modern european and muslim explanations of conversion to islam in south asia: a preliminary survey...

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Modern European and Muslim explanationsof conversion to Islam in South Asia: Apreliminary survey of the literature

P. Hardy

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society / Volume 109 / Issue 02 / July 1977, pp 177 - 206DOI: 10.1017/S0035869X00133866, Published online: 15 March 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0035869X00133866

How to cite this article:P. Hardy (1977). Modern European and Muslim explanations of conversionto Islam in South Asia: A preliminary survey of the literature. Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society, 109, pp 177-206 doi:10.1017/S0035869X00133866

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MODERN EUROPEAN AND MUSLIM EXPLANATIONS OFCONVERSION TO ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA:

A PRELIMINARY SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE1

By P. HARDY

Even among Muslims, the growth of Muslim population in South Asia excitedlittle attention before the later 19th century when the British-Indian adminis-tration began to number the population of the Indian Empire according todeclared or imputed religious allegiance. In medieval times, Muslim rulers andtheir aides, Muslim historians and literati, although often mindful that in "SouthAsia" they lived among a predominantly non-Muslim population, did not con-ceive the stability of Muslim dynastic rule or the continuation of political andfinancial advantages for Muslim elites, to be related to or dependent upon thesize of the aggregate of those who would deem themselves as, and be regarded byothers to be, Muslims. The very few references, over a period of 500 or 600years, in the religious literature to "conversions" suggest in their contexts andperhaps in their very rarity, that the Muslim religious did not postulate the qual-ity and strength of man's response in South Asia to the call of Islam to be pro-portionate to the numbers of those calling themselves, or called by others,Muslims.

Before the introduction of the British—Indian census on the sub-continentalscale, Muslims in South Asia had no means of envisaging themselves as an aggre-gate within a region or territory defined as such by the character of its politicalarrangements, of its topography or of its population. AurangzTb's levy of jizyaupon non-Muslims was based on a partial enumeration of non-Muslims (partialby reason, inter alia, of the canonical exemption of women, the halt, and thesick, and, in some districts, of villages wholly devoted to agriculture) and not ona religious census of the whole population, including Muslims. Mughal adminis-trative records were, moreover, not for public circulation. In referring to Muslims,writers would use such expressions as ummat-i Islam ("the community ofIslam"), or ahl-i Islam ("the people of Islam") or simply musalmanan ("Mussul-mans"): in referring to their habitat, terms such as bilad-iHind ("the country ofHind"), wildyat-iHindustan ("the dominion of Hindustan"), sul^anat-i mamlakat-i DihlT ("sultanate of the country of Delhi"), mamalik-i mahrusa ("the fortifiedor protected countries", i.e. those ruled by a sovereign), were used. The threecategories of reference, the personal, the spatial, and the political, were not con-flated.

Once the British in India had taken an all-India census (as that of 1872, withsome qualifications, may be described), including a census of religious adherences,and once the British began publicly to relate their political assessments andactions to the believed character of the social aggregates thus denominated, then

178 EXPLANATIONS OF CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA

the question of how the numbers of Muslims had grown in South Asia was tobecome charged with political suggestiveness. In the period after the granting ofseparate Muslim electorates, which in principle conferred a distinctive consti-tutional identity on the Muslim aggregate in British India, the question becamesupercharged. If Muslims in British India were descendants, peculiarly fecunddescendants perhaps, of immigrants with, by definition, a culture foreign toIndia, then the British might the more easily convince themselves and others thatthe population of British India should not be treated as a united people capableof sustaining self-governing institutions of a kind that appeared to require fortheir successful working some necessary minimum sharing of moral values. If,however, the majority of Muslims were descended from "sons of the soil", thenwhy should that majority not share an "Indian" political nationality with non-Muslims? There were other permutations: if among the Muslim population therewere large numbers of voluntary converts and if the acceptance of a new way oflife implies the rejection of an old way of life, then could rejecters (and theirdescendants) and rejected (and their descendants) live together in a self-governingpolitical community? In the past they could live together as fellow subjects, butin the future could they live together as fellow citizens? Then, if it were truethat many Muslims were descended from converts forcibly made, did this entitlethem to any special political consideration - or merely to special missionaryattention - by the descendants of those who had been the objects of attempts atforcible conversion? If, however, many changes in religious or social belonginghad occurred voluntarily, was this not both educative and cautionary for thosefrom whom the "converts" had detached themselves, and should political andsocial arrangements in a self-governing India not be such as might prevent theeducational and cautionary process from continuing? (Briefly, would the creationof Pakistan blot out any prospect of all Indians voluntarily becoming Muslim?)

