Islamic traditions: rulers, popular practice, and names for communities

Detail

The arrival of Muslim rule: a timeline of dynasties

• 711 CE — the Arab general Muhammad Qasim conquered Sind. Sind then became part of the Caliph's domain (the Caliph was the head of the Muslim world).
• He was a general of the Umayyad Caliphate and, by one account, marched with 20,000 cavalry and five catapults [2].

• This was a frontier conquest only. It did not spread Islamic rule into the Ganga plains.

• c. 13th century — Turks and Afghans set up the Delhi Sultanate in north India.

• Later Deccan Sultanates ruled the south-central plateau.
• 16th century — the Mughals took over north India.
• 18th century — Mughal power broke up and many regional states rose.

Shari'a and the ulama: the theory of rule

• Rulers were, in theory, guided by the ulama (the group of learned Muslim scholars of law and religion).
• The ulama asked rulers to govern by the shari'a — Islamic law.
• Shari'a was built from two main sources:
• the Qur'an (the revealed book), and

• the hadis (reports of what the Prophet said and did).

• Later, two more tools were added because new problems kept coming up:

• qiyas — reasoning by analogy (if a new case looks like an old settled case, apply the same rule);
• ijma — consensus of the learned scholars.

Note: Rulers did not always obey the ulama. Mughal practice often went its own way — Akbar took an active interest in Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity, pushed the ulama to the side in politics and law, and backed his own mixed religious movement, Din-i Ilahi [3][4].

Zimmi and jizya: the legal slot for non-Muslims

• Zimmi means "protected". It comes from the Arabic word zimma.
• In Islamic law, a zimmi was a person who followed a revealed scripture — chiefly Jews and Christians — living under Muslim rule.
• The deal was simple: zimmis paid a tax called jizya and in return got state protection of life, property and worship.
• In India the rulers stretched this status to cover Hindus, even though Hindus were not in the original list. This was a practical choice, not a rule from the books.
• The term in law books is dhimmi — a non-Muslim subject of a state run under shari'a. It is a recognised legal category, indexed as such in modern library subject systems [5].
• Jizya was a tax on non-Muslim populations paid to their Muslim rulers [6].
• Jizya could become a political fight. One Delhi Sultan gave big concessions to the ulama and refused to exempt Brahmins from jizya, arguing the shari'a gave him no room to do so [7].

Practice was flexible, not rigid

• Despite the legal theory, rulers in India were often generous to non-Muslim religions.
• Land endowments (grants of land) and tax exemptions were given to Hindu, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish institutions.
• Two concrete examples:
• Akbar's farman of 1598 (a farman is a royal order) told the officials of Khambat to let the Jesuits build a church there. Khambat (Cambay) is a port town in east-central Gujarat, at the head of the Gulf of Khambhat [8]. Three Jesuit missions reached Akbar's court, all before 1600 [3].

• Aurangzeb's letter of 1661–62 sent a cloak and Rs 25 to a Jogi (a Hindu ascetic), who is described as being "under the protection of Sri Shiv Jio".

• The bigger point: Mughal rulers came to see themselves as emperors of all their people, not only of Muslims.

Popular practice: the shared core

• Every Muslim accepted the five pillars of the faith:
• shahada — the declaration of faith (there is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet);
• namaz / salat — prayer, five times a day;
• zakat — giving alms to the poor;
• sawm — fasting in the month of Ramzan;

• hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca.

• On top of this shared core sat two layers of difference:

• sectarian difference — Sunni and Shi'a;
• local difference — language, dress, kinship, food, building style.

The Khojahs: local language for a Shi'a tradition

• The Khojahs are a branch of the Ismailis, which is a Shi'a sect.
• They composed ginans — devotional poems. The word comes from the Sanskrit jnana, meaning "knowledge".
• Ginans were composed in many everyday languages: Punjabi, Multani, Sindhi, Kachchi, Hindi and Gujarati.
• They were sung in ragas — the melodic frameworks of Indian classical music. So Islamic devotion here used an Indian musical system.
• They were written in the Khojaki script, which came from landa, a script used by traders and merchants. A religious tradition borrowed the writing system of the bazaar.

• Khojki is recorded as one of the scripts used to write Sindhi, alongside Arabic (Naskh), Devanagari and Gurmukhi [9]; it is also listed as a script used for Gujarati [10].

• On the Khoja community itself: they are described as Indian Muslims converted in the 14th century by the Persian pir Sadr-al-Din, who joined them to the Nizari Ismailiyyah sect of the Shi'a, and who later owed allegiance to the Aga Khan [11][12].

• The largest group of Nizaris was in India and Pakistan, where they were known as Khojas [12].

Arab traders on the Malabar coast: adopting local ways

• Arab merchants settled on the Malabar coast (modern Kerala).
• They took up Malayalam, the local language.
• More striking, they took up local kinship rules:
• matriliny — descent and property traced through the mother's line;

• matrilocal residence — the husband moves to the wife's household.

• These rules are the opposite of the patrilineal Arab norm. Trade and settlement bent custom.

