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If however, the Indian experience was unique for Islam so was the encounter with islam unique for Hinduism, other religions had been assimilated or marginalized; Islam alone could neither be swallowed whole nor be swept into a corner. The Hindus were shaken out of their insular mould and faced a phenomenon that had a trans regional and transcontinental enclosure… faced in Islam a growing tornado of alternative and, in many ways, contrary principles of law, social ethics and state-craft. Had this alternative paradigm been imposed on the people by the islam would have been at the gates of Vienna. In India however, although islam might have secured political and military dominance by the sward. The eminence  it achieved as a civilization had little  to do with force. Indeed, in Kerala and the Coromandal coast of tamil Nadu, where Islam nade its appearance long before Mohhamad Ghori, or even Mahmudof ghazani appeared at the Khyber pass, there was no sward involved at all. For centuries , islam in these areas was spread by seafaring merchants  from Arabia who brought with them the fascinating new belifs that had sprung up, suddenly but full-blown, in the deserts of Arabia. In other parts of India the vast majority of the Muslims were indigeons people drawn from the community of artsans, craftsman and exploited peasant jaati, who embrased Islam not because Islam appeared  to them as a liberating and humanizing process for emancipation from a heritage of bondage. In consequence there is no prototype Muslim in India the community exhibits all the Pluralism inherent in the pluralism of india.

Excerpted from “Confessions of a secular fundamentalist” by Mani Shankar Aiyar