To attempt to penetrate the field of the study of the growth of the Muslimpopulation in South Asia is to attempt to penetrate a political minefield. But todo so may help in the further understanding of the dynamics of social life inSouth Asia. Observers in all periods since Muslims entered South Asia have atleast agreed that Muslim numbers in the region have increased by other thannatural reproduction or immigration, that is by changes in social or religiousbelonging to which, following common usage in English, we may, in order tolaunch the present operation, apply the code word "conversion". It is unlikelythat today observers in the field in South Asia, unlike observers in Africa, will beable to witness "conversion" to Islam in progress - the political atmosphere istoo thick — but by a topographical survey of the lie of explanations of conver-sion offered from the middle of the 18th century to the early 1960's, possiblefuture observation posts may be the better sited. This paper is no more than acontribution to such a survey which will have to include a study of the interpret-ations and explanations in many literatures, particularly vernacular literatures,

EXPLANATIONS OF CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA 179

as yet unread, and for this writer unreadable. But let a small beginning be made.Before a convert, or a descendant from a convert, can be explained he has to

be observed and recognized. It seems that Europeans did not observe and recog-nize the native-born or native-descended convert to Islam in India for at least ageneration after the battle of Plassey (1757). It was not surprising that Europeansdid not: the centres of European power and activity, on the east coast aroundMadras and Calcutta and on the west coast around Bombay, were situated awayfrom the areas where the greatest concentrations of native-descended convertsexisted to be discovered. Moreover, in the earlier days of British supremacy, thebusiness of the East India Company servants, as rulers or as businessmen, did notalways bring them into touch with those classes of persons from which, it camein the event to be known, Muslim converts were largely drawn.

One of these servants, W. Adam, in explaining why he had wrongly thoughtthat Muslims were in a minority in the district of Rajshahi in eastern Bengal,pointed this out in 1836: "The Musalmans [of Rajshahi] with exceptions alsoform a very large majority of the cultivators of the ground, and day labourersand others engage in the very humblest forms of mechanical skill and buying andselling, as tailors, turban-makers, makers of huqqa-suckers, dyers, wood-polishers,oil sellers, sellers of vegetables, fruit etc. — in few instances attracting the atten-tion of those who do not mix much with the humbler classes of the people ormake special enquiry into their occupations and circumstances." On the otherhand, "the Hindus, with exceptions of course, are the principal zamindars,talookdars, public officers, men of learning, money-lenders, traders, shopkeepers. . . engaging in the most active pursuits of life and coming under the notice ofthe rulers of the country."2

Not that the existence of a Muslim population in India, large in absolute andsignal even in relative terms, went unnoticed and unrecorded before the taking ofthe first censuses in India in the 19th century. Robert Orme, in a work publishedin 1763, estimated that "time has formed in India a mighty nation of near tenmillion of Mahomedans", though, he added, "they are outnumbered by theIndians ten to one".3 This figure for total Muslim numbers was given again in1772 by Grose4 and in 1791 by Robertson;5 the estimate of the ratio of Muslimsto others is to be found also in Edward Gibbon.6 Charles Grant, however, writingin 1792, reduced the ratio to eight to one.7 The only wholly discrepant estimateof the ratio between Muslims and others is given in The modem part of an univer-sal history (1759) where Hindus are described as being at least 100 to one, "somesay many hundreds to one", compared with all the rest.8 All, however, who wrotebefore the governor-generalships of Comwallis and Wellesley, accepted the prop-osition that in referring to the "Mahomedans" they were referring to the "reign-ing nation",9 that is to the politically dominant component of India's peoples.

