THE IMPACT OF THE ARAB

India is the seventh largest country in the world, and the second largest in Asia. Before the advent of Muslims, the country was fragmented into small warring states and there was no concept Of Indian nationalism. The Muslim rulers, especially the Mughals, unified the country and gave it a central administration. They called the country Hind and Hindustan, i.e. a country of the Hindus (non-Muslims). The name 'India', a distortion of Hind, was given to her by the British rulers. Before the establishment of Muslim rule, there was no history of India. People of particular locality recorded some events of certain rulers vaguely. The Muslims took special care to record historical events and appointed historians to do that job. The British administration reconstructed their accounts and gave the Hindus a history of the distinct past not without their self interest to play one community against the other.

ISLAM, the youngest of the three great Semitic religions, dates from the early years of the seventh century./1/ Its founder, the Prophet Muhammad, was born in 570 A.D. in Mecca, an important center on the caravan route along the western coast of Arabia.

In the east the Muslim empire was extended to Central Asia, and, as we shall see, it was during this period that a part of the Indian subcontinent was annexed. In the course of these conquests, the Arabs became subject to older civilizations. Damascus was located in the heart of Syria, where Greek and Syrian culture had flowered for ages, and the Umayyad capital displayed a cultural and social life quite different from that of puritanical Medina. As heirs to the Byzantine civilization, the Umayyads developed the postal service, introduced a new coinage, established a state archive in Damascus, and introduced other changes in the organization of government.

During the Umayyad and the early Abbasid period, when the Arabs were at the height of their political power, they were also active in the intellectual field, making every effort to acquire knowledge from all sources. Sind became the link through which the fruits of Indian learning were transmitted to the Arabs, and by them made available to the rest of the civilized world. Indo-Arab intellectual collaboration was at its height during two distinct periods. During the reign (753-774) of Mansur, embassies from Sind to Baghdad included scholars who brought important books with them./8/ The second fruitful period [[15]] was the reign (780-808) of Harun-al-Rashid, when the Barmakid family, which provided wazirs to the Abbasid caliphs for half a century, was at the zenith of its power. Arab bibliographers especially mention Harun's wazir, Yahya the Barmakid, Yahya's son Musa, and grandson Amran (both of whom governed Sind for some time) for their interest in India and Indian sciences. Besides sending scholars to India to study medicine and pharmacology, they brought Hindu scholars to Baghdad, made them chief physicians of their hospitals, and commissioned them to translate into Arabic, Sanskrit books on such subjects as medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, philosophy, and astrology.