How India Became Muslim

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hi, welcome to Mukadima. My name is Savish. I'm currently in the countryside of beautiful British Columbia. Um, part of the reason was that it's been quite sunny recently and I didn't really want to set up my studio at home and do the whole thing, you know, at home. Um, but also because partly because the light uh one of one of my lights is malfunctioning. So, I decided that I'm going to just go out and it's a nice day. So, I'm going to go out and try to record this video outside. So last week on April 21st 2026, it was the 500th anniversary of the first battle of Panipat which was fought between a Timurid prince from Central Asia named Babur and uh the Sultan of Delhi Sultan Ibrahim Loodi. The result of this battle was that the Timurid prince Babar stood victorious and Ibrahim Lodi was defeated. His dynasty ended with him and his um sultenate the Delhi Sultenate was destroyed as well. Babour then goes on to found the Mughal dynasty also known as the house of Timur. Timur was one of his ancestors. So in that way, April 21st, 2026 was also the anniversary of the establishment of the Mughal dynasty.

[00:01:07]I wanted to make a video about that. But then I realized I already have too many videos about the Mughals. But what I don't have a video about is Islam in India before the Mughals came to the scene in 1526. And Islam on the subcontinent was already around for about 500 years, more than 500 years.

[00:01:22]And so there's all this history that I've essentially never covered on this channel. So today I want to make a video about that. Um so yeah, let's get started.

[00:01:45]So, Prophet Muhammad, as you might know, passed away in 632 CE and he was succeeded by um the Rashidun caiffs who ended up uh conquering much of the north which was previously under the control of the Greek Byzantines and the Persian Sassinets. The Rashidun themselves by their end in 661 had conquered modern-day states of Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and Iran. However, it was their successors who then carried the mission. The successors were a state known as the Umiads. By the year 7-Eleven CE, the Umiads stretched quite far from their capital at Damascus. Uh in the west, they had they were touching the Atlantic. They were established in what is today the country of Morocco. And in the east they were pretty much on the border of where Pakistan and Iran meet these days. In the west one of their generals named Tariban Ziad invaded Spain which was at the time in the middle of a bit of a succession crisis and he conquered parts of it and then his superior Musl comes along and he conquers the rest of it and so they establish a state known as Alandaloo in Arabic sources basically Muslim Spain and Portugal which uh continues to exist for about 781 years or so. In the east in the same year 7-Eleven, an Omayad general named Muhammad Kasim invades um what is today the Pakistani province of Synind. It was known as Synth back then as well. He defeats the ruling Hindu dynasty in Synth and he goes quite far up north um all the way to the Pakistani part of uh Punjab. However, he is recalled and he cannot really consolidate his control or mad control over this territory and in fact this territory is quite volatile at at the time. So the umads really have no hopes of holding on to it. So over the years other states independent states come into existence here such as the emirate of emirate of Mulan. Along with that an ismile Shia state comes into being as well which uh at the time the Ismileis were being persecuted by the Sunnis back in the Middle East. So they escaped to India where they established their own small state which was at least away from the clause of the Sunnis but it was still you know not a very strong position. They still had to make deals with Hindu kings and they still had to be wary of attacks from the the west.

[00:04:00]Now like I mentioned Muhammad Kasim brought the first Islamic army to India but that was probably not the first presence of Muslims in India. You see, the Arabian Sea is called the Arabian Sea because it was dominated by Arab merchants who sailed into India, various ports in India, um through the Malay archipelago all the way to China where they established the Hua community of Muslims which still exists and is quite a predominant Muslim community in eastern China. One of the states that they traded with and stayed in um was the modern day state of Kerala which they had been trading with for maybe as as far back as a thousand years before the prophet himself. So this is quite an old relationship and it continues after Islam as well. These Arab merchants had their own trading colonies in Kerala and they they talked to the locals, they married the locals. So there was a lot of integration happening as well. So there are even today there's a community there that claims descent from those Arabs. So they were likely the earliest Muslims. Unfortunately, we don't really have real evidence of that beyond speculation. We have all these legendary accounts. We one of these accounts also mentions a king from Kerala who goes to Mecca, not Makkah, sorry, Medina to meet the prophet himself. And this is almost entirely fictional. So we have all these legends. But the earliest real evidence of Muslims in Kerala comes from about um the 9th century. So about 100 years after Muhammad bin Kasim, but likely there were Muslims in Kerala who were merchants who came over in the the trading season and then left. Up north, like I mentioned, there were actual Muslim states that were in a bit of a precarious position, but they still continued to function all the way up till the year 1000. Now, what happened around that time in the Middle East? The Umad Caliphate had been replaced by the Abbassad Caliphate in 750 CE, who themselves had declined over the 9th century. So in the 860s 870s they had declined quite a bit and their own vassels had broken away and uh other states independent states had appeared throughout the Middle East including in Iran. Also a lot of central Asians were at this time converting to Islam as well. So these central Asians the Turks predominantly within them were starting to influence Islam through and through.