But most British observers or writers (not all, for Robert Orme was a signifi-cant exception) before the 1790's, saw the Muslims in India, as they, the British,


saw themselves in India, that is as members of an immigrant or of an immigrant-descended people. The British early recognized, however, that immigrant Muslimshad intermarried with "the women of the country".10 Robert Orme in 1753might divide "the Moors in Indostan" into "two kinds of people, differing inevery respect, excepting in the profession of the same religion", namely "Tartarscontinually naturalising themselves in Indostan" and a "second rank of Moorswhich comprehends all the descendants of converted Gentoos — a miserablerace, as none but the most miserable of the Gentoo casts are capable of changingtheir religion",11 but neither The modern part of an universal history,12 norRobertson nor Grant followed him. Luke Scrafton, however, in distinguishingArabs, Afghans, Persians, and Mughals among the "Mahometans of all sects andcountries who are settled in India", did add a further element to the Muslimpopulation, "the slaves they have brought up to their religion"; the former andthe latter, however, "compose the whole body of Mahometans".13

Probably the first European observer of the modern period to notice that, insome areas of India, Muslims constituted more than one in ten or one in eight ofthe population, was Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, whom the Company's govern-ment commissioned to survey the resources, both natural and human, of itsterritories in the Presidencies of Madras and Bengal. Buchanan-Hamilton travelledin the recently-annexed western coastal regions of the Madras Presidency in 1800and 1801, and in Bengal, Bihar, and the eastern districts of the North-WestemProvinces between 1807 and 1814. In 1807-8 he estimated that over two-thirdsof the population of the Dinajpur district in eastern Bengal was Muslim.14

Buchanan-Hamilton also saw that a goodly proportion of the Muslim popu-lation of which he was aware in both Malabar and in the Bengal Presidency was aconvert or a convert-descended population.15 But in Malabar his perceptions inthis respect had already been anticipated by Jonathan Duncan, who had travelledthere in 1793 after the East India Company had annexed Malabar following theThird Mysore War. Duncan was convinced that conversions to Islam had occurredin the Malabar region on a significant scale,16 and not only and not principallyby reason of the recent forcible intrusion of TTpu Sultan's forces (see below, p.185). Nevertheless, such observations did not make themselves felt in the generalhistories of India written by British historians before the middle of the 19th cen-tury. James Mill in his The history of British India, published in 1817 in threevolumes, does not mention the convert to Islam in India, and MountstuartElphinstone in his The history of India, published in two volumes in 1841, whileallowing, in a footnote, that east of the Ganges in Bengal, Muslims were morethan one half of the population, opined that "the whole of the Mussulmans inIndia at the present moment do not exceed one eighth of the population; andafter allowing for the great and long-continued immigration and for the naturalincrease, during eight centuries, of a favoured class whose circumstances gavegreat facility in rearing families, the number left for converts would not be very


great."17 It was not until the period after 1870, the period of the Indian censuses,of Hunter's A statistical account of Bengal, of the provincial and imperial gazet-teers of India, and of the ethnographical works of the generation c. 1890-c.1920, officially sponsored by provincial administrations, that the convert ofindigenous stock to Islam obtained, so to speak, full recognition. Even then, theBritish writer of general histories was slow to give him much consideration orimportance whether for the medieval or for the modern history of India. W. H.Moreland, in 1936, in the Short history of India, written jointly with A. Chatter-jee, was a noteworthy exception.18

