The Arabs in Sindh: Muhammad bin Qasim and the conquest of 712

What this chapter is for

This chapter tells how Islam first came to rule a part of South Asia. It was the conquest of Sindh by an Arab army under Muhammad bin Qasim between 711 and 713. You will learn what Sindh was before the Arabs came, why the Umayyad governor Hajjaj bin Yusuf sent an army there, how a commander of seventeen took the country from Debal on the coast to Multan in the Punjab, and how he governed the people he conquered. By the end you should be able to explain why the Arabs won, why their conquest stopped where it did, and what it left behind, and to argue either side of the question whether 712 was a turning point.

It is a long chapter, so here is the way through it. The first part sets the scene with the land, the Chach dynasty and eighty years of Arab contact before 711. The second part follows the campaign itself and weighs why it succeeded. The third part looks at how Sindh was governed, why the conquest went no further, what it left behind and how historians have read it.

Two of the eleven papers from CE-2016 to CE-2026 asked about this conquest directly, in CE-2016 and CE-2017, and CE-2024’s Part-I asked why Arab rule could not extend beyond Sindh and Multan.¹

Before you start

The words

Caliph. The ruler of the Muslim world after the Prophet ﷺ. In 711 the caliph was al-Walid bin Abdul Malik, who ruled from Damascus.

Umayyad. The family of caliphs who ruled the Muslim world from Damascus from 661 to 750. The conquest of Sindh was an Umayyad conquest.

Abbasid. The family of caliphs who overthrew the Umayyads in 750 and ruled from Baghdad.

Governor of Iraq. The caliph’s deputy over Iraq and all the lands to its east, from Persia to the borders of India. Hajjaj bin Yusuf held this post when Sindh was conquered.

Raja. A Hindu king. Dahir, the ruler of Sindh in 711, was a raja.

Jizya. A tax paid by non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim state, in return for which the state protected their lives, property and worship and excused them from military service.

Kharaj. The land tax paid on the produce of the land.

Zimmi (also written dhimmi). A non-Muslim subject who pays the jizya and lives under the state’s protection.

Chronicle. A history written as a record of events in the order they happened. The two chronicles behind this chapter are described in the section on how historians read the conquest.

The places

• Sindh. The lower Indus valley, from the Arabian Sea up to the edge of the Punjab. In 711 Dahir’s kingdom also reached north to Multan.
• Makran. The dry coastal land west of Sindh, now in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s south-east. It was the land road from Persia to Sindh.
• Debal. Sindh’s main port in 711, near the mouth of the Indus. Pakistani archaeologists identify it with the ruins at Banbhore, about 64 kilometres from Karachi.⁸
• Nerun. A town on the Indus where Hyderabad stands today.
• Brahmanabad. A great town of central Sindh. The Arab city of al-Mansura was later built two parasangs from it; a parasang was a Persian measure of about six kilometres.³
• Alor. Dahir’s capital, near today’s Rohri and Sukkur. Its ruins are called Aror.
• Multan. The great temple city of the southern Punjab, the last place Muhammad bin Qasim took.
• Damascus and Iraq. The caliph’s capital, and the province from which Hajjaj ran the eastern wars.

The story in plain words

1. For centuries Arab traders had sailed to the ports of Sindh and western India.
2. After Islam spread, the Arabs conquered Persia and reached Makran, next door to Sindh.
3. In 711 Sindh was ruled by Raja Dahir, son of a Brahmin minister named Chach who had taken the throne.
4. Pirates near Debal seized a ship carrying Muslim women to Iraq. Dahir said he could not control them.
5. Hajjaj bin Yusuf, governor of Iraq, sent two small armies. Both failed and both commanders were killed.
6. Then he sent his young cousin, Muhammad bin Qasim, with a proper army.
7. Muhammad took Debal, marched up the Indus, crossed it, and killed Dahir in battle in June 712.
8. He took Brahmanabad, Alor and finally Multan, and treated the Hindus and Buddhists as protected subjects.
9. A new caliph recalled and imprisoned him in 715, and he died in prison in Iraq.
10. Arab rule stayed in Sindh and Multan for three centuries, but went no further into India.

1. Why Sindh in 712 matters

Most of the subcontinent’s Muslim history begins in the north, with the Turkish armies that came through the Khyber and set up the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. Sindh is the exception. Nearly five hundred years earlier, an Arab army came by the southern road through Makran, and the lower Indus valley became a province of the caliphate. It was the first part of South Asia to be ruled by Muslims, and it stayed in Arab hands, in one form or another, for three centuries.

That makes 712 a starting point, and in Pakistan it is remembered as one. Sindh is often called Bab-ul-Islam, the gateway of Islam into the subcontinent, and Muhammad bin Qasim is honoured as the first Muslim to rule there. Pakistan’s second port, Port Qasim near Karachi, is named after him.¹⁰ But a starting point is not the same as a cause. Sindh in 712 did not lead on to Delhi. The next Muslim conquests came from a different direction, by different people, three hundred years later, as the chapter on the Ghaznavids and Ghorids tells. The exam questions on Sindh turn on exactly this tension. Was the conquest a turning point, or a brilliant episode on the edge of India?

