The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c20.50

c20.50

Evidences suggest that the Hindu, at least in the capital and its neighbourhood, suffered from no great disability; His wealth would indeed give him high social prestige. Matrimonial relations apart¹, the Muslim eventually was bound to get over his exclusiveness and the latter half of the century saw him adopting some of the Hindu's ways. Among the city population the social intercourse must have been fairly close. Amir Khusrau, perhaps, illustrates the new Muslim attitude when he takes pride in his being a born Hindui and declares in no ambiguous terms the superiority of India over all other countries². We hear of Hindu jogis and Muslim mystics freely mixing to discuss religious and social problems; Amir Hasan has preserved for us an account of one such discussion in which Faridduddin Shakargunj took part³. The incident, recorded of Firoz Tughluq's reign, of Muslim men and women visiting the house of a certain Hindu of Delhi who initiated them into pagan religious practices, implies a social intercourse that must have had its beginning in the later part of the 13th century⁴. This contact was, as is generally conceded, the basic factor in the evolution of the Urdu language whose earliest poetic specimens are to be found in the writings of Amir Khusrau⁵. A similar mixing of the two people produced the Indo-Muslim architecture whose initial phase is represented by the buildings erected by the Memeluke Sultans.