The Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent mainly took place between the 13th and the 18th centuries, establishing the Indo-Muslim period. Earlier Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent include the invasions which started in the northwestern Indian subcontinent (modern-day Pakistan), especially the Umayyad campaigns in India. Later during the 8th century, Mahmud of Ghazni, sultan of the Ghaznavid Empire, invaded vast parts of Punjab and Gujarat during the 11th century. After the capture of Lahore and the end of the Ghaznavids, the Ghurid ruler Muhammad of Ghor laid the foundation of Muslim rule in India in 1192. In 1202, Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji led the Muslim conquest of Bengal, marking the easternmost expansion of Islam at the time.

The Ghurid Empire soon evolved into the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, ruled by Qutb ud-Din Aibak, the founder of the Mamluk dynasty. With the Delhi Sultanate established, Islam was spread across most parts of the Indian subcontinent. In the 14th century, the Khalji dynasty under Alauddin Khalji, extended Muslim rule southwards to Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Deccan. The successor Tughlaq dynasty temporarily expanded its territorial reach to Tamil Nadu. The disintegration of the Delhi Sultanate, capped by Timur's invasion in 1398, caused several Muslim sultanates and dynasties to emerge across the Indian subcontinent, such as the Gujarat Sultanate, Malwa Sultanate, Bahmani Sultanate, Jaunpur Sultanate, Madurai Sultanate, and the Bengal Sultanate. Some of these, however, were followed by Hindu reconquests and resistance from the native powers and states, such as the Telugu Nayakas, Vijayanagara, and Rajput states under the Kingdom of Mewar.

The Delhi Sultanate was replaced by the Mughal Empire in 1526, which was one of the three gunpowder empires. Emperor Akbar gradually enlarged the Mughal Empire to include a large portion of the subcontinent. Under Akbar, who stressed the importance of religious tolerance and winning over the goodwill of the subjects, a multicultural empire came into being with various non-Muslim subjects being actively integrated into the Mughal Empire's bureaucracy and military machinery. The economic and territorial zenith of the Mughals was reached at the end of the 17th century, when under the reign of emperor Aurangzeb the empire witnessed the full establishment of Islamic Sharia through the Fatawa al-Alamgir.

The Mughals went into a sudden decline immediately after achieving their peak following the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, due to a lack of competent and effective rulers among Aurangzeb's successors. Other factors included the expensive and bloody Mughal-Rajput Wars and the Mughal–Maratha Wars. The Afsharid ruler Nader Shah's invasion in 1739 was an unexpected attack which demonstrated the weakness of the Mughal Empire. This provided opportunities for various regional states such as Rajput states, Mysore Kingdom, Sind State, Nawabs of Bengal and Murshidabad, Maratha Empire, Sikh Empire, and Nizams of Hyderabad to declare their independence and exercising control over large regions of the Indian subcontinent further accelerating the geopolitical disintegration of the Indian subcontinent.

The Maratha Empire replaced Mughals as the dominant power of the subcontinent from 1720 to 1818. The Muslim conquests in Indian subcontinent came to a halt after the Battle of Plassey (1757), the Battle of Buxar (1764), Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–1799), Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775–1818), Anglo-Sind War (1843) and Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–1848) as the British East India Company seized control of much of the Indian subcontinent up till 1857. Throughout the 18th century, European powers continued to exert a large amount of political influence over the Indian subcontinent, and by the end of the 19th century most of the Indian subcontinent came under European colonial domination, most notably the British Raj until 1947.

The first ever recorded incursion by Arabs in India occurred around 636/7 AD, during the Rashidun Caliphate, long before any Arab army reached the frontier of India by land. Uthman ibn Abi al-As al-Thaqafi, the governor of Bahrain and Oman, had dispatched naval expeditions against the Sasanian coast, and further east to the borders of India, as confirmed by the contemporary Armenian historian, Sebeos. Uthman, on his own initiative and without the sanction of Caliph Umar, according to the history of al-Baladhuri, had also launched two naval raids against ports of the Indian subcontinent, the first of these raids targeted Thane (a small town near Mumbai) and Bharuch (a city in Gujarat). The second raid targeted Debal (a town near Karachi). The assault on Thane, the first recorded Arab raid on India, was commanded by Uthman's brother al-Hakam, who also led the raid on Bharuch. The following raid on Debal was commanded by another brother, al-Mughira. The raids were probably launched in c. 636 according to al-Baladhuri. These expeditions were not sanctioned by Caliph Umar and Uthman escaped punishment only because there weren't any casualties.

The raids on Thane and Bharuch may have been successful as the Arabs had lost no men during these raids, but al-Baladhuri does not specifically state these raids as successful,(al-Balādhurī 1924, p. 209), so some scholars are of the opinion that the Arabs raids may have been failures. and forced the Arabs to retreat. The raid on Debal may have occurred in 643 AD and faced success, but it is unlikely as Umar was still the Caliph and Uthman was unlikely to disobey his directive on sea raids, and the source reporting this is deemed unreliable.

The motivation for these expeditions may have been to seek plunder or to attack pirates to safeguard Arabian trade in the Arabian Sea, not to start the conquest of India. Shortly after the Muslim conquest of Persia, the connection between the Sindh and Islam was established by the initial Muslim missions during the Rashidun Caliphate.