To answer that well you need the facts of the campaign, in order and with dates. You need the way the Arabs governed Sindh, which was more surprising than the conquest itself. You also need the reasons the Arab advance stopped at Multan, and this chapter gives you all three.

2. Sindh before the Arabs

Sindh in the seventh century was a rich, well-watered land along the lower Indus, with ports that faced Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Its people were Hindus and Buddhists, and the Buddhists were especially strong in the towns and among the merchants. Al-Baladhuri, writing in Baghdad in the ninth century, describes a great Buddhist temple at Debal, a tall tower with a long pole and a red banner on its top that turned in the wind over the city.³

The kingdom Muhammad bin Qasim conquered was not old. The Chachnama, the Persian history of Sindh, tells that an earlier line of kings, the Rais, ruled from Alor until a Brahmin named Chach, the chamberlain and secretary of the last Rai king, Sahasi, married the king’s widow and took the throne.⁴ The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes this as “the revolt of the Brahman Čač (after whom the book takes its title)”, and the earlier line as a Buddhist dynasty.⁵ Chach’s son was Dahir, the raja the Arabs fought.

The Chachnama gives the kingdom’s bounds in Chach’s time as Kashmir and Kanauj on the east, Makran on the west, the sea and the port of Debal on the south, and the mountains on the north.⁴ Its capital was Alor, a fortified city on a hill by the Indus. Under the king, governors ruled four great divisions from towns that later fell one by one to the Arabs, among them Brahmanabad and Multan.

The way Chach and Dahir ruled matters for the conquest, because it explains why some of their subjects did not fight for them. When Muhammad bin Qasim asked how the Jats of the Lohana tribe had been treated under Chach and Dahir, Dahir’s own former minister told him. They had not been allowed to wear soft clothes of silk or velvet; they went bare-headed and bare-footed; they had to take a dog with them when they went out, so they could be told apart; and their chiefs were forbidden to ride a horse with a saddle.⁴ Al-Baladhuri tells that 4,000 Jats (he calls them the Zutt) joined Muhammad’s army after the surrender of Sadusan.³

The Buddhists of the towns had a different grievance. They were traders, and the Chachnama shows them again and again making terms with the Arabs rather than fighting. At al-Birun (Nerun), the people had already sent two Buddhist monks to Hajjaj and made a treaty, and they opened their gates to the Arab army.³ A Pakistani historian, Dr Moqeet Javed of the University of the Punjab, lists both groups among the reasons the conquest was quick. In his account the lower castes “were hostile to the Hindu ruler”, and the Buddhists were “eager to make submission”.⁶

3. The Arabs and Sindh before 711

The conquest of 711 was the end of a long story, not the beginning of one. Arab merchants had traded with the ports of Sindh and western India long before Islam, carrying Arabian horses and dates and bringing back cloth, spices, ivory and swords.⁶ What Islam changed was that the Arabs became the rulers of Persia, and so the neighbours of Sindh by land.

The first Muslim expedition toward the subcontinent came in the year 15 of the Hijra, which is 636. Al-Baladhuri tells that Caliph Umar appointed Uthman bin Abi al-As al-Thaqafi governor of Bahrain and Oman, and that he sent an army by sea to Thana, near Bombay, and his brothers against Bharuch and the gulf of Debal. Umar had not been asked. When he heard, he wrote back angrily that if the men had been killed, he would have taken the same number from Uthman’s own tribe.³

Under Caliph Uthman, the governor of Iraq sent a man named Hakim bin Jabalah to look at the frontier and report. Al-Baladhuri preserves his report, which became famous: “The water supply is scanty; the dates are inferior; and the robbers are bold. A small army would be lost there, and a large army would starve.” The caliph sent no army.³

The raids went on by land through Makran and the hills of Kalat. Al-Baladhuri records that al-Muhallab bin Abi Sufra raided this frontier in the year 44 (664) under Caliph Muawiya, and reached Bannu and al-Ahwar, between Multan and Kabul.³ Most of these raids won booty but no lasting ground beyond Makran, and several commanders were killed.

Everything changed when Hajjaj bin Yusuf al-Thaqafi became governor of Iraq and the east in the year 75 (694). Hajjaj was the most able and the most feared governor of the Umayyad age, and he wanted the eastern frontier settled. He first appointed governors of Makran; one, Said bin Aslam, was killed by two rebels of the Allafi family, who then took refuge with Dahir.³⁶ That Dahir sheltered men who had killed the caliph’s governor was itself a grievance before any ship was taken.

4. The ship from Sarandip and the failed expeditions

The immediate cause of the war was an attack on a ship. Al-Baladhuri tells it in a few lines. The king of the “island of Rubies”, which is Sri Lanka (the Arabs called it Sarandip), sent Hajjaj some Muslim women whose fathers, merchants in his country, had died. The ship was attacked by pirates of the Meds of Debal and captured. One of the women, of the Banu Yarbu tribe, cried out “O Hajjaj!”, and when Hajjaj heard of it he answered, “Here am I.”³

Hajjaj wrote to Dahir and asked him to free the women. Dahir replied, in al-Baladhuri’s words: “Pirates over whom I have no control captured them.”³ To Hajjaj this was either a lie or an admission that Dahir could not keep order on his own coast, and either way it gave him a cause the caliph would accept.

