The sepoy's religious inheritance

In the wake of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, and the widespread perception that its provocateurs were the perpetually tumultuous Muslims, the North Indian schoolmaster Thomas Arnold wrote The Preaching of Islam to propose an alternative to the colonial historiography of Islam having spread in India at the tip of the soldier's sword. Projecting the missionary environment of Victorian India onto the medieval past, Arnold's alternative was to suggest that the majority of India's Muslims accepted Islam through the quiet preaching of the Sufis, spreading the simple tenets of Islam through rustic poems in the languages of the Indian peasant. Although modern scholarship has done much to refine and substantially reject both the sword and preaching theses, the connection between Islam and soldiering has remained a controversial topic. Fortuitously, much of the debate has centred on the region of India with which this book is concerned, namely the Deccan region which in large part became the territories of the Nizam of Hyderabad.