In summary, we find an interrelated set of significant changes occurr­ing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on a global scale. With the rise of E… - André Wink

It is a fact of immense significance that whereas in the making of Europe the conquests of Islam played the role of a powerfully effective but mostly external factor, in the East the expansion of Islam went on for more than a millennium and here, in South and large parts of Southeast Asia the association with Islam became so intimate that, as a result, we find an Indo-Islamic pattern of society and culture. (Introduction)

By the time that the Turko-Islamic conquerors arrived in North India, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Buddhism was no longer a religion of a floating population of itinerant monks but had become institutionalized in monasteries, which, supported by royal endowments of land as well as by donations from the mercantile communities, tended to become large academically oriented centres with permanent residents, vulnerable to outside attack, but still aloof from the rural masses (which only adopted random cultic elements from the religion). What happened, then, during the Islamic conquest, is that the academic (and soteriological / philosophical) tradition of Buddhism was uprooted in India itself, but replaced, outside the orbit of Muslim rule, by a variety of regional forms of Buddhism.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing analysis is that ecology was a major factor determining the progress and character of the Islamic conquest of al-Hind. For one thing, the subcontinent was unsuitable for Mongol-style nomadism on account of the absence of sufficient good pasture land. With the Mongols failing to penetrate beyond its western periphery, the Indian subcontinent cannot really be said to have experienced a 'nomadic conquest' at all. In this respect the thirteenth-century situation in the north was unlike the Iranian plateau, where Mongol conquest was followed by extensive nomadization and destruction of agriculture.