Hinduism and Islam: Medieval and Premodern Period

This article examines the relations between Muslim culture and the Indian world, focusing primarily on the trends, intellectual approaches, and reactions in this regard that arose in the Muslim contexts of South Asia. It does not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of the topic, of which many important aspects have in fact hardly been studied, but is mainly concerned with the examination of three subject areas that are of central importance for the study of such contacts. The first section focuses on the dialogue between Persian culture and Hindu knowledge by analyzing the movement for the Persian translation and compilation of works on Indian traditions and sciences. The second section offers a more detailed examination of the contacts between Islamic mysticism and the Hindu world. The final section, in contrast, deals with the adverse reactions to contacts with Hindu culture that arose in the Muslim world of South Asia. 

Textual Contacts: The Persian Texts on Indian Learning 

A substantial number of texts on the knowledge and traditions of the Hindus were produced in Persian in South Asia, both in the form of direct translation of texts, mostly from Sanskrit, and through the composition of new treatises and compendiums (see Ernst, 2003a; Speziale, 2010). The Muslims were not new to such undertakings, as it was, in fact, precisely through the contact with a pre-Islamic culture, namely the Greek culture, that they had acquired most of their philosophical and scientific background. The Persian studies on Indian learning constitute the most important translation movement from a non-Muslim tradition achieved in the Muslim culture since the translation of Greek texts into Arabic, which had flourished in the Abbasid world of the 9th and 10th centuries. 

Contacts with Indian traditions had already taken place long before the expansion of Muslim hegemony on the Indian subcontinent. During the Abbasid period, the translation of pre-Islamic sources was dominated by the influence of Hellenistic tradition, though Muslim scholars also came into contact with works and elements of Indian origin, as in the case of the decimal number system, which was passed on to Europe through Arab mediation. The most representative figure of this first phase of study was that of the great scientist al-Bīrūnī (d. after 1050), who studied Sanskrit, translated the Yogasūtra of Patañjali into Arabic, and wrote the Kitāb taḥqīq mā li’l-Hind, the most important medieval Arabic encyclopedia on the religion and knowledge of India. However, various factors indicate that these first studies in Arabic had an altogether limited impact on the Muslim world of later times, as may also be surmised from the small number of manuscript copies of these works that have come down to us. 

In South Asia, the compilation of Persian texts on Indian knowledge only began after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century. This wave of studies culminated during the period of the Mughals, who came to power in 1526 and progressively extended their supremacy over much of India. For somewhat more than half a century between the last decades of the 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, several Persian texts on Indian traditions were also produced and translated for the British. The British inherited the use of Persian as the official administrative language from the Mughal; it was replaced by English in 1835. 

Over the course of more than six centuries, the works that were produced covered a wide range of subjects such as epic literature, history, religion, philosophy, mysticism, narratives, law ( dharma ), music, and erotology (see kāma). Among the sciences, a prominent role was assumed by medicine and pharmacology (see āyurveda ), although one also finds treatises and chapters on mathematics, astronomy (jyotiṣa), zoology, alchemy ( rasāyana ), and thesāmudrika, a discipline that the Persian translators considered to be the equivalent of the qiyāfa, the physiognomy of the Muslim tradition. To these must be added the Persian-written treatises on the geography, flora, fauna, and culinary tradition of India. Several copies of these works were illustrated with miniatures, as for instance the translation of the Mahābhārata , the Harivaṃśa, the Rāmāyaṇa , the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the Amṛtakuṇḍa, the Śūkasaptatī, the Kokaśāstra (also known as Kokkokaśāstra or Ratirahasya), and the Śālihotra. The production of these texts decreased in the second half of the 19th century, essentially due to the decline of the role played by the Persian language in South Asia. The decline of Persian favored the rise of Urdu, the language in which several works on Indian traditions were written and published during the colonial period, thereby representing the final extension of the movement for the translation of Indian sources into the language of the Muslim civilization. 

