ABSTRACT
The independent Muslim chiefs, who succeeded to its fragments, left little permanent mark on the country, and the Arab conquest has been described by Stanley Lane-Poole as ‘an episode in the history of India and Islam, a triumph without results’. By the eighth century the territory between Arabia and Sindh had come under Muslim rule, and in a.d. 712 Muhammad bin Qasim launched the Muslim attack on Sindh. The reign of Queen Elizabeth of England a new strain of Muslim invaders, who in the fullness of time would prove to be endowed with greater political capacity than their predecessors, appeared in India. A policy obviously involved tolerance and respect for Hindu ideas, but, even apart from political necessity, Akbar’s enquiring and rational mind was naturally antagonistic to the dogmatism of orthodox Muslim teachers. Many of the most important Hindu nobles became, in the words of a Muslim chronicler, ‘props and ornaments of the throne’.
