Hinduism and the Coming of Islam

In the early months of 1026, after a long march across the desert, the cavalry of Mahmud of Ghazni reached the Shaiva temple of Somnath on the coast of Gujarat and sacked it. The near-contemporary sources count the year as 416 of the Muslim calendar, which had begun the year before, so even the date carries a small argument inside it. For nearly a thousand years that single raid would be remembered as a Hindu wound — and later it would also be pressed into service as an Islamic triumph, a colonial parable, and fuel for modern politics. The wound came first, and it was real. The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. The story of the temple has been rebuilt more often still.

Hold that raid in mind, because it is one face of the coming of Islam to India. Here is the other, and both are true at once.

More than a century before Mahmud rode, Arab dhows were already tying up on the Malabar and Konkan coasts. Muslim merchants prayed, married into local families, and raised mosques with the blessing of Hindu kings who valued their trade. The Kerala coast remembers a mosque at Kodungallur from the seventh century, within the lifetime of the Prophet himself, though historians hold that the standing building is centuries younger and the founding legend later still. So Islam reached India as a guest on the western coast and as a raider in the northwest, and neither arrival cancels the other.

The honest history of this encounter is the history of holding both together, and of noticing how often later ages have kept only one.

The many arrivals

The first thing to say is that there was no single coming of Islam. There were arrivals, plural, overlapping, contradictory, spread across eight hundred years.

There was the arrival by sea, the Arab traders settling on the western coasts from the seventh and eighth centuries, the oldest Muslim communities in India, formed by commerce and marriage rather than by any army. There was the arrival by the early sword, the campaign of the Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim in Sindh in 711 and 712. The fullest account of what followed, the so-called Brahmanabad settlement, in which the conqueror is said to have reinstated Brahmins in office, levied the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims, and extended the status of protected subjects to Hindus and Buddhists, comes to us from the Chach Nama, a Persian text written around 1226, some five centuries after the events it describes. The historian Manan Ahmed Asif reads it as a thirteenth-century work of political theory rather than a reliable chronicle of the eighth. The generous terms it reports may be real. They may also be a later age telling itself a story about how a conquest ought to be conducted.

There were the Ghaznavid raids around the year 1000, of which Somnath was one, plundering expeditions mounted for treasure and for the prestige of the idol-breaker. Mahmud of Ghazni raided India some seventeen times and governed almost none of it. There was the conquest that stayed, when the armies of Muhammad of Ghor took the north and his general Qutb al-Din Aibak founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, the first sustained Muslim rule in India, which passed through five dynasties across three centuries. And there was the Mughal empire, founded when Babur defeated the last Lodi sultan at Panipat in 1526.

And there was the arrival that is often credited with the widest, slowest spread of conversion, quiet where the others were loud: the advance of Sufi devotion, the mystics whose shrines, the dargahs, drew Hindus and Muslims alike.

The colonial historians collapsed all of this into a single, religiously defined “Muslim period,” and that habit hides more than it reveals. The encounter was many things at once. The Indian historians Mohammad Habib and Irfan Habib spent careers insisting on the most basic of its distinctions, the difference between a raid and a reign.

The name in the inscriptions

Here is a fact that should unsettle every modern teller of this story, from any side.

The violence was real; what is surprising is how the people who suffered it named it. When the Hindu kingdoms of the time recorded the armies that came against them, in their own Sanskrit inscriptions, carved in stone in the moment, they very often called the newcomers turushka, Turks, and yavana, the old word once used for the Greeks, rather than “Muslims.” The historian Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, reading these inscriptions closely, argued that medieval Hindus tended to see the invaders as one more foreign people arriving by the northwestern passes, marked first by ethnicity and language and only slowly, if at all, by religion. On his reading, the picture of a single Hindu civilisation locked for a thousand unbroken years in a religious war with a single Muslim one was not how the wars were experienced at the time; it was drawn much later. The suffering was not in doubt. What it was understood to be about, in the moment, was often something other than a clash of two faiths.

The spectrum of rule

Once Muslim dynasties ruled large parts of the subcontinent, their treatment of Hindu subjects and Hindu shrines ran across a wide spectrum, and an honest account refuses both the rosy version and the lurid one.

