Muslim-wank #4, over 50% of modern India (OTL borders) is majority Muslim

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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4th in a series of Muslim-wanks to try to bring some balance when Muslim-screws are vastly more popular on the board:

AHC: How can Islam be far more successful than in OTL in converting the population of India? In such a circumstances where many of OTL's current Hindu-majority states become majority Muslim instead, what geographic areas of India would be the most likely final holdouts of Hinduism?
 

CaliGuy

Banned
4th in a series of Muslim-wanks to try to bring some balance when Muslim-screws are vastly more popular on the board:

AHC: How can Islam be far more successful than in OTL in converting the population of India? In such a circumstances where many of OTL's current Hindu-majority states become majority Muslim instead, what geographic areas of India would be the most likely final holdouts of Hinduism?
Honestly, if you somehow butterfly away the Industrial Revolution for a millennium, or two, or three, or five, and have Muslims rule most of India most of this time, you might be able to accomplish this.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
Honestly, if you somehow butterfly away the Industrial Revolution for a millennium, or two, or three, or five, and have Muslims rule most of India most of this time, you might be able to accomplish this.

Seems like a bit of long wait, not to mention extreme worldwide change, and future history.
 
Stronger Islam in India is possible - say, if the Caliphate conquered more of Hindustan - and that would result in more Muslims. At best, I imagine something like Sindh, with a narrow Muslim majority (as Sindh had prior to Partition - in fact, it is the only part of Pakistan that still has Hindus, ignoring the claim over Jammu).

Honestly, if you somehow butterfly away the Industrial Revolution for a millennium, or two, or three, or five, and have Muslims rule most of India most of this time, you might be able to accomplish this.

You really can’t. Hinduism really pushed hard against Islam - during Shah Jahan’s reign, Hinduism in fact grew, converting Muslim nobles. See here.
 
How differently is/was Islam practiced in Sindh/Punjab/Hindustan/Bengal compared to Arabia?

Very different. It was very Sufi and took many Hindu concepts. Bhakti Hindu concepts influenced Islam and the Hindu concept of vegetarianism was considered very honourable, to the point that the Jains were well liked in Muslim Indian courts. Furthermore, there was also a surge of Zoroastrian concepts - the Mughals viewed the sun as holy and the Mughal concept of royalty was the farr-i-izidi, with the ruler the paternal ruler of his subjects and royalty as a beam emanating from the sun. Mughal rule was further justified by ancient Greek and Hindu concepts. These are extremely un-Islamic views.
 
Very different. It was very Sufi and took many Hindu concepts. Bhakti Hindu concepts influenced Islam and the Hindu concept of vegetarianism was considered very honourable, to the point that the Jains were well liked in Muslim Indian courts. Furthermore, there was also a surge of Zoroastrian concepts - the Mughals viewed the sun as holy and the Mughal concept of royalty was the farr-i-izidi, with the ruler the paternal ruler of his subjects and royalty as a beam emanating from the sun. Mughal rule was further justified by ancient Greek and Hindu concepts. These are extremely un-Islamic views.
Why would they still be considered Sunni then if that is so?
 
Why would they still be considered Sunni then if that is so?

The Wahhabi certainly wouldn’t think so, though they thought of everyone except for themselves as not being Muslim.

I think they’d be considered Sunni if only because of a lack of a better category.
 
Extremely Hard, Borderline ASB. The Hindus in India were very loyal to their religion withstanding conquest after conquest and several forced conversions and attempted proselytizations, holding steadfast to their faith.
 
Extremely Hard, Borderline ASB. The Hindus in India were very loyal to their religion withstanding conquest after conquest and several forced conversions and attempted proselytizations, holding steadfast to their faith.

That’s not the reason a conversion of India to Islam is implausible. After all, Persia was very loyal to Zoroastrianism, with two centuries of warfare between Zoroastrians and Arabs and constant revolts across Persia during the “Two Centuries of Shame”. But at the end of the day, after bloodshed and a diaspora of refugees to India, the Arabs converted Persia.

No, there is a simple reason why India cannot be converted to Islam. It is simply too far from the Arab centre to be conquered for a lengthy time, and the Turkic invaders were far more interested in jizya money than conversion.

I think an Arab conquest of India would be interesting, even if it were temporary. If the Arabs somehow conquered India, the majority religion of the Caliphate would not be Islam, but Hinduism.
 
That’s not the reason a conversion of India to Islam is implausible. After all, Persia was very loyal to Zoroastrianism, with two centuries of warfare between Zoroastrians and Arabs and constant revolts across Persia during the “Two Centuries of Shame”. But at the end of the day, after bloodshed and a diaspora of refugees to India, the Arabs converted Persia.

No, there is a simple reason why India cannot be converted to Islam. It is simply too far from the Arab centre to be conquered for a lengthy time, and the Turkic invaders were far more interested in jizya money than conversion.

