Multan (Islam and Muslims)

Synonyms

Multān

Definition

Multān is a city along the present east bank of the Chināb in the lower Punjab, now in the modern state of Pakistan.

Early Islamic History

To the early Arabs, who called the city al-Multān (from Old Persian mulasthāna, “frontier land”), Multān was situated at the northern border of Sind [20]. Since the early eighth century, it has been an important center for the Muslim encounter with Indian civilization, and from the thirteenth century, it became a contested frontier between the Mongol and Indo-Islamic worlds.

Multān was the northernmost city conquered by the Arabs under Muḥammad b. Qāsim. Although its inhabitants had resisted the Muslim invaders, when it fell in c. 713, the victors did not destroy the city’s famous Hindu solar temple, in marked contrast to the fate of the temple of Daybul in the Indus delta [8, 21]. The Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid amīrs sent to rule the city continued this pragmatic policy, meanwhile taking a significant portion of pilgrims’...