At one end stands Akbar. He abolished the hated pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya in 1564, took Hindu wives, had the Mahabharata translated into Persian as the Razmnama, built a House of Worship at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 where he summoned Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian, Muslim and Jesuit theologians to debate before him, and articulated a court doctrine he called sulh-i-kul, peace with all. His own ideologue Abu’l-Fazl looked back on Mahmud of Ghazni’s destructiveness and dismissed it as the work of fanatical bigots — a Muslim emperor’s court, in writing, distancing itself from the iconoclast it could have claimed as a hero.

At the other end stands Akbar’s great-grandson Aurangzeb. He reimposed the jizya in 1679; he is tied to the documented destruction of famous temples, the Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi in 1669 and the Keshava Deva at Mathura in 1670, with a mosque raised on the latter’s ruins; and he had the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur executed in Delhi in 1675 — a martyrdom the Sikh tradition remembers as that of the shield of India, killed for the freedom of others to keep their faith. These are grave acts, and no account that respects the people they were done to can file them under mere statecraft.

And yet the same Aurangzeb, twenty years before he pulled the Banaras temple down, had issued a farman in 1659 ordering his officers there to protect the Brahmins and the ancient temples of the city. He granted land to Hindu temples and maths elsewhere, and employed the largest share of Hindu officers, of Rajput mansabdars holding imperial rank, of any Mughal before him. The eminent historian Jadunath Sarkar read him as a zealot whose bigotry helped break the empire; Audrey Truschke reads him as a hard political actor whose choices followed statecraft, a reading that other scholars fault for underweighting the religious conviction in his own orders. Both are reading real evidence, and both readings are partial. The man does not resolve into a single sentence — and the tension itself, not either tidy verdict, is the honest place to stand.

Nor were the Hindu powers only ever objects in this story. The Rajputs fought and bargained and rebelled. The Marathas under Shivaji carved a Hindu kingdom out of the Deccan. Far to the south the empire of Vijayanagara rose specifically to hold the line against the sultanates pressing on it, even as its own kings borrowed the title of sultan and the dress of the Persianate court. The frontier ran through everyone.

The question of the temples

Temple destruction is the hardest matter here, and it must be handled with unusual care, because it is at once a real, documented catastrophe and a fiercely contested field of history.

Begin with what is not in dispute and must never be softened. Temples were desecrated deliberately and on a serious scale, some of them the holiest sanctuaries of their regions, and the loss was a genuine trauma that Hindus have carried and mourned ever since. The point of the historical debate that follows is not to lessen that loss. It is to establish, as exactly as the sources allow, how much was destroyed and why — questions on which serious historians genuinely disagree.

On the numbers, the fault line is sharp. At one pole, the activist compilation of Sita Ram Goel and Arun Shourie puts the figure near two thousand mosques raised on temple sites. At another, Richard Eaton, working from the sources that can be securely dated and attributed, counts about eighty desecrations across the whole span from 1192 to 1729 — and is careful to call this a documented floor rather than a full tally, since, as he says, the record is selective and much has surely been lost. Between these poles stand historians such as Meenakshi Jain, who argues from inscriptions and rebuilding records that the destruction was far more extensive and far more religiously driven than Eaton’s reading allows, and that the desecrated shrines were remembered, hidden, and reconstructed by Hindus for centuries afterward. The desecrations are agreed; their number, and their motive, are not.

Eaton’s own argument is that desecration tended to follow a political logic: it struck the royal temple of an enemy or a rebel king, the temple in which that king’s sovereignty was felt to reside, on the moving military frontier where one kingdom was being absorbed into another, while temples inside a settled domain were often treated as protected state property and sometimes patronised. He points to counter-examples, Akbar’s general Man Singh building the great Govind Deva temple at Vrindavan in 1590 under Mughal rule, and Mughal officials overseeing the Jagannath temple at Puri for generations, and argues that a purely doctrinal iconoclasm, of the kind André Wink described, would have levelled every village shrine rather than the selected few. Critics answer that the political-logic thesis explains too little: that the Persian court chronicles themselves boast of idol-breaking in nakedly religious language, and that, as Meenakshi Jain argues, it sits awkwardly beside the near-absence of the reverse case — Muslim rulers did not, as a rule, demolish the mosques of the Muslim rivals they conquered. Eaton’s defenders reply that rival Muslim shrines were in fact sometimes despoiled, and that a mosque and a king’s patron-temple carried different kinds of political meaning. The reader should know that Eaton’s framing is influential and carefully argued, and also that it is genuinely contested, not settled.

