ABSTRACT
It is a well-known fact that since the inception of Islam the concept ummah (Muslim brotherhood or community) has played a unique role in uniting the Muslims all over the world under a single Islamic umbrella. In South Asia, Islam became known when Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim took the kingdom of Multan (Punjab, India) in AD 711. However, the expansion of Islam took place only after 1192 when Mu’izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, also known as MuḤammad Ghūrī, defeated the emperor of India, Prithviraj Chauhan. Soon afterwards followed a wave of Islamic conversion of Hindus. Though the new converts followed Islam seriously, they could not isolate themselves from the innate Hindu culture and traditional practices of their forefathers. In name they were Muslims, but in their traditional practices they were not different from their cognate Hindus. More in particular, although Islam does not believe in a caste system, the Indian Muslim community became a caste society. Indian Muslims used caste names no different from the Hindu caste names. In this way, the affirmation of their new Muslim identity was built on the prevailing traditions. After all, the Indian Muslims remained in the same villages, continued their same professions, and maintained the same social interactions with the neighbouring Hindus. Adherents of both religious communities were part of the same kinship group and these kinship groups were a source of pride in village life. The new converts became agents of change in creating a Hindu-Muslim synthesis in arts, architecture, language, administration, diet system, and other fields.1 Indian Islam also absorbed various groups of Muslims who came to India as immigrants and were known as Turkish, Iraqi, Persian, and Afghan Muslims, but the civilization of India moulded them into a single group under the label of Indian 352Muslims. In other words, intercultural discourse, social commitment, and the feeling of belongingness to the region (mulk) of India became characteristics of the Indian Muslims. They were first Indian and then Muslim in their identities. The same situation prevailed in many other countries which were far away from the Arab world and all these countries gradually developed the same type of identities where their communicational language, in which they could laugh and weep, also became the language of their Muslim identity.
