region of the Indus River). The 

non-Muslim subjects were Hindus and Buddhists 

whom al-Thaqafi treated as “protected” peoples 

(dhimmis), like Jews and Christians who accepted 

Muslim rule and paid a special tax called the 

jizya

. There is little evidence that they were forced 

to convert, as some later historians assert. Sind 

became a province in the early Muslim empire.

The next major incursions by Muslim armies 

did not occur until the turn of the 10th century, 

when the controversial Turkic ruler Mahmud of 

Ghazni (r. 998–1030) launched up to 17 raids 

into Sind and adjacent regions from Ghazni, his 

capital in a

Fghanistan

. Mahmud, a defender of 

s

Unnism

, conducted these raids partly to eradicate 

Ismaili Shia who had settled in the Sind region. 

But he also wanted to control the region to secure 

its trade routes and plunder its wealth in order 

to enhance revenues for his growing empire and 

building projects in Ghazni. Hindu temples were 

especially good targets because they contained 

gold and precious gems. The most noteworthy of 

the temples Mahmud attacked was Somnatha, a 

Shiva temple located near a major regional port. 

Such temple raids were common in the ancient 

world and were also conducted by rival Hindu 

kings against each other. Mahmud’s raids paved 

the way for direct Muslim rule deep in the Indo-

Gangetic plain. In 1192, the state that Mahmud 

had created was destroyed by a short-lived Persian 

dynasty known as the Ghurids. The commanders 

they assigned to rule in Delhi became indepen-

dent and established the Delhi Sultanate, which 

was to rule northern India until the arrival of the 

Mughals in the early 16th century.

The first Delhi sultan was Qutb al-Din Aybek 

(r. 1206–10), who initiated the building of the 

Quwwat al-Islam (Power of Islam) Mosque and 

the Qutb Minar, a monumental complex on the 

southern outskirts of Delhi. It was built on the 

site of a Hindu temple with stones taken from 

destroyed temples. Aybek wanted the world to 

know that Muslims were the new rulers in 

the land. Interestingly, early Hindu sources and 

inscriptions suggest that the new rulers were not 

seen as Muslims by the local populace. They were 

referred to instead in social or ethnic terms as 

mlecchas (barbarians), Turushkas (Turks), Shakas 

(Central Asians), or Yavanas (Greeks) in remem-

brance of those other foreigners who had invaded 

India centuries before the Muslims. Conservative 

Ulama

 of the Delhi Sultanate and later chroniclers 

considered the Indians to be unbelievers (