What can be said with confidence is the resilience that answered the destruction. Again and again the deity was carried to safety, hidden, or re-installed, and the temple was rebuilt — Somnath, Kashi Vishwanath, the Keshava shrine at Mathura, and others raised again and again, keeping their old names even when their new scale was humbler, long after Hindus had lost the political power to protect them. That, too, is part of the history, and it belongs to the tradition’s memory as fully as the loss does.

The other meeting

If the story stopped at conquest and temples it would be a lie by omission, because alongside the violence ran a very different encounter, in the heart rather than on the battlefield.

This was the meeting of Sufism and bhakti, the mystical and devotional currents of the two faiths, which in India often flowed into one another. The Sufi orders, above all the Chishtis, planted shrines that became shared sacred ground. The tomb of Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and the tomb of Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi drew, and still draw, Hindu and Muslim pilgrims to the same threshold. When Babur took Delhi in 1526 he paid his respects at the Chishti tombs of the city he had just conquered.

Out of that confluence came the sant tradition of north India, the poet-saints who belonged fully to neither religion and spoke past both. Kabir, the weaver of Varanasi, somewhere in the fifteenth century, mocked the pieties of Hindu and Muslim alike and pointed beyond them to a God without form. Guru Nanak, born in 1469, drew from both wells and founded what became the Sikh tradition, a faith wholly its own. Ravidas, the leather-worker saint of the same city in the same age, sang of a casteless realm. And out of the wider meeting came a whole composite Indo-Persian world — a language that grew into Hindavi and then Urdu, the qawwali sung at the dargahs, a cuisine, a music, an architecture — though this shared culture always coexisted with real boundaries, and was not the seamless fusion later nostalgia sometimes imagines. The traffic ran both ways: the sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, the chronicles record, had Ganga water carried forty days’ journey for his own table, a Hindu king’s ritual taken up by a Muslim one.

The prince who translated the Upanishads

Nothing shows how deep this meeting could run better than the strange, doomed career of a single Mughal prince. Dara Shikoh was the eldest son of the emperor Shah Jahan and, for most of his life, the heir apparent to the throne. He was also a genuine mystic and scholar, a disciple of the Sufis, who became convinced that the truth his own tradition guarded and the truth the Hindu sages had found were, at the deepest level, one and the same.

In 1655 he set this conviction down in a short treatise with a beautiful title, Majma-ul-Bahrain, “The Mingling of the Two Oceans,” in which he laid Sufi and Vedantic ideas side by side and argued that they described the same reality in different words. Then he went further than any prince of his faith had gone. Gathering a circle of Sanskrit pandits in Varanasi, he had some fifty of the Upanishads translated into Persian, a labour completed in 1657. He called the collection Sirr-i-Akbar, “The Greatest Secret,” because he had come to believe that these Hindu scriptures were the hidden, protected book of pure monotheism to which the Quran itself alludes — that the Upanishads were not a rival revelation but the very wellspring of the truth he already held.

The story has an ending that is hard to bear. Two years later, in the war of succession that followed Shah Jahan’s illness, Dara was defeated by his younger brother, Aurangzeb, captured, tried on a charge of heresy in which his love of Hindu learning was turned against him, and executed in 1659. The tolerant heir lost; the brother who would later pull down the temple of Varanasi won. It is one of the great might-have-beens of Indian history.

But the secret Dara had unlocked did not die with him. His Persian Upanishads travelled west, and in 1801 a French scholar, Anquetil-Duperron, rendered them into Latin — the first time the Upanishads had ever been read in a European language. That Latin volume reached the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who called the Upanishads the consolation of his life and built them into the foundation of his own philosophy, from where their influence seeped into the whole Romantic and later Western discovery of Indian thought. The Upanishads reached Europe, and much of the modern world’s fascination with them began, because a Mughal prince who was about to lose his life to his brother believed that Hindu and Muslim were, in the end, reading the same book.

Why people became Muslim

Why, then, did millions of Indians become Muslim? Here too the honest answer is a spectrum, and any account that offers a single cause is selling something.

