Chapter 22: Encounter with Islam and Medieval Reconfiguration (c. 1000–1700 CE)

1. Early contact: Sindh and the Malabar coast

Muslim contact with the subcontinent predates the Delhi Sultanate by half a millennium. Arab traders were active along the Malabar and Gujarat coasts from at least the 7th century, and the first sustained Muslim political presence arrived with Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of Sindh in 712 CE, a regional Umayyad province that remained politically distinct from, and considerably earlier than, the later Turkic and Afghan conquests of the Gangetic heartland. André Wink's multi-volume Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (1990–2004) is the standard scholarly account of this longer, more gradual process of contact, trade, and conquest, which unfolded across the Indian Ocean world well before it became a story centered on Delhi.

From the 11th century onward, and especially following the Delhi Sultanate (1206) and later the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), the subcontinent saw sustained political rule by Muslim dynasties, producing a complex history including both destructive episodes — the sacking of major temples such as Somnath (1026) and others during various periods of conquest and iconoclasm — and long periods of administrative accommodation, cultural exchange, and syncretism, particularly visible in the Bhakti-Sufi devotional overlap described in Chapter 20, in composite architectural and artistic styles, and in the general policy of religious toleration practiced by the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), which stood in contrast to more restrictive policies under later rulers such as Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) (Eaton, 2000, ed., Essays on Islam and Indian History, and Truschke, 2017, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, are recent academic treatments that explicitly engage the historiographical debates over this period). This period is genuinely contested territory in modern Indian historiography and politics; both the conflict and the coexistence dimensions are well documented, and neither should be erased from the historical picture.

2. The Delhi Sultanate: five dynasties

The Delhi Sultanate was not a single continuous dynasty but a succession of five: the Mamluk or "Slave" dynasty (1206–1290), the Khalji (1290–1320), the Tughlaq (1320–1414), the Sayyid (1414–1451), and the Lodi (1451–1526), the last an Afghan Pashtun dynasty eventually overthrown by Babur at the First Battle of Panipat, which opened the Mughal period. Political fragmentation and frequent succession crises meant that religious policy varied considerably from ruler to ruler and region to region even within a single dynasty, which is one reason historians resist treating "the Sultanate" as though it pursued one uniform policy toward its Sanatan Dharma subjects across three centuries.

3. Temple desecration in historiographical context

Richard Eaton's influential essay "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States" (in Eaton, 2000) undertook a systematic count of documented instances of temple destruction across the entire Sultanate and Mughal period, arriving at roughly eighty authenticated cases between 1192 and 1729 — a real and serious number, but a small fraction of the temples built, patronized, and endowed with land grants by Muslim rulers across the same five centuries, including by some of the same rulers responsible for destructions elsewhere. Eaton's data further suggests that temple destruction correlated closely with specific political circumstances — the temple as a symbol of a defeated rival king's sovereignty, or retaliation for a local rebellion — rather than functioning as a blanket, continuously pursued policy of religious iconoclasm. This reframing does not erase the destructions or the trauma they caused, but it does complicate any simple narrative in either direction, and it is precisely the kind of evidence-based, source-critical history this book tries to present rather than adjudicate from outside.

4. Akbar and the Ibadat Khana

Akbar's reign is the period's clearest case of sustained state-level religious pluralism. He abolished the jizya, the tax historically levied on non-Muslim subjects, in 1564; built the Ibadat Khana ("House of Worship") at his new capital, Fatehpur Sikri, where he convened debates among Muslim, Sanatan Dharma, Jain, Zoroastrian, and eventually Jesuit Christian representatives; commissioned Persian translations of Sanskrit epics, including the Mahabharata as the Razmnama; and married into Rajput royal houses, integrating Sanatan Dharma nobility directly into Mughal administration. In 1582 he promulgated Din-i-Ilahi, a small, syncretic court order drawing on multiple traditions that never became a mass religion but stands as a striking historical artifact of his ecumenical instincts. J. F. Richards's The Mughal Empire (1993), part of the New Cambridge History of India, remains a standard scholarly account of these policies and their administrative context.