[00:06:16]One of these central Asian dynasties was established by a man named Subtagan who established it in modern day Afghanistan in the city of Khazni where the dynasty that he established got its name from the Khaznavits. Now Subuktagan himself a slave a former slave of another empire um died in 998 CE and was succeeded by his son Mahmood of Khazni who is sort of the real founder of the Khnavid Empire.

[00:06:43]Now Mahmood had an entire vision of what he wants to be. He wants to be the undisputed king of Iran, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia. He also wants to project his image as a good Muslim, a good Sunni Muslim. And to that uh effect he reaches out to the caiff in Bakaad, the Abbasad Kiff who sends him a robe of honor basically legitimizing him as a ruler who was endorsed by the Abbasid Kiff himself. of the Abasad Kaiff claimed to be the successor of the prophet and so there was a whole chain that went back to the prophet in this way. At this point Mahmud also takes the title of Sultan which means uh protector in this case the protector of the Sunni caiff and hence in a way acting on his behalf which was just a narrative thing.

[00:07:29]It wasn't actually real but Mahmood really runs with it. Mahmud wants to consolidate power and one of the things that you need to consolidate power is money because you know you need to fund your army and luckily for Mahmood not so luckily for the Indians there was a lot of money in India not that far away from where Mahmud was. So he decides to head to India. Now part of the reason for the invasion was of course to defeat the Hindu kings who were in India and the Shia iseli state that existed in in India at the time. He wanted to defeat them both and really sort of bolster his image as the protector of the caiff and the the righteous Sunni king. He is also sometimes given the title hammer of the infidels. So he's really running with the whole thing right now as as you can see. But that's not all that it was. The main reason was definitely money. He wanted to loot um especially some of the richer Indian cities and temples there to fund his army to secure his western flank against central Asian invaders who were really gearing up at this time.

[00:08:31]This is lend some credence by the fact that when he conquered the city of Lahar at uh some point he gave the command of the army that was garrisoned in there to a Hindu man. So in practice, he wasn't all that Hindu Muslims thing that he was he was trying to build himself up as.

[00:08:49]The book India in the Persian age by Richard Eaton starts with a chapter called the tale of two raids where he talks about one of Mahmud's most famous raids in India that on the temple of Somnat in Gujarat. That was not his first raid or his last. He had conducted more than a dozen raids before that as well. But that is the most famous one in that in popular imagination he's considered to have conducted a lot of chaos there and caused a lot of destruction there. The raid on Snath comes in 1025 but 3 years before that is the other raid that Eaton is talking about here that by the Chola Emperor Rajendra. The Jolola Empire was an empire in south India that existed across its southern and eastern edge.

[00:09:34]And Rajendra in 1022 led an army across the eastern edge of the Indian subcontinent all the way to what is today Bengal. Actually what was back then Bengal as well. There he defeated the king of the Pala uh dynasty and he took the idol of the god Shiva from the great royal temple. He took it back with him to his capital as he did with all the other minor dynasties that he had defeated on the way. He took the gods from their temples as well as not basically as loot but like as as trophies. So that is a clear example of something that was very present at this time not just in India but actually across the world. We'll come back to that later on when we talk about temple destruction in India in general. Now Mahmud like I mentioned raided Somnat and this is supposed to have been this big sort of worlds shattering campaign where he uh caused a lot of mayhem caused a lot of destruction but what's interesting is that the the raid is only recorded in Persian chronicles. It's not recorded in the contemporary Sanskrit chronicers. So the victims of this campaign whom we do have inscriptions and travel logs of this uh time period do not mention this raid at all. So what's likely happening here is that um Mahmood makes a big deal out of this this campaign um and takes the title of bikan which means idol breaker. For those who don't know Islam is a monotheistic faith and and uh idol worship is a big no no in Islam. So breaking it uh again goes very much with the image that uh Mahmud is trying to project at this point. So that's why his chronicles dial up the uh campaign quite a lot whereas the Sanskrit chronicles don't mention it at all because it might not have been as unique uh or as bad as later sources tell us. Mahmood certainly raided the temple. I'm not saying he didn't. I'm just saying that it wasn't as unique or as worlds shattering as Mahmud might have wanted you to think that it was. Richard Eaton, for example, writes the following. The demonization of Mahmood and the portrayal of his raid on Somnad as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842, the British East India Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the first Afghan war from 1839 to 1842. Seeking to regain faith among their Hindu subjects after their humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmood, after sacking the temple of Somnad, carried off a pair of the temple's gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By discovering these fictitious gates in Mahmud's former capital of Khazni and by restoring them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India's Hindus. Though intended to win the latter's gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain's catastrophic defeat just beyond the bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus' ill feeling towards Muslims ever since. From this point on, Mahmud's 1025 sacking of Snomnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early 20th century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. Back in the Middle East, another Central Asian dynasty rises up. This one is called the Sjuks and they destroy the western half of the Khaznavid Empire. They defeat them and then they push them into India where they have to take shelter in the city of Lahar which they had captured before I think in 1021 or so. But now they have to make it their capital and basically their most powerful city. On top of that one of their vassels, the Hudids rise up as well and they end up taking over the city of Khazni and sacking it for 7 days. The destruction of that city is legendary in the chronicles that we read about it. An interesting fact about that sack is that the library of the great philosopher Ibanina or Eisina was in Khazni at the time where some of Mahmud's successors had bought it from Isvahan and they had stored it in their own library which unfortunately was also lost as part of this sack. So after the sack of Khazni in 1150, the Khaznavits have moved to um the city of Lahore and in that way they have established the first powerful and independent state in India. Islamic state by that I mean Islamic state in India. The states before there were independent states for sure but they weren't really powerful. They were always on a bit of a shaky footing. Um and they can definitely not be called an empire whereas the Khnovitz can probably be called an empire. Although the Ghnavids were also on a very shaky footing at the time because the Hurids, their former vassels who had sacked their capital decided to invade India as well to take it from the Ghnavids. The Hurids were ruled by two brothers, Moisudin Muhammad and Gyudin Muhammad.

