Islam in the Subcontinent

“The first period covers the period from711 to 1757 and the second, from 1757 to the present.”

The Establishment of the Muslim Rule

The First Phase (711-1186)
The year 711 marks the initial contact of Muslims with India under the leadership of seventeen year old commander Muhammad bin Qasim who arrived in Sindh. After that, Muslim rule persisted in India for three hundred years. Three hundred years later, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna invaded India seventeen times. He did not establish a strong foundation of his empire in India and died in 1030.

The Sultanate Period (1192-1525)

In 1192, Muizuddin Ghori, a governor of Turkish Muslim origin from Ghazni, invaded on India and extended his empire towards Delhi and Ajmer. His lieutenant established Muslim rule in Bengal in 1204. The period from Ghori’s successors, known as the Slave sultans, until the advent of the Mughals in 1526 is known as the Sultanate period. During this time a total of seventeen sultans ruled over various parts of India. One of the sultans, Ala al-Din Khalji (1296-1316), extended Muslim control to central and parts of southern India.

Muhammad ibn Taghluq (1325-1351) conquered territory in the deep south of India and moved his capital to Devagiri.

By1500 Islamic culture and faith had become integrated into Indian society.

The Muslims of South Asia built on a legacy of Iran-Turkish culture and spread this culture in their dominion. Though they were of Turkish origin, the language of high culture and administration was Persian. Although Turkish hegemony was weakened by later dynasties such as the Khaljis (1290-1320) and the Tughluqs (1320-1413) when indigenous Muslims and no-Muslims were incorporated into the ruling polity.
The year 711 marks the initial contact of Muslims with India under the leadership of seventeen year old commander Muhammad bin Qasim who arrived in Sindh. After that, Muslim rule persisted in India for three hundred years.

The Mughals (1526-1748)
The Mughals were heirs to the Sultanate period’s Indo-Islamic tradition and built a magnificent empire. The founder of the Mughal rule, Muhammad Zahir al –Din Babur (reigned 1526-1530) encountered the two concentrations of power in India: the Muslim Afghan ruler, Ibrahim Lodi and the Rajput Hindu leader, Rana Sanga in 1526 and 1527 respectively. Having defeated both of them, he laid the strong foundation of his empire which inaugurated the most glorious period in the history of South Asian Islam.

Babur and his descendants were the born leaders of men. Babur’s son, Humayun, could not consolidate the areas he inherited from his father. In 1539, he was ousted and replaced by a capable Afghan leader, Sher Khan Sur. Sher Khan left a brilliant record of his administrative reforms in a very short period of his leadership (1539-1545). Humayun, after spending fifteen years in Iran as a fugitive, recovered his throne in India in 1555 only to die in 1556.

Humayun’s son, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (1556-1605), is remembered in Indo-Islamic history as the builder of the Mughal empire. He initiated territorial expansion, centralized administration, effective fiscal policy and united the heterogeneous ruling- the Persians, Turks, Uzbeks, Afghans, Indian Muslims and the Rajputs by imbuing a common identity of their spiritual and political bond to the person of the emperor.

His successors, Jahangir (1605-1627), Shahjahan (1628-1658) and Aurangzeb (1658-1707), successfully implemented his policies with some changes. The frontiers of the empire expanded and the architectural, artistic and literary activities thrived.

The Mughals were able to unify India. However, wars of succession, an inefficient administrative structure and weakened leadership caused the decline and collapse of the centralized imperial system.

The East India Company’s representative, Lord Clive, defeated the Muslim forces in the battle of Plassey in 1757 and Lord Lake took over the administration of Delhi in 1803. However, the successor states carried their cultural traditions until1857 when the colonization of India by the British was completed and an English colonial political, social and economic order came to be enforced over India.

The Coming of British Rule
The British East India Company had, in fact, been engaged in trade with India since the year 1600. In 1772, Warren Hastings was appointed as British Governor of Bengal and consolidated existing British commercial interests. British power came to be extended over various regions formerly under Muslim control.

The Eighteen Century: A “Dark” Century
In1707, the death of Aurangzeb signaled the collapse of the centralized Mughal government. The former provinces of the Mughal Empire became successors states, notably Awadh, Bengal, Haiderabad and Sind. In 1739, Delhi was sacked by the Iranian ruler, Nadir Shah Afshar. The Hindu Maratha attempt to gain power received a setback when they were defeated in 1761 by the Afghan leader, Ahmad Shah Abdali. British and French trading companies had appeared by this time in Bengal and Deccan.

However, it was not until 1748 when the ruler of Haiderabad, Nizam al-Mulk, died that Muslims began to become aware of the new threats to their authority.

In 1757, in the skirmish of Plassey, the East India Company’s force, with the help of their local allies, defeated the governor of Bengal and installed a puppet governor. The Company was entrenched in the region when they defeated the local allied forces, including the Mughals in 1764. They then forced the Mughal ruler, Shah Alam ll (died 1806), to hand over the civil governments of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the company.

Through their strategy of playing one group against the other, the company gradually gained control over other regions of India, including Delhi in 1803, Punjab in 1842 and Sind and Awadh by 1856.

The Mughals were able to unify India. However, wars of succession, an inefficient administrative structure and weakened leadership caused the decline and collapse of the centralized imperial system.


Muslims and the British Raj (1757-1857)
There were different religious movements aimed at reforming the Muslim society. Whereas the Wali-Allah generation tried to revive dynamism in the community through religio-moral reconstruction, subsequent generations showed sensitivity to political, economic and social development. This change is reflected in the activities of the Faraidis in Bengal and the Mujahidins in the Northwestern part of India.

The founder of the Faraidis movement, Haji Shariat-Allah (1781-1831), focused on the proper practice of the obligatory duties of Islam. The movement maintained its puritanical stance but became more political and aggressive under the leadership of Shariat-Allah’s son, Muhsin al-Din Ahmed, known as Dudu Miyan. The Faraidis clashed with the landlord, indigo planters and the police and refused to pay the taxes.

The other religio-political movement in Uttar Pardesh, Bihar, and the northwestern part of India is known as the Mujahidin Movement. The leaders of this movement, Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed (1786-1831) and Shah Muhammad Ismail (1781-1840), were greatly influenced by the Wali-Allah tradition. They successfully tried to rejuvenate the Muslim community in India by fusing Tariqa-i-Muhammadiyya with Wahhabism.

Educational System: The Eighteen Century

The examples of two madrassas; the Madrassa-i-Rahimiyya and Firangi Mahall provide differing approaches to change. Shah Wali-Allah (1703-1762), as head of the Madrassa-i-Rahimiyya, was an heir to the Indo-Islamic intellectual and theological heritage as well as that of Arabia where he studied. In his monumental work, Hujjat Allah al-Baligha (Great Divine Proof), he attempted to integrate the spiritual and material domains of human life. His emphasis on reinterpretation of the sources of Islamic law, the devaluing of differences among the four schools of Sunni law, the benefits of making the Quranic text available through translation to the community, and his belief in the forerunner of nineteenth-century modernists. He devised the simpler syllabus focusing on the core sciences of Islamic law, theology, hadith, and the sole study of Quranic text.

At the Firangi Mahall, a school established for Muslim education, the emphasis was on philosophy and rational sciences. The curriculum, developed by Mulla Nizam al-Din, remained popular in the Indo-Pakistan sub continent until 1969.

In the eighteenth century, the Naqshbandiyya stood out among Sufi groups for their reformation activities and scholarship. In their khanqahs in Sirhind, Dehli, Punjab and Sind, they expanded their energies in popularizing the prophetic tradition, application of Muslim law and reconstruction of religio-moral behavior of their disciples.

From a Quest for Rapprochement to Seeking Independence (1857-1947)
In religious and cultural spheres, this event did not bring about an abrupt end to the previous trends. Leadership of the community in political, cultural as well as religious matters shifted form religious scholars to the descendants of Mughal nobility. This new group of intellectuals, called the modernists, was not a product of traditional education. Noteworthy among them were Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), Sayyid Ameer Ali (1849-1928), and Shibli Numani (1857-1914).

The main preoccupation of these modernists was the uplift of Muslims. Through their writings they defended the Muslims’ religious and cultural heritage in the face of British imperialism.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan played an important role in developing an awareness of social, political and religious issues among Muslims. He presented Islam as a rational and natural religion fully capable of accommodating. In 1875, with the support of the British, he established the MAO College which later became a university known as Aligarh Muslim University.

Shibli also envisioned a modern Islam with traditional roots. He taught at Aligarh for sixteen years. Shibli, frustrated with the lack of depth in the training of students at Aligarh, took keen interest in an institution, known as Nadwat al-Ulama. Founded by Muhammad Ali Mongheri in Lucknow in 1894 for training future ulama, it was masterful in traditional Islamic and modern sciences and capable of producing scholarship of high calibre.

The next generation of intellectual, political and social leadership was provided by men who were journalists and poets in their early careers, namely, Muhammad Ali (1878-1931), Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958) and Sayyid Abul Ala Maudid (1903-1979). They were in the forefront of political movements in mobilizing their community to seek social and political gains.

Muhammad Ali was educated at an English school and was the first graduate from the Oxford University returning to his home-state, Rampur. He adopted journalism as his profession by starting the journal Comrade in 1911. This journal became an effective vehicle for expression of the discontent and anger of the Muslim intelligentsia. In1920, he founded Jamia Millia, an educational institution in Delhi, rivaling Aligarh college.

Muhammad Iqbal, “The most daring intellectual modernist, the Muslim World has produced,” in the words of the late scholar of Islam Fazlur Rahman, was the son of a tailor and grandson of a shawl peddler in Sialkot, a small town in West Punjab. Like other modernists, he studied in Western philosophy at Cambridge, Law at London’s Lincoln Inn, and received a doctorate from Munich University by writing PhD dissertation on Persian and Metaphysics. Like Shibli, Iqbal had a solid background in Arabic, Persian and Islamic Philosophy prior to his exposure to Western thought. He was a recognized poet at the age of 22.


Continuity and Change: 1947 and Beyond
The most enduring legacy of Iqbal, however, is not his reconstruction of Islamic thought but his idea of an autonomous homeland for Indian Muslims which was realized in 1947 with an establishment of Pakistan. Azad and Maududi could be considered together because of similarities in their backgrounds and activities. Each had traditional Islamic education, did not attend English schools, chose journalism as a profession, and was involved in Islamic religious reinterpretation. Azad founded a serious journal al-Hilal in 1912.

Twenty years later, Maududi started his Tarjuman al-Quran. Both used their journals as their main instrument for expounding their views on religious, state, law and socio-political issues. His journal had a short span of just over two years. Maudid’s Tarjuman outlined him and is still in circulation with a large readership. In 1913, Azad founded a party called Hizbullah (Party of God) to establish a system of government for social welfare in accordance with Divine injunctions. Maududi also founded Jamaat-I Islami, an organization of his own, to counter the drive for a homeland for Muslims.

Maududi was preoccupied with writing about the Muslim community and an ideal Islamic state. In 1938, he established training centre called Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) for the selected graduates of traditional and modern education systems and train them for moral and intellectual leadership. Both Azad and Maududi wrote commentaries on the Quran in urdu (Tarjuman al-Quran and Tafhim al-Quran respectively) for the purpose of religious reform of Indian Muslims by providing them direct access to the Quranic text in urdu.

Azad translated and commented on the first eighteen of the thirty chapters of the Quran and Maududi exegesis covered the entire Quranic text. Maududi’s major writings, including the Tafhim have been translated into English and several languages whereas Azad’s writings are accessible only to an Urdu readership.

Pan-Islamism, Separatism and Composite Nationalism
In the early 1920s, many Indian Muslims joined in launching the Khilafat movement (1919-1924). The goal of this movement was to pressure the British government to preserve the Ottoman Turkish territories as they were in 1914, and to safeguard the centrality of the spiritual and temporal position of the Ottoman sultan as a caliph of the Islamic world. Its uniqueness rested in the fact that it became a pan-Indian movement. On March 1, 1924, the National Assembly of Turkey voted to depose the Ottoman sultan and abolish the institution of caliph.

Modernism and Traditionalism

Among the post-independence modernists in Pakistan, the most noteworthy is Dr Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988), a Cambridge University graduate with a solid background in traditional Islam. He made a substantial contribution to the modernization of Pakistani laws. He was appointed the director of the Institute in 1936 and held that position until 1968. He left his imprint on the Family Laws Ordinance (1961).

The Political Leadership and Islam

Muhammad Ali Jinnah spoke to the Constituent assembly on August 11, 1947:
“You are free, you may go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place to worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another.”

the subject of Islam in this newly-born fledgling state and its affairs became an important element of political discourse. The ideological polarization of the community between the ulama and the modernists which had divided the community before 1947 continued after independence and shaped and nurtured the ideological cross-currents in Pakistan. The constitution of 1956, 1962 and 1973 reflect the fusion of secular and modernistic Islamic elements.