Islamic Civilization in South Asia

A History of Muslim Power and Presence in the Indian Subcontinent

Burjor Avari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136212253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

Muslims have been present in South Asia for 14 centuries. Nearly 40% of the people of this vast land mass follow the religion of Islam, and Muslim contribution to the cultural heritage of the sub-continent has been extensive. This textbook provides both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as the general reader, with a comprehensive account of the history of Islam in India, encompassing political, socio-economic, cultural and intellectual aspects.

Using a chronological framework, the book discusses the main events in each period between c. 600 CE and the present day, along with the key social and cultural themes. It discusses a range of topics, including:

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• How power was secured, and how was it exercised

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• The crisis of confidence caused by the arrival of the West in the sub-continent

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• How the Indo-Islamic synthesis in various facets of life and culture came about

Excerpts at the end of each chapter allow for further discussion, and detailed maps alongside the text help visualise the changes through each time period. Introducing the reader to the issues concerning the Islamic past of South Asia, the book is a useful text for students and scholars of South Asian History and Religious Studies.

1

Introduction

The First Muslims

The term ‘Muslim’ is of Arabic origin, and it means a person who submits to the will of God. More specifically, this person is a member of a community (Ummah) of people who profess to believe, however nominally, in the credo of the religion of Islam, again an Arabic term meaning ‘submission’ or ‘peace’.¹ This religion was founded in Arabia in the early seventh century CE by a remarkable person, Muhammad (570–632 CE), who combined in him the qualities of a mystic, visionary, soldier, statesman and humanitarian. Muslims believe that he was the last prophet of God in the Abrahamic tradition that encompasses Judaism, Christianity and Islam, despite the fact that Christians and Jews do not accept this claim.

The Arabian society of Muhammad’s time was both tribal and polytheistic in nature. The tribes were divided into warring clans, but a strict code of honour, common to many nomadic societies, governed their relationships during war and peace. Muhammad himself belonged to the powerful and influential tribe of the Quraysh who controlled the city of Mecca, his birthplace. This city, located on the trade route between Yemen in the south and Syria in the north, was a great trading metropolis, attracting to its bustling markets numerous merchants and buyers from the Arabian hinterland.² Congregating in the city annually were also many pilgrims who gathered to worship many pagan idols within the Kaaba, a monument reputedly built by Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) and his son Ishmael (Ismail in Arabic).³ Despite the presence of Jews and Christians in Mecca, most Arabs then had only a dim understanding of the concept of monotheism, a belief in one supreme God (Allah).

In 610 CE, at the age of forty, Muhammad received his first prophetic revelation in the form of a command from God to recite, at a retreat on Mount Hira, just outside Mecca.⁴ Many other revelations followed during the next twenty years, in response to the circumstances that he faced. The huge corpus of revelations that Muhammad recited verbatim verse by verse and preached to those who followed him, is what constitutes the Quran which, in Arabic, means ‘recitation’.⁵ Muslims consider the Quran as the word of God as revealed to Muhammad, and their sensibilities are gravely offended when the book is gratuitously mocked, insulted or abused. To his very small number of followers, initially consisting of his family members and friends, Muhammad preached the message of equity, justice and compassion; but it was not long before the most powerful people of the Quraysh in Mecca considered Muhammad’s ideas to be highly dangerous both for the stability of the city and for their own power and position. Ultimately, in 622 CE, their hostility forced him and his small band of Muslim followers to migrate north to Yathrib, thenceforth known as Medina (Madinat al-Nabi, the City of the Prophet). This migration, called the hijrah, marks the beginning of the Muslim era, as it is from then on that an embryonic Muslim community was shaped by Muhammad.⁶

The people of Medina proved more receptive to Muhammad’s ideas, but nonetheless he faced opposition from certain Jewish and Arab tribes. By tact and diplomacy, he kept the majority of people on his side. He and the Muslims, however, faced continuing hostility from the Quraysh in Mecca; and at least one of the Jewish tribes, although being warned twice, behaved treacherously by linking up with the Meccans. Muhammad therefore felt that he had no alternative but to prepare his followers to fight for survival. The Quran instructs the believers to work for peace, but Muhammad legitimized the idea of a just war and righteous revenge by his successful wars against Mecca and even approval of the mass slaughter of Jewish soldiers of Medina.⁷ If he had not done so, his mission would have ended in failure. By the time he died in 632 CE Mecca was in Muslim hands, the Kaaba was cleared of its pagan idols and vast numbers of Arabs were converting to Islam.