Mosque architecture: universal grammar, local dress

• Two features are universal in every mosque because they fix the direction of prayer towards Mecca:
• the mihrab — a niche (an arched hollow) in the wall facing Mecca;

• the minbar — the pulpit from which the sermon is given.

• Everything else — roof, walls, material — followed local building habit:

• a 13th-century mosque in Kerala with a roof shaped like a shikhara (the tall tower over a Hindu temple sanctum);
• the Atiya mosque, Mymensingh (Bangladesh), built of brick in 1609 — brick was the standard material in the delta because stone is scarce there;

• the Shah Hamadan mosque, Srinagar, built of wood in 1395 — wood suited the Kashmir valley.

• Kerala's mosque tradition is old: the Cheraman Juma Masjid at Kodungallur is dated to the 10th century CE and is still a working mosque [13].

• Bengal's brick mosque tradition is dense enough to have its own world heritage cluster — the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat (15th century) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site [14].

Names for communities: no "Muslim" in the sources

• Look at Sanskrit texts and inscriptions from the 8th to the 14th centuries: they almost never use the word "musalman" or any word meaning "Muslim".
• Instead, migrants were named by where they came from:
• Turushka — Turks;
• Tajika — people from Tajikistan;

• Parashika — Persians.

• Or they were fitted into older names already used for earlier outsiders:

• Shaka — the old name for Central Asian Scythians;

• Yavana — the old name for Greeks.

• Or they were called mlechchha, a general word meaning people who

• did not follow the caste rules, and

• did not speak Sanskritic languages.

• mlechchha could be used as an insult. But it rarely marked out a religious community standing against "Hindus".

• And "Hindu" itself did not start as a religious label — it began as a term about region and people, not creed.
• Why this matters: the sources show people classified by land, language and custom, not by two fixed religious blocks. The sharp "Hindu vs Muslim" frame came much later.

Prelims Hooks

• 711 CE — Arab general Muhammad Qasim conquered Sind, which became part of the Caliph's domain; he served the Umayyad Caliphate [2].
• Shari'a rested on the Qur'an and hadis, later supplemented by qiyas (analogy) and ijma (consensus).
• Zimmi comes from zimma ("protection"); zimmis paid jizya; in India the status was extended to Hindus even though the original category covered Jews and Christians.
• Akbar's farman of 1598 ordered Khambat officials to permit the Jesuits to build a church; all three Jesuit missions to his court came before 1600 [3].
• Aurangzeb's letter of 1661–62 granted a cloak and Rs 25 to a Jogi described as under the protection of Sri Shiv Jio.
• Five pillars: shahada, namaz/salat, zakat, sawm, hajj.
• Ginans (from Sanskrit jnana) are Khojah devotional poems sung in ragas, written in the Khojaki script derived from the mercantile landa script; Khojki is a recorded script for both Sindhi and Gujarati [9][10].
• Khojahs are a branch of the Ismailis, a Shi'a sect; Britannica links them to conversion in the 14th century by the Persian pir Sadr-al-Din and to the Nizari Ismailiyyah [11][12].
• Arab traders on the Malabar coast adopted Malayalam, matriliny and matrilocal residence.
• Mosque universals = mihrab (niche) + minbar (pulpit), both keyed to Mecca; local variants = shikhara-roofed 13th-century Kerala mosque, brick Atiya mosque Mymensingh 1609, wooden Shah Hamadan mosque Srinagar 1395.
• Cheraman Juma Masjid, Kodungallur (Kerala) — dated 10th century CE, still a living mosque [13]; Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat is a UNESCO World Heritage Site [14].
• Sanskrit sources of the 8th–14th centuries name migrants as Turushka, Tajika, Parashika, or reuse Shaka / Yavana, or use the generic mlechchha — but "musalman" is virtually absent.

Mains Points

• Law on paper versus rule in practice. The ulama's demand for shari'a rule was the stated ideal; land grants and tax exemptions to Hindu, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish institutions were the practice. Akbar's 1598 church farman and Aurangzeb's 1661–62 grant to a Jogi show the gap held across reigns and across rulers usually painted as opposites. Akbar also sidelined the ulama in law and politics and backed Din-i Ilahi [3][4] — but jizya could still be defended as legally binding, as with the Sultan who refused to exempt Brahmins from it [7].
• Zimmi shows Islamic law adapting to Indian reality. The category was made for Jews and Christians, who had revealed books. Hindus did not fit that definition. Rather than break, the category stretched. Use this to argue that legal frameworks bend when a ruling minority must govern a large, differently-organised majority.
• Islam in India was plural from the start, not a single block. One shared core (five pillars) plus deep variation: Sunni/Shi'a split, Khojah ginans sung in ragas and written in a trader's script, Malabar Arabs turning matrilineal, and mosques keeping only mihrab and minbar while roofs went shikhara, brick or wood as the region dictated. Good material against any answer that treats "Muslim" as one uniform culture.
• Naming is evidence about identity. That Sanskrit texts for 600 years used Turushka, Tajika, Shaka, Yavana and mlechchha — and not "musalman" — is direct evidence that contemporaries sorted people by region, language and caste practice, not by two opposed religions. Pair it with the point that "Hindu" itself was not originally a religious term to argue that communal identity in the modern sense was formed later.