The Problem of Historical Perception

Kashmir’s medieval history is often read through the narrow lens of religious conflict. Many later chroniclers, writing under altered political climates and ideological pressures, projected backward a narrative of struggle between faiths, conversion campaigns, and cultural replacement. This retrofitting has hardened into common perception, obscuring a far more intricate and layered reality.

The arrival of Islam in Kashmir did not overturn society overnight, nor did it create a new order structured around religious uniformity. Instead, the political and socio-economic life of the Valley reveals a long phase of negotiation, accommodation, and synthesis. Governance here was shaped not by doctrinal zeal but by considerations of social equilibrium, economic continuity, and administrative cohesion. The medieval Kashmiri state was, above all, a pragmatic institution concerned with land, taxation, irrigation, labour, and public order.

The route of Islam into Kashmir

Islam did not enter Kashmir directly from Arabia, nor in the earliest centuries of missionary expansion. It reached the Valley through the Mawalis—neo-Muslim communities of Central Asia, who had already lived for generations within settled agrarian societies, water-management cultures, commercial guilds, and revenue-based state structures. By the time it crossed the mountain passes into Kashmir, Islam had absorbed layers of Central Asian administrative experience, infused with the ethos of Sultanate governance.

Thus, Islam entered Kashmir not as a militant or proselytizing force aiming to convert the Kashmiri mind, but as part of an already-formed statecraft: a Sultanate accompanied by revenue structures, policing authority, judicial mechanisms, and systems for regulating land and water. In Kashmir, therefore, it was governance that shaped religious practice, not religion that dictated governance.

The Sultanate formed its institutions around the immediate needs of daily life: allocation of agricultural land, maintenance of irrigation networks (kul), collection of taxes, protection of trade routes, and the settling of local disputes. The earliest phase of Muslim rule was almost entirely preoccupied with the practical question: how does a state function in this terrain, with this population, and with these ecological constraints?

Parallels with the subcontinental political pattern

What unfolded in Kashmir was not an isolated peculiarity, but part of the larger administrative pattern of the subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate, which served as a political model across North India, drew heavily upon Central Asian traditions. Its priorities were revenue stability, social order, and territorial control—not the enforcement of religious homogeneity. The Mughal Empire inherited and refined this logic.

The ethos is best echoed in Babur’s message to Humayun, where he urged him to govern with justice, show regard for the sentiments of the Hindu majority, and avoid actions—such as cow slaughter—that injured their feelings. This advice represented the foundational line of Mughal statecraft.

The successors of the founder of the Mughal Empire upheld and strengthened this principle. Matrimonial alliances with Hindu families, especially the Rajputs, became routine. Raja Man Singh, Todar Mal, and many other Hindu nobles served at the highest levels. Imperial grants supported temples such as those at Vrindavan, and major Hindu scriptures, including the Razmnama (Mahabharata) and the Ramayana, were translated into Persian.

The survival of a vast Hindu majority across centuries, along with thousands of functioning temples, stands as living testimony that Islam in India did not spread through systematic coercion. Had forced conversion been the dominant mode, the demographic and cultural character of the subcontinent would have been unrecognizable.

A state with secular reasoning

The Kashmir Sultanate followed a political logic similar to Delhi and the Mughals, but with an even stronger grounding in local culture. It was not governed through religious rigidity. The Sultans neither subordinated themselves to the distant Caliphate nor issued coins in its name. Their sovereignty was articulated in political, not ecclesiastical, terms.

Most significantly, the Sultans of Kashmir left behind statements and policies that echo Babur’s advice to Humayun. The closest and most authoritative example comes from Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin (Budshah).

Zain-ul-Abidin’s instruction to his son, is the Kashmir’s equivalent to Babur’s counsel.

As recorded by Śrīvara in the continuation of Rajatarangini, Zain-ul-Abidin instructed his son Haidar Khan: “Rule with equal regard for all. Distinguish not between the creeds of men. Protect the temples and the mosques alike, for the kingdom rests on justice, not on the triumph of any faith.”

This is nearly identical in sentiment to Babur’s message—urging an heir to uphold religious sensitivity, maintain social harmony, and ensure justice beyond faith.

Similar instructions appear in other reigns:

• Under Sultan Shihab-ud-Din, officials were warned “not to trouble Brahmans or disturb their places of worship,” for “the realm prospers when all communities are content.”
• Sultan Ali Shah, on his accession, declared that “differences of religion must not become differences in justice.”

Such statements, emerging from different courts and generations, reveal a consistent political philosophy: religion was never the organising principle of the state.

