@article{1480504,
      recid = {1480504},
      author = {Asif, Manan Ahmed, },
      title = {A Book of Conquest : The ‹i›Chachnama‹/i› and Muslim  Origins in South Asia /},
      pages = {1 online resource (230 p.) :},
      abstract = {The question of how Islam arrived in India remains  markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard  accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate's incursions into  Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE.  In this telling, Muslims were a foreign presence among  native Hindus, sowing the seeds of a mutual animosity that  presaged the subcontinent's partition into Pakistan and  India many centuries later. But in a compelling  reexamination of the history of Islam in India, Manan Ahmed  Asif directs attention to a thirteenth-century text that  tells the story of Chach, the Brahmin ruler of Sind, and  his kingdom's later conquest by the Muslim general Muhammad  bin Qasim in 712 CE. The Chachnama has long been a  touchstone of Indian history, yet it is seldom studied in  its entirety. Asif offers a close and complete analysis of  this important text, untangling its various registers and  genres in order to reconstruct the political vision at its  heart. Asif challenges the main tenets of the Chachnama's  interpretation: that it is a translation of an earlier  Arabic text and that it presents a history of conquest.  Debunking both ideas, he demonstrates that the Chachnama  was originally Persian and, far from advancing a narrative  of imperial aggression, is a subtle and sophisticated work  of political theory, one embedded in both the Indic and  Islamic ethos. This social and intellectual history of the  Chachnama is an important corrective to the divisions  between Muslim and Hindu that so often define Pakistani and  Indian politics today.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1480504},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674972414},
}