[00:14:46]And it is Moisuin Muhammad who comes to India with his army and he destroys the Khaznavids. The Hurids are also uh kind of like the Khaznavids in two ways in that first of all they were an empire that stretched into India and into Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. But they also wanted to only extract India's wealth and take it to protect their western flank where there were central Asian tribes that were threatening them.

[00:15:09]So in that way they were quite similar to the Ghnavids. Now after the fall of the Khaznavvids and the destruction of the Ismael Shia states or or rather state there was I think there was only one. Moinhuri makes uh further incursions into India where he meets um various Hindu dynasties in battle. The most famous of this was of course the Johan dynasty of Rajasthan whose king Priti defeats uh Huri in the battle of Tarin in 1191. This pushes Huri back for a year. Hoody goes back to his capital and he regroups his military and he actually trains his military to fight elephants by making mock elephants out of clay and stuff in order to train them to fight um the the elephants that were a part of Johan's military. Now this works out well because just the next year Ruri invades again and this time he defeats Prit Johan and he takes over his state. Now during Muisin's lifetime his empire takes over cities like Delhi, Ajmir, Dibbul, Lahor and Aligard and Banaras. Banaras is a is also called Vanasi which is a holy site to the Hindus. These conquests are usually followed by the destruction of the royal temple in the city which I've mentioned before. Now this destruction of royal temple should not be understood as an attack on Hinduism itself but rather it was uh an imperialist move not a fundamentalist move. Royal temples just like churches and mosques were built by ruling dynasties in order to put up a very visible and public monument to their rule. So these buildings were usually destroyed in order to show the people that a new boss was in town. Like I mentioned the Chola Emperor uh Rajendra did that with the people that he conquered fellow Hindus if you can call them that. He didn't destroy the temples but he did take the idols from those temples in a way to show the people of his city that these are the people that I have conquered and to show the conquered people that um your temple is vacant means you have lost. So this is basically what it meant and you can see this all over the place. A general pattern that you would see was that the Roman Christians would take over a city from pagans and the pagans would have a huge temple in the middle to one of their gods and the temple would be destroyed by the the Christians. They would put a church there and then uh when the Muslims take over they would destroy the church and build a mosque there. So it was very much a tool of imperialism. I don't know if that's better than religious fundamentalism.

[00:17:36]That's up to you. But it should not be understood as a as a tool of religious fundamentalism. There were destructions of temples and mosques and churches that occurred as parts of fundamentalism, but that was usually much more rare than this thing. Now, before we continue, I'd like to tell everyone that uh on my website.com, I sell wall posters. My flagship is the timeline of Islamic history, which comes with and without portraits and covers, 1400 plus years of Islamic history in a comprehensive way.

[00:18:04]I also have the fall of Aland Andlus which shows the fall of Muslim Spain in Portugal that I mentioned before over a period of about eight centuries. And if you're watching this videos a couple of years after it's been released, then I have new charts as well that you should definitely check out. That's the best way to support Al- Mukadima and to show off some love for Islamic history as well. Alternatively, if you want to support Al Makadima, you can do so over on Patreon as well. The links to everything are in the description. Back to the video. Okay, so coming back to Moisuin Muhammad Huri or we'll just call him Muhammad Huri from now on. He had a bit of an allergy to giving power to his kinsmen and instead he gave power to his slaves who were governing the realm for him who were leading his armies etc. This was kind of a major thing in in the Islamic world. In fact, Nisam Mul the Sjuk Vazir is said to have said that one obedient slave is better than 300 sons because the latter desire their father's death and the former desire their master's glory. So Muhammad Huri had his uh his slaves managing pretty much every part of his empire. And even without his direct supervision, they would take armies out and conquer new territories.