The revelation — and to most British officials and observers it was nothingless — in the censuses of 1871—2 that Muslims were 22.8 per cent of the popu-lation of Madras, Bombay, Bengal (at that time incorporating Bihar and Orissa),the North-Western Provinces, Awadh, and the Panjab (including the frontier dis-tricts), and that probably a preponderance of the 38,356,507 Muslims recordedin those provinces was not, after all, of immigrant descent, however diluted,tended to focus attention on whether non-Muslims in India were still becomingMuslims. Before the age of the official demographer, Buchanan-Hamilton hadseen conversion in Bengal as occurring still, but only on a small scale. In the1870's, W. W. Hunter in A statistical account of Bengal recorded a number ofdistrict officers' opinions that conversion to Islam, if occurring at all, was on avery small scale.19 But in the 1890's some observers saw differently: T. W. Arnoldin The preaching of Islam had no doubt that in 19th-century India, the numberof Muslims had increased greatly for reasons other than a relatively higher Muslimbirth rate.20 W. Crooke, however, while conceding that between 1881 and 1891the rate of increase of the Muslim population was greater than of the Hindu andthat "in some places, as in western Bengal, much of its [Islam's] progress is dueto the active preaching of the ubiquitous Pir and Mulla", agreed with Mr.O'Donnell (Census Superintendent for the 1891 Bengal Census) that the growthof Islam "is due perhaps more to physical than to doctrinal forces", that is moreto the more vigorous constitution of the Muslim as an eater of meat (sic), hisacceptance of widow remarriage (sic), and the greater prevalence of polygamyamong Muslims (sic).21 "At present", Cooke held, "in northern India thereseems to be little active proselytism." Nevertheless, E. A. Gait, the Census Super-intendent for the 1901 census in Bengal, deemed conversion to be occurring suf-ficiently frequently for district officers to be asked to report specially upon it;indeed, Gait included extracts from their reports in his account of the census inBengal.22 Outside official circles, an impression that Islam at the turn of the19th century was attracting a considerable number of new adherents appears tohave been gaining ground, for in 1903 Stanley L&ne-Poole, in his Medieval Indiaunder Muhammadan rule, stated that "it has been estimated that about fifty-thousand Hindus turn Turk annually."23

Until materials in Persian and Urdu have been properly examined, it is


impossible to do other than speculate when, and in what social circles, Muslimsin India first asked themselves what proportion of their number in India wereconverts or descendants from converts, and for what reasons those who were notborn Muslims later became Muslims. It could be in the light of the traditionamong the Deobandi 'ulamd' that the efforts of the 'ulamd' had much to dowith a fourfold increase in the number of Muslims in India during 100 yearsof British rule,24 that the writings of the 'ulamd' will yield interesting data.As for those Muslims who sought to obtrude themselves upon their Britishrulers in order to influence their policies (and not in order to remove them asrulers), present indications are that interest in conversion and in converts waslate in showing itself. One Khondkar Fazl-i Rabbi, diwdn to the Nawwab ofMurshidabad, in his Haqiqat-i Musalmandn-i Bangala published in Calcutta in1891 (rendered into English and published four years later under the title Theorigins of the Musalmans of Bengal), recognized that there were in his day thosein Bengal who followed such occupations as weavers and washermen (significantlydescribed in the English rendering, but with no equivalent phrase in the Urduoriginal, as "the lower orders"), who, belonging to local communities, hadaccepted Islam ;2S but the remainder of the work is devoted to trying to provethat such Muslims formed a small minority of the Muslims in Bengal. Gait in the1901 census report for Bengal took pains to controvert Fazl-i Rabbi's thesis, andit was probably with echoes of this controversy still reverberating that KhudaBakhsh in 1912 in his "Thoughts on the present situation" wrote, grudgingly itsounds, that "say what we will, the largest portion of the Mohamedan populationare Hindu converts to Islam."26 Sayyid Amir 'All in the various editions from1891 onwards of his well-known "modernist" work, The spirit of Islam, appearsnot to have been interested specifically in whether Islam made converts in India.

