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part of the new Europe—much as Jewish, Hindu, or Chinese culture is now also
being accepted as part of Western multicultural richness. We must be wary of
Islamizing the problems of multiculturalism and immigrant integration.
One final note on multicultural progress: the UK journalist and writer
William Dalrymple writes, “It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11,
bin Laden, and the Clash of Civilizations, that the bestselling poet in the US in
the 1990s is a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught Shari’a law in a
madrasa.” He was referring, of course, to the Persian/Turkish medieval poet
Jalaladdin Rumi, one of the most beloved Sufi poets, whose poetry is a spiritual
balm to the world. Indeed, Islamic spiritualism is one of its glorious
contributions to human civilization. It would be great if there would be more
room for those spiritual themes in the troubled political and cultural lives of both
Muslims and Westerners, as the debates swirl over religion, identity, citizenship,
tolerance, and belonging.

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CHAPTER TEN
Islam and India
The world has seen three wars between predominantly Hindu India and Muslim
Pakistan over the past fifty years; the next such war could even unleash a nuclear
exchange. The Kashmir conflict has long been the major seed of contention, an
ongoing proxy war between India and Pakistan as Kashmiri Muslim liberation
groups fight a guerrilla war against perceived oppressive Indian rule.
Additionally, violent Islamist groups, usually with links to Pakistan, have
conducted several bloody terrorist operations inside India. Neither Indian nor
Pakistani populations have forgotten the bitter partition of India, engineered by
the British in 1947, in which millions of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims died in
savage three-way attacks during the vast transfers of populations—Muslims
from India to the new state of Pakistan; Hindus and Sikhs from the new state of
Pakistan to India. If this is not the locus of a “clash of civilizations,” then what
is?
Of all the “borders” between Islam and other cultures, India—the third such
case in our discussion of Islam’s contacts with other major civilizations—is one
of the most critical. Islam not only borders on India (in Pakistan and
Bangladesh), but large numbers of Muslims have lived within India for over a
millennium, with their own rich and complex relationships with Hindus. Over
time, Muslims have played highly diverse roles on the Indian stage: peaceful
traders propagating Islam in the south; conquering warriors out of Central Asia
in the north; founders and cocreators of one of the great “fusion civilizations” of
history between Islam and Hinduism that produced the brilliant Mughal Empire;
and finally a defeated Muslim minority divided in 1947 into a new Pakistani
state or minority status within India. In India the community has been the object
of de facto discrimination and suffers second-class citizenship. India also
represents the first non-Christian border with Islam that we will look at.
In our alternative scenarios of a world without Islam, the lines in India are
less clear. In one sense, things would be quite different without Islam: the world

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would have been deprived of the brilliance of the Hindu-Muslim fusion
civilization of the Mughals. At the same time, it might have been spared some of
the ugly religious struggles between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that have
characterized recent history. So, in this context, the more interesting question
might be, Was the religious strife between Hindus and Muslims inevitable? Did
this have to be a bloody border? Why are we where we are today? And how
much is really about religion? Or can the roots of the problem also be traced to
the self-serving policies of British colonial rule in India?
ISLAM’S INITIAL ENCOUNTER with India represented a major new
intellectual frontier for Muslims: Hinduism was not only an ancient, vast,
complex, and multifaceted religion, but was also the first religion Islam
encountered that was quite unconnected with Middle Eastern religions and
“People of the Book.” Hinduism represented a sharply different experience for
Muslims, with its explicit polytheism, its profusion of unconventional religious
images, and the startling combination of animal, human, and mythological
characteristics, elements of nudity or near-nudity in the religious art of numerous
Hindu sects—all of this combining to make Hinduism perhaps the most
“shocking,” in Islamic terms, of any religion the ‘ulama would ever encounter.
Yet the demands of reality soon created compromises and an uneasy coexistence
between Hinduism and Muslim society was established.
Not surprisingly, we find differing schools of interpretation about the entire
record of Islam in India. All nationalisms read history retroactively; that is, their
historians go back and mine the past for evidence to buttress their nationalist and
territorial claims of today and tomorrow. For Hindu nationalists, the Hindu
religion is as deeply rooted in Indian soil as anything can be; any other religion
intruding on that soil is either absorbed into its embrace or seen as an
unwelcome foreign intruder. Thus, both Islam and Christianity are seen in this
latter light—more on political and cultural grounds than on theological grounds.
Both Islam and Christianity sought to roll back Hinduism in their own favor. The
fact that the most widespread international symbol of India today should be the
quintessentially Muslim architecture of the Taj Mahal rankles Hindu nationalists
deeply. Yet an India without its Mughal fusion civilization would have been a
culturally far less rich place.
More liberal-minded accounts of that same history take pride in the rich fruits
of Hindu-Islamic civilization. Each culture markedly influenced the other in
profound ways, suggesting the creative absorptive power and malleability of