[00:19:09]So when Muhammad Huri was killed in 1206, it wasn't his sons who held real power. It was his slaves. They started to carve out spheres of influences from the cities that they ruled such as Delhi, Mulan, Lahar, etc. And they went to war with each other to become the successor of Muhammad Huri. Now at this point Delhi was not the great city that it would become in in later centuries.

[00:19:31]It was not even a big city. It was a pretty regional town but um it would later on of course become the city of India. If you were to ask someone at the time if they think that Delhi would win this struggle between all these slaves of Huri, I don't think anybody would have said that Delhi would win because Delhi was definitely not the main city.

[00:19:51]There were cities like Uch, Lahar, Mulan that were much more important than Delhi was at the time, but it would ultimately be Delhi that would win this struggle.

[00:19:59]Now, Delhi at this point was being ruled by one of Guri's slaves named Kutubin Ibuk. Kutubin Ebuk is known of course for the Kutubinar in Delhi. However, while Abuk was able to hold his own against his fellow slaves, he wasn't able to consolidate control because he died in 1210, just four years after the death of his master in a freak polo accident. And he was succeeded by one of his slaves named Ilmish. Ilmish in many ways would be the actual ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. Even though it was technically founded by Kotabadin Ibuk, it would be Tutmish who would found this empire in many ways and he would make Delhi what we know and love today.

[00:20:41]Tuttish unfortunately did not have a real claim to anything. Basically, he was the slave of a slave of a king. But he was militarily incredibly gifted. He defeated and killed the sons of his master Abuk to take over the sultenate.

[00:20:55]And then he defeated the other successors of Ruri and took over as the singular successor to Huri himself. He married one of Abuk's daughters as well to create a bit of a genealological connection between himself and his master. And on top of that in 1229 he was confirmed as the Sultan of Delhi by the ambassador Kaiff himself in the same way that he had confirmed Khaznavit Sultan. So this gave Tuttish a kind of legitimacy that no one else in India at the time had. Now there was a proper Islamic Sunni empire in India which was endorsed by the kaiff and it was a safe haven for people fleeing the Middle East and there were a lot of people fleeing the Middle East because the Mongols were coming. In 1219 CE the great Khan of the Mongols Changes Khan invaded the dominant power in Central Asia and Iran.

[00:21:49]theism shahi and he destroyed them. He obliterated that empire and he conducted destruction and total cleansing of many important cities in this territory. Any city that refused to surrender to him was completely wiped out. So this created a huge refugee crisis. Even after Changesh Khan died in 1227, his sons and grandsons and other successors kept expanding and this refugee crisis kept ballooning and ballooning. So for the next couple of decades pretty much up until 1260 1270 the Mongols were a looming threat on the entire Islamic world between the Nile and the Indis in India. However, Delhi just beyond the Indis was a safe haven. It had not been touched by the Mongols. So a lot of Muslims escaping from Persia and Central Asia ended up moving to Delhi. Delhi almost overnight if you were talking about relative scales became a huge city with a huge population of Muslim Persians, Muslim Turks, Afghans and Muslim Sufis. So these people brought with them their culture, the Persian culture, um the central Asian traditions and Islam in a very approachable form.

