destroying many of its grandest cities. This made
India a new center for Islamic learning and the
pursuit of Sufism. It was at this time that the
chishti sUFi order was founded in India, with
generous support from the Delhi Sultanate.
In southern India, Islam arrived with Arab
traders from southern Arabia rather than Turkic
and Persian warriors from Afghanistan and Cen-
tral Asia. They established trading outposts along
the Konkan (modern Karnataka) and Malabar
(modern Kerala) coasts as part of the wider Indian
Ocean trading system, perhaps as early as the
eighth century. These merchants received guaran-
tees of security from local Hindu rulers and inter-
married with the native population, giving rise to
the indigenous Mappila people. Later histories of
this era even suggest that they were able to con-
vert one of the local rulers and obtain permission
from him to build the first mosque in Malabar, the
Cheraman Juma Masjid, which resembled a south
Indian Hindu temple in its design. For centuries,
the Mappila have maintained connections with
their Arabian roots, many of them going to work
in the Persian Gulf region. The vitality of these
people is reflected in the fact that they continue
to grow in number, constituting one of the largest
Muslim populations by ratio to non-Muslims in
India today.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Delhi
Sultanate was ruling all of northern India from the
Punjab to the mouth of the Ganges in Bengal. It
then extended its reach southward into the Dec-
can Plateau. Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq (r.
1325–51) temporarily (1313–23) moved the capi-
tal 700 miles southward from Delhi to Daulatabad
(formerly known as Devagiri) to better integrate
the region under his rule and to avoid the Mongol
threat from the northwest. By the end of his reign,
Muslim rule had extended to the banks of the
Kaveri River deep in southern India. The sultanate
was unable to maintain centralized rule over this
vast area for long. Regional kingdoms emerged
throughout India, including the Hindu kingdom
of Vijayanagar in the south, which emulated many
of the political and cultural attributes of the Mus-
lim court. There were even Shii dynasties in the
central Deccan region created by Persian warrior
immigrants. The Deccan thus became an area of
dynamic cultural interaction and sociocultural
genesis, mixing not only Muslim and Hindu but
also Turkic and Persian with Dravidian and Arab
influence from the Konkan and Malabar coastal
areas.
The next configuration of Muslim power in
India was that of the mUghal dynasty, which
displaced the remnants of the Delhi Sultanate in
the early 16th century and ruled until the British
military eradicated it in the aftermath of the 1857
rebellion. The Mughals, a family of rulers claim-
ing descent from the Mongol conquerors Genghis
Khan (d. 1227) and tamerlane (d. 1405), built
upon the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate and
created a highly centralized bureaucratic state that
at its height in the late 1600s controlled much of
what now encompasses the modern nation-states
of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. From the
reign of akbar (r. 1556–1605) to that of his great
grandson aUrangzeb (r. 1657–1707), the Mughal
era was one of great cultural florescence and
economic prosperity. The capital cities of Delhi,
Agra, and Lahore were embellished with breath-
taking palaces, garden tombs, and mosqUes, the
foremost of which was the Taj Mahal, a tomb built
by Shah Jahan (r. 1627–66) for Mumtaz Mahal
(d. 1631), his beloved wife. Mughal artists pro-
duced magnificently illustrated epics and dynastic
histories. Akbar even commissioned illustrated
Persian translations of the Hindu sacred epics the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mughals
also promoted the cultivation of new agricultural
lands in Punjab and Bengal, a development that
led to the conversion of the populations of those
areas to Islam, not by force but through everyday
interactions with Muslim judges and holy men at
their mosques and shrines. Indeed, as Richard M.
Eaton has noted, there was an inverse relation-
ship between conversion to Islam and political
power. The areas with the largest proportionsIndia 353 J