The wave of Persian and Urdu studies on Indian knowledge was of much larger scope than the first wave of studies on the same topic that had been conducted in Arabic during the Abbasid period. However, it should be noted that these Persian works circulated mostly in India and that their impact outside the Indian subcontinent was, with a few exceptions, rather limited. Among these, we can mention the Malay adaptations of earlier Persian versions of classical Indian narratives such as the Pañcatantra and the Śūkasaptatī (Bausani, 1970, 339–340), and the circulation, among the Sufis of the Ottoman world, of the teachings of the Amṛtakuṇḍa, a manual on yoga that was first adapted in Persian and Arabic in India and subsequently translated into Turkish in the 18th century (Ernst, 2005, 32). Though of lesser significance and in many respects different, the role played, until the first decades of the 19th century in British India, by the Persian texts on Indian traditions that were compiled and translated for the colonial elite is in some ways similar to the one played centuries before by the Arabic texts that gave the medieval European scholars access to the knowledge of Greek origin. The first translations of some of the classics of Indian tradition into Western languages – such as the Upaniṣads, the Śālihotra, and the Bījagaṇita – were not realized on the basis of the Sanskrit sources but on that of the Persian versions produced during the Mughal period. 

Many of these works were composed for Muslim rulers and nobles or were dedicated to them. Several treatises of this type date back to the pre-Mughal period, especially the first Persian texts on Indian sciences and music. Texts on astrology and natural philosophy, including Varāhamihira’s Bṛhatsaṃhitā, were translated for the sultan of Delhi Fīrūz Šāh Tuġluq (r. 1351–1388). The Ġunyat al-munya, an anonymous treatise on music, was composed in 1374–1375 for Malik Šams al-Dīn, the governor of Gujarat (Sarmadee, 1978), while the Lahajāt-i Sikandar-šāhī (The Tunes of King Sikandar), another text on Indian music, was written by Yaḥyā al-Kābulī for the vizier Miyān Bhuwa Ḫān and dedicated to the sultan of Delhi Sikandar Lodī (r. 1489–1517). Another work dedicated to the same sultan of Delhi was the Maʿdan al-šifāʾ-i Sikandar-šāhī (The Source of Healing of King Sikandar): commissioned by the same Miyān Bhuwa and realized with the help of Indian paṇḍits , the work established itself as one of the most widely circulated Persian treatises on Indian medicine. The translation of Vāgbhaṭa’s Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, entitled Ṭibb-i šifā-yi Maḥmūd-šāhī (The Medicine of Healing of King Maḥmud), was dedicated to the sultan of Gujarat Maḥmud Begrā (r. 1458–1511). Between the 15th century and the first two decades of the following century, three Persian treatises drawing on the tradition of the Śālihotra, a Sanskrit classic on horses and their treatment, were composed for the sultans of Gulbarga, of Malwa, and of Gujarat. Also in the 15th century, the sultan of Kashmir Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn commissioned the first Persian translations of the Mahābhārata and of theRājataraṅgiṇī. 

The greatest patrons of the translations of Sanskrit works into Persian were the Mughals Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and Dārā Šikōh (1615–1659). In 1564, Akbar abolished the jizya – that is, the head tax imposed on non-Muslims living in Muslim kingdoms – and subsequently proclaimed the principle of ṣulḥ-i kul (universal tolerance). During the second half of the 16th century, the movement for the translation of Indian texts into Persian became an element of Akbar’s religious policy and imperial ideology. One of the most significant works in this vein is the Āʾīn-i Akbarī(The Institutes of Akbar) by Abū al-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602), a court historian and adviser to Akbar as well as one of the main architects of the imperial Mughal philosophy. The work offers an overview of the Mughal Empire under Akbar and includes an extensive final section on the geography and knowledge of India. At Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s new capital, a translation bureau (maktabḫāna) was set up for the will of the emperor, where Muslim scholars operated with the help of Hindu paṇḍits; the latter translated and explained the text in Hindi, which was then rendered into Persian by the Muslim scholars who were not familiar with Sanskrit. The works selected for translation included the following: epic texts such as the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, which the Mughals mainly interpreted as works of historical-political character and not as religious texts (see Ernst, 2003a, 178–182); the history of Kashmir by Kalhaṇa, entitled Rājataraṅgiṇī; the Atharvaveda; and works of narrative literature and treatises on astronomy and arithmetic, among which the Līlāvatī by Bhāskara. 

Fig. 1: Engraving of the Mughal prince Dārā Šikōh. 

