Conversion and Islamization in India, Historically

Raziuddin Aquil

The foreigner tag notwithstanding, a large majority of Muslims in India appear to be local converts from politically marginal and socially deprived backgrounds, emerging as part of a variety of historical processes involving social and religious change over a millennium and covering vast swathes of territories across the subcontinent. The early ancestors of these Muslim communities from lowly caste and tribal groups might have been attracted to the somewhat liberating ideas of medieval Islam, hoping for alleviation of their condition–social uplift and immediate political benefits included. These were not rulers in medieval India by any stretch of imagination, despite occasional examples of exceptional rise of ambitious individuals of low origin converting to Islam and achieving high political positions. Thus, the assumption that conditions of Muslims in general have deteriorated since the colonial transitions in the nineteenth century into the current mess is faulty to an extent. Medieval India was not a golden age for all Muslims, but perhaps only for a small section of Muslim immigrants and for broadly Hindu collaborators, who were not required to embrace Islam to acquire important political positions.

A careful scrutiny of historical evidence regarding conversion and Islamization might help abandon some of the dubious conjectures and motivated conclusions. From this perspective, the defensive approach of secularist/pluralist historians of maintaining silence on this communally sensitive theme seems a flawed strategy. Even if communities and their demagogues might want to decide what is acceptable to them as history, it is important that a mature and historically informed society has a tolerant space for understanding the dynamic processes through which communities have come into being. Modern explanations of the making of Islam in the Indian subcontinent generally include immigration of Muslims from West and Central Asia, religion of the sword, egalitarianism of Islam as represented by Sufi brotherhoods unleashing landslide conversion, and the connected process of cultural accretion through a combination of factors–ecological, economic, social, religious, and, of course, political.

The attempts to look at long-term social and religious change, taking into account medieval sources on acceptance or rejection of Muslim customs and rituals, as well as comprehending medieval languages of politics and recognizing the lack of a centralized authority in Islam open up the possibility of a more complex understanding of the making of Muslim communities. The rulers sometimes invoked religion to justify their violent conquests, projecting them as jihad (holy-war). However, when it came to rule, just as they needed to dismount from the horses used for conquests, the narrow political ideals of orthodox Sunni Islam were also set aside. The ulama’s occasional pressure to forcibly convert non-Muslims was not taken seriously by the emperors, who paid lip service to Islam, but put emphasis on being just and benevolent, not discriminating between subject populations on the basis of religion.

Also, exclusionist political ideologies did not favour conversion, for new converts would expect equal rights and share in power. Complete decimation of non-Muslims was also not advocated, as power-relation could not be exercised in a vacuum. The supremacy and domination of Islam could only be established in counter-position to the inferiority and subjugation of others. Ziya-ud-Din Barani, the leading political theorist and historian of the Delhi Sultanate, summed up the ambiguity: the Sultans must uphold the principles of the shari‘at (Islamic law), but the latter cannot be the basis of governance, nor should low-caste converts be given high political positions, monopolizing them for a small section of the entrenched elite. Thus, despite all the rhetoric of medieval Islamic violence and modern Hindu revenge, the fact remains that a vast Hindu population survived through the medieval centuries; it was not forced to migrate, slaughtered or converted to Islam.

Indeed, Muslim population at centres of so-called Islamic rule such as Delhi-Agra region remained minimal, with high concentration in regions at the margins of large Muslim empires. These communities have historically claimed that their ancestors embraced Islam at the hands of Muslim holy-men either directly or through the blessed presence of their shrines–a claim also made by Sufi fraternities even if early Sufi figures may not have worked with the explicit agenda of conversion. Sufis presented a humane face of Islam and played socially relevant roles, winning the hearts of the people through charitable endeavours and poetry of love in local languages, accommodating non-Islamic practices, and thus attracting a large number of followers without demanding formal conversion. In doing so, they heralded a process of Islamization, which was shaped by political developments, but not subject to any state coercion. This process is perhaps still continuing, even if the more Islamized and well-to-do Muslims might claim Perso-Arabic blood in their veins, risk being dubbed as outsiders, and charged with the natural reproduction hypothesis of hum paanch aur hamare pachis.

Earlier published in the Sunday Guardian: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/conversion-was-not-forced