INTRODUCTION 9action to the controversy that ensued after Danish newspapers pub-
lished cartoons of Muhammad. Another cause for invocations of vio-
lence against women as the originary moment for Islam in India was
the incarceration of Aafia Siddiqui-a professional chemist who was
eventually convicted of conspiring with al-Qaeda. "I wish that this na-
tion had a Muhammad bin Qasim who could hear the screams of Aafia
Siddiqui, and help her. We need him and his army," wrote javed
Chaudhry, a heavily syndicated Urdu columnist, in the Daily Jang in
December 2008.^14 Another commentator raised the specter of a "Mu-
hammad bin Qasim of the pen" who is needed to mobilize support
for this "daughter of Islam."^15 The event described (the rape of a
Muslim woman taken prisoner) is part of the origins narrative. It is
presented as a particular genesis for political action within a coherent
moral narrative taken from Chachnama.^16 Clearly these many invo-
cations of a past glory are an attempt to address a present historical
trauma.17 What interests me is the strength and tensile nature of this
particular event from all historical pasts available to Muslims in
South Asia.
Chachnama constituted as an origins narrative in British colonial
histories, was then examined by Indian nationalists, and was subse-
quently appropriated by the Pakistani nation-state to denote the true
account of Islam's arrival in India. It has widely been understood to
contain the story of the conquest of India and also to provide a ratio-
nale for a community or a state.
Rereading Chachnama
From colonial historians came the dominant framework for inter-
preting Chachnama: first, that its primary value was as a source for
the eighth-century accounts of Muhammad bin Qasim because it was
a translation of an earlier, no longer extant Arabic history; and second,
that anything that could not be mined for historical facts was romantic
gibberish clptting the text. These assumptions led the nationalist his-
torians to treat Chachnama as a carrier text (it carries within it an older,
more reliable text) which had to be carefully stripped bare and reassem-
bled into a "historically accurate" narrative. Such an approach removed
any need to read the text as a whole, examine the moral universe