In a broad sense, the Sufis were and are responsible for talking the principles and message of Islam to the doorstep of people in the sub-continent.  Delhi offered refuge during the 13th and 14th centuries to innumerable Sufis who became victims of Mongol invasions of Central Asia.

The loss of Bukhara, Baghdad, Samarqand and several other Islamic centres of scholarship became the gain of Delhi; the Indraprastha of Mahabharat soon became,  in the words of Amir Khusrau, ‘Jannat adan ast ke abaad baad’ ( a flourishing garden of paradise).

A visit to the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, which is not very far from the Nizamuddin railway station, is a lesson on catholicity. People from all walks of life come to the Dargah. Many of them are Hindus, who live in the neighbourhood and in far away places, though the Dargah doesn’t find a place in the itinerary of daily tourist services as yet.

Some scholars define Sufism as simply the name for the inner dimension of Islam. For some schools of thought, Sufism is outside the sphere of Islam.

Whatever be the considered view of scholars, clerics, the Left and the Right, it has not come in the way of people turning to Sufi masters for peace and solace. Sufi philosophy is universal in nature; though there have been some hybrid versions, Sufism has become the folk Islam in India and Pakistan, which before 1947 were a single geographical mass.  

Islam came to India in three waves with the Arab traders, invaders and Sufis. India accepted the new religion and helped in enriching Islam in all respects. There is a school of thought, to which this reviewer passionately subscribes, that Sufism has helped India to retain the pristine purity of Islam in all its splendour.

Though some extremist Islamist tendencies that have taken roots in Pakistan (Political Islam as Nadeem F. Paracha terms the phenomenon) had originated in India, thanks to its Sufi orientation, India has largely remained free of these aberrations and thus can be cited as a model to others.
Also   it is an undeniable fact that at the village level, Islam and Hinduism co-exist happily with Hindus visiting the local Dargah regularly and taking part in the Urs celebrations of the Pirs (Sufi Masters) whole heartedly.   I know this from first hand experience. Many Hindus, some of them orthodox, have named their sons and daughters after the local Pirs.

While folk Islam thus became a unifier of people in India, Political Islam in Pakistan has created a clamour for a modern-day caliphate run on the dictates of the Shariah as an alternative to democratic system. Military rulers, who, temperamentally, were disinclined towards democratic practices of pluralism and tolerating dissent, encouraged the development to create a class of social vigilantes and islands of puritanical practices that helped them to strengthen their hold on the society. War against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan gave respectability to Wahabism in particular and gave birth to the phenomenon of state sponsored and pampered Jihadi terrorism.