Islam in India

• 1. Introduction

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  Islam in India is the country's second-largest religion, claimed by roughly 172 million people as of the 2011 census. That figure makes India home to the third-largest Muslim population anywhere on earth, behind only two other nations. Yet the faith did not arrive here through a single moment of conquest or conversion. It came by sea before it came by sword, carried first by Arab merchants who had been sailing the Malabar and Gujarat coasts long before Islam existed at all. Three of the oldest mosques in India trace their founding to seafaring traders in the early seventh century. One legend holds that an Indian king converted to Islam during the lifetime of Muhammad himself, around 624 CE, at Kodungallur in what is now Kerala. How did a faith born in the Arabian Peninsula take such deep root across so vast and varied a subcontinent? What tensions did it create with the societies it entered? And what does it look like today, more than fourteen centuries after those first Arab ships touched Indian shores?

• 2. Arrival by Sea

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  Arab traders were a fixture on the Konkan-Gujarat and Malabar coasts long before the advent of Islam. Historians H. G. Rawlinson and Elliot and Dowson place the first Muslim travellers on Indian shores as early as 630 CE, which is within a year or two of the Prophet Muhammad's death. People on India's western coast were, as one source describes it, as familiar with the annual arrival of Arab traders as they were with the monsoon birds that came and went with the seasonal winds. Many of those traders did not go back. They married local women and settled, forming communities that blended Arab and Indian culture from the start. On the Lakshadweep islands just west of the Malabar Coast, tradition holds that a figure named Ubaidullah brought Islam in 661 CE; his grave is believed to lie on the island of Andrott. A few Umayyad coins, minted between 661 and 750 CE, were later discovered at Kothamangalam in Kerala's Ernakulam district, a quiet material trace of that early contact. In Malabar, the Mappila community may have been among the first local people to convert. Intensive missionary activity followed along the coast, and by the early ninth century Muslim missionaries there had inspired the conversion of a local king. Meanwhile, genetic studies published in 2005 comparing the Y chromosomes of 124 Sunnis and 154 Shias in Uttar Pradesh with those of Hindu caste groups found that the vast majority of Indian Muslims are genetically similar to the non-Muslim communities around them, with only minor detectable influence from the Middle East or Central Asia.

• 3. Conquest and Sultanate

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  Muhammad bin Qasim was just seventeen years old when he led the first Muslim military invasion of the subcontinent, pushing into Sindh in 672 CE. The Umayyad campaigns that followed were largely contained to that region. It was not until the Ghaznavids, under Mahmud of Ghazni, who lived from 971 to 1030 CE, that Muslim armies repeatedly struck deeper into South Asia's north-western plains, using swift cavalry and large armies to overwhelm local kingdoms. The decisive breakthrough came under the Ghurids, whose forces broke through into the North Indian Plains and whose general Qutb al-Din Aibak, from Ghazni, founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, built in 1193 CE, became the first mosque constructed in the Indian subcontinent under that new order; its adjacent Qutb Minar, begun around 1192 CE and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Delhi, announced that victory in stone. The Sultanate controlled much of North India for generations and launched repeated forays into the south. It was also responsible for repelling the Mongol Empire's invasions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a fact that altered the course of South Asian history. By the thirteenth century, India was also absorbing a wave of mechanical technologies from the Islamic world: water-raising wheels with gears and pulleys, machines with cams and cranks, papermaking, and the spinning wheel. In 1339, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating what became known as the Shah Mir dynasty.

• 4. The Mughal Peak

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  In the early sixteenth century, a new generation of Central Asian warriors swept into northern India, founding the Mughal Empire on superior mobility and firepower. What distinguished the Mughals from earlier conquerors was their administrative approach. Rather than stamping out local societies, they balanced and pacified them through inclusive ruling elites, centralised governance, and a Persianised court culture that demanded loyalty to an emperor who held near-divine status. Under Akbar in particular, tribal bonds and Islamic identity were deliberately set aside as the primary organising principle of rule. The empire's economic engine ran on agriculture, with taxes collected in a well-regulated silver currency that pushed peasants and artisans into wider commercial markets. The relative peace of much of the seventeenth century created conditions in which painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture all flourished. At its height, Mughal India produced roughly a quarter of the world's economic and industrial output, making it the world's largest economy in the seventeenth century, larger than Qing China or Western Europe. That dominance did not last. By the mid-eighteenth century the Marathas had routed Mughal armies and swept from Punjab to Bengal. Power shifted to the Nawabs of Bengal and to the southern kingdom of Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. The British East India Company conquered Bengal in 1757 and Mysore later that century. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, held authority over only the city of Old Delhi before the British exiled him to Burma after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

