A Pakistani Sindhi song, Paiso Aa, has crossed the border and gone viral among Indian Sindhis. It is light, playful, and unselfconscious. And it exposes something we repeatedly forget.
Sindh has been Muslim for over thirteen centuries.
The region was conquered in 711 CE by Muhammad bin Qasim, the teenage governor of Fars—thirteen when he entered Sindh, dead by nineteen. Almost an Alexander figure in miniature. Since then, Sindh and Multan have known uninterrupted Muslim rule longer than many parts of the Islamic world itself.
That matters, because it complicates a habit of thought that treats Islam in the Indian Subcontinent as permanently “foreign.”
In Sindh, it is not. Continue reading Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality