Although much of the current academic debate about the nature of South Asian Islam centres on textual constructions of Islam, the popular focus has been on architecture. The demolition of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 provided a violent illustration of the mosque as a nexus between divergent views of Islam, its culture and history in South Asia. While the medieval past and its histories can often seem arcane and remote, these events demonstrated how both could be mobilized in the service of the present to dramatic effect. In addition, they underlined how medieval monuments could be taken to instantiate tendentious histories, competing narratives that appear to be written in stone.
In his sensitive reading of the Qutb Mosque in Delhi, first published over thirty years ago and republished here, Mohammad Mujeeb warned against permitting 'the rhetoric of the medieval historians and the political slogans of our own times' to provide the lens through which medieval monuments were viewed. Nevertheless, in the past decades, nineteenth and twentieth-century scholarship on early Indo-Islamic architecture has been directly implicated in the targeting of mosques by religious nationalists seeking to replace them with temples, and thereby redress a perceived historical injustice. If, as Richard Eaton has suggested, the project for modern historians of South Asia 'has as much to do with unravelling complicated historiographies as it does with writing histories, the same is true of pre-modern architecture and its histories.
As a way of exploring the interrelationships between architecture, history, and historiography, this volume brings together divergent voices that have contributed to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on some of the earliest surviving mosques in South Asia. The chronological and geographical range of the volume is narrow, focusing on four mosques constructed for Turkic patrons in northwest India in the decades between 1192 and 1220. The single exception is the opening essay, which sets the tone for the volume by providing an overview of the (generally scant) material evidence for South Asian mosques in the period before 1192. This date has been considered a watershed in South Asian history, marking the victory of the Shansabanid or Ghurid sultan Muizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam (better known in modern South Asia as Muhammad Ghuri) over a confederation of Rajput armies led by the Chauhan raja Prithviraja III at Tarain (modern Tarori) in Rajasthan. The victory opened up the Gangetic Plain to the armies of the sultan, and by the time that Muizz al-Din was assassinated in 603/1206, his Turkic generals had extended the sultan's dominion from Ghazna to the borders of Bengal.
In South Asian historiography Ghurid expansion into north India has traditionally been represented as an (or even the) 'Islamic invasion of India, as it often was in the rhetoric of medieval historians. Implicit in the paradigm is a teleological view of history in which the exploits of the Ghurids continue and culminate a project of 'Muslim' expansion begun by Arab armies in eighth-century Sind, the 'slow progress' of Islam in South Asia as D.R. Bhandarkar famously put it. The teleology operates through a collapse of all possible identities into a unitary sectarian identification.
In doing so, it not only ignores ethnic and linguistic differences between the Muslim rulers who engaged with their Rajput counterparts over several centuries, but also aspects of intra-Muslim factionalism that undermine the notion of a monolithic Muslim self, and are directly relevant to the aggrandizement of Ghurid authority.
The rise of the Ghurids (named after the remote mountainous region of central Afghanistan from whence they hailed) had begun in 545/1150 with the sack of Ghazna, the eponymous capital of the Ghaznavid sultanate that had dominated the eastern Islamic world for a century-and-a-half. This dramatic event earned the Ghurid malik (chief) 'Ala al-Din Husayn the sobriquet Jahan-suz (World-burner). It also marked the abrupt entry of these mountain chiefs onto the wider political stage. The apogee of the sultanate was reached under Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam (r. 558-99/1163-1203) and Muizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam (r. 569-602/1173-1206), brothers whose joint rule came to define the apogee of Ghurid power. The brothers ruled in a condominium, the elder partner Ghiyath al-Din overseeing the westward expansion of the sultanate from Firuzkuh in west-central Afghanistan, while Muizz al-Din expanded the Ghurid's dominions eastwards from the former Ghaznavid capital. A third line based in Bamiyan was celebrated for its patronage of Persian literati, but is less immediately relevant to the Indian conquests. The floruit of the sultanate was brief (roughly between 1175 and 1205) and its existence ephemeral, for the death of Muizz alDin in 1206 effectively marked the end of Ghurid sovereignty. In its aftermath the neighbouring Khwarazmshahs of Central Asia incorporated large areas of the western Ghurid territories into their domains. In the east, the Turkish slave generals on whom the Ghurids had relied during their Indian campaigns assumed power in their own right, establishing an independent sultanate based in Delhi.
As the ambitions of the Ghurid sultans outgrew the confines of their mountain kingdom, their self-representations grew increasingly bombastic, marked by a dynamic process of self-fashioning designed to project their claims to authority in the wider world. The phenomenon is most apparent in the titulature of the Ghurids who, soon after the sack of Ghazna, assumed of the title of sultan to complement their traditional but less impressive claim to be malik aljibal (king of the mountains).
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