© koninklijke brill nv, leiden,  | doi:./_ chapter  India as a Sufi Spacetime in the Work of Jamālī of Delhi Shahzad Bashir The argument that Sufis played a crucial role in the establishment of Muslim communities in South Asia has had a number of iterations. An old version, still cited widely in public discussions, is that Sufis were originally the “peaceful” outsiders who accompanied military adventurers arriving into the Indian sub- continent from Iran and Central Asia from the fifth/eleventh century onward. Exhibiting exemplary piety and possessed of proselytizing zeal, these individ- uals are supposed to have attracted local inhabitants to Islam. This view has been critiqued convincingly by recent historians for being based on a simplis- tic understanding of socioreligious factors plausible for explaining change in religious affiliation. It has been replaced by theories that emphasize “conver- sion” as a lengthy community-based process that varies greatly depending on the types of religious communities that existed in different parts of India before the arrival of Muslims. In this version, the growth of Muslim populations is linked also to socioeconomic considerations such as agrarian expansion, defor- estation, and evolution of networks spread across regions and oceans. Charismatic Sufis do still matter in the more complicated understanding of how Muslims communities developed in South Asia. But in this instance, it is their dead bodies, and the stories told about them posthumously, that are seen as more important than their origins or what they may have said or done when they were alive. Interred in shrines controlled by descendants and other successors, these Sufis became nodes in pilgrimage circuits and were woven into community narratives. The shrines also received patronage from political elites seeking legitimacy, their caretakers often mediating between populations surrounding the shrines and rulers in urban centers located at a distance. Among other compelling attributes, recent historiographical inter- ventions regarding the significance of Sufis are able to account for the great variance between regions of India when it comes to the expansion of Mus- lim communities. Local social and ecological factors explain, for example, why territories that today comprise Bangladesh and Pakistan are majority Muslim, while the area around Delhi, where Muslim dynasties were centered for many centuries, is not.The explanatory principles involved here are extendable to sit- Shahzad Bashir - 9789004410121 Downloaded from Brill.com07/01/2020 12:58:00AM via Brown University Library