Muḥammad Dārā Šikōh is another emblematic figure of this study movement. The most famous translation sponsored by this Mughal prince was certainly the Sirr-i akbar (The Greatest Secret), a Persian adaptation of the Upaniṣads that was translated into Latin toward the end of the 18th century by the French orientalist A.H. Anquetil-Duperron. Dārā Šikōh himself authored the Majmaʿal-baḥrayn (The Confluence of the Two Seas), the largest Persian treatise of comparative nature on the religious and philosophical thought of Islam and Hinduism. The main purpose of this work is to demonstrate the basic equivalence between the fundamental doctrines of Islam and Hinduism. According to Dārā Šikōh, Allāh, the name of the divine essence, finds its correspondence in the syllable oṃ , while the divine attributes of beauty (jamāl) and majesty (jalāl) correspond to the triguṇa of Indian thought: sattva, rajas, and tamas(guṇa ). The Sufi doctrine of the successive stages of manifestation, which begins with the realm of divine nature (lāhūt) and ends with the realm of human nature (nāsūt), finds its equivalent in the Hindu doctrine of the four states (avasthās) of the self: jāgrat,svapna, suṣupti, and turīya (awake, sleep, deep sleep, and “the fourth” [i.e. a state of pure consciousness]). The distinction between rūḥ andrūḥ-i aʿẓam in Muslim tradition corresponds to that between ātman and paramātman in Hindu thought. The angels (firištas) of Islamic tradition correspond to the deities (devatās) of Hindu tradition, thus leading to the identification of Gabriel, Michael, and Israfel with Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva, respectively. The Islamic prophets (nabīs) correspond to the mahāsiddhas (persons who have attained perfection). Hū Allāh, one of the spiritual invocations (ḏikrs) of the Sufis, corresponds to the mantra “so’ham,” while the “prince of invocations” (sulṭān al-aḏkār) of the Sufi mystics is compared to the anāhatanāda (the unstruck sound) of the yogīs. Furthermore, a new Persian translation of the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha was made at the request of Dārā Šikōh. 

Works of this type were also produced for other Mughal emperors and dedicated to them, as for instance an adaptation of the Yogavāsiṣṭha made for Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627) and two new translations of the Rāmāyaṇadedicated to the same ruler as well as the translation of the Bījagaṇita of Bhāskara – on algebra – which was dedicated to Šāh Jahān (r. 1627–1658) by ʿAṭāʾ Allāh Rašīdī. It should be noted that the production of these texts, particularly in some disciplines, did not come to a standstill during the reign of Awrangzēb (1658–1707), who is usually portrayed as the Mughal emperor who embodies the antithesis of the policy of openness toward Hindus that had been inaugurated by Akbar. Persian treatises on Indian medicine were dedicated to Awrangzēb; in 1704, Jaṭādhara even composed a work on astronomy for him in Sanskrit, the Phatteśāhaprakāśa (see Speziale, 2010, 421–422; Pingree & Subbarayappa, 2001, 810). Another text from the time of Awrangzēb is the Tuḥfat al-hind (Gift of India), a compendium on the Indian arts – among other things prosody, rhetoric, music, erotology, and thesāmudrika – written by Mīrzā Ḫān ibn Faḫr al-Dīn for the education of the Mughal prince Jahāndār Šāh. 

As relevant as the patronage of Muslim nobles may have been for the stimulation of the translation process, it is still important to point out that this current of studies was not restricted to the elite cultural context of the princely courts. Quite to the contrary, a substantial number of works were actually produced by scholars working outside the courtly environment. In the field of science, and especially in that of medicine, the compilation of these texts by Muslims was not so much motivated by intentions of cultural nature as by factors of pragmatic order, such as identifying the drugs of Arab-Persian tradition in India and acquiring new remedies from the rich pharmacopoeia of Indian doctors. The main purpose of these works was thus not the study of ancient local traditions but the adapting of useful knowledge to present needs (Speziale, 2010, 409–410). 

Many Persian texts were not straightforward, faithful translations of the Sanskrit sources, and many authors preferred to compose new texts in Persian rather than to translate previous works in their original form. Quite often, the material was translated and presented in a manner that was adjusted to the intellectual background of Muslim scholars and readers. Intentions of this type are encountered in various forms and treatises. A well-investigated case is that of the translations of the Amṛtakuṇḍa, the progressive Islamization of the terms and concepts of which has been analyzed by C. Ernst (2003b). Another such case is the Mirʾāt al-ḥaqāʾiq (The Mirror of Realities), an abridged version of the Bhagavadgītā in Persian made by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Čištī (d. 1682), in which the basic meanings of the text are expounded in Sufi terminology and commented on with quotations from theQurʾān and other Muslim sources. In the scientific field, a recurring practice of this kind is encountered in the medical treatises, in which the properties of Indian drugs were frequently described on the basis of the doctrine of the four natural properties (hot, cold, wet, and dry), which the Muslims had inherited from the natural philosophy of Greek origin. Another example is the Persian adaptation of the Śālihotra compiled for the nobleman ʿAbd Allāh Ḫān Fīrūz-Jang (d. 1644): the Indian text was supplied with an introduction in which some traditions of Prophet Muḥammad about the horses are cited; subsequently, a manuscript copy from the 18th century was illustrated with the miniatures of two kinds of horses that were part of a tradition mentioned in the introduction. 

