A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORY 49Any of the descendants from Muhammad Sam Ghur in the twelfth
century to Zahiruddin Bahar in the sixteenth to Khan-e Arzu in the
eighteenth have been rendered as outsiders. Thusly articulated, Muslim
foreignness is also ever-present in scholarly understandings, which is
predicated on the narratives of arrivals and origins across borders and
boundaries that took shape along contemporary geographies. This work
attempts to untangle such representations.
It is thus important to re-think geography for Muslim history in
India. It is important to underline the interconnected nature of the city
states in northwest and southwest India. They must be seen as dynamic
lived spaces connected to other city states in Afghanistan or Central
Asia and not merely as nodes in a military conquest. It is imperative
to resist a distillation of experience into military events, for it fore-
closes meaning in the texts that emerged from these lived spaces.
Through the prism of conquest, the histories of Muslim polities are
little more than collections of names and occurrences in the conquered
past of India.
Left unremarked are the social and cultural life during that time.
Most generically, the very words "Muslim" and "Islam" were unques-
tioned categories although the words were the grounds for theological
and political debate during the early periods of Muslim presence in
India. The result is that a medieval author's identity is subsumed by
his place of birth or putative sect and racial identification, even though
those certainties are generally not given and are certainly not in the
archive. For instance, though Juzjani's family was based in Lahore for
two generations, yet he is considered as an outsider to Delhi.^2
I want to situate the early thirteenth-century urban and political
centers of the northwest (Samarkand, Bukhara, Ghazna, Ghur, Kabul,
Lahore, Multan) and of the southwest (Multan, Uch, Diu, Muscat). The
farthest distance between these nodes of trade and power is roughly
300 miles, with multiple networks connecting one node to another.
Since the tenth century, these cities had constituted a remarkably vi-
brant politic:ltl. and mercantile life and were tied to hundreds of smaller
economies.
Within this cosmopolis, Uch and Multan (which lies· 7q 'wiles \ l\ r \
northeast of Uch) need particular attention. Dating to the turn of the
millennium, the histories of these cities are generally narrated as his-
tories of conquest.^3 Multan and Uch were settlements of considerable