Indian Muslims: Who Are They c4.20

c4.20

With this conceptual framework let us examine the structure and organization of Muslim community in Hindustan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Punjab saw the emergence of Muslims as a local community consequent to the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni. But for a few immigrants in the shape of Ghaznavid officers and soldiers, the bulk of Muslims were converts from the indigenous Hindu population. Similar was the case in pockets of Sind, Gujarat, Bihar and Malabar. The process of their conversion was hurried. All of a sudden the invader appeared in a city or a region, and in the midst of loot and murder, a dazed, shocked and enslaved people were given the choice between Islam and death. Those who were converted were deprived of their scalp-lock or *choti* and, if they happened to be caste people, also their sacred thread.⁵⁹ Some were also circumcised. Their names were changed, although some might have retained their old names with new affixes. They were taught to recite the *kalima* and learnt to say the prescribed prayers. But beyond this, to them their conversion would have meant little. These neo-converted Muslims lived, as before, among the vast majority of the Hindus. Their interest lay, as before, in co-operating with their erstwhile friends and relations rather than with their foreign co-religionists whose main occupation was to fleece the Punjab and exploit the people. They continued in their old professions and vocations; perhaps they were given some preferential treatment in the redistribution of the conquered land, but there was hardly any change in the economic set-up with its inter-dependence, cooperation and collaboration, and they remained as intimately associated with their old social and economic order as in days before they were made Musalmans.