Rise of Islam in India is the outcome of foreign invasion. In fact, the Indian history is dominated by the recurrent theme of foreign invasion. For centuries waves of invaders swept through the vulnerable passes of the northwest and across the fertile plains of the north, before the tides of conquest ebbed and died on the boundless plains of Hindustan.

The Aryans reached India in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, followed by the Kushanas in the 1st century AD, and then in the 6th century, the Hunas. The most significant among the invaders were the Muslims, who invaded India as early as the 8th century. Each wave of invasion brought its own distinctive cultural practices and religious beliefs, yet finally each was absorbed by the vast mass of the indigenous population. Successive generations left rich cultural deposits in the stratified soil of the society of India.

Islam was first ingrained in the lower Indus valley by the Arab governors of the Umayyad caliphs. In 711 Muhammad ibn Qasim conquered Sind on the crest of the earliest wave of Arab success, as the armies of Muslim drove west into Spain and the heartland of Christian Europe, and east into Persia, Transoxiana and Central Asia.

Qasim had been ordered by the Iraq governor to fight against piracy on the sea routes between the Arab lands and the western coastal regions of India and Ceylon. He stormed the pirate stronghold of Debal, defeated the Brahmana king Dahir, and reached the west bank of the Indus, before broadening his conquests with the capture of the cities of Bahmannadad and Alor. This initial wave of conquest was significant since it implanted Islam for the first time on Indian soil and also brought the Arabs large numbers of slaves for use in the conquered lands, enabling the economic potential of the agricultural heartlands of the Fertile Crescent to be fully exploited.

The early Muslims were strictly instructed not to get in the way of the local religious customs or traditions and to tolerate the Hindu practices. Unfortunately, only fragments of their ancient mosques survive. The remains of one from the early 8th century has been discovered 40 kilometers east of Karachi at Bhambore, which may be the site of ancient Debal, scene of Qasim`s victory. After Muhammad ibn Qasim, there was no large-scale Arab immigration. Arab influence slowly declined, although Sind and Multan, in what is now Pakistan, kept links with Egypt and Iraq. This early Arab conquest had important consequence for the future, for the political system brought in by Qasim offered the basis for the policy of Muslims later in India As per Muslim practice Qasim treated the idolatrous Hindus with religious tolerance, as `people of the book`. He bestowed on them the status of zimmis or the protected. By the time of the constitution of Muslim supremacy at Lahore and Delhi, this liberal tradition was already well entrenched, diluting the rigorous provisions of the sharia with regard to idol-worshippers and non-believers.

This initial link was maintained for over 300 years, a local event in the history of Islam but a major one in the history of India. Although these early traces of the rise of Islam in India were extinguished almost entirely by subsequent raids, and, in particular by the multiple invasions of the Afghans and the Turks, in the coastal areas of Gujarat and the Deccan there was widespread peaceful contact with the Islamic world, as there had been with the west in classical times.

At Bhadreshwar in the Kutch, the Solah Khambi Masjid predates the great wave of the invasion of Muslim in the later parts of the 12th century and offers a tangible historical link with the remote coastal trading enclaves of early settlements of Muslims in India. From these coastal colonies at ports such as Cambay and Chaul, and that further south on the Malabar Coast, the Muslim missionaries travelled to spread Islam to Malaya and Indonesia.

The full blow of Muslim military might hit India in the earlier parts of the 11th century when the Turkish Ghaznavids under Mahmud of Ghazni conquered many of the Rajput rulers of the north-west, penetrated as far as Varanasi in the east, and sacked the legendary Somnath temple in Saurashtra on the west coast in 1026. These annual raids were restricted when the Seljuk Turks took Ghazni in 1038. With the rise of the Ghurids under Muhammad of Ghor in the 12th century, a considerable portion of northern India was absorbed into an Islamic empire extending as far as the Caspian Sea.

The Ghurids reigned the inaccessible central region of Afghanistan. Their aggressive zeal carried them both east and west, absorbing the remains of the Ghaznavid Empire. In 1192 they defeated Prithviraj Chauhan, the legendary Rajput ruler of Ajmer and Delhi, on the second battle of Tarain, where the mighty `Hindu host tottered and collapsed in its own ruins`. After two years, the Hindu Gahadavala king of Varanasi and Kanauj succumbed.

The mounted archers of the army of the Muslims were formidable shock troops. They wreaked havoc among the Hindu and Rajput forces very often, who were cramped by their dependence on ponderous elephants and battle trains. Within twelve years of the death of Prithviraj Chauhan, the Hindus of northern India were reduced to tributary status under the rule of the Slave dynasty in India of the Muslims. The leader of the Muslim invasion, Qutb-Ud-Din Aibak, was the most successful of all the commanders of Muhammad of Ghor. Appointed viceroy and placed in charge of all the conquests of his master in India, he used his semiautonomous position to carve out an extensive empire. He laid permanent foundations for the institution of Muslim power in northern India.

At first he strengthened his hold on Punjab, then, in rapid succession, he seized Ajmer, invaded the Gwalior Fort and conquered Delhi and Kanauj, reaching the distant stronghold of Kalinjar in the remote territory of Bundelkhand in 1203. Another Ghuri general, Ikhtiyar-ad-Din Muhammad Khalji, break through Bihar and Bengal, seized the ancient city of Gaur and attacked Assam. With the death of Muhammad of Ghor in 1206, Qutb-Ud-Din Aibak assumed power at Lahore. When the Afghan parts of the empire were cut off from India by the Mongols, an independent dynasty was created, based on Delhi, the ancient capital of Prithviraj Chauhan, a strategic centre which controlled the corridor between the Himalayas and the Thar Desert in India. It was a great trading city, commanding the region between the Ganges and Jamuna.

The Slave dynasty, begun by Qutb-Ud-Din Aibak and maintained by his successors until 1290, was called so since three of its most important sultans; Aybak, Iltutmish and Balban, were former slaves who had received manumission before achieving royal power. The Delhi Sultanate was the first prominent centralized Muslim kingdom in India. The power of the Sultanate was recognized throughout the north and west, although in many of the regions away from Turco-Afghan military control, the influence of the local Hindu and Rajput chiefs remained formidable. The Sultanate also helped in the rise and growth of Islam in India.