He sent two expeditions, and both failed. Ubaidullah bin Nabhan raided Debal and was killed. Budail bin Tahfa al-Bajali was sent from Oman; when he met the enemy his horse bolted, and he was surrounded and killed.³ Two dead commanders and a defeat made the matter one of the caliphate’s honour. Hajjaj now prepared a real army and chose to lead it a young man of his own family.

Muhammad bin Qasim al-Thaqafi was Hajjaj’s kinsman; in Hajjaj’s letters in the Chachnama he is “my dear cousin”.⁴ He was very young. An Arab poet quoted by al-Baladhuri praised him because “He commanded armies at the age of seventeen”, and the Chachnama too calls him “a youth of seventeen”.³⁴ He was already governing in Persia and had been ordered to march on Rayy when Hajjaj turned him toward Sindh.

Hajjaj prepared the army with unusual care. He gave Muhammad 6,000 men from the army of Syria, the caliphate’s best troops, and more from other sources, and supplied “everything he desired, even to thread and needles”. He ordered him to wait at Shiraz until the army was ready. Al-Baladhuri adds a detail that shows how closely Hajjaj planned. Knowing that vinegar was scarce in Sindh, he soaked cotton in vinegar and dried it, so the army could soak it in water and season its food.³ Siege engines and supplies went by sea to meet the army at Debal.

5. The march from Makran to Multan, 711 to 713

The campaign had three stages. First came the march through Makran and the siege of Debal. Then came the march up the west bank of the Indus, the crossing, and the battle in which Dahir was killed. Last came the taking of the great towns, Brahmanabad, Alor and Multan. Figure 1 sets the whole story, from the first raid to the end of Umayyad Sindh, on one line, and Figure 2 maps the road.

Debal and the road up the Indus

The army marched through Makran, took two towns on the way (al-Baladhuri names Kannazbur and Armabil), and reached Debal on a Friday.³ The Chachnama dates the arrival to the tenth of Muharram in the year 93, which fell in late October 711.⁴ Ships arrived the same day with men, weapons and supplies. Muhammad dug trenches, set up lances with flags along them, and placed a great catapult called al-arus, “the bride”, which needed 500 men to work it.³

The siege turned on the temple’s banner. Hajjaj, who wrote to Muhammad every few days and received his reports every three days, told him to shorten the catapult’s foot, set it toward the east, and aim at the pole on the temple tower. The pole was broken, the defenders lost heart, and when they came out to fight they were driven back. Ladders were raised, and a soldier from Kufa was the first over the wall. Al-Baladhuri does not hide what followed. Muhammad “kept up the slaughter of the inhabitants for three days”. Then he marked out a quarter for the Muslims, built a mosque, and settled 4,000 Muslims in the city.³

From Debal the army went north. At Nerun, whose people had already made a treaty with Hajjaj through two Buddhist monks, the gates were opened and supplies brought out.³ Other towns made terms one after another. Sehwan was taken, and Sadusan surrendered on terms, its monks acting as go-betweens; it was from Sadusan that the 4,000 Jats joined the army.³

Dahir had stayed on the far, eastern bank of the Indus. Muhammad built a bridge of boats and crossed, at a point al-Baladhuri describes as bordering the lands of a king called Rasil, “while Dahir was careless and neglectful of him”.³ Dr Javed makes the same judgment: “Had Raja Dahir stopped the Arabs at the bank of the River, the situation would have been quite different.”⁶

Dahir’s death and the fall of the towns

The armies met on the east bank. Dahir rode an elephant, surrounded by other elephants and by his nobles. Al-Baladhuri calls it a battle “the like of which had not been heard of”. Dahir was forced off his elephant, fought on foot, and was killed near evening, and his army broke.³ The Chachnama gives the day as a Thursday, the tenth of Ramadan in the year 93.⁴ Ramadan of the year 93 fell in June 712. (The translator of the 1900 English edition added notes giving 711, but the year 93 of the Hijra ran from October 711 to October 712, so Ramadan in it fell in 712.)

The fort of Rawar was taken next. There Dahir’s widow, fearing capture, burned herself, her attendants and her possessions.³

Dahir’s scattered army gathered at Brahmanabad and resisted, and the town was taken by force; al-Baladhuri gives the dead as 8,000, “Some say 26,000”.³ Other towns, Sawandari and Basmad, made peace on condition that they fed the Muslims and gave them guides.

At Alor, Dahir’s capital, the people held out for some months and then surrendered on terms. The terms are among the most important lines in the whole story. Muhammad agreed “that he should not put anyone to death, nor interfere with their temples”. He explained his reason in one sentence that al-Baladhuri records: “The budd are like the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the Jews, and the fire-temples of the Magians.” He imposed the kharaj and built a mosque.³

Multan was the hardest siege. The defenders fought well, and the Arab supplies ran so low that the soldiers ate their donkeys. Then a man came out and showed them where the water entered the city; they cut it off, and the thirsty city surrendered “at discretion”, which means without terms. The fighting men were killed, and much gold was taken. The treasure was so great that Multan was remembered as “the frontier of the House of Gold”.³ Multan fell in 713.

