Aqeel Ahmad

 For millennia, ideas, people, and goods moved freely between the Indian subcontinent and what is now the Middle East, with routine trade well established by the sixth century A.D. In A.D. 660 the second caliph, Umar, sent the first Arab expedition to Sindh, and in 711 the province was conquered by Mohammad ibn Qasim. Along with advanced military power came missionaries and traders, and the process of conversion to Islam began. There are still important Muslim trading communities throughout South India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives—and farther east in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These traders (and minor Muslim rulers) shared their knowledge of the sea route from East Africa to India with the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first European to make the long journey around Africa and across the Arabian Sea.1 Parenthetically, just as Islam came to India in the seventh to the eighth century, South Indian Hindu kingdoms began their exploration and domination over large...