[00:23:03]The the Sufi kind of Islam, not really the Islam of the scholars but rather the Islam of the Sufis. In fact, many of the Sufi saints that are still revered in India and Pakistan, such as Jalaludin Tabrizi and Kotabadin Khaki came to India during Totmish's reign. And these other Sufi saints with them brought their own networks also known as or brotherhoods which expanded themselves throughout all of India. The Sufis preached a more simplified version of Islam. basically mysticism and a message of love and harmony which was not really offensive to the Hindus because the Hindus already had similar mysticism traditions and so this new kind of religious faith was a bridge that they would use to convert to Islam. Say what you will about Sufis but for example the Wahhabis could never do something like this. Non-Muslims would look at Wahhabism and be like yeah we're not converting to that leave us alone. So in this way the Muslim Sufis were very similar to the Hindu sadhus and so they started a massive unofficial campaign of Islamizing India. An interesting side note here the Mongols did a similar thing in north caucuses where Islam had actually not been able to penetrate for about six centuries. Muslim armies tried to conquer it but almost always failed and so they had not been able to break into the north caucuses. But when the Mongols came around, they pushed Muslim Sufis into the north caucuses where they ended up Islamizing them. And that's why we have states like Dakistan and Cheschna being Muslim today. For all the Muslims that the Mongols killed, they also created millions of more. Anyhow, El Dotish's death in 1236 led to a smaller succession crisis. However, he was succeeded by some of his children including his daughter Raja Sultana who was the only female ruler of Delhi up until Indra Gandhi became uh the prime minister of India in 1966. But none of Tuttish's descendants are able to hold on to power in the same way that Il Tuttish had been able to and they become puppets. And um in the year 1266 they are not puppets either anymore because one of these puppet masters Balban takes over as Sultan. Balban himself was quite capable and his 21-year reign was quite prosperous. But upon his death his successors are brushed aside by the Turko Afghan Khalji dynasty. The Khalji dynasty was founded by Jalbin Khalji but it was actually his nephew Alawudin Khalji who should be considered the real founder of this empire. That pattern repeats itself a lot in India. Aladin was ruling as a regional lord from a place nearby the modern city of Ilabad from where he led out raiding campaigns into South India. You see India is split almost right in the middle by the Vinda mountains and the Narada River. The south of it, not all of it but the south of it is known as the Dakan plateau. And so far Islam hadn't really entered it uh except through the coastal merchants that I mentioned before who had entered Kerala. Alawudin did so in 1294 when he crossed the the Vinda mountains and he took an army in a swift campaign to the city of Dvgiri which was the capital of the Hindu Yadav dynasty. The Yadavs dominated the territory immediately south of the Vinda mountains. Hence they were quite rich. So Aludin made them pay tribute and used this tribute to buy the support of the military and go back home and depose and kill his uncle Jalaludin to take over as Sultan himself. In the year 1296, his loyal African general Malik Puffur led multiple raids into the Dean and basically that's how Islam first established itself as a military power in the Dean through the blade of Malik Kafur who went quite far south as far south as modern-day Karnatak and Maduray. In addition to that, Aloudin also conquered the port state of Gujarat which was uh a like I mentioned a port state. So it was quite rich. It was also a merchant colony of various people. So this was a big get for Aloudin. Now almost everything that Aloududin does in his life I think is guided to some extent by a fear of the Mongols. At this point in the 1290s the Mongols were coming back. They had been in a succession crisis civil war state between 1260 and 1290. But after 1290 they were once again gearing up for further incursions into territories they hadn't conquered. And the biggest territory they hadn't conquered was India. In 1297, for example, the Mongols invaded into what we call Punjab and went as far as the city of Casur, which is today on the border of India and Pakistan. Alludin was able to push them back, but it was only a matter of times till they come back and they did come back in 1298 and 1299. In 1303 CE, Aloudin was busy with the siege of the fort of Jetar in Rajasthan, which is a story that has been eulogized, well, not eulogized, but rather fictionalized by Mohammad Jayasi in his Padmatur Padmawati, which was also turned into a movie in 2017 and caused a a lot of problems. I'm not going to get into that. Now, at the same time, the Mongols invaded and they took advantage of the fact that Aludin was not in Delhi to move on Delhi. Aloudin rushed back to his capital but wasn't able to fortify it. So he fell back to another fort where he was able to protect himself but Delhi was sacked by the Mongols. They came within inches of taking the entire empire had Alawudin fallen in that fort.

[00:28:33]So Aloudin for the rest of his life was very very aware of this fact that the Mongols were not some minor threat. They were a matter of life and death for his entire empire. So he brings about new reforms. He builds more infrastructure.

[00:28:48]He reforms the taxation system, changes people around. And all this was in service of being able to collect more taxes in order to make more money to defend against the Mongols. Now some of his reforms, unpopular as they might be, were actually very effective. For example, during his reign, the cost of wheat was very much controlled and the common people were able to afford it quite easily compared to other periods when the cost of wheat would go up and down quite dramatically during the monsoon and other kinds of seasons. His reforms also helped him in pushing the Mongols back. He was able to push back multiple raids and even counter raid in Afghanistan which was at the time the territory of the Mongols. For example, Malik Kafur in 1305 defeated a huge Mongol army at a site called Amroa and another general of Alawin claimed as many as 29 raids that he had pushed back. So the Mongols were pretty much stopped by Aloudin. They didn't send another major army into India up until 1327 which was one of the last Mongol armies to ever enter India. Anyhow, Aludin died in 1316 and Malik Kafur put one of his sons, a child on the throne with the hopes of controlling him. But another son then brushed away um Malik Kafur and his brother to take over. This son was known as Mubarak Sha. This unrest in Delhi had led to some of the Dean states that were paying tribute to Alawudin and his uh state to stop sending payments. And so Moubarak Sha decided to invade the Dean with his army and instead of doing what his father had done which was just you know go in harass them take tribute and come back he decided to conquer them. Mubarak Sha took the great city of Dvgiddi and actually built a very famous mosque there that is the earliest example of Islamic architecture in the Dean at least earliest surviving example. And in 1320, the Khaljis also conquered the city of Bij Japur, which in the future would become a very important Muslim city as well. But that's a bit ahead of us right now. Mubarak Sha was himself assassinated by someone who then ascended to the throne and took the title of Sha. What's interesting about Sha is that he was not Central Asian or Afghan or Persian or anything like that.

