ABSTRACT
Islam evolved in Arabia but the largest number of its followers resides in South Asia, which consists of eight nations, namely Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Islam's expansion outside the Arabian Peninsula is owed to diverse factors, including a political vacuum resulting from the Perso-Byzantine wars, desire for a more stable and predictable authority, especially from the viewpoint of merchants and farmers, and the spread of syncretic and egalitarian traditions such as Sufism. While revivalism has been a major Muslim response since the advent of the British Raj in India, some élite strove to inculcate a greater receptivity towards modernity among fellow Indian Muslims. A new and equally ambivalent relationship between religion and politics has emerged, in which forces of history, economy and demography, often in conjunction with interstate and ideological schisms, have occasioned a volatile phase in the history of South Asia.
