The Indo-Persian Legacy: Why Subcontinental Islam Resonates More with the Persianate World than the Arabs
By Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam
16 March 2026
Main Points:
• For centuries, South Asian Muslim culture developed within a broader Persianate civilizational sphere where Persian served as the language of administration, literature, and scholarship.
• The spread of Islam in the subcontinent was deeply shaped by Sufi networks such as the Chishti and Naqshbandi orders, many of which originated in Persia and Central Asia.
• The Hanafi school of jurisprudence, founded by the Persian-origin jurist Abu Hanifa, became the dominant legal tradition in the region.
• Persian cultural influence remains visible in everyday religious vocabulary such as namaz, roza, and Ramzan, as well as in poetry, architecture, and devotional traditions.
• Although reformist movements later promoted closer alignment with Arab textual sources, the Indo-Persian synthesis of Hanafi jurisprudence and Sufi spirituality continues to shape South Asian Islam.
Islam is often perceived primarily through an Arab cultural lens because its sacred texts emerged in the Arabic language. Yet the historical experience of the Indian subcontinent tells a more complex story. While the Qur’an and Hadith formed the theological foundation of Muslim belief, the cultural expression of Islam in South Asia developed largely within a broader Persianate intellectual and spiritual sphere.
From the 11th century onward, Muslim rule in the subcontinent—beginning with the Delhi Sultanate and later continuing under the Mughal Empire—integrated India into a vast cultural zone stretching from Iran and Central Asia to Anatolia. Within this world, Persian served as the language of administration, literature, diplomacy, and scholarship.
Historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson famously described this transregional cultural sphere as the “Persianate world.” In his influential work The Venture of Islam, he explained how Persian language and aesthetics shaped Muslim societies far beyond the geographical boundaries of Iran itself. Thus, he avers, South Asia and the Indian subcontinent became one of the most vibrant centres of this Persianate civilization.
A Prophetic Tradition and the Persian Scholarly Legacy
Muslim scholars have often referred to a well-known prophetic tradition that appears to recognize the intellectual contributions of Persian scholars. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is reported to have said:
“If knowledge or faith were suspended at the star Surayya, a man from Persia would attain it.”
In classical Arabic, Surayya refers to the Pleiades star cluster, symbolizing something extremely distant or difficult to reach. Many commentators interpreted the saying as an acknowledgement of the remarkable role Persian scholars would later play in the development of Islamic intellectual traditions.
One of the most influential figures associated with this legacy is Abu Hanifa (699–767), the founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. Though he lived in Kufa in present-day Iraq, Abu Hanifa was of Persian ancestry. His legal methodology later became the dominant framework of Islamic law across Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Indian subcontinent.
The Hanafi Foundation of South Asian Islam
When Muslim political authority expanded in India under the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughal Empire, the Hanafi school became the principal legal tradition guiding courts, scholars, and madrasas across the region.
This legal framework reached its institutional culmination during the reign of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb with the compilation of the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, one of the most comprehensive collections of Hanafi legal rulings ever produced.
Yet legal scholarship alone did not shape the character of Islam in South Asia. Equally important were the Sufi networks that spread Islamic teachings through spiritual guidance, ethical instruction, and social engagement.
Indian Sufi Saints and the Persianate Tradition
Many of the most revered saints of Indian Islam were connected to spiritual lineages originating in Persia and Central Asia.
Among them was Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, the founder of the Chishti Order in India, who established his spiritual centre in Ajmer in the twelfth century. Revered as Gharib Nawaz, he emphasized compassion, humility, and service to humanity. His teachings attracted followers across religious communities and helped shape a culture of spiritual inclusivity.
His legacy continued through figures such as Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, whose khanqah became a major centre of spiritual guidance and charity.
Another important figure was Syed Muhammad Gesu Daraz, popularly known as Khwaja Banda Nawaz who carried the Chishti tradition from Delhi to the Deccan and helped spread Sufi teachings across southern India.
In Kashmir, the Persian scholar Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, widely known as Shah-e-Hamadan, played a transformative role in introducing Islamic scholarship and institutions while embedding Persian cultural traditions into the region’s intellectual life.
