Conflict and Cosmopolitanism in “Arab” Sind

In 1962, the historian A. B. L. Awasthi wrote, “the Turkish conquest of India began with the Arab conquest of Sind.” The sentiment expresses a common teleology according to which Muslims, irregardless of their ethnicity, linguistic identities, or specific sectarian affiliations, acted in concert across more than five centuries to affect a “slow progress of Islamic power” in South Asia as D. R. Bhandarkar had put it three decades earlier. Despite these attempts to invest Arab expansion into Sind in the early eighth century as the Ur-moment of “Muslim” conquest, the period of Arab dominion in Sind has commanded remarkably little serious attention by historians of art and architecture. Over the past decades several articles, dissertations, and at least one book have addressed the history of Arab rule in Sind or the religious identities of those who lived under it during the eighth through tenth centuries. By contrast, the material culture of the period has been neglected. Where it is mentioned, it is usually relegated to a footnote in historical surveys of Indo-Islamic art and architecture, an evolutionary dead end in a trajectory that leads inexorably towards the glories of Mughal art. Sind is a region located at the southern end of the Indus valley in what is today Pakistan, extending roughly from the ancient city of Multan in the north to the Indus delta and Indian Ocean in the south (fig. 15-1). During the heyday of the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries, the region was connected by both land and sea to the mercantile and urban centers of