Forced conversion is prohibited in Islam. This is made clear in the Qur’anic chapter Al Kafirun, as well as the 256th verse of the second chapter, which declares that there is no compulsion in religion.
Some Muslim rulers in India, disobeying Islam, forcibly converted non-Muslims to Islam. But these were individual instances: there were never any policies of forced conversion. By and large, it was unknown.
Consider the Mughals: they wanted tax-paying, contented subjects, not forcibly converted Muslims. Most Mughal subjects were always Hindu. In East Bengal in the seventeenth century, Mughal state officials were actually punished for trying to convert non-Muslims, something which was seen as threatening to disrupt the social order. Sources show how one officer had his position stripped from him for converting the son of a Bengali chief to Islam.
In fact, the historian Richard Eaton shows that most conversions to Islam happened in places where Muslim imperial authority was weak, rather than in imperial strongholds. This completely disproves the idea that conversion was generally at the point of a sword.
Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 (2019)
