In 711, the Umayyad Caliph in Damascus sent two failed expeditions to Balochistan (an arid region on the Iranian Plateau in Southwest Asia, presently split between Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and Sindh.
Nature of the expeditions was punitive, and in response to raids carried out by pirates on Arab shipping, operating around Debal. The allegation was made that the King of Sindh, Raja Dahir. The third expedition was led by a 20-year-old Arabian chieftain named Muhammad bin Qasim.
Bin Qasim invaded the sub-continent at the orders of Al-Hajjaj bin Yousef, the governor of Iraq. Qasim's armies defeated Raja Dahir at what is now Hyderabad inSindh in 712. He then proceeded to subdue the lands from Karachi to Multan with an initial force of only six thousand Arabian tribesmen; thereby establishing the dominion of the Umayyad Caliphate from Lisbon in Portugal to the Indus Valley.
Qasim's stay was brief as he was soon recalled to Iraq, and the Caliphates rule in South Asia shrank to Sindh and Southern Punjab in the form of Arab states, the principal of whom were Al Mansura and Multan.
One of Dahar’s daughter’s then spoke and said: “The fact is that Muhammad Qasim was like a brother or a son to us; he never touched us, your slaves, and our chastity was safe with him. But in as much as he brought ruin on the king of Hind and Sind, desolated the kingdom of our fathers and grandfathers, and degraded us from princely rank to slavery, we have, with the intention of revenge and of bringing ruin and degradation to him in return, misrepresented the matter and spoken a false thing to your majesty against him.”
The author of the Chachnama then writes that had Muhammad Bin Qasim not lost his senses in the passion of obedience, he could have made the whole journey normally, while wrapping himself in raw leather and locking himself in a trunk only when a part of the journey remained to be covered.
