5/21/2023 0 Comments Book of travels battataAn alternate narrative is gaining strength in contemporary times, of this time as one of a grand culture confluence between two great cultures – the 'Islamic' and the 'Indian' – to give rise to a new composite 'Indo-Islamic' culture. This view, of Islam having been brought into the subcontinent by the sword of the Delhi Sultans and later the Mughals, is not without its basis – for language of a similar tone can be seen even in the Sultans' own accounts of their deeds – but is a very simplistic lens through which to examine the complex interactions between diverse cultures that was taking place at this time, not only in the subcontinent, but across the Old World. These foreign warriors, the story goes, saw themselves as ghazis (holy warriors) embarking on a jihad (holy war) to seize the infidel lands of Al-Hind from the Dar al-Harb (world of strife) and bring them into the Dar al-Islam (world of Islam). ![]() In the context of the Indian Subcontinent, the story of the spread of Islam has typically been seen as the history of a series of raiders and invaders entering the subcontinent from a northwesterly direction with intent to loot, plunder and conquer. ![]() 1 This expansion is commonly held to have marked the foundation of a new Islamic World spanning across three continents, a super-national entity within whose borders a distinctly Islamic culture flourished to varying degrees. Small wonder, then, that the historian Richard Eaton likened the birth of Islam to a political revolution not entirely unsimilar to the French or Russian Revolutions. Within the next 130 years, Arab armies, fleets, merchants and settlers fanned out of the Arabian Peninsula to spread across all the lands from Gibraltar in the west to the Indus delta and the very borders of the Celestial Empire of China in the east. That man, Mohammad ibn Abdullah, would soon rise to prominence among the Arab people, preside over the birth of a new religion and set in motion events that would ripple outwards across the whole of the Old World. ![]() In the early decades of the Seventh Century CE, a lone merchant wandering the mountains of Arabia claimed to have heard the voice of an angel issuing him a command from God. (The following is a paper I wrote for a course on Art and Architectural History) Introduction A comparative look at Islamic architecture in Delhi, Madurai and the Malabar Coast
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