Why didn't Islam ever catch on in most of India, despite centuries of rule? Shouldn't it have appealed to the lower classes? Why did it stick in Sindh and Kashmir but not the Gangetic plain or the Deccan?
>>821130
I have no idea, but I like the fact that there are friggin elephants walking up a ramp infront of an incredibly huge fortress.
>>821204
Yeah
Moar of these fortresses plz
>>821130
>Why didn't Islam ever catch on in most of India
It did. 14% of the current population of India is Muslim, and that doens't include Pakistan and other places that are historically in the Indu sphere. Islam did appeal to the lower castes, from whom a large percentage of today's Indian Muslims descend from. If by your question you mean:
>Why didn't Islam ever have a super majority in most of India?
The answer is because of the lack of forced conversion, national pride in those that didn't want to convert despite the benefits of doing so, and other imaginable social feelings (no doubt resentment, especially of upper class hindus, etc.)
>>821130
Hinduism was pretty resistant to Christianization efforts for what I believe are similar reasons. You introduce your holy figures into a polytheism and they'll just say "cool, more gods" and file them away somewhere in their huge canon where they'll be essentially ignored without being outright rejected.
>>821130
Like the anon above said, it did, and there are hundreds of millions of South Asian Muslims now.
As for why it wasn't a sweeping conversion, that's because there were basically two kinds of Muslim cultures in the subcontinent - the raiders and the merchants.
Raiders were the frontiersmen of Central Asia, like cossacks, who lived by raiding others and gaining fame through border reaving. They lived all over Afghanistan and the Punjab and only ever bowed to authority in the form of one of their own rising to power.
The merchants on the other hand were the middle class that formed around the Turkic raiders that established sultanates throughout India between the 12th and 16th centuries, trading Indian goods with Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
While both could be zealous in their antagonism with non-Muslims, both raiders and traders tended to defer to realpolitik and form local alliances with Hindu and Sikh peers, and were mostly satisfied in carving out their own niche than actually wiping anyone out. The types that seriously attempted to mass convert India tended to come from further abroad in Central Asia - the Timurs and the Baburs and the Durranis, and many times the local Indian Muslims allied with other native powers against them.
>>821260
Yet the same didn't happen to the Hellenistic, Norse, Arabic, and Celtic polytheistic faiths.
>>821239
A lot of Muslim Indians were expelled to Pakistan as well.
>>821239
Islam in India was the equivalent of a white woman in the ghetto. They accepted hindus as being on equal footing on their interpretation of what people of the book was.
>>821260
>>821277
That guy is wrong. Christianity/Catholicism has been remarkably successful in converting foreign faiths. Shit, one of the apostles trip to India still had converts a thousand years later. Though, they wore the tonsure and did the cross sign backwards. Christian communities existed in China, and only declined because the lack of connection. When Matteo Ricci went to china, he was so successful at converting the Chinese both the Chinese (though not the emperor, the emperor as enamored by his intellect and ability to out chinese the chinese at their own intellectual games) and the pope were concerned he was gonna do some shady stuff.
>>821277
Hinduism was somewhat more advanced and organized than the polytheistic cults that Christianity and Islam overcame. It had a very literate and formalized priestly class with popular culture and public rituals that most non-Hindu Indian rulers attempted to respect for reasons of stability or bureaucratic expediency.
Someplace that was more primitive and animistic like the Bengal for example was far more readily Islamized than the more advanced and developed Deccan.
>>821286
The Chinese Christians had the unfortunate fate at first being almost killed off in the 800s and then being associated with the Mongols
>>821277
Hinduism has a higher power level than Abrahamic faiths, while European paganism has a lower power level.
The Plagues of Egypt don't have shit on magical ultra-nukes and flying palaces.
>>821308
They could have recovered, but they had no liturgical connection. People came, converted them, and left. With a lack of trained priests and a lack of holy books to understand etc they sort of languished and were just weird chinese, rather than being practicing christians.
Of course, this all came to a head when the man proclaimed himself to be the brother or something of jesus and a hundred million chinese died in a revolt
Islam has only been able to gain traction in tribal or recently tribal societies
>>821324
or sweden
france
germany
uk
huh, doing better than Christianity
>>821320
Not really. They had protests that were trained and everything else. You forget how many monks and priests traveled the silk road when the Mongols ruled.
>>821344
*priests
>>821320
You also forget that Nestorians were the majority in China. And China is slated to have the largest Christian population by the end of the century
>>821272
To add, there was another and more significant presence in South Asia: the Sufis, who were the primary evangelists, proselytizers, and initiators of Islam to the populace. To this day, even with the disease of radical Islamism, most Indian Muslims are entrenched in Sufism.
>>821286
>Christian communities existed in China, and only declined because the lack of connection.
>only declined because the lack of connection.
They were slated to be the third biggest religion in China during the T'ang to Song Dynasties.
And then the Mongols happened, who had Christian Turkics with them, and being a Christian in China = Being a barbarian nigger. Became unpopular and many people simply abandoned it.