Against the background of constitutional change in which elective represen-tation for Muslims (among other non-Hindus) was related to communal pro-portion, of forcible conversion of Hindus by the Muslim Mappillasin 1921, andof Hindu efforts to reintegrate the demi-Muslim, demi-Hindu Malkana Rajputsinto the Hindu fold, modern educated Muslims seem not to have been anxious todraw attention to conversion to Islam in either medieval or modern India. A.Yiisuf 'All in The making of India (1925) was content quietly to point out thatMuslims in India were not "in the mass" ethnically different from Hindus andthat Muslim saints and Sufis were important "in the formal conversion of Hindusto Islam".27 Muhammad HabTb in an article on the Arab conquest of Sind, pub-lished in 1929, found it difficult to say how the mass of the people of Sindeventually became Muslim. By the middle of the 1930's, however, converts toIslam in India had become of conscious interest to the growing number ofMuslim historians of the period of Muslim political supremacy.28 And so it hasremained until the present day, whether among the modern Muslim writers ofIndia or among those of Pakistan.


It is necessary to set the explanations which Europeans have offered for con-version to Islam in India against the two assumptions which almost all Europeanobservers of the Indian scene have made (even though individual observers havenot always proceeded directly from assumption to consequential explanation ofspecific types of conversion occurring in India), namely that Islam is in essence amissionary religion, and that it does not, in principle, exclude the use of tem-poral power to encourage acceptance of it. The parenthetical qualification isimportant: many observers have pointed to what they believed to be a disjunc-tion here between what the summons of Islam is and what Muslims in India haveactually done.

Few expressed attitudes as extreme as that of Sir Henry Miers Elliot at theopening of his account of the advance of the Arabs in the 8th century to conquerSind. "Their energies at all times impetuous were now solely concentrated uponexecuting the injunctions of the 'king of fierce countenance, understanding darksentences' that they should enforce belief at the point of the sword which wasemphatically declared to be 'the key of heaven and of hell'."29 More wouldassent to Gibbon's "Mohammed was alike instructed to preach and to fight" orto W. W. Hunter's "the whole conception of Islam is that of a church eitheractively militant or conclusively triumphant — forcibly converting the world, orruling the stiff-necked unbeliever with a rod of iron."30 There were those who,following Gibbon, recognized that subjugation by the sword was not the same asannihilation or "conversion" by the sword and who understood that the statusof zimmi was that of a politically subordinate being; some held, however, thatany formal granting of zimmi status for idolators was but a reprieve advised, inthe hope of future conversion, by weaker-minded jurists. T. P. Hughes, whoserved as a missionary in India, wrote in his influential Dictionary of Islam underzimmi: "With regard to the idolatry of a non-Arabic country . . . ash-Shafilmaintains that destruction is incurred by them also; but the other learneddoctors agree that it is lawful to reduce them to slavery, thus allowing them, as itwere, a respite during which it may please God to direct them into the rightpath, but making, at the same time, their persons and substance subservient tothe cause of Islam."31 Murray Titus, also a missionary in India, was equally surethat it was a religious duty for Muslims to invade non-Muslim countries, indeedone that strictly orthodox Muslims held to exist even at the time he wrote(1930), and that the use of force had always been recognized by the orthodoxlawyers of Islam as a proper and lawful method of propagating the faith of theProphet.32

But while most commentators have assumed that Islam required Muslims tosecure, at the very least, the political dominance of their faith, to ensure that theresources of unbelievers should be applied, by the use of force and policy, to themaintenance of Islamic institutions, there has been no unanimity that Muslimconquerors in India had acted to fulfil that religious requirement, though there


was a more-generally-held feeling that political success in India had made Muslims"yet more proud, sanguinary, sensual and bigotted" and that "power has beenand is their darling object; nothing was scrupled by them to obtain it".33 But iffor 18th-century Europeans, Muslim rulers in India were "naturally vain, affectshew and Pomp in everything, are much addicted to Luxure, fierce, oppressiveand, for the most part, very rapacious"; and if the Hindus were "naturally jeal-ous, suspicious and pefidious" and kept in "abject slavery" by the "Moors",34

these were but ills of the flesh to which all men under a system of "orientaldespotism" were prey and had little or nothing to do with being a Muslim orbeing a Hindu. Several 18th-century European observers remarked upon theatmosphere of religious tolerance in India. William Hunter noted in 1790: "Andhere by the way we may observe that these two religions [the Hindu and theMuslim] having existed together in Hindostan for so long a time, the professor ofboth have acquired a habit of looking on each other with an eye of indulgenceunusual in other countries between those who maintain such opposite tenets."35