A Shared Moral Grammar

The political pragmatism of the Sultans resonated with the Valley’s spiritual climate. Kashmir had long nurtured a tradition of mystical introspection and ethical simplicity. When Sufism entered this landscape, it found in Rishiism an extraordinary counterpart.

The Rishis, embodied in the life and words of Nund Rishi, stressed purity of heart, contentment, compassion, and a universal fellowship that transcended sects. His ethical vision owed much to Lal Ded, whose verses urged freedom from ritual rigidity and inner awakening. This dialogue between Lalla and Nunda shaped a shared moral vocabulary—a Kashmir where faith was not a marker of separation but a path of parallel seeking.

Court and Governance

The Sultanate absorbed this ethical environment. The rulers neither enforced Shariat law strictly nor reshaped marriage customs to fit Islamic jurisprudence. Court chronicles such as Baharistan-i-Shahi and Tārīkh-i-Kashmir record marriages that openly defied Islamic legal norms:

• Sultan Hasan Shah married two Muslim sisters—an act prohibited by Islamic law.
• Zain-ul-Abidin married two daughters of the Pandit noble Ochu.
• Sultan Sikandar married a Pandit woman.

These unions were not perceived as transgressions; they were unremarkable expressions of everyday closeness between communities.

Jahangir, observing this intermingling, remarked that Kashmiris “ally themselves with the Hindus, and both give and take girls.” His discomfort reveals how deep this social proximity ran.

Pandits formed an indispensable segment of the administration. They served as revenue officers, state counselors, teachers, astrologers, and scribes. The claim that only a handful of Pandit families survived early Islamic rule is dispelled by Baharistan-i-Shahi, which records 1,200 Hindu families living in the Valley during that period.

Shared sacred imagination

Even Mughal chroniclers recognized the plural ethos of Kashmir. They recorded a verse expressing the spiritual atmosphere of the Valley:

Islam and unbelief walk here together in peace,

Each speaking in its own voice.

Yet the call of unity remains:

He is One, without partner.

It captures the layered religiosity of Kashmir—a land where identities remained fluid and the divide between faiths was neither absolute nor antagonistic.

The aberration of Suhabhatta

History, however, is not an unbroken arc of harmony. The episode associated with Suhabhatta during the childhood reign of Sultan Sikandar stands out for its violence. A Pandit who had converted to Islam after suffering humiliation at the hands of his own community, Suhabhatta used his new political proximity to settle personal scores. Some temples were damaged, and some Pandit families faced targeted pressure.

But this episode was a distortion, not a doctrine. It was neither state policy nor a religious programme. The very fact that Zain-ul-Abidin later reversed every harsh measure of this period—recalling the exiled Pandits, rebuilding temples, restoring endowments, and issuing advice echoing Babur’s—shows that the Sultanate as a whole did not share Suhabhatta’s animus.

Reassessing the Claim

The image of systematic temple destruction in medieval Kashmir collapses when confronted with historical evidence. Sultan Sikandar himself constructed the Ganpatyar Temple, confirmed by an inscription on a surviving sculptural slab.

Mirza Haidar Dughlat, in Tarikh-i-Rashidi (16th century), observed that more than 150 temples were active and standing. Nearly three centuries later, G. T. Vigne noted around seven hundred ancient temples still dotting the Valley.

If a campaign of annihilation had occurred, such survival would have been impossible. The archaeological and literary record, taken together, reveals not destruction but continuity.

Continuities into modern political culture

This tradition of coexistence shaped modern political developments as well. Anti-feudal mobilization in the early twentieth century did not begin as a religious movement. The Muslim Conference soon realised the limitations of sectarian identity and transformed itself into the National Conference, echoing the Valley’s older principle of shared belonging. The shift reflected a deep historical instinct—the recognition that Kashmir’s destiny had always depended on the unity of its people.

Conclusion: A legacy worth recovering

To revisit this history is to rediscover a Kashmir fashioned not by the conquest of belief but by mutual accommodation, cultural exchange, and shared ethical vocabularies. Islam in Kashmir was not imposed; it was absorbed. And in being absorbed, it took on the moral cadence and spiritual gentleness of the Valley.

The Sultans of Kashmir, much like Babur advising Humayun, understood that a kingdom endures not by the triumph of one faith over another but by justice, balance, and sensitivity to the sentiments of all its people.

This legacy of coexistence, if recalled with clarity, challenges modern narratives of division and reopens the memory of a civilization built on the quiet strength of shared life, a Kashmir that once knew how to live together, and still carries the echoes of that wisdom.

Dr. Abdul Ahad is a Kashmir based author and historian.