• 5. Muslims and Independence

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  Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, widely known as the Frontier Gandhi, spent 45 of his 95 years in jail fighting British rule. His story is one of dozens from Muslim Indians who shaped the independence movement. Ashfaqulla Khan of Shahjahanpur conspired to loot the British treasury at Kakori near Lucknow in what became known as the Kakori conspiracy. Umar Subhani, a millionaire industrialist from Bombay, funded Mahatma Gandhi's Congress activities and died in the cause. Syed Rahmat Shah of the Ghadar Party worked as an underground revolutionary in France and was hanged in 1915 for his role in the failed Ghadar Mutiny. Ali Ahmad Siddiqui of Faizabad planned the Indian Mutiny in Malaya and Burma alongside Syed Mujtaba Hussain of Jaunpur and was hanged in 1917. Mahmud al-Hasan of Darul Uloom Deoband was implicated in the Silk Letter Movement, which sought to overthrow the British through armed struggle. Until 1920, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who later founded Pakistan, was a member of the Indian National Congress. Muhammad Iqbal, poet and philosopher, was for much of his life a strong proponent of Hindu-Muslim unity and an undivided India, perhaps until 1930. Until the 1930s, the Muslims of India broadly conducted their politics alongside their countrymen within the framework of an undivided India. Among Muslim women, Hazrat Mahal, Asghari Begum, and Bi Amma all contributed to the independence struggle, their names recorded alongside the men who more often appear in standard histories.

• 6. Partition and Its Aftermath

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  The Indian Independence Act 1947 set the 15th of August 1947 as the appointed date for partition, though Pakistan celebrates its creation on the 14th, because the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, attended the transfer-of-power ceremony in Karachi a day early before travelling to Delhi. What followed was among the largest population movements in recorded history. Estimates of those who crossed the new borders between India and Pakistan range from ten to twelve million people; historian Richard Symonds placed the death toll at a minimum of half a million. In the 1941 census, the undivided subcontinent counted roughly 94.5 million Muslims, comprising twenty-four percent of the total population. After partition, about two-thirds of those Muslims ended up in Pakistan, east and west, while one-third remained in India. The 1951 census recorded 7,226,000 Muslims who had moved to Pakistan from India, while 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs had moved the other way. Former Law and Justice Minister Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar had advocated for a full population exchange to ensure communal peace, arguing in his book Pakistan or Partition of India that such a transfer was the only lasting remedy. That full exchange did not happen; the Liaquat-Nehru Pact of 1950 sealed the borders, halting further mass migration. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave assurances to roughly 35 million Muslims who remained in India that they would be treated fairly in the new democratic state.

• 7. Denominations and Traditions

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  Over 85 percent of Indian Muslims follow the Sunni branch of Islam, while just over 13 percent are Shia. Within Sunni practice, the Barelvi movement, founded in 1904 by Ahmed Razi Khan of Bareilly, commands the largest following; it formed as a defence of traditional South Asian Islam against the revivalist Deobandi movement, which took its name from a small town northeast of Delhi where its founding seminary was established in the nineteenth century. The Deobandi movement was also shaped by Wahhabism from its early days. Sufism cut across many of these divisions. Moinuddin Chishti, who lived from 1142 to 1236, settled in Ajmer and drew large numbers of converts through his personal holiness; his Chishti Order became the most influential Sufi lineage in India. Sufis found resonance with Indian philosophical traditions, particularly nonviolence and monism, making conversion a process of cultural blending rather than rupture. The Bohra Shia community traces its origins to Gujarat in the second half of the eleventh century, with roots in Yemen and Fatimid Cairo; after the 24th Dai fled persecution in Yemen and died in 1567 CE, the administration of the mission moved permanently to India. The Ahmadiyya movement, founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, occupies a distinct position: India's government, supported by a 1971 court verdict, recognises Ahmadis as Muslims, unlike neighbouring Pakistan, which does not. Ahmadiyya membership in India is estimated somewhere between 60,000 and one million. The Dā'ī who heads the Bohra community today is the 53rd in an unbroken line of succession.

• 8. Society, Law, and Contemporary Life

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  India has more than 300,000 active mosques, a number the source describes as higher than any other country including the majority-Muslim world. Muslim Personal Law governs civil matters such as marriage, inheritance, and waqf properties for Muslims under the Shariat Application Act of 1937, with courts generally applying Hanafi Sunni law for Sunnis and Shia law where it differs substantially. Three of India's twelve presidents have been Muslims: Zakir Husain, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Mohammad Hidayatullah is the only person in Indian history to have served in all three of the country's highest offices: President, Vice-President, and Chief Justice. Literacy figures from the 2011 census show that 57.9 percent of Muslims were literate, compared to a national average of 64.8 percent; Kerala stands out sharply, where 88.58 percent of Muslims were literate. The Muslim population grew from about 9.8 percent of India's total in 1951 to 14.2 percent by 2011, though the Sachar Committee Report noted that since 1991, Muslims have seen the steepest fertility rate decline of any religious group in India. The Pew Research Center projects that India will have 311 million Muslims by 2050. In March 2025, the Indian Parliament passed the Waqf Amendment Bill, which prompted widespread protests from Muslim organisations and opposition parties, and has since been challenged in the Supreme Court, suggesting that the legal and political relationship between the Indian state and its Muslim citizens remains actively contested ground.