Historian Richard M. Eaton, in his study The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, has shown that such Sufi networks played a crucial role in the spread of Islam across South Asia, often through gradual cultural and social processes rather than military expansion.
Persian as the Language of Culture and Scholarship
For centuries, Persian functioned as the primary language of administration, literature, and intellectual life in Muslim courts across India. Poets, scholars, and mystics produced a vast body of Persian literature that shaped the religious and cultural imagination of the region. Figures such as Amir Khusrau and later Mughal-era scholars contributed significantly to the development of Indo-Persian literary culture.
The influence of Persian can also be seen in everyday religious vocabulary among South Asian Muslims. Words such as namaz for prayer, roza for fasting, and Ramzan for the fasting month entered regional languages through Persian and Urdu rather than directly from Arabic terms like salat, sawm, or Ramadan. This linguistic transformation reflects the deeper cultural synthesis that characterized Islam in the subcontinent.
Reformist Movements and the Debate Over “Arabization”
Despite the strength of the Indo-Persian tradition, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of reformist movements that sought to reshape Islamic practice.
One of the earliest impulses came from the reformist ideas of Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, an eighteenth-century scholar of Delhi who called for renewed engagement with the Qur’an and Hadith during a period of political decline following the weakening of the Mughal Empire.
Although Shah Waliullah himself remained firmly rooted in the Hanafi and Sufi traditions, later reformers including his own son Shah Abdul Aziz Muhaddith Dehlawi interpreted his ideas as a call to purify Islam from local customs and Persianate influences.
During the 19th century, these impulses became more organized through traditionalist Islamic institutions and seminaries such as Darul Uloom Deoband and the scripturalist Ahl-i Hadith movement. Many puritanical scholars associated with these circles sought to align South Asian Islam more closely with the early Arab sources of the faith and adopted a more critical stance toward popular Sufi practices, local customs and cultural norms.
By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intellectual exchanges with reformist currents from the Arabian Peninsula also contributed to what some scholars describe as a gradual process of “Arabization” within segments of Muslim discourse in South Asia.
A Legacy That Still Resonates
Despite the reformist debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, the older Indo-Persian synthesis has remained remarkably resilient. The enduring popularity of Sufi shrines such as Ajmer Sharif and the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi continues to reflect the deep cultural roots of Sufi spirituality in the subcontinent. Persian-Urdu devotional poetry, musical traditions such as qawwali, and the widespread adherence to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence all testify to the persistence of this historical legacy.
As scholars such as Muzaffar Alam have demonstrated in his work The Languages of Political Islam in India, Persian language and culture played a central role in shaping the intellectual and political life of Mughal India.
This historical and cultural connection also helps explain why developments in Iran often resonate among a large section of Indian Muslims across sectarian lines. For many, Iran is not viewed merely as a contemporary political actor but as part of a longer Persianate civilizational heritage that has influenced South Asian Islamic thought, spirituality, and scholarship for centuries.
At the same time, issues such as the Palestinian cause have contributed to broader expressions of solidarity within parts of the Muslim world. In India too, public demonstrations and expressions of concern over developments in the Middle East have occasionally taken place in cities such as Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.
Such responses reflect how religious symbolism, political narratives, and historical memory can intersect in shaping popular perceptions. Yet the attitudes of Indian Muslims remain diverse, shaped by multiple historical, cultural, and geopolitical influences.
To encapsulate, the history of Islam in South Asia illustrates how religious traditions evolve through cultural interaction. Rooted in the Arabic scriptures of Islam yet profoundly shaped by Persian intellectual and spiritual traditions, the Indo-Persian synthesis created one of the most distinctive expressions of Islamic civilization.
In an age when rigid and monolithic interpretations of religion often dominate global discourse, the Indo-Persian experience offers a powerful reminder: Islamic civilization has never been culturally uniform. It has flourished precisely through dialogue between different societies, languages, and intercultural intellectual traditions.
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Contributing author at New Age Islam, Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi is an Indo-Islamic scholar, writer and researcher on Indian Sufism, interfaith ethics, and the spiritual history of Islam in South Asia. His latest book is "Ishq Sufiyana: Untold Stories of Divine Love".
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