RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISMArab rulers in IndiaThe sultanate of Delhi was not the first Islamic state on Indian soil. In 711
at a time when the Arabs captured Gibraltar and started their conquest of
Spain and a year after Bokhara in Central Asia had succumbed to Islamic
conquerors, an Arab conqueror had also established a bridgehead in Sind
at the mouth of the Indus. This conquest of Sind had started with an
insignificant episode: a ship in which the king of Sri Lanka had sent
Muslim orphans to the governor of Iraq had been captured by pirates;
when the raja of Sind refused to punish those pirates the governor of Iraq
launched several punitive expeditions against him until finally the
governor’s son-in-law, Muhammad Ibn Qasim, conquered most of
southern Sind. In this campaign the governor of Iraq had enjoyed the full
support of the caliph, but when a new caliph ascended the throne he
recalled Ibn Qasim and had him executed. This did not, however, put an
end to the policy of conquest: in 725 other Arab commanders successfully
extended their campaigns into Kathiawar and Gujarat as far as southern
Rajasthan. The valiant Arabs seemed to be poised for a rapid annexation
of large parts of India, just as they had swept across all of Western Asia.
But in this period the rulers of India still proved a match for the Islamic
conquerors. Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas stopped their progress in western India
and finally the Gurjara Pratiharas prevented their conquest of northern India. As
we have seen earlier, the Muslim traveller Mas’udi, who was in India around 915,
reported on the great number of troops which the Gurjara Pratiharas had
earmarked especially for the defence against the Arabs. Sulayman, another Muslim
historian, listed the Rashtrakutas along with the caliph, the emperor of China and
the emperor of ‘Rum’ (the Byzantine emperor of the Rome of the East,
Constantinople) as the four mightiest rulers of the world.
Initially Sind and the Panjab remained under the direct control of the
caliph, who appointed the various governors himself. This direct control
ended in 871, when Arab princes in Mansura (Sind) and in Multan (the
Panjab) established independent dynasties of their own. These rulers seem
to have followed a policy of peaceful coexistence with the Hindu
population. It is said that the rulers of Multan even carefully protected the
temple of the sun god at Multan in order that they might threaten the
Gurjara Pratiharas with its destruction if they were attacked.
The destructive campaigns of Mahmud of GhazniIn the year 1000 this more or less peaceful balance of power in northern
India was shattered when Mahmud of Ghazni waged a war of destruction
and plunder against India. From that date until 1025 he launched a total of
seventeen campaigns of this sort and captured places as far distant as
Saurashtra of Gujarat and the capital of the Gurjara Pratiharas, Kanauj.