5. Aurangzeb and contested memory

Aurangzeb's reign presents the sharpest historiographical contrast. He reimposed the jizya in 1679 and issued orders resulting in well-documented temple destructions, including at Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi (1669) and the Keshava Deo temple at Mathura (1670), both traditionally associated with sites sacred to Shiva and Krishna respectively. At the same time, contemporary court records show continued land grants to certain other temples and Sanatan Dharma religious institutions during his reign, and Sanatan Dharma officials continued to serve at high levels of Mughal administration throughout. Audrey Truschke's Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (2017) is the most prominent recent academic attempt to hold both sets of facts together against what she argues are simplified, politically motivated popular narratives on multiple sides; her conclusions remain actively debated among both historians and the wider public, and readers should understand that this is a live area of scholarly and political contestation rather than settled history.

6. A shared cultural inheritance

Alongside conflict and its documentation, this five-century encounter produced an enduring composite culture: Indo-Islamic architecture blending Persian, Central Asian, and Indic forms, from Fatehpur Sikri to the later Taj Mahal; the emergence of Urdu as a literary language fusing Persian, Arabic, and vernacular Hindustani vocabulary; the qawwali devotional music tradition performed at Sufi shrines that continues to draw both Muslim and Sanatan Dharma devotees; and the Bhakti-Sufi convergence detailed in Chapter 20, in which the boundary between the two religious idioms was, for many ordinary devotees at Sufi dargahs, never as sharp as later political narratives would suggest. Holding the conflict and the convergence together, without letting either erase the other, is the central historiographical challenge of this period — and one this book returns to directly in Chapter 23's treatment of the colonial encounter that followed.

4. Interaction Rather Than a Single Story of Conflict

The encounter between Sanatan Dharma traditions and Islam after the establishment of Muslim-ruled states in parts of South Asia cannot be reduced either to an uninterrupted history of religious harmony or to a continuous civilizational war. Political conquest, taxation, patronage, warfare, migration, trade, Sufi institutions, temple networks, vernacular literature, court culture, and everyday exchange all operated simultaneously. Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s study of the Deccan, for example, examines temples through architectural and epigraphic evidence and explicitly moves beyond a simple Sanatan Dharma-versus-Muslim model. Their research shows that conquerors, administrators, local elites, and religious institutions interacted with temples in different ways at different moments, including destruction, appropriation, political use, architectural reuse, and accommodation.

This distinction matters because temples were not merely places of private devotion. Major temples could possess land, wealth, political connections, and symbolic importance. Consequently, an attack on a temple could have a political meaning as well as a religious one, while restoration or patronage could communicate legitimacy. A ruler’s relationship with a temple therefore needs to be interpreted within the political circumstances of the particular kingdom rather than generalized across centuries or dynasties. Evidence for temple desecration is real in some historical contexts, but the frequency, motives, and consequences must be reconstructed from specific records.

The encounter also transformed Sanatan Dharma traditions internally. Persian became an important language of administration and high culture in many regions, while Sanskrit continued to function as a major transregional intellectual language. Vernacular literary traditions developed in interaction with both. Eaton's formulation of overlapping Sanskritic and Persianate cultural worlds is useful because it draws attention to cultural circulation rather than assuming that religious identity determined every aspect of political or intellectual life.

At the level of religious practice, devotional traditions could develop vocabularies that crossed social and linguistic boundaries. Sufi and bhakti traditions should not simply be declared identical, because their doctrines, institutions, and historical genealogies differ. Nevertheless, shared environments could produce analogous devotional forms, vernacular poetic exchanges, pilgrimage relationships, and overlapping sacred geographies. Historians must distinguish demonstrable influence from parallel development. Similarity is a reason to investigate a connection, not proof of direct borrowing.

For Sanatan Dharma, the medieval period was therefore not merely an age of external pressure. It was also a period of internal diversification, new regional literary cultures, institutional adaptation, temple rebuilding, philosophical debate, and changing patterns of patronage. The historical record is strongest when these developments are examined together. Such an approach preserves the reality of violence and coercion where evidence demonstrates them while also recognizing the extensive everyday interaction that cannot be explained by a binary conflict model.

