2020 Chapters (Layout Features)

Narratives of Earliest Hindu–Muslim Encounters

Ahmed Asif, Manan

This chapter makes two broad claims. The first is to incorporate a longer history of state­ craft in north India into our examination of Mughal regime. The second is to take me­ dieval Indian Ocean texts as critical source material for understanding forms of state- making, negotiation of difference, and encounters between social actors. Toward these claims, the chapter reads a set of ninth- and tenth-century narratives linking Sindh and Gujarat to Aden and Cairo. Within these texts are representations of various forms of en­ counters between those understood as Arabs and Muslims and those labeled Hindi or Sindhi. The chapter explicates accounts of embeddedness of Islam in India, of crime and punishment as modes of statecraft, of everyday gendered lives, and of networks of ex­ change in order to provide a longer history of understanding pivotal concerns of the Mughal regime in the sixteenth century.