Long, before the advent of Islam, even as early as the third millennium BCE, India had cultural bonds with the Mesopotamian civilization, now the region of Iraq and Iran.  As explained by N. N. Bhattacharya, there are plenty of references to establish a very close contact between India and the Islamic world. Actually, Iraq was an area that had been a part of the Vedic civilization at one time. The extreme antiquity of India’s trade with the West-Asia (now known as middle-east) is an established fact.

In the Rig Vedic age, Afghanistan and its neighboring countries were culturally a part of ancient India, Bharatvarsha, and ancient Iran was also hardly distinguishable from India. It is recognized that some forms of Vedic culture prevailed in Western Asia. According to the Syrian writer Zenob, there was an Indian colony in the canton of Taron (in the region of modern day Turkey) on the upper Euphrates, to