Throughout the medieval period, Gujarati Muslim merchants played a pivotal role in establishing Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

The traders built a mosque during the times of Muhammad in Gujarat and other parts of the western coast of India as early as the 8th century C.E, spreading Islam soon as the religion gained a foothold in the Arabian peninsula.

This episode ushered a period of five centuries of Muslim Turkic and Mughal rule, leading to a conversion of a number of Hindu Gujarati people to Islam and the creation of many new converted communities such as the Molesalam and Miyana.

[36] Middle Eastern traders landed at Ghogha (located just across the narrow Gulf of Cambay from Bharuch/Surat) around the early seventh century and built a masjid there facing Jerusalem.

[38][39][40][41][42][43] Over the course of history, a number of famous Arab travellers, scholars, Sufi-saints and geographers who visited India, have described the presence of thriving Middle Eastern Muslim communities scattered along the Konkan-Gujarat coast.

[50] His well-known Iranian contemporary Estakhri, the Persian medieval geographer who travelled to Cambay and other regions of Gujarat during the same period, echoed the words spoken by his predecessors alongside his itineraries.

[52][53] The Chinchani copper plate inscriptions of Śaka Samvat show the region of Sanjan being ruled by a Persian Muslim governor in the 10th Century.

[55] Similar epitaphs mention the arrival of pious Muslim Nakhudas from Hormuz as well as families from Bam residing in Cambay, and from the discovery of tombstones of personages from Siraf, at the time one of the most important ports on the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, suggests altogether that the Muslim community of Junagadh had a strong and established link with Iran through the commercial sea routes.

[64] Early 14th-century Maghrebi adventurer, Ibn Batuta, visited India with his entourage and recognised the powerful merchant presence on the Gujarat shores.

The reason is that the majority of its inhabitants are foreign merchants, who continually build their beautiful houses and wonderful mosques - an achievement in which they endeavor to surpass each other.In the 16th Century, Barbosa visited Rander, a town currently inhabited by the Surti Sunni Vohras and noted[68] Ranel (Rander) is a good town of the Moors, built of very pretty houses and squares.

It is a rich and agreeable place ...... the Moors of the town trade with Malacca, Bengal, Tawasery (Tannasserim), Pegu, Martaban, and Sumatra in all sort of spices, drugs, silks, musk, benzoin and porcelain.

The Moors of this place are white and well dressed and very rich they have pretty wives, and in the furniture of these houses have china vases of many kinds, kept in glass cupboards well arranged.

Their women are not secluded like other Moors, but go about the city in the day time, attending to their business with their faces uncovered as in other parts.Arabic sources speak of the warm reception of the significant immigration of Hadhrami sāda (descendants of Muhammed) who settled in Surat during the Gujarat Sultanate.

Prominent and well respected Sāda who claimed noble descent through Abu Bakr al-Aydarus ("Patron Saint of Aden"),[69] were held in high esteem among the people and became established as Arab religious leaderships of local Muslims.

[71] The 19th century European Gazetteer by George Newenham Wright, corroborates this cultural exchange through the ages as he points out that the Arab inhabitants of Mukalla, capital city of the Hadhramaut coastal region in Yemen, were known to intermarry with the Muslims of Kathiawar and those resident from other areas of Gujarat.

[72] In the 17th century, the eminent city of Surat, famous for its cargo export of silk and diamonds had come on a par with contemporary Venice and Beijing which were some of the great mercantile cities of Europe and Asia,[73] and earned the distinguished title, Bab al-Makkah (Gate of Mecca) because it is one of the great places of the subcontinent where ancient Hindus welcomed Islam and it flourished as time went on.