Soomra dynasty

The Soomras were a local Muslim dynasty that held power in Sindh, the lower Indus valley in today's Pakistan, from the early eleventh century until the mid-fourteenth. They rose in the confusion that followed a Ghaznavid invasion, survived alongside stronger neighbours for more than three centuries, and are remembered in Sindh as patrons of its language and of a famous ballad tradition. Our maps call their state the Soomra Emirate.

Few contemporary records of the Soomras survive. Coins from Sindh in this period are scarce and often hard to read, and much of the later story comes from Persian chronicles written centuries afterwards and from Sindhi oral tradition. Dates for individual rulers therefore vary between modern lists, and even the founding year is given variously as 1011, 1025 or 1026.

In 1025 Mahmud of Ghazni attacked Mansura, then the capital of Sindh. Its ruler, Khafif, fled and drowned, and it is unclear whether he was the last of the Habbarid emirs or the first Soomra. According to a later chronicle cited by the Sindhi historian Habibullah Siddiqui, the Soomras gathered at Thari, in the present Badin district, and raised a chief named Soomar as ruler, and Thari became an early capital.

The family's background is disputed. The historian André Wink regards them as of local origin, later claiming both Rajput and Arab ancestry; the sixteenth-century Ain-i-Akbari called them Rajputs, while other writers argued for Arab descent. Some Soomras followed Isma'ili Shi'a Islam: Arab travellers described them as Qarmatians, a letter to the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo has been identified, and some coins of the period name Fatimid caliphs.

The Soomras were probably based in lower Sindh, while the Ghaznavid Empire and later the Ghurids held other parts of the region in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Siddiqui's survey describes a Ghurid seizure of the port of Debal in 1176 that proved short-lived, and an invasion by the Khwarazmian prince Jalal al-Din in the early thirteenth century. One ruler, named in the sources as Shimuddin Chamisar, submitted to Iltutmish of the Delhi Sultanate and kept his throne as a vassal.

Sindhi writers credit the Soomra period with the growth of Sindhi as a language of poetry and teaching, and with the spread of Islam through Sufi preachers and religious schools. The madrasa at Sehwan was associated with the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, who died in 1274, and the traveller Ibn Battuta stayed in Sehwan in 1333. The semi-historical ballad of Dodo and Chanesar, about two rival Soomra princes, was handed down by minstrels for centuries and is valued as a source on medieval Sindh.

In 1333 Ibn Battuta found the Samma tribe in revolt. Soon after 1335 the Sammas drove out the Soomras, whose last ruler took refuge in Gujarat under the protection of the Delhi sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. Muhammad marched on Sindh in 1351, perhaps to restore him, but died at Sondha, and the Samma dynasty took power. A branch of the Soomras is said to have ruled on at Umarkot, in the Thar desert, until about 1440.

Our 1100 map shows the Soomra Emirate along the lower Indus, with the Ghaznavid realm to the north-west and the lands the map labels Solankis to the south-east.