The textual contacts and the translation of texts from Sanskrit were not the only means by which the Muslim scholars came into contact with Indian knowledge. The transmission of knowledge also took place in other ways, above all through oral instruction and through the intermediary of other vernacular languages such as Hindavi. The famous historian Muḥammad Qāsim Firišta (b. around 1570), who also composed a treatise on ayurvedic medicine (Dastūr al-aṭibbāʾ), studied under the Indian teacher Caturbhuj al-Hind. In the 17th century, Fażl Allāh, the author of the Qiyāfa-šināsī (The Understanding of Physiognomy, a work in verse on sāmudrika), relates that he learned that science from an Indian teacher named Gōpāl, while Muḥammad Jāmī, who produced a Persian adaptation of the Kokaśāstra, speaks of having been placed in the service of itinerant yogīs and ascetics following the difficulties encountered during the drafting of his work. Another important example is furnished by Dārā Šikōh, who met with the mystic Bābā Lāldās in Lahore in order to submit a series of questions to him about Indian doctrine. These talks between Bābā Lāldās and Dārā Šikōh were not conducted in Sanskrit but in a local vernacular and were then translated into Persian. 

During the Mughal period, and afterward up to the colonial period, the Persian works were read and written not only by Muslims but also by Hindu scholars as well as by some Christians. Some Persian texts composed for noble Hindus are also attested, as for instance the Timṯāl-i ašyāʾwa azhār al-adwiya – an illustrated work on the flora and fauna of Kashmir written by Ḥakīm Ġulām ʿAlī for Ranbīr Siṅgh (r. 1857–1885), the mahārāja of Kashmir (Naushahi, 1998). Many Hindus, and especially those from the higher castes, studied at the madrasas of Mughal India – in which the languages of instruction were Persian and Arabic – in order to earn the diploma that allowed them to apply for the posts of state administration. Some of these Hindu scholars were also able to hold teaching positions within the Indian madrasas (see Alam, 1998, 325–330). The Brahmans, for their part, did not fail to criticize the study of Persian vocabulary and knowledge on the part of Hindus (Pingree, 1997, 86–87), although it does not seem that these attacks were able to substantially inhibit the study of Persian, especially in view of the career opportunities afforded by the knowledge of this language. By way of example, until the 1830s, half the students of the 93 madrasas for Persian in the district of Burdwan (Bengal) were Hindus, above all Kayasthas and Brahmans, while two of these schools were maintained by the same rājā of Burdwan. Although there is evidence that paṇḍits had already collaborated in the preparation of Persian translations from Sanskrit in earlier times, the composition of Persian texts by learned Hindus attained significance especially from the mid-17th century onward. The latter touched on various fields ranging from poetry to history and scientific topics, in addition to those fields that were more closely connected with the employment of Hindus in the Persian-speaking administration, namely accounting (siyāq) and epistolography (inšāʾ). Although this textual production remains poorly studied to this very day, it is quite clear that several Persian texts written by Hindu authors displayed also a knowledge derived from Muslim tradition and subsequently also from modern Western science, as in the case of Vraja Mohana’s Maḫzan al-ʿulūm, a short summary of rational and traditional sciences written before the mid-19th century. While elements of Muslim knowledge, at least in certain fields (as in the scientific field), occasionally also circulated by way of Sanskrit works, it was to a much greater extent by means of Persian that the erudite Hindus of the Mughal period came into contact with knowledge of Muslim origin. 

Islamic Mysticism and Hinduism 

Sufism, the main mystical school of the Muslim world, is one of the most important areas through which to examine the contacts between Indian Islam and Hinduism. From the early Orientalist studies in the colonial period, certain analogies between the two traditions even supported the theory that aimed to interpret Sufism – which the first orientalists considered to be incompatible with Islam – as a phenomenon derived from the Indian world. More accurate studies on issues that were better suited for such hypotheses – such as the doctrine of the “subtle centers” (laṭāʾif) and the exercises for breath control – have in fact demonstrated how the interpretation of these practices in the Sufi texts fits into a doctrinal horizon of Islamic origin that, beyond the apparent analogy, has nothing to do with the teachings of yoga . On the historical level, furthermore, the contacts between the Muslim mystics and the yogīs only flourished after the introduction of the Sufi orders in India - that is, several centuries after the appearance of Sufism (see Ernst, 2003b; 2005). 