Al-Baladhuri closes the campaign with an account. Hajjaj reckoned that he had spent 60,000,000 dirhams on Muhammad’s army and that what came back was 120,000,000. “We have appeased our rage and obtained revenge,” he said, “and have made a profit of 60,000,000 dirhams plus the head of Dahir.”³ The words matter for the argument about why the Arabs came, which the section on how historians read the conquest takes up.

6. Why the Arabs won

A small army took a large kingdom in about two years. The question “why” has been asked by every historian of the period, and CE-2022 asked it of the later Turkish conquests too. The causes sort into two groups, the strengths of the Arabs and the weaknesses of Dahir’s kingdom, and Dr Javed of the University of the Punjab sorts them the same way: “the splendid strategy of the Arabs, and, second, the blatant operational blunders on the part of Raja Dahir and his men”.⁶

The first strength was planning. The conquest was not a raid. It came after eighty years of contact and two failed expeditions, from a base in Makran, with a picked army, siege engines by sea, and supplies down to needles and vinegar.³⁶ Hajjaj ran it from Iraq, with letters every few days; the Chachnama gives the text of about twenty of them.⁵

The second was military skill. The Arab army had beaten Persia and Byzantium. It had siege engines that Sindh’s towns could not answer, it was disciplined, and its commander moved fast and chose his crossing well.

The third was policy. Town after town surrendered on terms because the Arabs kept their terms. Nerun opened its gates before the army arrived; Sadusan and Alor surrendered through their monks; and Brahmanabad’s people were allowed to rebuild their temples. A town that knew it would keep its life, its property and its worship had less reason to fight to the end.

The first weakness was a divided people. Dahir’s dynasty was new, Brahmin rulers had replaced a Buddhist line, and the Jats and Meds lived under humiliating rules. Thousands of Jats joined the invaders.⁴³ The Buddhist merchants of the towns, who had most to lose from a long war, made terms.

The second was Dahir’s own handling of the war. He let the Arabs march up the Indus and cross it unopposed, and he fought one great battle in which his own death ended the war. When a king led from an elephant, his fall broke his army.

The third was isolation. No other Indian king came to Dahir’s help, and after his death his sons fought on separately.

Figure 4 sets these causes side by side.

Weigh the two sides against each other, because the examiner rewards a ranking. Military skill alone does not explain the speed, because Multan and Brahmanabad show that a town which chose to fight could hold out for months. What made the campaign quick was that so many towns chose not to fight. That choice came from the meeting of Dahir’s weaknesses with the Arabs’ policy, because subjects who had little love for their rulers were offered terms they could believe. So the strongest single cause is political, not military.

7. The settlement of Brahmanabad: how the Arabs governed Sindh

The conquest is famous; the way Sindh was governed afterwards is more important, and it is the part most candidates leave out. The question Muhammad bin Qasim faced was new to Muslims in the east. What was the legal status of Hindus and Buddhists? The Quran names Jews and Christians, the People of the Book, as communities who may live under Muslim rule on paying the jizya. Hindus and Buddhists were not named.

The Chachnama tells how the question arose. After Brahmanabad, the townspeople agreed to pay the tax and became zimmis, and the Brahmins were appointed to collect the revenue. But the priests of the temples grew poor, because people were afraid to make their offerings. They came to Muhammad’s door and asked that the people be allowed “to repair and construct Budh temples and carry on our worship as before”. Muhammad wrote to Hajjaj.⁴

Hajjaj’s reply is the document to carry into the hall. As the Chachnama gives it:

“With regard to the request of the chiefs of Brahmanabad about the building of Budh temples and toleration in religious matters, I do not see (when they have done homage to us by placing their heads in the yoke of submission, and have undertaken to pay the fixed tribute for the Khalifah and guaranteed its payment) what further rights we have over them beyond the usual tax. Because after they have become zimmis (protected subjects) we have no right whatever to interfere with their lives or their property. Do, therefore, permit them to build the temples of those they worship. No one is prohibited from or punished for following his own religion, and let no one prevent them from doing so, so that they may live happy in their own homes.”⁴

Put simply, once the people paid the tax and accepted Muslim rule, they were zimmis, and the state had no right over their lives, their property or their worship. Muhammad told the chiefs, headmen and Brahmins that they could build their temples, trade freely with the Muslims, keep their festivals as their fathers had, and give their Brahmins three dirhams in every hundred of revenue.⁴ The Chachnama adds that he “permanently settled their affairs in the same way and on the same lines, as had been followed in the case of the Jews, Fire-worshippers, Nazarenes and Magians of Irak and Syria”.⁴ That one decision extended the status of protected people to Hindus and Buddhists, and Muslim rulers in India followed it for a thousand years.