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both. Yet today, Indian Muslims have become disadvantaged minorities within
the great Indian society they once ruled and helped shape. They’ve come in from
outside, been at the top, fallen to the bottom, and are now mulling over their
place as a minority in the new conditions of the modern Indian state. Maybe it is
this diverse historical trajectory that has given Indian Muslims the most subtle
and complex vision of Islam in multicultural society to be found anywhere.
INDIA TOUCHED MUSLIMS in particular ways. First, it is one of the many
areas of South and Southeast Asia where Islam did not initially come by the
sword. Trading connections between Arab seafaring merchants and the
southwest coast of India were well-established long before Islam. According to
Hindu records, the first actual Muslim settlement on the Indian subcontinent
took place in the early seventh century in just one such Arab trader settlement.
Reportedly, the first mosque was established in Kodungallur in today’s Kerala
province in 612 CE, during the Prophet’s lifetime.
Historians draw major distinctions between the nature of Islam in the north
and in the south of India. In the south, Islam came on the scene early via trade
and missionary work; in the north, Islam entered many hundreds of years later as
one of the many invaders of north India from Central Asia. As a result, tensions
between Muslims and Hindus are more pronounced in the north than in the
south, where the Muslim population gradually integrated into the local culture,
as opposed to the Muslims who invaded the north with their armies of mixed
Persian, Arab, Turkic, and Mongol blood.
Muslim Arab armies first entered northern India under the Umayyad Dynasty
from Damascus and conquered Sind, the westernmost province of the
subcontinent. Further Muslim military invasions came out of Afghanistan in the
tenth century; finally, the great Turko-Mongol commander Babur, from Central
Asia, founded the Mughal Empire with the fall of Delhi in 1526. The Mughals
would control nearly all of India at its height. The Mughals themselves
represented a fusion of Turko-Mongol and Persian culture and both languages
were brought to India, where they exerted a huge impact on Indian culture and
language.
As the Brookings Institution scholar Stephen P. Cohen has written:
Although each of these conquerors [Greeks, Huns, Scythians, and
Muslims] viewed the Subcontinent as an extension of their exogenous
power base, they later came to view the world through Indo-centric eyes.

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The absorptive power of Indian society has always been impressive….
[Islam] also brought new military technologies, theologies and political
ideas but it did not destroy Indian civilization as it had destroyed pre-
Islamic Persian culture. Eventually, under the Mughals, India was again
unified, within an imperial system. With this new order even Islam was
powerfully influenced by this Hindu culture, just as Islam shocked and
transformed Hinduism.
Sufi Islam, with its mixed syncretic character, appealed to many Hindus and
helped soften the initial impact of Islam. But the Muslim clerical class never
reached consensus on how to deal with Hindus and Hinduism. The outstanding
Muslim scientist and polymath al-Biruni spent time in India in the mid-eleventh
century observing the society; he remarkably concluded that in the end,
Hinduism, with all its multiple deities, was basically a monotheistic faith:
The Hindus believe with regard to God that he is one, eternal, without
beginning and end, acting by free-will, almighty, all-wise, living, giving
life, ruling, preserving; one who in his sovereignty is unique, beyond all
likeness and unlikeness, and that he does not resemble anything nor does
anything resemble him.
But what of the multiple “idols” worshipped in Hinduism? Al-Biruni believed
that their worship essentially reflected the theological ignorance of the lower
classes that clung to them, but that Hinduism as a higher philosophical concept
shares an essential monotheism with Islam. Whether one agrees with this
interpretation or not—and most ‘ulama certainly did not—this conclusion is
indeed striking coming from a Muslim scholar himself.
For most of the ‘ulama in India, inclusion of Hindus among the “People of
the Book” seemed an impossible theological reach, but if they were not, then
forced conversion to Islam was appropriate. Some ‘ulama were zealous and did
compel conversion and even argued that death was appropriate in the case of
noncompliance. There are accounts of the destruction of Hindu temples in
various parts of India, while many others were transformed into mosques.
Indeed, more commonplace than the use of violence were reports of Mughal
emperors raising the level of the poll tax to squeeze poorer Hindus into
conversion to Islam, to gain relief from the tax. Even more typically, however,
many lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam to escape the rigid caste system of