Although some influential Indian Sufis did not fail to direct harsh criticism against the Hindus, the Sufi mystics were undoubtedly those religious figures within Islam who were most inclined to conduct a dialogue with the Indian world. The contacts between Sufism and Hinduism materialized on various levels, from the most educated level of literary tradition to the most varied of popular piety. Some Sufis such as Dārā Šikōh, who was a fervent adept of the Qādirī order, considered the Vedas to be a revealed book and believed – in accordance with theQurʾān verses in which it is stated that God sent prophets to all nations – that India had also received the divine gift of prophecy in ancient times. Various figures of Indian tradition were thus interpreted as persons who had been entrusted with a task similar to that of the Muslim prophets, as for instance in some adaptations of theAmṛtakuṇḍa in which Brahmā and Viṣṇu are identified with Abraham and Moses, and three legendary yogīs are equated with as many monotheistic prophets. Sayyid Sulṭān from Chittagong (d. 1648) – a Sufi of the Mughal period – included Hindu deities and avatārs among the prophets in his Nabīvaṃśa (Line of the Prophets). Similar interpretations spread in Hindu circles. The Nāth yoga, one of the Indian mystical schools that stood in closer contact with Muslim culture, held that the same Prophet Muḥammad had been initiated to yoga by a disciple of the legendary teacher Gorakhnāth (see Shea & Troyer, 1998, 129). The Taḏkira-yi Ġawṯiyya, a Sufi text in Urdu written by Gul Hasan in 1884, records the words of an Indian sage who equated the function of the avatār with that of the prophets as bearers of an exoteric teaching for the masses and of a secret one for the chosen few, such as that imparted by Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna and by Muḥammad to ʿAlī. 

Some Sufis who were active in India even went so far as to include methods derived from the yoga tradition in their manuals, as for instance the recitation of mantras . Among these, some texts by authors of the Šaṭṭāriyya and Čištiyya orders are particularly worthy of mention, namely the Risāla-yi šaṭṭāriyya by Bahāʾ al-Dīn Šaṭṭār (d. 1515), the Rušdnāma by ʿAbd al-Quddus Gangohī (d. 1537), and the Niẓām al-qulūb by Niẓām al-Dīn Awrangābādī (d. 1729). However, this does not mean that all the descriptions of this type in texts written by Sufis intended to incorporate such elements. In the aforementioned Gul Hasan’s Taḏkira-yi Ġawṯiyya, which collects the biography and the teachings of his teacher Ġawṯ ʿAlī Šāh Qalandar (d. 1880), the description of the subtle centers of Sufi doctrine is accompanied by a presentation of the yogic cakras, which are also depicted by way of a diagram (see fig. 2). As in the Majmaʿal-baḥrayn of Dārā Šikōh, the intent of this exposition is to effect a comparison and not to propose a synthesis of the doctrines of Sufis and yogīs. The comparison with Sufi methods excluded any analogy with the practices of idolaters. In one of his letters, the Naqšbandi Sufi Mīrzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān (d. 1781) explained to his disciples that the meditation over the images of Hindu deities is similar to the rābiṭa of the Sufis – the concentration on the mental picture of the teacher in order to obtain spiritual inspiration from it – and that this bears no relationship whatsoever to the idol worship of the Arab unbelievers of pre-Islamic times. 

Fig. 2: A diagram of the cakras from the Sufi treatise Tad̠kira-yi Ġawti̠yya (1884) by Gul Hasan. 