[00:31:03]He was Indian. He was born a Hindu in Gujarat and he had been taken as a slave by the Khalis and he had grown up or at least come up in Delhi and had hence become quite powerful and now he took over as Sultan. So he was the first native Sultan of Delhi. Unfortunately not for long. He was quite unpopular and one of his most unpopular policies was banning the slaughter of cows which as you might know cows are a sacred animal to Hindus. Well, some Hindus, not all Hindus. Hinduism is a is an umbrella term for a large and diverse religious tradition. So what uh one Hindu believes or says is not necessarily true for others. But anyhow, this ban on cow slaughter among other things was quite unpopular. And so Sha was overthrown by another general of Alin named Riyadin Dougluk who was probably in his 70s at the time. He had actually pushed away quite a few Mongol attacks. So his army was quite hardened itself and so's forces were really no match for him.

[00:32:09]Interestingly, Riatin Touglak might have been of mixed um central Asian or Persian and local Punjabi descent. So that really shows how foreign Muslims were becoming integrated into Indian society at this point. Okay, just to summarize, um Sind and Punjab were first conquered by Muslims in 7-Eleven CE under Muhammad iNasim. Then the Khaznavvids conquered Punjab and established the first independent Muslim state in India, a powerful independent state in India. They were followed by the Hurids who expanded their empire further east all the way to Bengal capturing important cities like Delhi on the way. Well, Delhi wasn't really important at the time though. Then the slave Mamlugs consolidated power over these holdings and really established a foothold and uh brought in a lot of Muslims from outside who really helped the Islamization process get started.

[00:33:00]The Khalis then expanded into the Deaken and Gujarat for the first time. They actually also conquered parts of Rajasthan but Rajasthan was not really directly controlled by the Khalis pretty much at all. They took tribute from them but it wasn't like controlled controlled by the Khalis. After that we have two more chapters to go in the story of the Islamization of India before the Muls arrive. The Touglaks are the first of these two chapters. Now when Giatin Touglak took over in 1320, he was quite old at the time. As had happened with the death of Raudin Khalji, the chaos in Delhi led to the states of the Deakan refusing to pay tribute. So Dhlak sent his son Ulhan with an army to the Dean in order to harass them and get them to fall back in line. However, Ulu Khan had a different plan. Instead of simply harassing and taking tribute, he defeated the ruling Gakata dynasty and destroyed them taking over their capital Barangal which he renamed to Sultanpur.

[00:34:00]Like with other places of dynastic change, Ulhan destroyed the royal temple. He then actually built a great square uh at the location which also had a mosque and an audience hall. Again, this should not be considered an attack on Hinduism because Tulak was famously quite tolerant. He was a bit bipolar for sure but he was still famously tolerant of Hinduism. He would later patronize Hindu temples as well. In the meantime, Touglak, the senior um king went to Bengal to reassert his authority there.

[00:34:30]So when Ulukhan returned triumphantly to Delhi, he arranged for a reception to honor his father who was also returning triumphantly from Bengal. So when the old Sultan arrived in Delhi, he entered the reception area and unfortunately the canopy collapsed and the old Sultan died. Over the centuries, historians have accused Ulhan of having arranged for this unfortunate event because it was Ulukhan who took over as Sultan after death, the death of his father.

[00:34:57]Now Touglak was in his 70s and he was ruling one of the most powerful empires in the world. And I don't think it's very good if there's a 70-year-old guy ruling one of the most powerful empires in the world. it just doesn't work out.

[00:35:10]So, I understand like I'm not saying I condone it, but I get it. Sometimes you have to restore the balance of power, you know, old people, problems, all that. I I I get it. I'm just saying that I get why Ulu Khan did that. Ulhan took over as Sultan in 1325 as Muhammad Iban Tukluk. Now, Iban Tukluk is a very famous and fascinating figure. He was famously probably bipolar or something and everything that he did in his lifetime was a disaster. The man was almost supernaturally cursed. I often use the term tlesque to refer to something that I do with a good intention, but it backfires dramatically. So, that maybe tells you a lot about him, but I'm not going to talk a lot about him in this video because I want to make an a separate video for him. So, we're not going to go into a lot of detail uh about him, but let me give you some examples of the things that he messed up. He decided to issue some currency reforms in order to pay his army. That backfired. He built a new capital that backfired. He sent an army into Afghanistan to maybe conquer some parts of Central Asia or something.

[00:36:16]Thousands died. Nearly the entire army was destroyed there. And not even by another army. It just the weather and the conditions and all that was not good uh at all for an Indian army. However, Mouhammad Tul did expand his control into the Deaken and consolidated his control over that. So, he would actually be the Muslim ruler who would reach the farthest south with a military. Not actually reach the farthest south but but actually control the farthest south in India. Um because later on in the late 17th and early 18th centuries muhal emperor Alamir did go that far south but he was never able to conquer as far as Muhammad tluk managed to rule even though like wanted to he tried to he destroyed it was his obsession but despite that he wasn't able to do that in 1327 Mohammad Tugalook remodeled the old yadava city of Dvagiri and he renamed it as Dalatabad the city of the state and he moved his capital there. He didn't actually move his capital there.

