[20] The foundation of the Sultanate was established by the Ghurid conqueror Muhammad Ghori, who routed the Rajput Confederacy, led by Ajmer ruler Prithviraj Chauhan, in 1192 near Tarain in a reversal of an earlier battle.

The establishment of the Sultanate drew the Indian subcontinent more closely into international and multicultural Islamic social and economic networks,[28] as seen concretely in the development of the Hindustani language[29] and Indo-Islamic architecture.

[35][34][36][37][38] Mongolian raids on West and Central Asia set the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, intelligentsia, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from those regions into the subcontinent, thereby establishing Islamic culture there.

[83] After the Mongols withdrew, Ala ud-Din Khalji continued to expand the Delhi Sultanate into southern India with the help of Indian slave generals such as Malik Kafur and Khusro Khan.

[98][96] Muhammad bin Tughlaq chose the city of Deogiri in the present-day Indian state of Maharashtra (renaming it Daulatabad), as the second administrative capital of the Delhi Sultanate.

He saw their role as propagandists who would adapt Islamic religious symbolism to the rhetoric of empire, and that the Sufis could by persuasion bring many of the inhabitants of the Deccan to become Muslim.

[108][109] By 1339, the eastern regions under local Muslim governors and southern parts led by Hindu kings had revolted and declared independence from the Delhi Sultanate.

[110] The historian Walford chronicled that Delhi and most of India faced severe famines during Muhammad bin Tughlaq's rule in the years after the base metal coin experiment.

[127][128][129] He also vastly expanded the number of slaves in his service and those of Muslim nobles, who were converted to Islam, taught to read and memorize the Quran, and employed in many offices especially in the military, out of which he was able to amass a large army.

[46] Members of the dynasty derived their title, Sayyid, or the descendants of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, based on the claim that they belonged to his lineage through his daughter Fatima.

[146] Abraham Eraly thinks his forebears were likely that Khizr Khan's ancestors were likely descendants of an Arab family who had long ago settled in the region of Multan during the early Tughluq period, but he doubts his Sayyid lineage.

[164] The historian Peter Jackson explains in The New Cambridge History of Islam: "The elite of the early Delhi sultanate comprised overwhelmingly first-generation immigrants from Iran and Central Asia: Persians, Turks, Ghūrīs, Khalaj from the hot regions (garmsīr) of modern Afghanistan".

[166] Over time, successive Muslim dynasties created a "centralized structure in the Persian tradition whose task was to mobilize human and material resources for the ongoing armed struggle against both Mongol and Hindu monarchies".

For the Sultans, as for their Ghaznavid and Ghurid predecessors, this entailed the suppression of heterodox Muslims, and Firuz Shah attached some importance to the fact that he had acted against the ashab-i had-u ibadat (deviators and latitudinarians).

The balance of the evidence is that in the latter half of the fourteenth century, if not before, the jizyah was levied as a discriminatory tax on non-Muslims, although even then it is difficult to see how such a measure could have been enforced outside the principal centres of Muslim authority.

The nucleus of this Southeast Asian sultanate military were the Turco-Afghani regular units named Wajih, which were composed of elite household cavalry archers who came from slave backgrounds.

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in India has been compared to the expansion of the Mongol Empire and called "part of a larger trend occurring throughout much of Eurasia, in which nomadic people migrated from the steppes of Inner Asia and became politically dominant".

[217] The Hindustani language (Hindi) began to emerge in the Delhi Sultanate period, developed from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhramsha vernaculars of North India.

[29] The officers, the Sultans, Khans, Maliks and the soldiers wore the Islamic qabas dress in the style of Khwarezm, which were tucked in the middle of the body, while the turban and kullah were common headwear.

Both types of building essentially consist of a single large space under a high dome, and completely avoid the figurative sculpture so important to Hindu temple architecture.

[note 3] The surfaces of both are elaborately decorated with inscriptions and geometric patterns; in Delhi the shaft is fluted with "superb stalactite bracketing under the balconies" at the top of each stage.

[223] The Tomb of Iltutmish was added by 1236; its dome, the squinches again corbelled, and is now missing, and the intricate carving has been described as having an "angular harshness", from carvers working in an unfamiliar tradition.

Another very early mosque, begun in the 1190s, is the Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra in Ajmer, Rajasthan, built for the same Delhi rulers, again with corbelled arches and domes.

[226] The Alai Darwaza gatehouse at the Qutb complex, from 1311, still shows a cautious approach to the new technology, with very thick walls and a shallow dome, only visible from a certain distance or height.

Bold contrasting colours of masonry, with red sandstone and white marble, introduce what was to become a common feature of Indo-Islamic architecture, substituting for the polychrome tiles used in Persia and Central Asia.

[227] The tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam (built 1320 to 1324) in Multan, Pakistan is a large octagonal brick-built mausoleum with polychrome glazed decoration that remains much closer to the styles of Iran and Afghanistan.

The tomb of the founder of the dynasty, Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (d. 1325) is more austere, but impressive; like a Hindu temple, it is topped with a small amalaka and a round finial like a kalasha.

[230] He was buried in the large Hauz Khas Complex in Delhi, with many other buildings from his period and the later Sultanate, including several small domed pavilions supported only by columns.

This pattern came to an end with the Mughal Empire, where Akbar's chief minister Abu'l-Fazl criticized the excesses of earlier sultans such as Mahmud of Ghazni.

[36][35] The first historical record of a campaign of destruction of temples and defacement of faces or heads of Hindu idols lasted from 1193 to 1194 in Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh under the command of Ghuri.