Islam in India

India has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, roughly 200 million people, about 14% of the country. Islam arrived in three distinct ways, and collapsing them into one story is the source of most of the bad arguments about it.

It came first by sea. Arab traders were on the Malabar coast within decades of the Prophet’s death; the Cheraman Juma mosque in Kerala is traditionally dated to the seventh century, which, if accurate, would make it among the oldest mosques in the world.

It came second by conquest, from the eleventh century onward, with Turkic and Afghan military elites establishing the Delhi Sultanate and eventually the Mughal Empire.

And it came third, and numerically most importantly, by conversion, largely at the margins of Indo-Muslim political power rather than at its center, and disproportionately in Bengal and western Punjab, which is why those regions became Muslim-majority. At the same time, the imperial heartland around Delhi and Agra never did. Richard Eaton’s work on Bengal is the standard treatment, and the pattern it identifies argues strongly against the “conversion by the sword” account: the sword was most prevalent exactly where conversion was least.

Sufism did much of the work. The great Sufi orders, Chishti above all, established shrines that drew, and still draw, Hindu and Muslim devotees alike. Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah in Delhi and Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah in Ajmer remain among the most visited religious sites in India by people of every faith.

What emerged was distinctively Indian: Urdu, developing from the Persian-Hindustani contact of the Sultanate courts into one of the great literary languages; Hindustani classical music, whose lineages run through Muslim families for centuries; Mughal architecture and painting; and a body of syncretic devotional practice that both orthodoxies have periodically tried to stamp out.

Modern history is harder and shorter to tell: the partition in 1947 split the subcontinent’s Muslim population three ways. The Muslims who stayed in India are, on most measures, such as literacy, formal employment, and representation in government service, the country’s most disadvantaged large religious group, a finding documented in the Sachar Committee report of 2006. Communal violence has recurred throughout the republic’s history. This is contested political ground, and this page describes it rather than adjudicates it.

Further reading: Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (1993). Barbara Metcalf, Islam in South Asia in Practice (2009).