The question of how Islam arrived in India remains markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate's incursions into Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE. In this telling, Muslims were a foreign presence among native Hindus, sowing the seeds of a mutual animosity that presaged the subcontinent's partition into Pakistan and India many centuries later.

But in a compelling reexamination of the history of Islam in India, Manan Ahmed Asif directs attention to a thirteenth-century text that tells the story of Chach, the Brahmin ruler of Sind, and his kingdom's later conquest by the Muslim general Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE. The Chachnama has long been a touchstone of Indian history, yet it is seldom studied in its entirety. Asif offers a close and complete analysis of this important text, untangling its various registers and genres in order to reconstruct the political vision at its heart.

Asif challenges the main tenets of the Chachnama's interpretation: that it is a translation of an earlier Arabic text and that it presents a history of conquest. Debunking both ideas, he demonstrates that the Chachnama was originally Persian and, far from advancing a narrative of imperial aggression, is a subtle and sophisticated work of political theory, one embedded in both the Indic and Islamic ethos. This social and intellectual history of the Chachnama is an important corrective to the divisions between Muslim and Hindu that so often define Pakistani and Indian politics today.

About the Author
Manan Ahmed Asif is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and the author of A Book of Conquest (Harvard).

Reviews
This is an innovative, refreshing, and provocative intellectual history that makes a major intervention in debates surrounding the question of Islam's 'advent' in the South Asian subcontinent. In A Book of Conquest, Manan Ahmed Asif aims at dismantling the dominant origin myth that portrays Islam's encounter with India as a conquest. -- Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University
A Book of Conquest is an important study that joins a growing conversation about precolonial India, moving beyond both colonial and nationalist tropes concerning the place and origins of Muslims in Indian society. Manan Ahmed Asif's radical re-reading of the Chachnama aims to correct portrayals of the Muslims of India as descendants of foreign conquerors. -- Richard Eaton, University of Arizona
Ahmed's re-reading will no doubt provoke scholars in both Pakistan and India. It cuts against the grain of the way the Chachnama has been discussed and taught for centuries. Though its rigorously argued style may not help win the readership it deserves outside academia, the book comes at a pivotal time. -- Kanishk Tharoor * The Hindu Business Line *
A thorough and detailed study of the early-thirteenth-century Persian narrative Chachnama, by Muhammad Ali Kufi of Uch. Asif's reading of the narrative seeks to dislodge earlier-particularly colonial and nationalist-interpretations that labeled the Chachnama a book of conquest...By reading the Chachnama as a whole and within its context, Asif convincingly argues that it is a political tract focused on the ethics of political and social relationships and accommodating sacral and other differences. -- Chitralekha Zutshi * American Historical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674660113
Author Manan Ahmed Asif
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press