It has also been argued that the lack of written Gujarati sources was due to Gujarati merchants not wanting outsiders to access this exclusive language of trade. Gujaratis, well-known for their influence in trade and business, were prime merchants in the Indian ocean in the centuries prior to the emergence of the East India company. The state’s diverse religious and ethno-linguistic communities are reflected in both Gujarati architecture and the Gujarati language, which is interlaced with Persian, Arabic, Swahili and Sanskrit. Centuries of migration have seen it become a cosmopolitan melting pot. Sitting on the Arabian Sea, Gujarat is the most western state of India. In this article, I want to concentrate on a part of India that is often overlooked in discussions of Islam: Gujarat. Ibn Battuta, who travelled throughout the Islamicate, even worked as Qadi (judge) in the Delhi sultanate in the 14th century, before his disastrous shipwreck. One of the oldest mosques in the world, Cherman Juma Mosque, is thought to have been built in Kerala, in the south of the country, in 629 AD, and a few years later the Palaiya Jumma Palli Masjid was built in Tamil Nadu.
However, evidence suggests that the religion first reached the shores of the Gujarati-Konkan and Malabar coasts (in the south) almost a thousand years earlier, in the 7th century, through trade in the Indian Ocean with East African and Arab merchants.
The claim that the Mughal Empire is responsible for the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, is often made by far-right (Hindu or Indian) nationalists, and has contributed to the common misconceptions that Islam is a recent phenomenon in South Asia, and that it spread from the north of the country to the south. Islam in India is often portrayed as a byproduct of the 16th century Persian Mughal Empire but if you look past the Taj Mahal and Jama Masjid of Agra and Delhi, you find that Islam’s roots actually run far deeper in other parts of the country.