[00:37:17]It's it was to serve as a sort of a co- capital. And that move was a disaster, a complete disaster. Over the centuries, the disaster has been exaggerated. I think it wasn't that big of a disaster, but it was still a pretty big disaster.

[00:37:30]It was, for example, not supposed to be, like I mentioned, it was not supposed to be the capital. He wasn't replacing Delhi. He was establishing Dal Tabad as a capital to control the southern half of the empire across the Vinda mountains because the mountains and the Narada river serve as a very formidable boundary between north and south India.

[00:37:49]So it was very difficult to rule the decken from Delhi. So establishing a power there was pretty important and he did do that. The intention was good and the plan was quite good as well but the execution left a lot to be desired. Also it's said that he moved the entire population of Delhi like forced them to move to Dalatabad uh so that quote not even a cat or a dog left standing in the city but that's also not true. Probably a quarter of the population was moved and uh much of that was the elites. So the elites were moved there and that actually led to some interesting consequences. First of all, people resented the fact they were being moved.

[00:38:22]So in this way resentment across the empire rose up quite a bit but also it bolsters dalatabad as a uh primary Muslim city in the dean which would help later Islamization of the dean which we'll come back to in a minute. Anyhow, because of all this resentment uh and all these problems with failed policies, um Touglak's empire began to teeter and uh it started to decline with vassels starting to walk away and Touglook himself died in 1351 and in the following decades the empire just pretty much collapsed. Didn't like fully actually collapse but its control vanished almost completely. Bengal walked away as the Bengal Sultenate.

[00:39:03]Gujarat walked away as the Gujarat Sultenate and other regional dynasties appeared as well. But Dalatabad played a very interesting role like I mentioned it played a role in the Islamization of India and that was because there was a lot of elites in Dalatabad and they became familiar with the Deken. So when Togal's empire failed, people from here established their own independent dynasties. And the most important of these dynasties was founded by a man named Al-Bin Bahman Sha who founded the Bahami Sultanate and he was a vassel of Muhammad Iban Touglook. He he or his people were at least moved in that original move as well. So in that way he was able to consolidate some power in the decade. In the following years, we also saw the rise of the Hindu Vijayagar Empire, that probably would have happened anyway. But if Tulak hadn't moved the capital to Dalatabad and moved his whole elite class there, um it's likely that there would have been no Bahami Sultanate. And over the following centuries, for about two centuries, the Bahamin Sultanate helped consolidate Muslim control in the Dean and they served as a counterweight to the Vijayagar Empire. And so I think that if the whole Talabad fiasco hadn't happened, there would have been no Muslim state in the Deaken. Muslim conquests in the Deaken would have been just rolled back and um they would never have consolidated control over the Decan. So that is one thing that uh Dal Tabad helped in doing. Now the break up of Touglook's empire meant that for the first time in Indian history, there was a bunch of powerful independent Muslim sultenates on the Indian subcontinent.

[00:40:37]Like I mentioned, there was one in Bengal, there was one in Gujarat, and on top of that, there was something appearing in Kashmir as well in the 1320s. But that's not a story for this video. I have a separate video about that. These independent states were able to consolidate Islam in their territories much better than anybody from Delhi could have been able to. Um, for example, nobody from Delhi could have been able to control Bengal in the way that somebody living in Bengal would have been able to. And so they were able to consolidate control in these regions as well. Now the last chapter in this history of Islamic India before the rise of the Mughals is the invasion of Dimmoud Balain. Dimmutain like I mentioned before was an ancestor of Babur himself. So he was an ancestor of the Mughals. He rose up in Central Asia in the 1360s and he took over Central Asia, Samarand, Persia, parts of West Asia. He would even go as far as Ankara in Turkey where he would defeat the Ottoman Empire. In 1398, he invaded India and he captured the city of Delhi which was at the time being ruled by Tulak but it was obviously nothing compared to what it had been at its peak. Timmur sacked the city of Delhi.

[00:41:46]He destroyed the city of Delhi and he returned with a lot of loot and left behind a lot of chaos. So after Tammur a scramble for power began which um led to all these regional dynasties trying to hold on to and gain more power within India. This started the so-called long 15th century which is a period between um 1398 and 1526 when um Babur takes over. Again there were a bunch of localized dynasties and they were able to consolidate power much better than Delhi Sultanate could ever have in these far-flung regions. Now the indirect consequences of Timur's invasion are immeasurable. The things that his invasion did to India, I I don't know if I can fit it in this video or any other video because there were a lot of things that his invasion did because like I said that his invasion jump started the long 15th century and everything that happened long 15th century can to some extent be credited to Timur. Fun fact, you can directly link Timur's invasion of Delhi to Shakespeare. Timur was mythologized in a play by a playwright named uh Christopher Marlo who was an inspiration for Shakespeare. So anyhow we're only going to talk about two consequences of his invasion of India.

