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ISLAM
They constitute the largest single group of the followers of Islam, consisting of over 400 million people in Pakistan and Bangladesh, which are predominantly Muslim, as well as in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, where they are in a minority. India, in fact, has well over 130 million Muslims, the largest single minority in the world. The most prominent language of Muslims of this area is Urdu, related closely to both Sanskrit and Persian, although many other Indian languages, such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, and Tamil, are also used by Muslims. Bengali must be considered, along with Urdu, as the other major literary Islamic language of the Subcontinent. After the Arabs and Persians, the next important group, in terms of its participation in Islamic civilization and its role in Islamic history, is the Turkic people, who are spread from the Balkans to eastern Siberia. The Turks have played a major role in the political life of Islam during the past millennium. It was the Turks who created the powerful Ottoman Empire, stretching from Algeria to Bosnia, an empire that lasted for about seven centuries, until World War I. But the Turkic people are not limited to the Turks of the Ottoman world and present-day Turkey. Several of the now independent republics of Caucasia and Central Asia are ethnically and linguistically Turkic, although some are culturally very close to the Persian world. There are also people of Turkic stock within Russia itself. There are perhaps more than 150 million people belonging to this ethnic group, with languages that are neither Semitic, like Arabic, nor IndoIranian, like Persian, but Altaic. They represent a distinct zone within Islamic civilization that has been in