Tradition · religion · India
Islam
It reached the subcontinent three separate ways and the differences still show. Arab traders were on the Malabar coast within a generation of the Prophet, and Kerala's mosques are built in local timber with tiled roofs; conquest came later from the north-west, through Sindh in 711 and the Ghurids from 1192; and the Sufi orders — Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri, Naqshbandi — did the work of settlement, which is why the subcontinent's Islam is a landscape of dargahs rather than only of mosques.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kerala is claimed as the oldest mosque in the subcontinent and was built on land granted by a Hindu ruler, some five centuries before any Muslim army reached the south.
Connections (5)
- Shared site withHinduism
The interesting thing about these two in the subcontinent is how many places refuse to be assigned to either. Hindus are a large share of the pilgrims at Ajmer Sharīf; Shirdi's Sai Baba is claimed by both and settled by neither; Bābā Budangiri is one cave held simultaneously to be Dattātreya's seat and a Sufi saint's tomb; at Odero Lal a single compound is temple and mosque with Muslim keepers and mostly Hindu pilgrims. None of this is syncretism as a programme — it is what happened where the two lived adjacent for a thousand years.
- Sacred transplantCheraman Juma Masjid, Kodungallur
Islam reached the subcontinent by sea before it came by land, and the difference shows in the buildings. The Cheraman Juma Masjid at Kodungallur is claimed as the oldest mosque here, built on land granted by a Hindu ruler within a generation or so of the Prophet, and built in Kerala timber with a tiled roof and no dome or minaret at all. Five centuries before an army reached the south, the religion arrived as a trading community and was housed like one.
- Craft tradition ofQawwālī
Conquest brought rulers; the Sufi orders brought a religion. The Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri and Naqshbandi silsilas settled the subcontinent's Islam, and qawwālī is how they did it — sung at the dargah in Hindavi and Braj as well as Persian, at shrines open to everyone, to music the orthodox repeatedly tried to ban. That is why the subcontinent's Islamic landscape is a map of tombs rather than only of mosques, and why the shrines have Hindu pilgrims.
- CampaignBarbarikon / Banbhore
The land route began at the Indus mouth. Muhammad bin Qasim took Debal in 711 — the port at Banbhore, where a mosque of that date has been excavated beside the Hindu and Buddhist remains — and Sindh became an Umayyad province while the rest of the subcontinent was untouched. It stopped there for three centuries. Banbhore is therefore both the oldest mosque site in the subcontinent and one of its most layered, which is the whole history in one mound.
- Alternative toSikhism
Nanak's most quoted line is a refusal of both labels — there is no Hindu, there is no Musalman — and his first journeys went to Mecca and Baghdad as readily as to Hardwar. What followed was not coexistence: Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur were executed under Mughal authority, and the Khalsa was instituted in 1699 as a response. The tradition holds a theology built partly from Sufi vocabulary and a history of martyrdom at Muslim hands, and does not reconcile them.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Islam in India”. Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age (2019); Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.
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