[00:43:05]First because of his invasions in general like in central Asia and Persia and all that a lot of Muslim refugees again escaped to India. One interesting example of a refugee is a man named Sayyad Ali Amdani who came to the valley of Kashmir. Kashmir is a remote valley.

[00:43:21]It is surrounded by mountains. So, it's quite impenetrable. And so far, Muslims hadn't really penetrated into it. But with say Ali Hamdani and his son, a Sufi tradition was established in Kashmir, which led to Kashmir being one of the most Muslim areas in all of India. Like I mentioned, I have a video about that.

[00:43:38]Secondly, because of the devastation that Timmur brought to India and the chaos that ensued after it, there was a lot of spiritual crisis within people.

[00:43:47]You can see evidence of that within the poetry and the stories that were written around the time. So the people were forced to turn to spiritual leaders Allah Sufis. So a lot of people started communicating with the Sufis and the Sufis became much more influential around this time as well. So they also helped bridge the gap between Islam and Hinduism allowing for many Hindus to convert to Islam. In the following decades, Delhi would be ruled first by the Seyad dynasty and then by the Loi dynasty who would be defeated by one of Thimur's uh descendants like I mentioned before, Babur, which is what we're commemorating today. It's not April 21st actually. It's it's some days after that. Uh but still it's April 21st, 1526 is when um the Mughal Empire was established. Synind, Bengal, Gujarat, Kashmir, Rajasthan and the Deakan all would fall to the Mughals and the Mughal Empire would hit its peak under Emperor Arange Alamir right before his death in around 1707 CE. Now let's talk a bit about how Islam actually spread to India to its people. Well, it was the Sufis pretty much that's pretty much it.

[00:44:57]There's there's not much else. The Sufis established networks of Khanas or Sufi lodges I guess maybe you can call them uh across India which began to provide spiritual services as well as some physical services as well. For example, they were shelters for travelers and they provided food to the poor at times.

[00:45:15]The biggest names in terms of Sufi brotherhoods are the Kadiri, the Chishi, the Nakbandi and the Sarvi. The Chishi order specifically stands out because while it was not founded in India, it was very much India coded and it it was very much seen by the locals and even today seen by people as an Indian order more so than any else I think and it wrapped itself up in a version of Islam that was not offensive to Hindus at all.

[00:45:44]It was a very simplified version of Islam but it was like mystic and all these things. So um Hindus would would not would not be offended by it. Uh for example, the Hindus have a tradition of pajan which is a musical expression of the veneration of their gods. And one of the early Chishis Aosro is credited with having developed the Kavali which is also a musical expression of the veneration of Muslim figures such as Allah and Prophet Muhammad and some of his companions and family members. Now these are not the same in terms of like musical tropes and stuff. Some person of musical background would probably tell you a bit better than that. But as far as religious value goes, these were quite similar. So again, this is another tool that was used by the Sufis to help Hindus cross into Islam. Now was a student of Shehikh Misadin Aliyia. Sheh Namadin Aliyia lived from 1238 to around 1325. So he was born just after the death of Il Tuttish and he died weeks into the sultenate of Muhammad ibn Tulok. So that's a pretty long life. He sent his followers to far-flung regions of India from Delhi where they would establish their own networks and try to convert people there. Not actually try they I wouldn't say that they were actually like trying to convert people.

[00:47:06]They were just providing spiritual services that helped people convert. In that way his teachings also got localized because people from these far-flung regions would come to Delhi to learn from Nisamuin Alia and they would go back and and teach that to the locals. One of the most famous examples of this is a Bengali student of his named Osman Sarajin who came to him in Delhi and then he went back and he taught the locals in their own languages. Additionally, some of Aliyah's uh students became quite influential. The affforementioned Amir Kosuro for example is a very famous poet and uh in addition to that he was in the court of Aludin Khalji. So in that way these Sufis were influential and associated to courts. Another uh famous student of um of Alia was Zadin Bi who was a historian. He was also associated with the Delhi court. So in that way this established a two-way relationship between the Sufis and the Delhi court.

[00:48:00]The Sufis legitimized the Delhi sultans and and provided them a connection to the Indian population whereas the Delhi sultans patronized them and allowed them to expand their network. So together they formed a state and religious collaboration of sorts. As a result in the 19th century when the British took over around 25% of the population in India was Muslim. Today if you count both um Pakistan and Bangladesh and then India uh about 30% of the population is Muslim. So that was pretty much a primer of Islamic states in India before the mogul came around. There's a lot more that I want to talk about in this video.

[00:48:38]A lot more that I had to cut out but I am leaving you with a promise of more detailed videos about the Delhi Sultanate. See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon on the screen right now. You can see the names and tiers of the patrons.

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