Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

It is an amazing coincidence that Muslim contact with India and the West began in the same year—711 CE. It was in this year that Muhammad bin Qasim’s probe into India took place. He was a young general in the Umayyad’s army. Another general with the Caliphate, Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the narrow strip of ocean between Morocco and the tip of Spain. He anchored by the giant rock which he called Jabal al Tariq (the Rock of Tariq). The British renamed it Gibraltar. North of Gibraltar, through Spain and Portugal, the entire Iberian Peninsula came under Muslim rule. This lasted nearly 800 years until Columbus set sail for the New World in 1492. During the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, Andalusia’s capital, Cordoba, became the biggest and ‘most dazzling city in Western Europe’ in the tenth century, when London and Paris were small towns. Jewish, Muslim and Christian philosophers met in the city square. It became a renowned intellectual centre. It had more hamams (steam baths) for its population of about 200,000 than even some of the later and bigger Ottoman cities. This, at a time, when there was a taboo on bathing in Europe. Composer Mozart had died at thirty-six because of this taboo. At the other end, Muhammad bin Qasim’s probe which landed him in Sindh signalled the Arab world’s continued interest in India. Before Islam, there had been thousands of years of trade relations between the two, punctuated by acts of piracy, to loot and to control the shipping lanes. Qasim’s invasi...