Islam in South Asia
Delhi Sultanate, Mughals, Sufi orders, and the partition of 1947
Islam reached South Asia within decades of the Prophet's death and became a permanent part of the subcontinent through Sufi orders, sultanates and the Mughal Empire. Today South Asia — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together — is home to the largest Muslim population of any region in the world.
Overview
What you will learn: the specific dynasties (Delhi Sultanate, Mughal Empire) that established Muslim rule in South Asia; why Sufi orders — especially the Chishti — did more than armies to establish Islam as a lived religion in the region; the reformer Shah Waliullah of Delhi; and the trauma of partition in 1947.
Context
Muslim armies reached Sindh (now in Pakistan) under Muhammad ibn Qasim in 711 CE — the same year as the crossing into Spain — establishing an early Muslim presence in the subcontinent. From the tenth century onward, Ghaznavid raids and settlement pushed Muslim rule further; by 1206 CE the Delhi Sultanate was established, ruling much of northern India for over three centuries (1206-1526) under five successive dynasties.
What this means
The Mughal Empire (1526-1857 CE) was founded by Babur, a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan. Its most historically significant rulers include Akbar (r. 1556-1605), who consolidated the empire and pursued a policy of religious tolerance (including the abolition of the jizya on non-Muslims for a period and the establishment of an interfaith dialogue project, the Ibadat Khana); Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658), under whom the Taj Mahal was built as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal; and Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), a more traditionalist ruler whose expansive military campaigns and stricter religious policies remain heavily debated by modern historians (Audrey Truschke, Munis Faruqui and others have written recent revisionist and defensive readings). The empire declined rapidly after Aurangzeb's death and was formally ended by the British in 1857.
What this means
But the deeper story of Islam in South Asia is not primarily the story of dynasties. Sufi orders — most importantly the Chishti — established themselves in the subcontinent from the twelfth century onward. Muinuddin Chishti (d. 1236 CE), based in Ajmer, is the founder whose shrine remains one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in South Asia for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Nizamuddin Auliya (d. 1325 CE) of Delhi taught generations of scholars and Sufis and shaped popular Islam in the region for centuries. The steady, generational work of the Sufi orders — teaching, feeding, adjudicating, marrying — is what most historians credit with the actual conversion of much of the population over centuries.
What this means
Serious scholarly reform continued through the Mughal decline. Shah Waliullah of Delhi (d. 1762 CE) translated the Qur'an into Persian, wrote major works of hadith and legal theory, and is a foundational figure for most later South Asian reform movements — Deobandi, Barelvi, and modernist alike. Later reformers — Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Aligarh), the Deoband seminary (founded 1866), and Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) — worked under the pressure of British colonial rule and the collapse of Muslim political power.
Context
The partition of British India in August 1947 created Pakistan (initially with an eastern wing that became Bangladesh in 1971) and India. The partition displaced an estimated 10-20 million people and killed several hundred thousand to over one million people in communal violence, according to standard modern estimates. It is one of the largest forced human migrations in recorded history. Today the three successor states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) together contain roughly 600 million Muslims — the largest regional Muslim population in the world.
Reading South Asian Muslim history honestly
Two common distortions to avoid. First, treating the Mughal period as either purely tolerant (an Akbar-only reading) or purely oppressive (an Aurangzeb-only reading); the sources support neither extreme, and serious modern historians read the period with more care. Second, projecting today's national and sectarian divisions back onto centuries in which most people did not think in those terms. Islam in the subcontinent was, and is, plural — legally (Hanafi majority with significant Shafi'i and Shia minorities), linguistically (Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil and many others), and in devotional culture (from Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith seminary Islam to Barelvi and Sufi shrine culture).
Application today
The Chishti pattern — steady local presence, service, hospitality, and teaching over generations — is the same one Muslims in any diaspora face today. Institutions built on that pattern outlived every dynasty that ever ruled the subcontinent.
Reflection
In South Asia, Sufi teachers and traders did more to spread Islam than any army. What kind of steady, unglamorous work in your own life might, over decades, matter more than any single event?
Related lessons
- Islam in Southeast AsiaIndonesia, Malaysia, and how trade — not conquest — built the world's largest Muslim population
- Trade and Cultural ExchangeThe Indian Ocean, the trans-Saharan routes, and the goods and ideas they carried
- The Spread of Islam Beyond ArabiaConquest, conversion, trade and the slow reshaping of a region