I think an Arab conquest of India would be interesting, even if it were temporary. If the Arabs somehow conquered India, the majority religion of the Caliphate would not be Islam, but Hinduism.
Was Persia actually loyal to Zoroastrianism though, I keep hearing that the reason why Islam dominated most of the society relatively quickly is because the native faith lost grip over the population.

Also if you think about it, it's possible Christianity was the majority religion for quite a while during the Umayyad period, so it wouldn't exactly be unheard of.
 
That’s not the reason a conversion of India to Islam is implausible. After all, Persia was very loyal to Zoroastrianism, with two centuries of warfare between Zoroastrians and Arabs and constant revolts across Persia during the “Two Centuries of Shame”. But at the end of the day, after bloodshed and a diaspora of refugees to India, the Arabs converted Persia.

No, there is a simple reason why India cannot be converted to Islam. It is simply too far from the Arab centre to be conquered for a lengthy time, and the Turkic invaders were far more interested in jizya money than conversion.

I think an Arab conquest of India would be interesting, even if it were temporary. If the Arabs somehow conquered India, the majority religion of the Caliphate would not be Islam, but Hinduism.
I believe that a certain caustic approach was applied to Persia and that with the native power in a state of disillusionment caused Islam to spread rapidly there. I don't necessarily consider it plausible that India would be outright mostly Muslim due to the loyalty people had to Hinduism.
 
4th in a series of Muslim-wanks to try to bring some balance when Muslim-screws are vastly more popular on the board:

AHC: How can Islam be far more successful than in OTL in converting the population of India? In such a circumstances where many of OTL's current Hindu-majority states become majority Muslim instead, what geographic areas of India would be the most likely final holdouts of Hinduism?



Well, to begin with, let us assume you mean the entirety of the Indian subcontinent, in which case Muslims constitute 35% of the continent. This is for purposes of calculation and history.


The first proper interaction with Islam would be the Ghazni raids, which alienated quite a few Hindus and other religions too, and to this day is a source of resentment. That would have to be undone. Instead, the possibility of a Ghurite invasion being the first taste of Islam that India has would be much more beneficial. Now, assuming that Qutub-Din Aibak is the same as he is in OTL and known as a funder of temples, there is not much threat of either Sultanate-wide rebellion or alienation with the Hindu populace. Now, coming to the creation of the Islamic populace in India. Unlike other Islamic communes around the world, the Islam practiced in India inexplicably had its own caste boundaries, which were considered by them to be independent of religion. This backwardness was a major failure of Islam in India, as rather than aiming to be a liberator from shackles of caste oppression, it integrated itself into an Indian setting. Islam probably would have more followers in India if it was aimed at the lower castes.


Another thing that could have increase India's Islamic population was the lack of divisive British propaganda. The British often aimed at creating divided represantations of Muslim and Hindu rule, and ended up creating a chain of events that ultimately led to Partition. However, at a more present time, if the British hadn't totally annihiliated Muslim potentates in India, through annexation or subsidiary alliances, never mind that, there probably would be a gradual change to Islam.


To answer the last part of your question, India doesn't work on a religious-ethnic basic, but on a basis in which the two are independent of each other. Hindus and Muslims would probably be dispersed throughout the country.
 
The strength of the Hinduism which resisted conversions to Islam and later Christianity during a period of seven and a half centuries of foreign domination was, in my opinion. more as a result of the caste system than the religious faith. The loyalty to one's own caste was always stronger than any other loyalty. I think when conversions to another religion occurred it was more in groups of members of a particular caste than the conversion of individuals or families. Even today, in the twenty-first century, the stranglehold of the caste over its members is very strong. All the religious reformers throughout the long period of Indian History from Goutham Buddha down to Mohandas Gandhi, has criticized the caste system strongly. But the criticism of thousands of religious leaders and reformers have never succeeded in weakening the strength of this old system, not to comment about uprooting it. Though it is viewed as a curse of the Hinduism and a roadblock on the path of the social development, it has also prevented its adherents from crossing the border fence of the Hindu religion. For a Hindu, especially in rural villages, to be expelled from one's own caste is something worse than a death sentence.
 
Another thing that could have increase India's Islamic population was the lack of divisive British propaganda. The British often aimed at creating divided represantations of Muslim and Hindu rule, and ended up creating a chain of events that ultimately led to Partition. However, at a more present time, if the British hadn't totally annihiliated Muslim potentates in India, through annexation or subsidiary alliances, never mind that, there probably would be a gradual change to Islam.

Very dubious. By the time colonization came around, the Muslim states gave up converting the Hindus, realizing that conversion would be very difficult if not impossible, and Muslim rulers liked the jizya tax they got from Hindus. And as I’ve noted above, Hinduism fought quite hard against Islam, and without British rule devastating Bengal, the Chaitanya Vaishnavite cult would likely continue to prosper in Bengal, converting Muslims as well as followers of other religions - Manipur, for instance, was converted from its indigenous religion to Hinduism by Vaishnavite ascetics. There’s also Sikhism, another force threatening Islam, which would have many more followers if the Sikh Empire survived.
 
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