The Arabs did not try to govern Sindh with Arabs alone. They kept the old machinery. Brahmins collected the revenue, local headmen kept their places and were given the title of Rana, and the old officials advised the new rulers; Dahir’s former minister Siyakar was the man who told Muhammad how the Jats had been treated.⁴ Muhammad’s instructions to his officers survive in the Chachnama: “Tax every person according to his means and circumstances”, divide shares justly, and do not quarrel among yourselves “so that your country may not be devastated”.⁴ Figure 5 shows the settlement as a structure.

Do not draw the settlement as gentler than it was. The same chronicles that record Hajjaj’s letter record three days of killing at Debal, the slaughter at Brahmanabad, the killing of the fighting men at Multan and the enslaving of women and children there.³ Al-Baladhuri describes towns taken by force being treated one way, and towns that surrendered on terms another. Archaeology at Banbhore points the same way: carved stones from an older temple were reused in the Grand Mosque, with their carved faces turned into the wall.⁹ The fair statement is that the conquest was a war, fought as wars then were, and that the settlement which followed was unusually tolerant for its age. Both halves belong in an answer.

8. The fall of Muhammad bin Qasim

Muhammad bin Qasim’s career ended as suddenly as it began, and for reasons that had nothing to do with Sindh. Hajjaj died in 714, and the news reached Muhammad after Multan.³ Then the caliph al-Walid died, and his brother Sulaiman succeeded him. Sulaiman hated Hajjaj and his family. He appointed Salih bin Abdur Rahman over the revenue of Iraq, a man whose brother Hajjaj had put to death, and Salih sent a new governor to Sindh who put Muhammad in chains.³

Muhammad was taken to Wasit in Iraq. Al-Baladhuri preserves the verses he spoke in prison, one beginning “They lost me, and a precious thing they lost, / For a day of adversity and frontier defence”, and records that “Salih tortured him and others of the family of abu-‘Ukail to death”. He adds that “The people of al-Hind mourned the loss of Muhammad, and set up a portrait of him in al-Kiraj”.³ He died in 715.

The Chachnama tells a different and more famous story, that Dahir’s daughters, sent to the caliph, falsely accused Muhammad and that he was sewn into a hide on the caliph’s order. Al-Baladhuri, the earlier and more sober source, says nothing of this. When you write about his death, give al-Baladhuri’s account as the history, and if you mention the Chachnama’s story, call it a later tradition.

9. Sindh after Muhammad bin Qasim, and why the conquest stopped at Multan

The conquest did not end the fighting. When Muhammad was taken away, “the kings of al-Hind had come back to their kingdoms”, in al-Baladhuri’s words, and Dahir’s son Hullishah (other sources call him Jaisiah) returned to Brahmanabad.³

The next turn came from the pious caliph Umar bin Abdul Aziz (717 to 720). He wrote to the kings of Sindh “inviting them to become Moslems and be subject to him, agreeing to let them continue on their thrones, and have the same privileges and obligations as the Moslems”. Al-Baladhuri records that his reputation had reached them, and that “Hullishah accepted Islam, and so did the other kings, and they adopted Arab names”.³ Under the governor Junaid in the 720s the peace broke down; al-Baladhuri says Hullishah turned back from Islam and declared war, though “Others say that he did not begin the hostilities, but that al-Junaid attacked him”, and he was killed.³ Dr Javed reports a Pakistani view that the cause was distrust between the two men, political rather than religious.⁶

The Arabs then built cities of their own. Under the governor al-Hakam bin Awana the Muslims had lost ground, and he built a fortified refuge which he named al-Mahfuza, “the protected”. Muhammad bin Qasim’s son Amr, who served under him, then built a city on the other side of the lake and named it al-Mansura, “the victorious”, which became the seat of the governors.³ Dr Javed dates the two cities to the years 113 and 121 of the Hijra, which are about 731 and 738.⁶ Al-Mansura stood near old Brahmanabad, and its ruins are still there.

CE-2024’s Part-I asked why Arab rule could not extend beyond Sindh and Multan.² Several causes worked together.

1. Politics at the centre. The conquest depended on Hajjaj and Muhammad. Their fall in 714 and 715 removed the planner and the commander, and their successors were men of a rival faction.³
2. Quarrels among the Arabs. The Arab tribes in Sindh, the northern Mudar and the southern Yemenis, fought each other, and governors took sides. Dr Javed names “tribal enmities and infighting between the Arabs” as the main cause of the Umayyad decline in Sindh.⁶
3. The Indian kingdoms. East of the Indus and the Thar desert lay strong Hindu kingdoms. Junaid’s raids of the 720s and 730s reached Rajputana and Gujarat, but Indian inscriptions record that the Pratihara king Nagabhata and the Chalukya ruler Pulakeshiraja defeated the Arabs, and Indian historians make this the main reason the advance stopped.¹² Under Junaid’s successor Tamim, al-Baladhuri admits, “the Moslems withdrew from the land of al-Hind, and abandoned their headquarters, and they have not returned so far as that since”.³
4. The land itself. The desert of Thar and the distance from Iraq made Sindh a far frontier, as Hakim bin Jabalah had warned Caliph Uthman.³
5. A change of dynasty. In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, and Sindh’s governors were drawn into the struggle; Dr Javed records the last Umayyad-era governor killed by the first Abbasid governor in the year 132, which is 749-50.⁶

Of these, the first two decided the timing and the last three set the limit. A divided frontier province, far from its capital and facing strong kingdoms across a desert, could hold what it had but not take more.

