As early as 672 A.D. the Arab armies had subdued Bokhara and from this centre Islam spread gradually to Afghanistan, India, Kashmir and Chinese Tartary, but it took 200 years of alternate coercion and persuasion for Islam to supplant the Buddhism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism of those areas.
India first felt the force of the Muslim sword in 712, when the Khalif Walid sent an army to avenge an outrage on an Arabian vessel. Qasim, the Muslim general, offered Islam or tribute; but the Rajputs chose the arbitrage of the sword. Qasim defeated them and forcibly circumcised a number of Brahmans. This having failed to make them Muslims, he proceeded to put all the Brahmans over seventeen years of age to death, and to enslave the rest. Contrary however, to the law of the Quran, the other Rajputs were allowed to continue in their idolatry and pay tribute. In fact the Arabs showed more clearly in India than anywhere else that their object was not so much the conversion of idolaters and polytheists as the plunder of temples and the enlargement of the Muslim Empire. We may search the record of bloodshed and spoilation in vain for any trace of a purely missionary effort to win over converts to Islam. In the “History of India”, by Wheeler, the eminent authority writes “The military adventurers who founded dynasties in Northern India and carved out kingdoms in the Deccan, cared little for things spiritual; most of them had, indeed, no time for proselytising, being continually engaged in conquest and war.”
Turkish invasions of the Punjab began at the end of the tenth century; but it was in the following century, under Mahmud of Ghazni, that Islam was really established as a dominant power in India. Mahmud made nearly a score of invasions altogether, with the usual results of obtaining incredible quantities of loot, demolishing temples, and slaughtering infidels. Delhi became the capital of this Muslim kingdom, which was further enlarged by Muhammad Ghori and the slave kings during the latter part of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries.
A second kingdom was formed in Bengal and Behar (of which Gour was the capital) by Muhammad Baktiyar, who even made an attempt to carry Islam into Assan and Thibet. The feeble Hindus of Bengal offered no resistance to the invader. Many of the influential Brahmans were put to death and the mass of the people gradually embraced Islam. It seems that remarkable efforts by un-named missionaries were as influential as political influence. The higher classes of Hindus were, however, practically untouched by Islam.
Southern India was not really attacked until the reign of Ala-ud-din in the fourteenth century, and the Deccan kingdom was soon afterwards severed by a Sh’ia revolt from the kingdom of Delhi, and Kulbarga became the capital of a new Muslim state. Mahmud, who was Sultan from 1378 to 1397 A.D., seems to have been imbued with more of the missionary spirit than other Sultans of the country, and he is said to have established schools for orphans, in which they were brought up as Muslims.
Meanwhile, all the strict laws of Islam were becoming obsolete, and Muslim was found fighting Muslim, Muslim soldiers even served under heathen kings against their co-religionists. The result of this was a weakening of the barrier between Hinduism and Islam with the shield of Islam being marked with deeper dents than the shield of Hinduism. It is a hotly debated question whether the large number of Muslims in India is due to a rapid and long-sustained process of peaceful conversion, or to large immigrations, political influence, and physical force. The actual number of immigrants can never be even approximately guessed, but it must have been large, and probably a good portion of the Muslims in the North West provinces are descendents of these invaders. The Bengal Muslims are descendents of low Hindu castes, who were converted in great numbers when the Muslim kingdom of Gori was established.
Again the Shi’a element, which was at first subordinate, finally, in the person of Akbar, grasped the supreme power in the state, was one which helped to disintegrate Indian Islam. This element was chiefly conspicuous in the Deccan kingdom, where it was, perhaps introduced by the Mongol mercenaries and Persian immigrants. They were held in very low repute, and more than once large bodies of them were massacred by the Sultans. The Shi’as, being less strict than the Sunnis, made use of Hindus in administration and debased the character of Islam by assimilating it to Hinduism. At the same time they made it more acceptable to the native Hindus, many of whom became Muslims. From this compromise of religion arose the Indian Sufis, who, mingling the fire-worship of the Persians and the Pantheism of the Hindus with some of the tenants of Islam looked upon Muhammad and Ali as incarnations of the Supreme Spirit. And acknowledged the truth of the Quran only in a spiritualised sense.
But there were other, and more definite, attempts to amalgamate the two religions. At the beginning of the fifth century Kabir preached the identity of the Hindu and Muslim God. Ali and Rama were names of this God. A century later Chaitanya preached the common salvation of all races and all castes. Islam and Hinduism, he taught, both contained elements of truth. Midway between these two reformers comes Nanuk, the founder of Sikhism, which is distinctly a compromise between the religions. The peaceful teaching of Nanuk was transformed into the basis of a religious warfare by the Guru Govind in 1700. Idolatry and Islam were both to be uprooted and their rites abolished, while the duty of killing Muslims was a duty incumbent on every Sikh.
No Muslim kingdom was formed south of the Deccan, but probably offshoots of the Deccan Muslims settled in may parts of the south; but their numerical strength in those quarters, of which Ibn Batutah speaks in the fourteenth century, was due partly to another cause. As in the case of China, the earliest introduction of Islam into the peninsula of India was by traders to the coast, who undoubtedly made some converts. The descendants of these converts were the Mappilas and Moplahs, on the Malabar Coast.
In the Maldives Islam was introduced peacefully as Ibn Batutah expressly tells us by a Berber named Abu Barakat, a holy man who knew the Quran by heart and could exorcise spirits. After a month’s teaching, the king and his family embraced Islam, and his people followed his example.
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