India
Located in South Asia on the Indian Subcontinent, India is bordered by the Bay of Bengal, Myanmar and Bangladesh to the east, Pakistan and the Arabian Sea to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north, and Sri Lanka, an island state, to the south. The ethnic distribution of the country's population is 72% Indo-Aryan, 25% Dravidian, and 3% Other.
Islam entered the Indian Subcontinent in the late 1st century Hijri, with the Arab conquest of the Sindh region in 710 CE. In the late 10th century, with the conquest of the region by Mahmud of Ghazni in 17 campaigns, Islam began to spread quickly in the Indian geography. Thus, the expansion of Islam in the subcontinent was then carried out by Turkish raids from the North India region in the 12th century. For centuries from this date until the British colonial period, Muslim Turkish states were active in the region and dominated the Indian geography to a great extent. The most important of these were the Ghaznavids (963-1186), the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), the Deccan Sultanates (1527-1686), and the Mughal Empire (1526-1858).
Today, all information concerning both the country's population and the proportion of India's Muslims in the population are estimations. As of 2018, the population of the country is estimated to be about 1 billion 340 million and it is reported that Muslims make up about 15% of the country's population. Based on this data, it is possible to assume that around 200 million Muslims are living in India. However, due to the lack of census data and the increasing Hindu nationalism against Muslims in the country, the data, which cannot be confirmed, implies that the actual number of Muslims in India is much higher than this. Moreover, in the more than 70 years since independence, Islam is the only religion that has increased proportionally in the country. While the proportion of Hindus has decreased from 84.8% in the 1951 census to 79.8%, the proportion of Muslims has increased from 9.8% to 14.2% in the same period according to official figures.
The majority of India's Muslims follow the Hanafi school, while Shi'ite Muslims are estimated to make up between 10 and 15% of the Muslim population. Based on this assumption, India is the second country in the world with the highest population of Shiites after Iran.
Sufi movements, which have had a great contribution to the Islamic expansion in the Indian peninsula since the earliest times, are prevalent and active in the country today. Especially the Deobandi movement was founded in the mid-19th century and the "Tablighi" Jamaat, which emerged out of the Deobandi movement in 1926 and has become the largest Islamic community in the world today, should be considered in this context. Organized in 160 countries, it has 80 million followers in the Indian Subcontinent alone. On the other hand, Ahmadiyya, which is considered to be one of the deviant sects outside the Ahl al-Sunnah world, appeared in India at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, this movement has about 2 million followers around the world.