Forgotten Societies: Islamization of the Hinterland of Ghur, and its Post-Conversion Afterlives, c. 998-1245 CE

This paper is a preliminary presentation of history of ‘medieval Ghur,’(c.998-1245 CE). The specific historical inquiry is the processes of conversion of Ghur’s inhabitants to Islam, and their post-conversion afterlives. Although Ghur is recognized in the historiographies of South Asia and Iran for the role of the Ghurid sultans (1150-1206 CE) in the establishment of an enduring Muslim Persianate polity and the expansion of Islamicate culture and power in India, my paper departs from the previous literature on three accounts. At a basic level, I discuss the conversion of to Islam in the Ghur valley, which occurred comparatively late (11th and 12th centuries), considering that the wider region is represented in the literature as a full-fledged center of Islamicate and Persianate culture and power at the time. I intend to show that conversion to Islam in medieval eastern Islam, especially in the hinterland localities, was neither necessarily through the meditation of warrior ghazis nor through the ‘Islamic urbanization’ suggested by historians (e.g., Richard Bulliet) medieval Islamic society and culture. At a methodological level, I suggest based on a set of newly discovered primary documents that there is a distinction between conversion to Islam on the one hand, and enigmatic post-conversion afterlives on the other, with the latter involving multiple interpretations, confusions, zealousness, and probably remorsefulness. These aspects of post-conversion afterlives connected to social organization, social mobility, and social identity, are missing in the discussions of conversion to Islam in the literature. At a historiographical level, I hope to show in my longer research work that changes and continuities from one form of social and cultural tradition, such as ‘Iranian,’ to another form of tradition, such as ‘Persianate’ or ‘Islamicate,’ were not synchronic across time and space bifurcated between a Persian and Islamic or an Islamic and Indic encounter. And I intend therefore to suggest that the developments of these newer forms of traditions and organizations theorized as ‘Persianate’ and ‘Islamicate’ or ‘Indo-Islamic’ should not be seen as occurring exclusively in the courts and cities of Iran and Hindostan through rulers, viziers, and poets, but as occurring simultaneously in their broader complex hinterlands, and in everyday life.