Arab Conquest of Sindh (712): Muhammad bin Qasim and Raja Dahir

The Arab conquest of Sindh was the campaign of 711–713 in which an army of the Umayyad Caliphate under the young commander Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, often called Muhammad bin Qasim, conquered the lower Indus valley in what is now Pakistan. In 712 his forces defeated and killed Raja Dahir, the region’s Hindu king, and went on to take Multan. The conquest created the first lasting Muslim-ruled province in South Asia.

Background: the Umayyads look east

In the early eighth century the Umayyad Caliphate, ruled from Damascus, was expanding on several fronts at once. Under Caliph al-Walid I (r. 705–715), Arab armies crossed into Spain in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania and pushed into Central Asia beyond the Oxus.

The eastern provinces were run by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq, a formidable administrator. Arab forces had raided the coasts of western India since the 630s and fought in Makran, the dry coastal region between Persia and Sindh, but earlier attempts on Sindh itself had failed.

Sindh was ruled by Dahir, son of Chach, a Brahmin minister who had seized the throne in the seventh century. The kingdom, with its capital at Aror (Alor) near modern Rohri, contained a large Buddhist population alongside Hindus, and its rule over local chiefs was uneven.

Sindh also mattered for trade. Its ports on the Indus delta linked the Persian Gulf with western India, and Arab and Persian merchants already sailed this route. Controlling Debal and the lower Indus would protect that commerce and add a rich agricultural province to the caliphate.

The pretext and the failed expeditions

The Arabic historian al-Baladhuri, writing in the ninth century, says the war began when pirates near Debal, the main port of Sindh, captured ships sent from Sri Lanka carrying Muslim women and gifts for al-Hajjaj. Dahir answered that he had no control over the pirates. Al-Hajjaj sent two expeditions, under Ubaydullah and then Budayl, and both commanders were killed.

Al-Hajjaj then chose Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, a member of his own Thaqif tribe and a close relative, to lead a larger force. Later accounts say he was only about seventeen.

The campaign of 711–713

Muhammad marched through Makran with an army usually estimated at around 6,000 Syrian cavalry, along with camel riders and a baggage train, while siege engines and supplies came by sea. Al-Baladhuri mentions a great catapult called al-Arus, “the bride”, which needed hundreds of men to operate.

He besieged Debal, probably in late 711 or early 712. The town fell after the catapult brought down the banner on its temple, and the defenders were killed over three days. Muhammad settled several thousand Muslims there and built a mosque. Debal’s location is not certain, but many scholars identify it with the excavated port of Banbhore near Karachi.

The army moved up the Indus. Some towns, such as Nerun, near modern Hyderabad, surrendered on terms negotiated with Buddhist leaders, while Sehwan and others were taken by force. After crossing the Indus, Muhammad met Dahir’s army near Rawar. Dahir fought from an elephant and was killed, according to the Chach Nama in June 712. His widow is said to have defended Rawar before its fall.

The Arabs then took Brahmanabad after a siege, followed by Aror. In 713 they captured Multan, then a wealthy pilgrimage centre with a famous Sun temple, after a long siege. The temple’s gold, al-Baladhuri reports, more than repaid the cost of the expedition.

Governing Sindh

Muhammad’s rule combined force with negotiation. According to the sources, when people of Brahmanabad asked to rebuild their temples, he replied with the guidance of al-Hajjaj that they should be treated like Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians: allowed to keep their religion and temples in return for paying the jizya, a poll tax on non-Muslims. Brahmins were kept as tax collectors and administrators.

This extension of protected, or dhimmi, status to Hindus and Buddhists was an important precedent for later Muslim rule in South Asia, even though conversions, enslavement of captives and destruction during the fighting were also part of the conquest.

Fall of Muhammad bin Qasim

Muhammad’s career ended abruptly. Al-Hajjaj died in 714, and al-Walid in 715. The new caliph, Sulayman, was hostile to al-Hajjaj’s family. Muhammad was recalled, imprisoned at Wasit in Iraq and died under torture in 715.

Consequences

Sindh remained part of the caliphate, passing to the Abbasids after 750. In the eighth century, Arab governors tried to push further east into Gujarat and Rajasthan, but these campaigns, mostly in the 720s and 730s, were checked by Indian rulers, including the Gurjara-Pratihara king Nagabhata I and the Chalukyas of Gujarat.

As caliphal control weakened in the ninth century, Sindh came under local Arab dynasties, the Habbarids at Mansura and a separate emirate at Multan. These states connected South Asia with the trade and scholarship of the Islamic world; Indian astronomy and mathematics reached Baghdad partly through contacts of this kind.

Larger Muslim conquests of northern India came much later and from a different direction, beginning with raids from Afghanistan such as those of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century.

How we know: the sources

Two main texts tell the story. The earliest is al-Baladhuri’s Futuh al-Buldan (“Conquests of the Lands”), a ninth-century Arabic history that gives a short, fairly sober narrative. The second is the Chach Nama, a much longer Persian work completed around 1216 by Ali Kufi at Uch in Punjab. Ali Kufi said he translated it from an older Arabic book, but historians debate how much of it reflects eighth-century sources and how much reflects the thirteenth-century world in which it was written. Archaeology at Banbhore, where a mosque with an inscription of the early eighth century has been excavated, adds physical evidence of early Muslim settlement on this coast.

Myths and facts

Myth: Muhammad bin Qasim was executed because of a false accusation by Dahir’s daughters. The Chach Nama tells how two captured daughters of Dahir, sent to the caliph, claimed Muhammad had dishonoured them, and how he was sewn into a raw hide and died on the way to Damascus. This dramatic story is not found in al-Baladhuri, who simply records his imprisonment and death under Sulayman, and it is generally treated as legend.

Myth: The conquest of Sindh began Muslim rule over India. It created one Muslim-ruled province on the edge of the subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate and other large Muslim states emerged only after the late twelfth century.

Timeline

• c. 708–710: Pirates near Debal seize ships from Sri Lanka; two Arab expeditions against Sindh fail.
• c. 711: Muhammad ibn al-Qasim leads a new army through Makran.
• c. 711–712: Debal is besieged and stormed.
• 712, June: Raja Dahir is killed in battle near Rawar, according to the Chach Nama.
• 712–713: Brahmanabad and Aror are captured.
• 713: Multan falls after a long siege.
• 714: Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf dies.
• 715: After Caliph al-Walid I’s death, Muhammad is recalled and dies in prison at Wasit.

Why it matters

The conquest of Sindh brought South Asia into direct political contact with the Islamic world for the first time and established a Muslim-ruled province that lasted for centuries. Its treatment of Hindus and Buddhists as protected subjects set an early pattern for later states. Remembered very differently in modern Pakistan and India, it remains one of the most debated episodes in South Asian history.