The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.

A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia

by Manan Ahmed

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.

Anne discusses Professor Ahmed's book with Columbia University's George Sansom Professor of History Carol Gluck.