Influx of Islamic ideas

Thirteen hundred years ago, Arab sailors who came to Indian coasts taking advantage of monsoon winds professed a new faith, Islam. A thousand years ago, warlords from Central Asia started raiding India for the wealth in its temples. Eight hundred years ago, they started settling around Delhi to take advantage of India’s rich agricultural wealth and control the trade routes. Thus, the Islamic world made its entry into India.

With the arrival of the new rulers came immigrants from Central Asia, Persia and Arab countries. They came with new ways of thinking – the Persianate Islamicate way of thinking, very different from the Indian way of thinking. These sometimes were hostile to the local beliefs and practices and sometimes, collaborative. Politics aside, we must appreciate there was a rush of knowledge and a major transformation in Indian culture from about 800 years ago.

Today, when people talk about Indian knowledge systems, they usually refer to Indian knowledge systems which originated in India. In the process, we forget the major contribution that happened to India in the Islamic period. The Islamic world shaped global history from the 7th century onwards right up to the 16th century after which Europeans took over. It was during this time that India saw many changes.

Architecture

In architecture, for example, the true arch and the dome entered India. In Mauryan times, there are records of true arch being done, but this technology was forgotten. Suddenly, across India, people started seeing the true arch and dome manifesting in structures called mosques.

Mosques were communal gathering places where the entire community gathered to pray, usually on Fridays. This structure was very different from the Hindu temples because everyone was welcome. While in Hindu temples, only certain castes were allowed to enter the temple, others were kept out.

The concept of all praying together to one Almighty God did not exist. The Hindu temple was the house of god, where a god lived and to whom you went to visit. Hindus fed and clothed images of gods. Muslims had no images of gods; they simply reaffirmed their promise to follow God’s law. For Muslims, prayer was a mandate. Hindu rituals were not. Different communities of Hindus had different gods, with one particular deity favoured by the state.

Mosques were important in the Islamic world because every Friday the name of the Sultan would be uttered in this place. So anybody who wanted to become a king had to first build a mosque where there would be people ready to acknowledge him as a representative of Allah on earth who had the caliph’s permission.

Technology

Camels were animals that were introduced to India in this Islamic period. India did know the two-humped camels, but those came from Central Asia, right from Vedic times, and their images are found in many Buddhist stupas. But the single-humped camel came from Arabia much later, around 1000 AD. The epic of Pabuji, in Rajasthan, speaks of the folk hero securing camels from another land – the kingdom of Lanka!

Another thing which entered India in the agricultural space was the water wheel. We know that in ancient India, there was something called a Jal Yantra. But again, like the true arch, this knowledge was forgotten. It re-entered India through the Sufis, teachers of Islamic mysticism, who popularised new farming technologies.

Many Sufis travelled to frontier lands far from Brahminical domination. For example, western Punjab and eastern Bengal. In these lands there was new agricultural land exposed by shifting rivers. The Sufis encouraged marginalised pastoral and tribal people to take up agriculture. As new prosperous villages emerged, they venerated these Sufi teachers and eventually became Muslim.

Along the tributaries of Punjab, one finds many dargahs built over tombs of Sufi saints, who brought new technology and ways of thinking and transformed the lives of the Jatt people. The 16th century Bengali epic, Nabi-Bansa by Syed Sultan, on lives of prophets, describes how the angel Jibril teaches Adam and Hawa (Eve) farming and how Ibrahim, the patriarch, moves to new lands, clearing forests, and establishing farmlands. These lands to the west and east of India had the largest concentration of Muslims and eventually became Pakistan and Bangladesh.