There was the sincere religious draw, above all the pull of Sufi devotion and the dignity it offered to those whom caste had fixed at the bottom, for whom a faith that seated all worshippers on the same floor was a genuine liberation. There was the slow work of agriculture and settlement on the forest frontiers, where, as Eaton showed in his study of Bengal, Sufi pioneers clearing land for the plough drew whole communities into a new faith over generations, with no army anywhere in sight. And there was coercion, real and not to be waved away: conquest and captivity in some times and places, the steady fiscal pressure of the jizya, and the plain worldly advantage of joining the ruling faith.

The reason most historians doubt the sword was the main engine lies in a single striking pattern. If conversion had come mainly by force, the Muslim population of the subcontinent should be densest where Muslim power sat longest and heaviest, in the Gangetic heartland around Delhi and Agra. It is not. It is densest at the far edges, in Bengal and in western Punjab, the frontiers furthest from the throne — the geography of the plough and the Sufi more than of the garrison. This pattern does not erase the coercion that is documented; it constrains how much of the whole vast movement coercion can account for.

How it is remembered

Return now to Somnath, because the deepest lesson of this history is about memory — and about who controls it.

The raid of 1026 carried many meanings to the people of its own time. It appears in Sanskrit inscriptions, in Jain chronicles, in the records of the merchants who kept trading at the port, and in the Persian histories that magnified it into a holy victory. The historian Romila Thapar, in a book-length study of the temple, argued that Somnath became the single defining wound of Hindu India only much later, and that a great deal of that modern, political charge was amplified on a colonial stage: in 1842 the British governor-general Lord Ellenborough ordered the army returning from Afghanistan to bring back what he called the gates of Somnath, and the House of Commons debated the gesture in 1843; the gates, when they arrived, turned out to be the wrong ones, and were left in a fort at Agra. Other historians, Meenakshi Jain prominent among them, push back hard on Thapar here, arguing that the desecration and the longing to rebuild were remembered in Indian sources across the centuries, not manufactured in London — and the distinction worth holding is this: the modern political deployment of Somnath was indeed sharpened under colonial and post-colonial conditions, but the wound itself, and the memory of it, are far older than the British.

The larger colonial imprint is less disputable. It was nineteenth-century British scholarship and administration that first sorted Indian history into a Hindu period, a Muslim period, and a British one, in James Mill’s influential scheme of 1817. Eaton notes an irony at the close of his study: that colonial civilisational template, of a Hindu India and a Muslim India set eternally against each other, was later picked up on both sides of a new border, by Pakistani and by Hindu-nationalist historiography alike — two very different projects reaching for the same inherited frame. And Thapar adds a hard point that cuts against comfortable memory: temples were sometimes looted and desecrated by Hindu kings against rival Hindu kings too, yet only the destructions by Muslim rulers are remembered now. That is a real caution against selective memory — even as the sheer scale of the medieval destructions, the deliberate targeting of the very greatest sanctuaries, and the openly religious language in which the chronicles recorded them are part of why those particular wounds cut so much deeper, and are mourned still. Memory is selective; so is forgetting; and both are political.

So this is the quiet turn the article reaches. Much of what happened can be argued toward with evidence — the dates, the desecrations, the dynasties. What is fought over hardest is who gets to tell the story, and which of its many true faces is allowed to stand for the whole.

The eleventh-century scholar Al-Biruni saw the difficulty already. He was a Muslim, brought to India in the orbit of Mahmud himself, and clear-eyed about his patron. In Edward Sachau’s public-domain translation he warned that the truth of any report depends on the reporters, “who are influenced by the divergency of interests and all kinds of animosities and antipathies between the various nations.” Of Mahmud’s raids he wrote plainly, against his own patron, that they had scattered the Hindus “like atoms of dust scattered in all directions,” so that “their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.” He named the wound, and he did not spare the man who made it.

He was no flatterer of the Hindus either. The same book records his exasperation that “the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.” A man who watched the wound being made named the wound, and the pride, and the danger of how all of it would be remembered.

A thousand years later, all of it is still with us. The conquest is part of the story, and so is the temple pulled down, and the temple rebuilt in defiance, and the harbour where the trader was welcomed, and the shrine where two faiths still kneel, and the weaver who mocked them both.

A history that keeps only the harbour is a side. A history that keeps only the wound is a side. Keeping all of it, the loss and the meeting together, without letting either erase the other, is the harder and truer thing.