A History of Islamic Societies

In the Indian subcontinent, Islam was introduced into an already developed civilization defined by agriculture, urbanization, higher religions, and complex political regimes. India was defined by the caste system, by Brahmanic Hinduism and Buddhist religions, and by Rajput and other Hindu political elites. In the past, there had been great empires, but on the eve of the Muslim invasions India was divided into numerous small states. The Muslim conquests brought a new elite and a new level of political integration, beginning the process of generating a new culture blending universal Muslim concepts and symbols of statecraft, cosmopolitan artistic pursuits such as architecture and painting, and regional motifs. In India, Muslim religio-communal orientations encompassed all of the principal varieties of scholasticism, Sufi orthopraxy, shrine worship, and reformism. In India, as opposed to Iran or the Ottoman Empire, a pluralistic religious society escaped bureaucratization and state control. The special cultural qualities of Indian-Islamic civilization and the autonomy and plurality of religious tendencies made it a distinctive variant of Islamic societies.

The Muslim conquests and the Delhi sultanates

The conquests of India began in earnest with the Ghaznavids. Their regime in Afghanistan was based on Turkish military slaves. They captured Lahore in 1030 and plundered North India. In the late twelfth century, free Afghan mountain warlords, under the leadership of the Ghurid dynasty, began the systematic conquest of India. Between 1175 and 1192, the Ghurids occupied Uch, Multan, Peshawar, Lahore, and Delhi. In 1206, one of the Ghurid generals, Qutb al-Din Aybeg, the conqueror of Delhi (r. 1206–10) and his successor, Iltutmish (r. 1211–36), founded the first of a series of dynasties collectively known as the Delhi sultanates (1206–1526). (See Map 16.) Each dynasty represented a different segment of the Afghan-Turkish Inner Asian military lords and their clients, the victors of the moment in the constant jockeying for power. The successive dynasties made repeated efforts to centralize state power, but each was merely senior in a political society composed of numerous local Muslim and Hindu lords. Each dealt with the problem of establishing an Islamic state in a region of profound Hindu and Buddhist culture. In succession, they made Delhi a refuge for Persian bureaucrats, Muslim scholars, and Sufis fleeing the Mongol invasions of the Turkic, Persian, and Afghan regions to the north. Out of their collective achievement emerged a distinct kind of Indian-Muslim civilization. (See Table 14.)