Furthermore, he brought into place the use of Islamic terms, such as khata, sanad, the use of 'bin' to denote 'son of' into administration; and these terms have been in use ever since. Tipu is also known to have attempted to assign Islamic names to several places - for example, Yousufabad for Devanahalli, Nasarabad for Mysore, Farukhyab Hisar for Chitradurga, Faiz Hisar for Gutti and so on.

Tipu strengthened and instituted education in Persian and Urdu among Muslims in the Mysore region. To this day, unlike Muslims in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Muslims in southern Karnataka use Urdu.

Tipu sent a letter on January 19, 1790 to Budruz Zuman Khan. It says:

Don't you know I have achieved a great victory recently in Malabar and over four lakh Hindus were converted to Islam? I am determined to march against that cursed Raman Nair very soon. Since I am overjoyed at the prospect of converting him and his subjects to Islam, I have happily abandoned the idea of going back to Srirangapatanam now. 

Brittlebank, Hasan, Chetty, Habib and Saletare, amongst others, argue that stories of Tipu Sultan's religious persecution of Hindus and Christians are largely derived from the work of early British authors such as Kirkpatrick and Wilks, whom they do not consider to be entirely reliable. A. S. Chetty argues that Wilks’ account in particular cannot be trusted, Irfan Habib and Mohibbul Hasan argues that these early British authors had a strong vested interest in presenting Tipu Sultan as a tyrant from whom the British had "liberated" Mysore. This assessment is echoed by Brittlebank in her recent work where she writes that Wilks and Kirkpatrick must be used with particular care as both authors had taken part in the wars against Tipu Sultan and were closely connected to the administrations of Lord Cornwallis and Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley.

It is believed that Tipu ordered Shamaiya Iyengar to be blinded. However, Tipu himself forgave Shamaiya when Shamaiya's son bravely defended against the British during the last Anglo-Mysore War, dying due to a gunshot in the chest.

During the early years his rule Tipu Sultan sent an embasy to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, to Sultan Abdul Hamid I requesting urgent assistance against the British East India Company and had proposed an offensive and defensive consortium. However,the Ottomans were at crisis and still recuperating from the devastating Austro-Ottoman War and the Russo-Turkish Wars. Due to the Ottoman-inability to organize a fleet in the Indian Ocean, Tipu Sultan's ambassadors returned home only with gifts from Abdul Hamid I and later Selim III.

Like his father Hyder Ali before him,Tipu Sultan maintained many embassies and made several contacts with Mohammad Ali Khan ruler of the Zand Dynasty in Persia. Tipu Sultan also maintained correspondence with Hamad bin Said,the ruler of the Sultanate of Oman.

Some historians claim that Tipu Sultan was a religious persecutor of Hindus. In 1780 CE,he declared himself to be the Badshah or Emperor of Mysore, and struck coinage in his own name without reference to the reigning Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II. H. D. Sharma writes that,in his correspondence with other Islamic rulers such asZaman Shah of Afghanistan, Tipu Sultan used this title and declared that he intended to establish an Islamic empire in the entire country, along the lines of the Mughal Empire which was at its decline during the period in question. He even invited him to invade India to help achieve this mission. His alliance with the French was supposedly aimed at achieving this goal by driving his main rivals, the British, out of the subcontinent.