The authors associated with the Muslim mystical circles were interested not only in religious topics but also in other Indian arts and sciences. The most famous Persian adaptation of the Śūkasaptatī, a collection of wisdom tales, was composed by Żiyāʾ al-Dīn Naḫšabī (d. around 1350/1351), a Čištī from the period of the Delhi Sultanate who is also credited with a Persian translation of the Kokaśāstra, a classic work of Indian erotology. Šāh Ahl Allāh (d. 1776), brother of the renowned Delhi theologian Šāh Walī Allāh and himself a Naqšbandī Sufi, wrote the Takmila-yi hindī, a treatise on Indian medicine. Indian knowledge also circulated through some treatises that were falsely attributed to Sufis. Several Arabic copies of the Amṛtakuṇḍa are thus ascribed to Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), the famous Andalusian-born Sufi. Another text that enjoyed a certain popularity was the Haft aḥbāb, a treatise on alchemy that also describes the Indian doctrine. This apocryphal work is attributed to a group of seven authors, including the Suhrawardī master Ḥamīd al-Dīn Nagawrī (d. 1246); the Čištī Sulaymān Mandawī (d. 1537), who was instructed in the principles of the Amṛtakuṇḍa by ʿAbd al-Quddus Gangohī; and Gyān Nāth Saʿādatmand, a Nāth yogī converted to Islam who exposes the sayings on alchemy that are ascribed to Gorakhnāth. The motif of the Nāthyogī’s conversion as a narrative device for the transmission of knowledge from one tradition to the other, resurfaces in chapter 4 of the treatise, which is ascribed to a certain Mīr Muḥammad Hāšim Buḫārī, who describes the methods for the production of acids that Dayā Nāth, a yogī of 300 years, allegedly passed on to Šayḫ Ẓahīr al-Dīn Rūmī after the latter had converted 84 yogīs to Islam, including the same Dayā Nāth (Speziale, 2006). 

Beyond the hagiographic rhetoric of the conversion of yogīs by Sufis, however, there is no doubt that several Hindus were interested in Islamic mysticism, that some were even initiated to Sufism, and that some Hindu nobles gave donations on Muslim shrines (Gordon, 2002, 330). To cite an example, Banwalī Dās Walī (d. 1667/1668) – Dārā Šikōh’s secretary (munšī) – was also a disciple of the latter’s own Sufi teacher. The most significant filiation of this type appears to be that of a Hindu branch, still active today, that was derived from the Naqšbandī-Mujaddidī order through the initiative of Ramchandra Sakshena (d. 1931), who obtained the license (ijāza) to initiate Hindu disciples to Sufism from his teacher Fazl Ahmad Khan (d. 1889), a successor of the school of Mīrzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān (Dahnhardt, 2002). 

A similar phenomenon took place in the opposite camp with the appearance of some groups of Muslim yogīs such as the Rawal and the Bachhowalia. C. Servan-Schreiber has studied one of these in particular, namely the Bhartrihari of Uttar Pradesh – a group of musicians and singers specialized in the repertoire of the Nāth tradition, who are active up to the present day, although they have been gradually becoming marginalized (Servan-Schreiber, 1995; 1999). Another study has recently shed light on a text of uncertain date entitled Mohammad Bodh(The Wisdom of Muḥammad), which was meant to be recited by the Muslim yogīs during the month of ramaḍān(Bouillier, 2010). Another important form of interaction is represented by a number of mystical-religious personalities such as Bābā Ratan, Satya Pīr, and Dattātreya, who, over the course of time, have acquired traits derived both from Hinduism and from Islam (Bouillier & Khan, 2009; Stewart, 2002; Deák, 2010). 

The legacy of the contacts between Sufism and the Indian environment is still quite apparent today in the popular piety associated with the cult of the Sufi saints, which attracts numerous Hindu devotees, and sometimes also devotees from other religions. In various Sufi shrines (dargāhs), it is customary to observe forms of popular devotion that are typical of Indian rather than of Muslim ceremonies, as for instance the offering of flowers and of other substances such as incense, rice, and coconuts. The local influence is also visible in the rite of circumambulation (ṭawāf) around the tomb of the saint, which, in the Indian dargāh, is customarily performed clockwise (also among the Muslims) - that is, according to Indian ritual practice - and not counterclockwise, which is the direction of the ṭawāf around the Kaʿba of Mecca. 

Adverse Reactions 

Reactions against the trends that favored a dialogue with the Indian world manifested themselves at various times and with various accents. As emphasized by M. Gaborieau (1985), the claim that Islam and Hinduism constitute entirely different civilizations and religions is a theory that runs through the entire history of Muslim thought, from the writings of al-Bīrūnī in the 11th century all the way to the founder of Pakistan  Muhammad Ali Jinnah (d. 1948), when it became inextricably linked with the reasons that precipitated the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim entity existing separately from the rest of the Hindu subcontinent. 