It was the inspiration of the Quran that guided Muhammad to develop, over a number of years, a simple and effective programme of daily living for Muslims, in order to bind them together. This consisted of five practices or the Five Pillars of Islam.⁸ First, a Muslim must for ever continue to declare that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His messenger (Shahada); second, a Muslim must prostrate before God and pray five times a day (Salat); third, a Muslim must donate alms for the benefit of the poor, traditionally set at 2.5 per cent annual levy on assets and capital (Zakat); fourth, with exceptions on the grounds of age or illness (to be re-compensated eventually), a Muslim must fast from sunrise to sunset in the ninth month, Ramadan, of the Muslim calendar (Sawm); fifth, a Muslim must endeavour to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, without incurring debts (Hajj). These practices are a testament both to Muhammad’s faith in God and his understanding of human nature. They not only foster a sense of inexplicable unity and bond among the believers but also appeal to the better nature and altruism of the followers. The rule on fasting, for example, is an effective way of promoting empathy for those suffering from hunger and famine. There are certain other Quranic injunctions on a number of subjects, such as dress, diet, marriage, inheritance, etc., but they were modified in later centuries. The bedrock of Muslim consensus lay in the five practices that constitute a comprehensive social and ideological programme of belief that is followed even today by over a billion Muslims across the world.

The Prophet’s experiences and revelations in Mecca, his flight to Medina, his wars with the Meccans and the Jews, his final triumphal return to Mecca and the conversion of Meccans to Islam all mark the key stages of his life’s work and achievements. With his death in 632 CE Muslim history took a new turn. Three major developments now shaped the early history of Islam and Muslims: territorial expansion, sectarian dissension, and legal sophistication. Most of the Arab territorial expansion took place during the period of the first three caliphs, Muhammad’s successors, Abu Bakr (632–4), Umar (634–4) and Uthman (644–56), and later under the Umayyad dynasty (661–750).⁹ The Persian/Iranian Sasanian Empire was destroyed and the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire gravely threatened. Muslim Arab power spread throughout most of the Middle East and North Africa. From a small and struggling Muslim community with its two outposts at Mecca and Medina there arose a mighty Islamic Empire that extended as far as Sind, Spain, Central Asia and the Sahara desert. The message of Islam reached out to the conquered Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and others; and, except within Persia/Iran, Arabic became the main language of communication and culture across the empire. How and why the vast masses of people were converted to Islam remains a controversial subject, but it would be utterly naïve to think that people were forced to become Muslim at the point of a sword.¹⁰ The Arabs dominated the early Islamic Empire that reached its zenith under the Abbasid dynasty during the ninth and the tenth centuries; but with the decline of that dynasty and the fragmentation of the empire, other Muslim peoples and nations came to the forefront of Islamic imperial -ism. Today, nearly 1.5 billion people profess to be Muslims, and great centres of Islamic civilization are spread across the globe.

Muslim sectarian dissensions broke out over the question of succession shortly after the death of Muhammad. A faction that strongly believed in the idea of community leadership being vested in a member of his family claimed a place for Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, as the caliph. This faction came to be known as Shia, or the partisans of Ali. Another larger faction, called the Sunni, disagreed and wanted a leader chosen by consensus and in accordance with the Sunnah or the established custom. The first three caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman were the Prophet’s companions, not his relations. Ali had to wait his turn for twenty-four years before he became the caliph. Although his caliphate was not particularly noteworthy in its achievements and lasted only four years (656–60), the Shia continued to press the claim for his descendants too. In fact, the caliphate passed on to Muawiyah, a senior member of the Umayyad family in Mecca, who established his capital at Damascus. In 680 the Shia supported Ali’s son Husain against Yazid who succeeded his father Muawiyah in that year. Husain’s defeat and martyrdom at Karbala, Iraq, therefore entrenched among the Shia a feeling of being a beleaguered minority.¹¹ Later, in the eighth century, the Shia, too, split over the matter of rightful succession among their imams, with the Ismailis (the followers of seven imams) forming a separate branch from the majority Shia (the followers of twelve imams, the twelfth one being hidden).¹² In succeeding centuries, many other splits in the Muslim community arose over ideological or theological issues. The group called the Kharijites, for example, opposed absolute monarchy.¹³ The Sufis were not a separate sect, but their eclectic interpretation of the Quran and other aspects of Islamic law marked them out as distinct from the traditional theologians, the ulama.¹⁴

The early Islamic Empire was a melting-pot of ideas exchanged between the dominant Arabs and the subject people. A high level of cultural and intellectual sophistication prevailed at the Abbasid court in Baghdad; disciplines as diverse as mathematics, chemistry, medicine, art, commerce, law and aesthetics were greatly enriched by ideas carried by scholars drawn from across cultures.¹⁵ Europe’s cultural transition from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance, for example, was due greatly to what she learnt from the Islamic civilization of that era.

