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As is well known, Islam arose in Arabia, which, alongside the pagan Communities, had a large number of tribes and groups which professed Judaism and Christianity. So far as we know, the relations between the Jews and Christians and their Arab neighbours in pre-Islamic times were cordial, or were not at any rate adversely affected by differences of faith. In its self-view Islam represented both a continuation and a supersession of the two earlier Semitic faiths. The Jewish Gospel as well as the New Testament had originally represented divine messages, and so those who follow them were 'People of the Book', to be distinguished from the 'Infidels'. But the Gospel texts, the Quran itself had claimed, had suffered from unauthorized deletions and insertions; and this claim, of course, created a fundamental point of disagreement between the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. Nonetheless, early Muslims seemed fairly well familiar with both the earlier Semitic religions.

The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when François Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he saw eastern states different from the European in two major particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words, the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and polity. This was in contrast to Western Europe, where the limitation of state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over the land, under its protection, were the surest means to progress and prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez faire state.

There have been numerous attempts to explain the fall of the Mughal Empire; and I truly feel great hesitation in adding myself to the long list of its exponents. To historians like Irvine and Sarkar, the decline could be explained in terms of a personal deterioration in the quality of the kings and their nobles. The harem influence grew—and women, for some strange unscientific reason, are always supposed to be a bad influence. The kings and nobles became more luxury loving, though no-one has yet established that the Mughals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enjoyed any less luxurious mode of living than their eighteenth-century successors. Sarkar, in his monumental History of Aurangzib, also elaborated upon the traditionally recognized factor, namely, Hindu–Muslim differences: Aurangzib's religious policy is thought to have provoked a Hindu Reaction that undid the unity that had been so laboriously built up by his predecessors.