Earliest Muslim Invasion in the Sind

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India’s west coast was acquainted with Arabs and other western Asians as part of the commercial expansion of the early medieval period, when a number of emporia were established in India.

In the eighth century, another sort of Arab presence appeared in the form of a Muslim Army that conquered Sind. Between 711 and 725 CE, parts of the Sind, the western Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujurat were occupied by Iraqi-Arab soldiers whose expansion was curtailed by the Rajas of the Deccan and Gangetic plain. In this ancient heartland of the Indus civilisation, and in parts of the Punjab to the east, India’s Islamic period might have begun then, rather then in 1200 CE, but for the resistance shown to the invaders by the kings of Kanauj. Small advances were made from the Sind into neighbouring Gujarat and the Kathiawar peninsular, where minor sultanates were established. These soon cut themselves of from Baghdad, and the sultans lived in peace with other rulers of the Sind and western Punjab.

For the time being, Islamic penetration of the subcontinent was concluded; the restless energies of certain Muslim leaders turned northward into Central Asia. And began the conversion of the Turkic pastoralists. Within its sphere of control in western India, the Arab Islamic hegemony was governed form Baghdad by the Abbasid caliphate until the late ninth century when Arab garrisons in India and elsewhere threw off the Caliphal control and began to rule as independent sultans.

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