Encyclopedia of Islam

kafirs

) 

and polytheists (mushriks) who must be fought 

and subdued. However, this outlook was not the 

prevailing one at the time. The practical necessi-

ties of organizing and ruling an expanding state 

government meant that the Muslim Afghans, 

Turks, and Persians, as minority rulers, had to 

find ways of winning the cooperation of the popu-

lation. These included collaborating with Hindu 

Rajputs (local kings), bringing non-Muslims into 

government service, and treating the populace 

not as disbelievers but as dhimmis. Intermarriage 

between Muslims and Hindus also occurred. His-

torians of this period have found that there was 

no widespread program of forced conversion to 

Islam, nor was there wanton destruction of Hindu 

places of worship, as is the conventional view 

nowadays. Rather, Muslim rulers desecrated only 

those temples that were closely identified with 

rival Hindu rulers. They also patronized Hindu 

temples. During the mid-13th century, the Delhi 

Sultanate was home to religious scholars and 

Sufis seeking refuge from the Mongol onslaught 

that was sweeping through Middle Eastern lands, 

K  352  

India

---

destroying many of its grandest cities. This made 

India a new center for Islamic learning and the 

pursuit of Sufism. It was at this time that the 

c

hishti

  s

UFi

  o

rder

 was founded in India, with 

generous support from the Delhi Sultanate.

In southern India, Islam arrived with Arab 

traders from southern Arabia rather than Turkic 

and Persian warriors from Afghanistan and Cen-

tral Asia. They established trading outposts along 

the Konkan (modern Karnataka) and Malabar 

(modern Kerala) coasts as part of the wider Indian 

Ocean trading system, perhaps as early as the 

eighth century. These merchants received guaran-

tees of security from local Hindu rulers and inter-

married with the native population, giving rise to 

the indigenous Mappila people. Later histories of 

this era even suggest that they were able to con-

vert one of the local rulers and obtain permission 

from him to build the first mosque in Malabar, the 

Cheraman Juma Masjid, which resembled a south 

Indian Hindu temple in its design. For centuries, 

the Mappila have maintained connections with 

their Arabian roots, many of them going to work 

in the Persian Gulf region. The vitality of these 

people is reflected in the fact that they continue 

to grow in number, constituting one of the largest 

Muslim populations by ratio to non-Muslims in 

India today.

At the beginning of the 14th century, the Delhi 

Sultanate was ruling all of northern India from the 

Punjab to the mouth of the Ganges in Bengal. It 

then extended its reach southward into the Dec-

can Plateau. Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq (r. 

1325–51) temporarily (1313–23) moved the capi-

tal 700 miles southward from Delhi to Daulatabad 

(formerly known as Devagiri) to better integrate 

the region under his rule and to avoid the Mongol 

threat from the northwest. By the end of his reign, 

Muslim rule had extended to the banks of the 

Kaveri River deep in southern India. The sultanate 

was unable to maintain centralized rule over this 

vast area for long. Regional kingdoms emerged 

throughout India, including the Hindu kingdom 

of Vijayanagar in the south, which emulated many 

of the political and cultural attributes of the Mus-

lim court. There were even Shii dynasties in the 

central Deccan region created by Persian warrior 

immigrants. The Deccan thus became an area of 

dynamic cultural interaction and sociocultural 

genesis, mixing not only Muslim and Hindu but 

also Turkic and Persian with Dravidian and Arab 

influence from the Konkan and Malabar coastal 

areas.

The next configuration of Muslim power in 

India was that of the m

Ughal

 

dynasty

, which 

displaced the remnants of the Delhi Sultanate in 

the early 16th century and ruled until the British 

military eradicated it in the aftermath of the 1857 

rebellion. The Mughals, a family of rulers claim-

ing descent from the Mongol conquerors Genghis 

Khan (d. 1227) and t

amerlane

 (d. 1405), built 

upon the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate and 

created a highly centralized bureaucratic state that 

at its height in the late 1600s controlled much of 

what now encompasses the modern nation-states 

of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. From the 

reign of a

kbar

 (r. 1556–1605) to that of his great 

grandson a

Urangzeb

 (r. 1657–1707), the Mughal 

era was one of great cultural florescence and 

economic prosperity. The capital cities of Delhi, 

Agra, and Lahore were embellished with breath-

taking palaces, 

garden

 tombs, and 

mosqUe

s, the 

foremost of which was the Taj Mahal, a tomb built 

by Shah Jahan (r. 1627–66) for Mumtaz Mahal 

(d. 1631), his beloved wife. Mughal artists pro-

duced magnificently illustrated epics and dynastic 

histories. Akbar even commissioned illustrated 

Persian translations of the Hindu sacred epics the 

Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mughals 

also promoted the cultivation of new agricultural 

lands in Punjab and Bengal, a development that 

led to the conversion of the populations of those 

areas to Islam, not by force but through everyday 

interactions with Muslim judges and holy men at 

their mosques and shrines. Indeed, as Richard M. 

Eaton has noted, there was an inverse relation-

ship between conversion to Islam and political 

power. The areas with the largest proportions