A Book of Conquest A Book of Conquest THE CI1ACHNAMA AND MUSLIM ORIGINS IN SOUTH ASIA Manan Ahmed Asif Ill Ill • II ,,• Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016 '. Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Asif, Manan Ahmed, author. Title: A book of conquest : the Chachnama and Muslim origins in South Asia / Manan Ahmed Asif. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. I Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016009480 I ISBN 978067466on3 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Kuf1, 'Ali ibn l;Iiimid active 13th century. , Chachniima I Islam and politics-South Asia. I Islam-South Asia-Historiography. I South Asia-Politics and government. Classification: LCC BP173.7 .A4835 2016 I DDC 954.91/8021-dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016009480 ,,. • l I •I .• '·1 I ,, , I O • + t j • ••~ t '< I For Shaista Ahmed Contents LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION xi Introduction 1 I. Frontier with the House of Gold 23 2. A Foundation for History 47 3. Dear Son, What Is the Matter with You? 78 4. A Demon with Ruby Eyes rn3 5. The Half Smile 128 6. A Conquest of Pasts 150 Conclusion 180 NOTES 187 WORKS CITED 219 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 235 INDEX 241 Illustrations Map of the regions of Sind, Gujarat, and Arabia 10 List of sacral sites in Uch 24 Letter writer 79 Grave of Rai Tulsi Das 104 A Hindu grave 10 5 Purported graves of Arab soldiers who came to Sind with Muhammad bin Qasim n6 The well of Baba Farid 121 Tomb of Bibi Jawindi 129 Graves of the Prophet's Companions 151 ix Note on Transliteration and Translation THE PRIMARY TEXTUAL SOURCES under review in this book are written in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Sanskrit-with Arabic words often appearing either in Persian texts or in Urdu texts. A further complication to adopting a specific transliteration schema is the dif­ ferent vocal emphasis in pronouncing Persian and Arabic terms in contemporary South Asia. To promote wider reception of this work, I have removed all diacritical marks, indicating only the presence of the letters hamza with an apostrophe (') and 'ayn with a reverse apos­ trophe ('). The Persian i~iifa is indicated as -i. The Arabic definite ar­ ticle is omitted from proper names (e.g.,Baladhuri and not al-Baladhuri). However, when citing sources, I have left the text unaltered. Place names are specific to the historical period and reflect usage in primary sources-most importantly, Sind rather than Sindh, Uch rather than Uchch or Uch Sharif. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. All dates are of the Common Era (CE) unless otherwise noted. xi Introduction BEGINNINGS are a seductive necessity. The interest in beginnings is not new-narratives of origins and genealogies frame much of the recorded past. Yet, for the modern nation, the romance of origins and the gravitas of a unique genealogy are imperative. For the modern state, such stories offer the pride of modernity and of linear progress (the per­ petual -ing to the First World). For the citizens of these modern states, these stories, illustrated in textbooks, contain values, morals, and na­ tional character. In America, for example, the Founding Fathers repre­ sent the beginnings of this nation in myriad and ever-present ways. The statues of Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson in front of academic or state buildings, in public parks, at crossroads, gesture at specific origins of the state. These statues act as personifications of static moments of origins-a teleology and an ethic. In Germany, Ar­ minius; in France, Charlemagne; in England, King Arthur; in India, Asoka; and so on across the globe. 1 Some of these origins perform af­ fective tasks (the committee of men who gave birth to the United States are ,neant to invoke in its citizens feelings of filial love), while others help constitute an always renewable past (the rediscovery of Genghis Khan as a hero for leaders in former Soviet states is meanf to invoke a pre-communist past). I 2 INTRODUCTION A Question of Origins The question of origins was significant for the European inquiry into the pasts of the world in general and colonized people in particular. In Enlightenment thought-from Descartes to Vico to Kant-the study of Europe's own origins necessitated equally an inquiry into the origins of the New World or of India or China. These "scientific" inquiries into origins of language (philology) and origins of human society (history) created, by the later eighteenth century, a vast body of philosophical and ethnographic material about the colonized and Orientalized world. It is in this set of inquiries that my project begins. I am concerned here with a particular story of beginnings-that of Muslims in India-and the ways in which it structures the reading of Muslim pasts in South Asia. At its barest this narrative asserts that Islam is fundamentally Arabian and hence, geographically foreign to India. This outsider origin of the faith makes its adherents outsiders as well. Muslims thus come &om the outside to India: either as for­ eign conquerors or foreign traders or foreign proselytizers, all distinct from the "indigenous."'In this beginning, there are a number of points of origins-one is in the early-eighth-century campaigns from Arabia to Sind under Muhammad bin Qasim; another is in the eleventh­ century campaigns from Ghazni to Gujarat under Mahmud of Ghazni; another, in the sixteenth-century campaign from Kabul to Delhi by Zahiruddin Bahar. These multiple points of origins act as constant renewals of foreignness in this beginning story, and, paradoxically, these diverse renewals feed a monolithic, ahistorical, atemporal Islam in India. Critically, the history of political states in India (tagged Muslim) encompasses the social and cultural lives of all who claim any variety of Islam as their faith. In this book, I take aim at a particular origins narrative of a Muslim political state in India-the 712 expedition of Muhammad bin Qasim to Sind-to expose its historical specificity and the way it was em­ ployed in later reconstructions. What is at stake when we question this origin and revisit the history that is outside of it? I submit that certain "infallible" social and political frameworks fall apart and newness emerges. INTRODUCTION 3 First, let me demonstrate the power and dominance of this origins narrative in South Asia. This narrative positing the Muslim as always distinctly an outsider is one of the primary ideological fulcra that re­ sulted in the 1947 Partition of colonial India. One articulation of this idea was expressed in 1940 by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All India Muslim League and the first governor general of Pakistan: The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philoso­ phies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civili­ sations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and concep­ tions. Their aspects on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from dif­ ferent sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different, and they have different episode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. 2 Jinnah's articulation of difference in regard to the past (an articula­ tion that mirrored early twentieth-century Muslim nationalism) incongruently posits cultural practices as uniform•across a vast geo­ graphy. That is, the Muslims do not marry or dine with non-Muslims either in the present or in the past-the Muslims everywhere in India constitute a unitary body. In support of this reading of the present, Jinnah asserts a difference in history and in historiography-that these two communities have different pasts, and they have different sources for those pasts and must therefore interpret history differently. Hence to someone who may say that the Mughal elite intermarried with non-Muslims, Jinnah's answer would be that we must interpret their acts in accordance with different civilizational standards or look for their depictions in different archives. Like Jinnah's nationalism, Hindu communalism also looked to the past, also relied on historiography, and also argued numerically, but with a radltally different view of the past and the future. Hence in 1940, the conservative and militant proponents of Hindu supremacy such as V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar would reinterpret the heroes and the foes: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hin­ dusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation ,has been 4 INTRODUCTION gallantly fighting on to shake off the despoilers." 3 For the Hindu Right, the "foreign" origins of Muslims in India demonstrated their "indig­ enous" struggle against conquest and domination: each new arrival of the Muslims was another war of attrition. After Partition, the bonse­ quences of this understanding of the past became evident in 1992. A sixteenth-century mosque, the Bahri Masjid in Ayodhya, was taken apart brick by brick by thousands who believed it to be birthplace of the God Ram. In this destruction, the conflation of historical and mythic time was not an accident or a divergence-it represented the culmination of a decades-long utilization of this origins myth for the Hindu Right. These two threads of understanding pasts-Jinnah's insistence on separatism and the Hindu Right's insistence on avenging past wrongs-are distinct and produce vastly different trajectories for the future.