Islam reached the Indian subcontinent soon after the death of the prophet. The earliest Muslims were Arab traders, who landed on the south-western coast of India in the late seventh century ce. In 711 the Arab general Muhammad Qasim invaded from the northwest and, defeating the local raja, established Sind as the easternmost province of the Umayyad Caliphate. For the next three centuries Islam remained a curiosity on India's northern fringes. In the chaos attending the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in the late tenth century, a series of Central Asian military tribal confederations began to rule Afghanistan. Drawn from the Turkish nomads of the northern steppes, these horseback warriors formed the ruling aristocracy of the Islamic states that would dominate north India for the following seven hundred years.

The Ghaznavids (977–1186), under the leadership of Mahmud of Ghazni, conquered much of the Punjab, establishing their capital in Lahore. They were followed by another dynasty of Turkish warriors, the Ghurids (1186–1215), who under Qutb al-Din Aibak (1206–10), occupied Delhi. Qutb al-Din founded the first in a series of dynasties known collectively as the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526). What these dynasties had in common was the ethnicity of their rulers – Afghan or Turkish military elites from Central Asia. Under ‘Ala al-Din Khalji (1296–1316) these Muslim warriors extended their control over Gujarat, Rajasthan, the Deccan, and parts of south India. The Khaljis were followed by the Tughluqs (1320–1413). Muhammad ibn Tughluq (1325–51), founder of the mature state, strengthened his rule by recruiting converts and the newly-immigrated, counterbalancing the power of the long-established aristocratic families. The ruling elite of the Delhi Sultanate were a religious and cultural minority, aggressively Muslim in the largely non-Muslim environment of the subcontinent. These warriors pledged allegiance to the Caliph, supported the judicial authority of the ulama, and welcomed talented newcomers from the towns and cities of eastern Islam.

Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn al-Biruni was one of the first Islamic astronomers to explore Indic astronomy/astrology. Although the astronomers of al-Ma'mun's House of Wisdom had translated the works of Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta into Arabic in the early ninth century, they had not visited the subcontinent.