The concerns over the mixing of Islamic customs and local practices that arose in the Muslim milieu are clearly detectable in the Ḥujjat al-hind, a treatise of uncertain date. This polemic work against Hinduism, written in the form of a dialogue between a parrot and a starling, was composed in order to admonish the Muslim villagers who were living in close contact with the Hindus and adopting their religious beliefs. In the text, the Indian deities are equated with fallen angels such as Satan, while the powers of the yogīs are presented as miracles of diabolical origin (see Digby, 1970, 4–5, 11). 

The Muslim disapproval of the policy initiated by Akbar is fittingly illustrated by the account given by the historian ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī (d. 1615), who, in spite of his ideas, was commissioned by Akbar precisely to collaborate in the Persian translation of Indian texts such as the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. The translation of the Mahābhārata was also accomplished with the participation of Ḥājj Sulṭān Thāneswarī, the father-in-law of Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1624), who accepted the assignment in spite of his disdain for its content and only for the prestige that he would derive from it (Rizvi, 1992, 406). Opposition against the employment of Hindus in the administration of the Muslim kingdoms arose from various sides. Emblematic in this regard were the letters sent to the Muslim nobility by ʿAbd al-Quddus Gangohī and by Aḥmad Sirhindī, which also, requested the imposition of the jizya on the Hindus (Digby, 1975, 33–34; Friedmann, 2000, 73–74). The protest formulated by the poet Ġawwāṣī (17th cent.) against the influence acquired by Hindus at the court of the Qutb Shah in Golconda was equally vehement (Bausani, 1968, 97). 

Dissenting voices came therefore not only from the ranks of the more conservative religious circles but also from some influential Sufi teachers and even from a personality such as ʿAbd al-Quddus Gangohī, who was known precisely for his knowledge of yoga. Some Muslim mystics rejected the equivalence of the principles and methods of the two traditions. In his letters, Aḥmad Sirhindī refuted the notion that Rāma and Raḥmān (one of the names of Allāh) constitute a single principle, while Šāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) in his al-Qawl al-jamīl denied the resemblance between the Sufi methods of breath control and those practiced by the yogīs. On one occasion, Šaraf al-Dīn Manerī (d. 1381) even went as far as to claim that the yogīs of his time did not understand the mystical doctrine that they had inherited; a similar reproach was later formulated by ʿAbd al-Quddus Gangohī with regard to a point in the physiological doctrine of yoga (Digby, 1975, 35–36). 

As the analysis conducted by S. Digby has shown, the episodes on the yogīs that are recounted in the Indo-Persian biographies of Sufi saints are frequently embedded in hagiographic narratives that depict Sufis and yogīs in competition with each other and invariably end with the defeat and conversion of the Hindus. (Digby, 1970). It should nevertheless be noted that the principal aim of these stories was probably not to voice anti-Hindu polemics but rather to assert the spiritual superiority of the Sufi saints over other rivals, as in the episodes in which the Muslim ʿulamā (religious scholars) who are hostile to Sufism are to be defeated. However, there appears to have been cases of real armed confrontations between factions of Indian and Muslim wandering ascetics, as in the case of the clash between a group of saṃnyāsīs and another group of nude Jalālī and Madāri dervishes – provoked by the killing of a cow – described in the Dabistān-i maḏāhib, a well-known Persian text describing the principal religious schools that existed in India in the 17th century (see Shea & Troyer, 1998, 231). 

The distance between the two cultures widened during the colonial period, which was characterized by the birth of Muslim reformist movements that advocated a return to the original purity of Islam as a means of overcoming the decadence of a Muslim world subjected to colonial rule. Some of these groups, such as Sayyid Aḥmad Šahīd (d. 1831) and his mujāhidīn, aspired to purge Indian Islam of all practices that had been adopted from the Hindu environment. As an antidote against the local contaminations of Indo-Persian culture, the reformist thinkers advocated the necessity of returning to the original sources of Islam, in the Arabic language. For those who supported the creation of Pakistan, figures like Akbar and Dārā Šikōh had to be denigrated because of their attitude toward the Hindus, whereas Awrangzēb was hailed as the restorer of Muslim identity in the Mughal Empire. An emblematic example of this vision is found in the poem Emperor Alamgir and the Tiger by Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), in which Akbar and Dārā Šikōh are accused of having planted the seed of heresy in India, whereas Awrangzēb is celebrated as the reviver of Islamic faith: 

The last arrow in our quiver 
in the battle between faith and unbelief.