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Hinduism itself, or simply to become part of the ruling cultural order. But in the
end, the Mughals could not convert most of the country—and knew they could
not—so the situation settled down into a kind of cool coexistence, at least from
the point of view of the ‘ulama. In some functional sense, then, Hindus did
become a kind of nominal “People of the Book,” even if it was in principle
theologically unacceptable and incompatible.
On the other hand, while few Muslims would visit a Hindu temple, most
Hindus were comfortable visiting Muslim shrines as part of an expression of
Hindu syncretism or pantheism. Islam simply joined the pantheon. Nor did
Hindus have any interest in seeking converts to Hinduism—their religion is a
closed system that basically admits no converts; one must be born into the
system. If one seeks to convert to Hinduism, functionally it must be to a specific
caste and community; but lacking community or blood ties, into which caste
would the outsider be legitimately accepted? Without specific caste association
from birth, one is left floating in a theoretical Hindu social limbo. And other
unanticipated fusions took place. At the formal level, Islam certainly does not
welcome integration of other religious traditions into it. Yet India saw at least
one fascinating experiment in the fusion of Islam with Hinduism, the brainchild
of the innovative mind of Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (1542–1605),
Babur’s grandson. Akbar emerges as the most remarkable of all the Mughal
rulers over a four-hundred-year period.
Akbar was well aware of the welter of competing faiths within India,
including Islam (Sunni, Shi’ite, and Isma’ili), countless sects of Hindu faiths,
Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism. He was tolerant, fascinated
with religion, and thrived on religious discussion, bringing together adherents of
various religions for debate of theological and moral issues. From these
exchanges, he reportedly concluded that no religion had a monopoly on the
entire truth; he therefore took the revolutionary step to create on his own a new
religion, Din-i-Ilahi, or Divine Faith, which represented a fusion of Islamic,
Hindu, and other Vedic beliefs, as well as beliefs from Christianity and Judaism.
Through propagation of the Divine Faith, he hoped to forge a unity within the
country that would no longer be beset with religious differences—a kind of
religious Esperanto.
Muslims, of course, were already familiar with the Jewish and Christian
antecedents to Islamic theology. Din-i-Ilahi also contained elements of
mysticism, philosophy, ethics, and nature worship, with emphasis on tolerance of
religious diversity. It recognized no gods, prophets, scriptures, or priestly
hierarchy. The admixture of these “pagan” ideas, however, was quite offensive to
most of the ‘ulama, who saw the entire project as utterly blasphemous, though

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they had to be circumspect about what the emperor propounded. In the end, the
new religion did not make it outside the palace walls; it was simply too bizarre
and lacked social or cultural foundation. Nonetheless, it represented a
remarkable vision of ecumenical thinking before its time, and Akbar is well
remembered by Hindus, even though his admirers among the ‘ulama are few.
If religious fusion seems abstruse, not so the Mughals’ brilliant architecture,
which combined Hindu and Islamic style with a strong Persian flavor, perhaps
the most famous and enduring contribution of the empire. The great Mughal
public buildings to this day remain glorious works of art, of which the Taj Mahal
has achieved the greatest perfection, but is rivaled by dozens of palaces, forts,
mosques, and madrasas, frequently worked in red sandstone. The Mughal style
has gone on to influence Muslim architecture around the world and even graces
large numbers of public and private buildings across Britain—a symbol of the
mighty British Raj period in India.
The Mughal Dynasty also created great poetry and established the
foundations of Indian classical music. The most familiar Indian cooking in the
world today is that of northern India, a superb fusion of earlier Indian cuisine
with Persian cooking, known still as Moghlai cooking. The two sister languages
Hindi and Urdu both represent the same fusions of Persian, Arab, and Turkish
vocabulary grafted onto a north Indian grammatical base; they remain the
dominant languages of northern India and Pakistan today. In short, modern
Indian civilization is inconceivable—almost unrecognizable—without the
Mughal element. Yet this fact does not sit well with some Hindu nationalists.
In terms of counterinfluence, one major cultural impact of Hinduism upon
Islam was less felicitous: that of the Hindu caste system on Indian Muslims.
Within the Hindu caste system, one is born into a specific place in the caste
hierarchy for life; these caste positions are fundamentally unchangeable in ritual
and social terms. A Brahmin (upper caste) may not have any physical contact
with an untouchable (Dalit), and if so, is required to perform ritual purification.
One’s place in the caste hierarchy determines the range of permitted
occupational and social parameters. Indian Muslims, exposed over long periods
to this caste system, eventually absorbed some elements of it, in which Muslim
society came to be informally divided into Ashraf (noble) and Ajlaf (lower)
castes. While the Muslims in India were originally a very small percentage of the
population at the time of the first Muslim invasions from the north, over time
there were Hindu converts to Islam in much larger numbers, often bringing
social vestiges of their lower caste status with them. By the time of partition, the
number of Muslims in India had reached some 14 percent.
In Islam, by any theological measure, a caste system among Muslims is

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unacceptable; the Qur’an makes clear that the only individual superior to another
in the eyes of God is the more pious. But in India we observe the de facto cross-
cultural impact of religions living side by side.
Several striking perspectives, then, emerge from all of this. First, when Islam
entered India via traders and missionaries, as in the south, there was no friction.
Muslims in South India are generally ethnically identical to their Hindu
neighbors. But in the north, the seat of Indian political power, ethnic differences
did exist: essentially Turko-Persian Muslims from Central Asia represented
identifiable foreign conquerors, often viewed with resentment by those displaced
from power. A second phenomenon is how “incompatible” theologies under
situations of daily human intercourse managed to coexist over time and even
influence each other, although cases of interreligious violence certainly occurred.
Third, a fusion culture emerged of great brilliance—one to match an equally
brilliant fusion of Islam with Persian culture in Iran, and of Turko-Islam with
Byzantine culture in the Ottoman Empire.
“Bloody borders,” then, hardly captures this extraordinary dynamic, one that
involved rich ethnic cross-pollination as well as cultural and religious influences.
Would Zoroastrian Persia have abstained from conquest in India? In what ways
would its conquest of India have been different? Would non-Muslim Turks from
Central Asia shrink from joining other groups to invade India from the North?
Islam does not appear to have been a central factor.

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