Islam in South Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  Islam in South Asia claims more than 650 million adherents. That makes this region the single largest Muslim population on earth, roughly one-third of all believers worldwide. The faith entered this land not through conquest campaigns but through ancient sea routes. Arab traders had worked the Malabar Coast for generations before the Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 CE. Each spring, seafarers arrived along that southwestern shore with the monsoon winds. They brought dates and aromatic herbs, and eventually a new religion. The last ruler of the Chera Perumals of Makotai accepted Islam during Muhammad's own lifetime. He took the name Tajudheen and commanded that a mosque be built at Kodungallur in present-day Kerala. How the faith then spread from that southwestern shore to Bengal and beyond remains one of the subcontinent's most compelling questions. Why Muslim majorities formed precisely where they did, on the peripheries of Muslim political power, is an equally striking puzzle.

• 2. The First Mosques

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  The Barwada Mosque in Ghogha, Gujarat, may be the oldest surviving mosque on the subcontinent, built before 623 CE. The Cheraman Juma Mosque in Methala, Kerala, followed in 629 CE. Local tradition attributes its founding to Malik Deenar, who led a group of the Prophet's companions to the Malabar Coast. A third early mosque, the Palaiya Jumma Palli in Kilakarai, Tamil Nadu, arrived just a year later, in 630 CE.

  A document called the Qissat Shakarwati Farmad records that Malik Dinar founded mosques at Kollam, Madayi, and Barkur on the Malabar Coast. He also built at Mangalore, Kasaragod, Kannur, Dharmadam, Panthalayini, and Chaliyam. These are regarded as among the oldest mosque sites on the subcontinent. Tradition holds that Malik Dinar died at Thalangara in Kasaragod town. The Kerala Muslim tradition also venerates the Masjid Zeenath Baksh at Mangalore as one of the subcontinent's oldest mosques.

  The Mappilas, the Muslim community that formed along this coast, may have been the first group in South Asia to convert to Islam. Ubaidullah is credited with carrying the faith westward from the Malabar Coast to the Lakshadweep islands in 661 CE. His grave is believed to rest on the island of Andrott.

• 3. Commerce as Conduit

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  A Muslim ship was first sighted on the Indian coast as early as 630 CE. Historians Elliot and Dowson recorded this in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. H. G. Rawlinson placed the first Arab Muslim settlements on the Indian coast in the last part of the 7th century CE. That claim comes from his Ancient and Medieval History of India. J. Sturrock, in his Madras District Manuals, and Haridas Bhattacharya, in Cultural Heritage of India Vol. IV, corroborated the same timeline. But Arab traders had been visiting these shores long before even the earliest of those estimates.

  Hindu merchants in Sindh and Gujarat took a different view of the Arab arrivals than their Malabar counterparts did. They saw the newcomers as commercial competitors, and the northwestern coasts proved far less receptive to cultural exchange. Along the Malabar Coast, the situation was reversed: Arab traders married Indian women and settled permanently, forming a distinct Indian-Arabian Muslim community over generations. Those same merchants carried the numeral system developed by Indians across the trading world. Through their networks, that mathematical tradition reached the Middle East and eventually Europe. By the early 9th century, missionaries in Malabar had achieved something that trade alone could not: the conversion of a local king.

• 4. The Makran Campaigns

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  Usman ibn Abu al-Aas, the governor of Bahrain under Caliph Umar, mounted the first Islamic incursion into the subcontinent by sea. He sent his brother, Hakam ibn Abu al-Aas, to raid and scout the Makran region around 636 CE or 643 AD. This came well before any Arab army crossed into India by land. A second incursion followed when Al-Hakim ibn Jabalah al-Abdi attacked Makran in 649 AD. Al-Hakim was a companion of the Prophet Muhammad and a devoted supporter of Ali ibn Abu Talib. He had also traveled through Sind to Makran, reporting on the region to the Caliph.

  Historian Derryl N. Maclean traced the early Sindh-Shia connections to Hakim ibn Jabalah's presence in the region. Al-Hakim died in the Battle of the Camel, fighting alongside Sindhi Jats who had come under Shia influence during Ali's caliphate. He was also a poet, and couplets he wrote in praise of Ali ibn Abu Talib survived in the Chachnama. In 658 CE, Harith ibn Murrah al-Abdi and Sayfi ibn Fil' al-Shaybani, officers in Ali's army, led campaigns against Sindhi bandits. They pursued their targets as far as Al-Qiqan, which is known today as Quetta.

• 5. Saints and Settlements

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  The sultans and Mughals who ruled Muslim polities across South Asia sought to expand their power, not to win converts. Evidence for that comes from a striking geographical pattern. South Asia's Muslims did not concentrate in the heartlands of Muslim rule but on its peripheries, in the northwest and northeast of the subcontinent. Richard M. Eaton identified Sufis as the key to that distribution, focusing particularly on West Punjab and East Bengal.

  In areas where Sufi orders received land grants and supervised the clearing of forests for agriculture, they became community mediators. They stood between farming settlements and both worldly and divine authority. Sufi teachers did not, by Eaton's account, preach social equality. Their influence came from proximity to daily agricultural life rather than formal preaching or political backing. Land grants that placed Sufi orders in East Bengal and West Punjab shaped the subcontinent's demographics more lastingly than conquest had.

• 6. Reform and the Modern Landscape

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  Improved transport in the 19th century brought Muslim communities across South Asia into more direct contact with Mecca. Easier access to pilgrimage and to the wider Islamic world fed a wave of reformist movements that stressed Quranic literalism. Those movements held everyday local practices up against scriptural commands and found them wanting. The Faraizi movement in 19th-century rural Bengal became one of the most visible of these currents. Its aim was to remove indigenous folk practices from Bengali Islam and commit its followers exclusively to the worship of Allah and Muhammad.

  In 1947, the political drive for a separate Muslim state produced Pakistan, the most direct expression of reform's emphasis on exclusiveness. In 1971, Pakistan divided, with its eastern portion becoming Bangladesh. Afghanistan and the Maldives complete the group of Muslim-majority nations in the region. India's 14.12 percent Muslim share is the largest such proportion in any non-majority Muslim country. Islam stands as the second religion in India and the third in both Sri Lanka and Nepal. The reformist movement also carried a cultural aspect alongside its religious aims. It advocated an identification with Arab culture that continues to shape Muslim life across South Asia.