Sikandar Shah Miri
[6][8] Soon, he leveraged a power-vacuum in the wake of a crippling Mongol raid to help Rinchan, a Buddhist from Ladakh, usurp the throne and after his death, waged a successful war against widow Kota Rani to claim the kingdom for himself.
[8][7] A contemporary Shaivite mystic Lal Ded borrowed from Sufism and local cults to attack core tenets of Brahminism and likely, serviced conversion to Islam among the lower strata of society.
[8] Nonetheless, the Kings continued to actively patronage Hinduism: Alaud'din had commissioned a Hindu Matha and Qutubu'd-Din had held royal yajnas.
Uddaka), who was also her cousin, burning his own daughter and son-in-law Muhammad, son of a fellow minister Sahaka, on charges of conspiring against Sikandar.
[2][11] Waqfs were endowed to shrines and numerous Sufi preachers from Central Asia were provided with jagirs and installed in positions of authority.
[2][11] The office of Shaikhu'l-Islam was established to provide monetary stipends and alms to the needy, pilgrims, travelers, physicians, scholars and other deserving people.
Sikandar commenced the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist shrines till, in the words of Jonaraja, no idol remained, even in the privacy of peoples' homes.
Suhaka Bhatt and Saifuddin) who served as Sikandar's counsel — was accused of instigating the King into "[taking] delight day and night in demolishing the sculptures of the gods.
[11] Chitralekha Zutshi, Richard G. Salomon and others reject the idea only religious motives lay behind Sikandar's actions and call for a nuanced contextual reading of Rajatarangini, a work that was commissioned by Sikandar's successor, who wished to bring back the Brahminical elite into the royal fold and establish Sanskrit as an integral part of a Sultanate that strove to be cosmopolitan.
[20][21][22] According to Zutshi and Salomon, Sikandar's policies were guided by realpolitik[22] and, like with the previous Hindu rulers, were essentially an attempt to secure political legitimacy by asserting state power over Brahmans and gaining access to wealth controlled by Brahminical institutions.
[23] Walter Slaje disagrees about such proposed absence of religious motivation, in part, given the differential rituals of destruction undertaken by Hindu and Muslim kings with the latter rendering sites inoperable for long passages of time by massive pollution or outright conversion.
[17][6] Mohammed Ishaq Khan emphasizes on the centrality of caste in understanding Jonaraja's reception of Shah Miri — he notes that even Hindu figures like Lal Ded had found no place in the Rajatarangini(s) and other Pandit corpus of history, until recent times.
completely reject the narratives of persecution and accuse the Brahman chroniclers of wanton bias and myth-making, stemming from their personal jealousy at losing socio-economic dominance.
[11]Numerous scholars arrived from Central Asia in his court: Sayiid Ahmad of Isfahan drafted a commentary on a Firazi text and also wrote epistles, Sayyid Muhammad Khawari wrote a commentary on Lum'at ul-I'tiqaad as well as another work (Khwar Nameh) of unknown genre, and Muhammad Baihaqi composed poems eulogizing Sikandar.
[11] The first stone sculpture of Kashmir—a four-armed Brahma, argued to be one of the finest in the history of the subcontinent—was sculpted by son of a Buddhist Sanghapati in 1409 and dedicated to Sikandar.
[4] Sikandar was married to at-least three women: Mera; an unnamed daughter of Pala Deo; and, Sobha about whom Jonaraja does not provide any details.
[16] Despite these reverses, the Islamisation of elite politics meant very few caste groups other than Brahmans took the opportunity of re-conversion and a largely irreversible change set-in in post-Sikandar Kashmir.
[7][17][14] The Hindus receded into relative political unimportance, with Pandit nobles being last prominent in the court of Hasan Shah, Zain's grandson.