5. Religious Institutions Under Changing Political Regimes

Political change affected religious institutions through patronage, taxation, landholding, pilgrimage security, appointments, and access to urban and rural resources. These mechanisms could produce both disruption and adaptation. A temple might lose a patron but gain another; a pilgrimage route might shift; a shrine could be rebuilt; or a local religious institution might survive through community support rather than royal sponsorship. Consequently, political change should not be equated automatically with religious disappearance.

The medieval period also witnessed extensive movement of people and ideas. Merchants, soldiers, administrators, poets, scholars, Sufis, monks, and pilgrims crossed political boundaries. Persianate court culture and Sanskrit intellectual culture coexisted and sometimes interacted, while vernacular languages became increasingly important vehicles for religious expression. Richard Eaton's account of the Persianate age explicitly challenges interpretations that organize the entire period around Sanatan Dharma-Muslim relations alone, instead emphasizing overlapping cultural worlds.

Temple evidence illustrates the value of local case studies. Eaton and Wagoner's research on the Deccan uses architectural and epigraphic evidence to investigate how Muslim rulers and officials interacted with Sanatan Dharma temples after conquest. Their conclusions show why generalized statements about “the Muslim treatment of temples” are inadequate: political motives, local circumstances, architectural reuse, patronage, and symbolic politics varied considerably.

For readers studying Sanatan Dharma, this period is therefore best understood as one of institutional resilience and transformation under changing political conditions. Religious traditions could preserve inherited rituals while changing language, patronage, geography, and organizational forms. The evidence also shows that religious communities were historical actors, not passive objects of imperial policy.

6. Evidence, Terminology, and Responsible Interpretation

Several methodological principles help prevent overstatement. First, terminology must be historically situated. Words such as “Sanatan Dharma,” “sect,” “folk,” “tribal,” “orthodox,” “reform,” and “modern” have different meanings in different contexts. Applying a contemporary category to a much earlier community can create the illusion of continuity where the evidence actually shows a change in identity or institution. Second, religious traditions should not be represented solely through elite texts. Archaeology, inscriptions, regional literature, temple records, biographies, oral traditions, and ethnographic research can reveal dimensions of religious life that normative Sanskrit texts do not record.

Third, similarities should be described cautiously. A shared ritual form, deity name, symbol, or philosophical idea may result from direct borrowing, common inheritance, independent development, or later reinterpretation. Establishing influence requires chronological plausibility and some evidence of transmission. This is particularly important when discussing connections between local traditions and pan-Indian deities, between Sanatan Dharma and Islamic traditions, or between ancient and modern institutions.

Finally, uncertainty should be treated as information rather than a weakness. A historical account becomes more trustworthy when it tells readers what is known, what is probable, what is disputed, and what belongs primarily to sacred tradition. The purpose of a research-oriented portal is not to eliminate religious meaning but to keep different kinds of claims intelligible. Where the evidence cannot establish a precise conclusion, the chapter should say so explicitly. That standard will be applied consistently throughout the remaining chapters.

Regional differences in encounter

The medieval encounter varied sharply across regions. In Kashmir, Punjab, Bengal, the Deccan, Gujarat and the Gangetic plain, political regimes, trade networks and local communities created different patterns of interaction. A single chronology of “Hindu-Muslim relations” therefore conceals more than it reveals. Local archives, vernacular literature, architecture and shrine traditions often provide a more precise picture.

Sufi shrines and Hindu pilgrimage centers sometimes existed within shared social environments, while other sites became symbols of political conflict. Shared participation should not be exaggerated into doctrinal agreement, and conflict should not be treated as the whole history. Both coexist within the record.

The philosophical lesson is that encounter can produce translation without synthesis. Communities can borrow artistic forms, vocabulary or institutional practices while maintaining different understandings of God, scripture and salvation. This is a useful model for studying all interreligious contact.