10. Three centuries of Arab Sindh: al-Mansura and Multan

The fall of the Umayyads did not end Arab Sindh. Abbasid governors ruled it from al-Mansura for about a century, but as the caliphs in Baghdad weakened, their hold on so distant a province became a hold in name. In the year 257 of the Hijra (870-71) the caliph handed Sindh, with other eastern provinces, to the Saffarid ruler of Sistan, Yaqub bin Lais, to keep him away from Iraq. After Yaqub died in 879, Sindh fell apart into two Arab states of its own, which “transmitted no revenue and rendered no political allegiance to the Khalif” but still prayed for him in the Friday sermon.¹¹

The traveller and historian al-Masudi visited the Indus valley in 915 and 916, and his account is the best picture of these two states. Multan was ruled by an Arab amir of the Quraish, Abu’l Dalhat al-Munabbih, whose family had held it, al-Masudi was told, almost since Islam came to the land. The amir kept a paid army, and al-Masudi counted 120,000 villages around the city. The great temple of the Sun at Multan still drew pilgrims from all over India, and its offerings were the largest part of the amir’s revenue. The amir’s threat to harm the idol, al-Masudi says, was enough to stop the neighbouring Hindu kings from attacking him.¹¹

The lower Indus, from the sea to Alor, was ruled from al-Mansura by another Qurashi family, the Habbaris, descended from an Arab who had come to Sindh around the year 111 of the Hijra (729-30). The amir of al-Mansura had eighty war elephants, and his land was well farmed, though he had to defend it against the Meds and the desert tribes.¹¹ Al-Masudi found at his court descendants of the Prophet’s family who had fled persecution in Iraq, a sign that Sindh had become a refuge as well as a frontier.

So for three hundred years the Muslims of the Indus valley lived under Muslim rulers of Arab blood, in two settled states that traded, prayed and studied as part of the Muslim world, while the rest of India knew Islam mainly through merchants on its coasts. That is the real meaning of the claim that Sindh was the gateway of Islam. Arab Multan came to an end only when Mahmud of Ghazni, coming from the north-west, took the city, and that story belongs to the next chapter, on the Ghaznavids and the Ghorids.

11. What the conquest left behind

The conquest’s legacy is easier to see than its limits. Sindh and Multan were Muslim lands for three hundred years before the Turks arrived, and four things came of that.

The conquest planted a Muslim society in the lower Indus valley, with settlers, garrisons and a mosque in every conquered town. The best surviving trace is the Grand Mosque of Banbhore, the site Pakistan’s archaeologists identify with Debal. The Sindh government’s antiquities department describes a stone mosque 34 metres by 35, with a courtyard and a prayer hall whose flat roof stood on 33 wooden pillars. An inscription dated 727 makes it, in the department’s words, “the best preserved example of an early mosque in the region”.⁸ Dr Muhammad Rafique Mughal’s study of the site gives the inscription’s date as 109 of the Hijra, which is 727-28.⁹ Conversion itself was slow; Pakistani writers stress that Hindus and Buddhists remained a large part of Sindh’s people for centuries.⁷

Sindh became the road by which Indian learning reached Baghdad, and Arab learning reached India. A Pakistani writer, Muhammad Huzaifa Nizam, gives examples from the Arabic sources. A Sindhi scholar called Kankah carried an Indian astronomical work to Baghdad, which became the Arabic Sindhind. Sindhi physicians translated the great Indian medical books. The Indian numerals passed into Arabic use as arqam al-hindi, “the Indian numerals”, and from there, much later, to Europe.⁷ The ports of Sindh also kept the sea trade with the Gulf alive; Banbhore remained Sindh’s port until the Indus moved in the eleventh century.⁸

The Brahmanabad settlement gave Muslim rule in South Asia its first legal model, in which non-Muslims were protected subjects who paid the jizya and kept their worship, and local leaders stayed in office. Later rulers did not always follow it, but it was the precedent.

Last, the conquest gave Pakistan a founding memory. The title Bab-ul-Islam for Sindh, the name of Port Qasim, and the place of Muhammad bin Qasim in Pakistan’s school histories all express the idea that Islam’s history in this land began here.

12. How historians read the conquest

Everything above rests on two chronicles, and a strong answer knows what they are.

The first is al-Baladhuri’s Futuh al-Buldan, “The Conquests of the Lands”, written in Baghdad in the ninth century. It is short and plain, it names its informants, and modern historians trust it most.

