Pappu Plaster

Islam is an Arab-origin religion, which is why Arabs retain a foundational place of pride and dignity within it. The Persians then resisted and Persianised Islam under native Persian Muslim rule after overthrowing Arab political control : they injected their high culture, elevated Persian language and literary forms into the core of Islamic high culture, and produced works such as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, an epic that deliberately celebrates pre-Islamic Persian kings and heroes while registering clear resentment toward the Arab conquest that overthrew the Sasanian order. In doing so, they largely stripped Islam of its early Arab tribal particularism and made it a vehicle for a partial Persian cultural continuity. The Turks, for their part, supplied the imperial arm of Islam from the High Middle Ages onward and eventually converted the caliphate itself into a Turkish institution under the Ottomans. Together these three groups (Arabs, Persians, and Turks) secured distinct and complementary roles as the theological, cultural, and imperial pillars of the Islamic world. Because the Islamisation of their lands was effectively complete, they faced little residual “pagan” stigma when they continued to take pride and transmit their pre-Islamic heritage. Iranian Muslims still read and teach the Shahnameh; Turkish Muslims still take pride in both Ottoman imperial achievement and their earlier Turkic traditions and origins; Arab Muslims continue to centre their own linguistic and genealogical heritage. Pre-Islamic culture could be domesticated without existential conflict. Elsewhere the pattern was different. In India, Islam was introduced and expanded largely by military conquest rather than by organic, majority conversion under native Muslim polities. There was never a sustained, indigenous Indian Muslim dynasty that ruled in the subcontinent. More decisively, Hinduism’s continued demographic resistance and civilisational continuity meant that large-scale Islamisation never occurred. As a result, Indian Islam was never fully domesticated. It retained a pronounced anti-Indian edge (with important exceptions) that has historically preferred to celebrate foreign Turkish invaders and an imported Persianate high culture while remaining distant from, or actively hostile to, the native Hindu high culture of the land. The contrast is concrete. How many Kashmiri Muslims read and treat Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (the classic chronicle of Kashmir’s pre-Islamic kings) as part of their own cultural inheritance, in the way Persianate Muslims treat the Shahnameh? How many Awadhi Muslims read Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas and regard it as a shared element of their regional heritage?. In other cases too, the answer remains largely negative: the preferred historical memory continues to centre figures such as Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Sikandar Shah, and/or the Mughals, while native pre-Islamic kings and traditions are treated as alien or irrelevant. This is an honest and still unresolved tension. As long as large sections of Indian Muslim opinion continue to glorify foreign conquerors and an imported Persianate culture at the expense of the native high culture of the subcontinent, simply because that native culture is shared with Hindus, Islam in India will remain incompletely domesticated. The resulting friction with the Hindu majority is structural, not merely contingent on particular politicians or incidents. Lasting civic peace becomes realistic only when the dominant pattern shifts toward the model represented by figures such as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: Muslims who treat the land’s deeper civilisational inheritance as their own rather than as the property of an adversary community. Until that domestication occurs on a broad scale, the cultural and historical gulf will continue the conflict.