An aspect of Muslim intellectual rigour may be seen in the way Islamic law developed during that period. At first, only the five basic practices and other injunctions from the Quran formed the basis of this law. In the seventh and eighth centuries, however, there began a systematic process of compiling, codifying and narrating all the events of Muhammad’s life, his ideas, deeds and conduct, from a variety of historical sources and from the accounts provided by his companions. It was a highly complex process, involving checks, verifications, elucidations, interpretations and commentary; and ultimately all the reports were called the ahadith (or hadith in singular). The authenticity of each hadith’s narration had to be reliably supported and scrutinized by a chain of devout Muslims leading to the Prophet himself. The ahadith are the basis of the Sunnah of the Prophet, which has come to mean the behaviour of Muhammad.¹⁶ For Muslims, therefore, Muhammad is the perfect and heroic ideal.¹⁷ Islamic law encompasses both the Quran and the Sunnah, and the combination of the two constitutes what is called the Shariah or the straight path of divine law.¹⁸ But the complexity goes further than that. Over many centuries, Muslim jurists have also laid stress on two other aspects of law: the idea of consensus (ijma) and reasoning by analogy (qiyas). These two are the foundation of what is known as ijtihad or independent reasoning. The science of jurisprudence (fiqh) thus came to be perfected through varied interpretations by jurists within different schools of law. Since a Muslim ruler could hardly be expected to be familiar with so many difficult issues of interpretation, an entire class of professional people, traditionally known as ulama, came to be involved with the interpretation, dissemination and enforcement of Islamic law, as expressed by the Shariah or the Fiqh. The Shariah and the Fiqh are the two great pillars of Islamic law, as it has developed over fourteen centuries; but the important point to remember is that the two are not necessarily opposed to each other.¹⁹ Wise and learned human beings can interpret the law in line with customs and conventions of a prevailing age or a particular part of the world, but they must do so without infringing the limits set by the divine law. While the West has now abandoned any notion of divine law, Islamic law holds fast to it: and that is at the heart of the tension between the West and Islam. Within the Muslim world itself the absence of a central authority with powers to adjudicate has led to many disputes and conflicts.

The South Asian Context

Clarifying the Terms

In the context of this book, the term ‘South Asia’ refers to the three modern states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are other states in South Asia, but this book deals specifically with the history of Muslims in these three states. The term ‘Indian subcontinent’ has no political implication; it is simply the description of the more specific geographical zone in South Asia, covering the three states referred to. The term ‘India’ is widely used in this book in two particular senses. First, it refers to a pervasive culture and civilization within the region over many millennia, which the many diverse peoples of the subcontinent have been aware of through religion, art, literature or customs. Political India is a new nation, but cultural India is an ancient regional civilization. Second, with the rise of British power from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, ‘India’ also became a well recognized and acknowledged term in historical and political literature throughout the world. Additionally, for many centuries, the term ‘Hindustan’ was used by Muslims to denote the region we are talking about.

The term ‘Islamic civilization’ generally refers to the political, social and cultural advances achieved by the early Muslims in the heyday of the Islamic Empire under the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties between the eighth and the tenth centuries CE. Yet, as we mentioned earlier, in each of the many regions of the world where Muslim influence spread during that period or subsequently, such advances only became possible through a fruitful interaction of Islamic ideas, values, aesthetics and imagination with those of the indigenous inhabitants. The resulting product was always hybrid. This phenomenon can also be observed in the case of the Islamic civilization that developed in South Asia over many centuries. There, too, a uniquely localized model developed, which may justifiably be called Indo-Islamic civilization.

The term ‘power’ in the subtitle refers to the rule exercised by Muslim monarchs and their governors over numerous regions of South Asia for many centuries. The high noon period of their sway was between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries when the four great Mughal emperors ruled over virtually the whole of the subcontinent. The monarchs and their associates were essentially an elite group of people with...