The second is the Chachnama. The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes it as the “Persian translation of an early anonymous Arabic history of Sind compiled at Arōr in the 3rd/9th century”, translated “some time after the year 613/1216” by Ali bin Hamid Kufi, a scholar at the court of Nasiruddin Qabacha in Sindh.⁵ It is far fuller than al-Baladhuri, giving the text of about twenty of Hajjaj’s letters, and it mixes the Arab account with a local Brahmin tradition of the Chach family.⁵ Its details, including the famous letter, are generally accepted; its romantic tales, such as the end of Muhammad bin Qasim, are treated with caution.

The reading that leads in Pakistan, and in this chapter, sees the conquest as the opening of Muslim history in South Asia. Sindh is the gateway; Muhammad bin Qasim is a gifted young commander who conquered by skill and governed with justice; and the Brahmanabad settlement shows Islam’s tolerance from the start. Dr Javed’s account is typical. The conquest succeeded, he writes, through “the splendid strategy of the Arabs” and Dahir’s “blatant operational blunders”, and Muhammad bin Qasim was “one of the greatest generals of Arab-Islamic history” who “fell prey to the palatial politics”.⁶

Within Pakistan there is a second view. Nizam argues that taking 711 as “the year when Pakistan’s foundation was laid” is unhistorical, because Muslim contact began eighty years earlier, because conversion was gradual rather than sudden, and because it cuts the land off from its older history.⁷ He does not doubt the conquest’s importance; he doubts that one year can carry the weight of a nation’s origin.

Indian historians read the same events from the other side. The standard Indian history of the period, edited by R. C. Majumdar for the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, stresses that Sindh fell because it was weak and betrayed, not because the Arabs were stronger. Sindh, it says, “was at the moment exhausted by civil wars, internal discords, and foreign aggression”, and Dahir’s “statesmanship and military skill were also much inferior to those of his rival”. It blames the desertion of chiefs and “the unpatriotic character of the Buddhists”, and concludes that “The conquest of Sindh should not, therefore, be regarded as indicating in a general way the military superiority of Muslims over Indians”. Its proof is what came next: “the conquest of Sindh was the first and the last great achievement of the Arabs in India”.¹² Other writers have stressed the slaughter at Debal and Multan, the enslaving of captives and the treasure, which Hajjaj’s own account of his profit seems to confirm.

The readings agree more than they seem to. Both see Dahir’s divided kingdom and his poor generalship as a large part of the story, and both accept the speed and skill of the Arab campaign. They differ on what it meant. For Pakistan, 712 opened a history that runs on to 1947; for Majumdar, it proved only that a weak Sindh could be taken, while the strong kingdoms beyond it held. The evidence supports a middle position. The campaign was a war of conquest, with revenge and revenue openly in Hajjaj’s mind, and the advance did stop where Indian power began. The settlement that followed was, by the standards of the eighth century, a tolerant one that protected temples and kept local leaders in place, and the Muslim society it founded lasted. A good answer says both, and argues that what made 712 matter was the settlement more than the battles.

13. What students mix up

• The year. Some books give 711 and some 712. The army reached Debal in late 711, and Dahir was killed in June 712. Say “711 to 712” for the campaign, and “712” for the conquest of Sindh.
• Where Dahir died. He died in a battle after the Arabs crossed the Indus, before Brahmanabad and Alor were taken, not at Alor.³
• Who sent the army. Hajjaj bin Yusuf, governor of Iraq, sent it, with the permission of the caliph al-Walid. The caliph did not lead it.
• Hajjaj and Muhammad. Muhammad bin Qasim was Hajjaj’s cousin and young commander, not his son.
• Sindh and Delhi. The conquest of Sindh did not lead to Muslim rule in Delhi. The Turks who founded the Delhi Sultanate came through the north-west three centuries later.
• Zimmi status. The settlement did not make the Hindus Muslims. It made them protected non-Muslim subjects who paid the jizya.
• The death story. The tale of Dahir’s daughters is the Chachnama’s; al-Baladhuri says Muhammad was tortured to death in prison at Wasit.

14. What the examiners have asked

These past questions sit squarely in this chapter’s subject.¹

Both Part-II questions quote a claim and ask you to discuss it, so both want a judgment. CE-2016’s claim is about “everlasting results … all over South Asia”, which is the turning-point question this chapter keeps coming back to. CE-2017’s claim is narrower and easier to support: the conquest did open a road for Islam and for trade, as the section on what the conquest left behind shows. CE-2022’s question on “the causes of Muslim’s success in India” belongs to the Turkish conquests, but the causes in the section on why the Arabs won make a useful comparison.¹

15. Facts to take into the examination hall

Numbers: an army with 6,000 Syrian troops at its core; a catapult worked by 500 men; 4,000 Muslims settled at Debal; 4,000 Jats join after Sadusan; 60 million dirhams spent and 120 million returned.³ People: Hajjaj bin Yusuf, al-Walid bin Abdul Malik, Muhammad bin Qasim, Raja Dahir, Chach, Sulaiman bin Abdul Malik, Umar bin Abdul Aziz, Hullishah or Jaisiah. Sources: al-Baladhuri’s Futuh al-Buldan; the Chachnama, translated by Ali Kufi after 1216.

