Muhammad ibn al-Qasim conquers Sind

Arab expeditions against Makran and Sind had begun in the 7th century. According to the 9th-century historian al-Baladhuri, the immediate pretext was an attack by Med pirates of Debal on a ship in which the king of Sri Lanka was sending back to al-Hajjaj Muslim women, daughters of merchants who had died on the island (the Chachnama adds gifts for the caliph). When Dahir, the Brahmin king of Sind, replied that he had no power over the pirates, al-Hajjaj, with the approval of the caliph al-Walid I, sent his young kinsman, then about seventeen, with Syrian cavalry — 6,000 horsemen by the chroniclers’ count — and contingents from Iraq, while catapults went by sea. Debal was stormed — al-Baladhuri tells how a catapult shot brought down the pole on its great temple — and a mosque was built there; at Banbhore, probably the site of Debal, excavators have found a mosque with an inscription of 727, one of the earliest in the region. Nerun, whose Buddhist monks had already come to terms with al-Hajjaj, opened its gates; at Sehwan the Buddhists sided with the Arabs, and the governor, after a brief resistance, fled. After crossing the Indus the Arabs met Dahir near Rawar; the king, fighting from an elephant, was killed — on 10 Ramadan 93 (June 712), according to the Chachnama. Brahmanabad fell after a long siege, then Aror and finally Multan, famed for its temple of the Sun.

The conquerors treated Hindus and Buddhists as protected subjects (dhimmis) paying the poll tax and kept many Brahmin officials in their posts. After the deaths of al-Hajjaj (714) and al-Walid I (715) the new caliph Sulayman recalled Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, who died in custody in 715. Sind remained a frontier province from which the governors raided deeper into India and through which Indian astronomy later reached Baghdad. The fullest account of the conquest, the Persian Chachnama, was composed only in the early 13th century and claims to translate an Arabic original; historians such as Yohanan Friedmann and Manan Ahmed Asif debate how much of it reflects the 8th century, so its dates and numbers are uncertain.