16. What loses marks on this subject

1. Telling only the battles. The settlement of Brahmanabad is the most important part, and the examiners know it.
2. No dates or wrong dates. Debal late 711, Dahir June 712, Multan 713, Muhammad’s death 715.
3. A one-sided story. Write the conquest as a war and the settlement as tolerant. Leaving out either half reads as propaganda or as an attack.
4. Agreeing with “everlasting results … all over South Asia” without qualification. Sindh did not lead to Delhi. Say what the results were and where they stopped.
5. No sources. Name al-Baladhuri and the Chachnama. Quote a phrase from Hajjaj’s letter.
6. Treating the Chachnama’s romance as fact. Give al-Baladhuri’s account of Muhammad’s death.
7. Forgetting why the conquest stopped. It answers half of every “turning point” question.

17. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2016, Question 2: “‘Conquest of Sindh produced everlasting results not only in Sindh but all over South Asia’. Discuss.”¹

“Discuss” asks you to weigh the claim. It has two parts: results in Sindh, and results “all over South Asia”. The first part is easy to support and the second needs qualifying, so your position is: the conquest produced lasting results in Sindh and laid foundations for South Asia as a whole, but it did not by itself bring Muslim rule to the rest of India.

• Introduction. Sindh under Raja Dahir; Hajjaj’s army under Muhammad bin Qasim, 711 to 713; Debal, Dahir’s death in June 712, Multan 713. Your position in one sentence, as above.
• Background, short. Eighty years of contact; the ship from Sarandip; two failed expeditions.
• Results in Sindh. The first Muslim society: settlers, mosques, Banbhore’s mosque of 727. Three centuries of Arab rule, al-Mansura. Gradual conversion.
• Results for South Asia: the model of rule. Hajjaj’s letter; Hindus and Buddhists as zimmis; temples protected; Brahmins kept in office. The precedent for later Muslim rulers.
• Results for South Asia: the bridge. Indian astronomy, medicine and numerals to Baghdad; trade through Sindh’s ports.
• The limits. Why the Arabs stopped at Multan: the fall of Hajjaj and Muhammad, Arab infighting, Indian kingdoms, the desert. The Delhi Sultanate came from the Turks in 1206, not from Sindh.
• How historians read it. Pakistan’s reading, Sindh as Bab-ul-Islam; the reading that stresses plunder; the evidence for each.
• Judgment and conclusion. Everlasting in Sindh and in the legal model it set; a foundation rather than a cause for the rest of South Asia.

Here is a model introduction, in the register that earns marks.

In 711 an army sent by Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, and commanded by his seventeen-year-old kinsman Muhammad bin Qasim, marched through Makran to the port of Debal. Within two years it had killed Raja Dahir, taken Brahmanabad and Alor, and reached Multan. Sindh thus became the first region of South Asia under Muslim rule, and it remained so for three centuries. The claim that the conquest produced everlasting results is fully borne out in Sindh, where it planted a Muslim society and established, in the settlement of Brahmanabad, the principle that non-Muslims could live as protected subjects. For South Asia as a whole, however, its results were a foundation rather than a cause: the Arab advance halted at Multan, and Muslim rule over northern India came three centuries later, from another direction.

What to remember from this chapter

• Sindh was conquered by Muhammad bin Qasim, sent by Hajjaj bin Yusuf under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid, between 711 and 713.
• The immediate cause was the seizure of a ship carrying Muslim women from Sarandip by the pirates of Debal, and Dahir’s refusal to act; two expeditions failed first.
• Debal was reached in late 711 and taken by siege; Dahir was killed in June 712 after the Arabs crossed the Indus; Brahmanabad, Alor and then Multan (713) fell.
• The Arabs won through planning, skill and a policy of trusted terms, and because Dahir’s kingdom was divided and he lost everything in one battle.
• Hajjaj’s letter made Hindus and Buddhists zimmis whose lives, property and temples were protected. Local Brahmins and headmen kept their places.
• Muhammad was recalled by Caliph Sulaiman and died in prison at Wasit in 715.
• The Arabs stopped at Multan because of politics at the centre, their own quarrels, strong Indian kingdoms and the desert.
• The conquest left the first Muslim society in South Asia, a bridge for learning and trade, a model of rule, and Pakistan’s founding memory of Sindh as Bab-ul-Islam.

Check yourself

Answer each from memory, in your own words, before you open the answer.

1. What was the immediate cause of the war, and why did Hajjaj not accept Dahir’s answer? (The section on the ship from Sarandip.)

2. Put these in order: Multan taken, Debal reached, Dahir killed, Brahmanabad taken, Alor surrenders. (The section on the march.)

3. In your own words, what did Hajjaj’s letter about Brahmanabad decide, and why was it new? (The section on the settlement.)

4. Give two reasons the Arabs did not advance beyond Multan, and say which you think mattered more. (The section on Sindh after Muhammad bin Qasim.)

5. Why should you be careful with the story that Dahir’s daughters caused Muhammad bin Qasim’s death? (The section on his fall.)

6. From the chapter on how to sit the paper: what is the difference between a list of causes and an analysis of causes, and how would you apply it to why the Arabs won?