That such a belief as this had become familiar in educated circles in England ageneration before is suggested by a similar comment in The modern part of anuniversal history.36 A contrast in the degree of official tolerance was oftenpointed to, both in the 18th and the 19th century, as between the period ofMughal supremacy and that preceding it. J. H. Grose in 1772, in accepting thatthe "successors of Tamerlane" in India had shown "great toleration and easinessin point of religion", believed that they did not find this difficult since "religionwas for them a matter of political conformity."37 George Campbell, in the middleof the 19th century, was expressing the commonplace belief when he wrote that"Akber gave his character to the Mogul empire. He was far from being aMahommedan bigot: he was, on the contrary, altogether a free-thinker and wouldhave united all his subjects in one system of pure deism."38 In 1883 James Wise,in surveying the conditions of Muslims in Bengal, considered Sikander Lodl inthe 15th century to have been the last persecuting Muslim ruler in India.39

But other voices were to be heard. Quentin Craufurd in 1790 saw the con-quest of the "Mogul Tartars" as fixing on succeeding generations "a lasting trainof miseries"; as bringing with them "the spirit of a haughty superstition", exact-ing conversion, and, where they did not, "destroying temples and images ofstone and metal".40 A century later H. G. Keene spoke of "centuries of Muslimpersecution",41 while in the 20th century Murray Titus found that "It is beyonddispute that one of the characteristics of the Muslim conquest of India was thatof a militant propaganda with the purpose of establishing not only Muslimgovernment over the people, but the Muslim faith as well."42

Still other commentators saw the domination of the Muslim in India as, in itsessential theme, a political domination only, though they might not deny to thatpolitical domination incidental religious consequences. Although MountstuartElphinstone regarded the Arabs as "fanatical missionaries", by contrast the later


Turkish rulers were "politic sovereigns more intent upon the aggrandizement oftheir families than the propagation of their faith".43 Sir Alfred Lyall believedthat "the military adventurers who founded dynasties in Northern India andcarved out kingdoms in the Deccan, cared little for things spiritual."44 StanleyLane-Poole expressed in 1903 a similar judgement, but with a fresh nuance:Muslim rule was political in idiom and intent, but the profession of Islam was animportant badge of identity and a source of group solidarity for the ruling elite.45

With such different views of the general character of Muslim rule in India existingside by side (and none commanding general assent or supremacy even in particu-lar phases of modern Indian history), readers may find the variety of interpret-ations of conversion to Islam in India, blandly proposed at any one time, andapparently in disregard of each other, not so remarkable.

A majority of European commentators on conversion to Islam in India hasaccepted that some conversions by the use of force did occur. This acceptancehas been made irrespective of whether those who made it believed as a matter ofgeneral principle that Muslim rulers had a religious duty to propagate Islam byany and every means, or that Muslim rulers in India habitually, and of set pur-pose, acted in recognition of such a duty. Those who write of the use of force inconversion do not define their understanding either of "force" or of "conver-sion"; the following references to their writings are made on the assumption thatthe meaning of "forcible" conversion is the offering a man (or woman) the pros-pect of death, pain or imprisonment which he or she can only escape, should heor she wish to do so, by the performance of acts with a symbolic significance,acts which he or she would not otherwise perform but for the prospect thusoffered. Some, however, who speak of forcible conversion in India appear to bethinking in terms of the offering of prospects of personal disadvantages short ofdeath, pain or imprisonment. They are excluded from consideration at this point.

Early European observers tended to depict attempts at forcible conversion asacts of natural Muslim choler by the early Muslim invaders, eventually desistedfrom out of policy, once Muslims had marked the tenacity of the Hindus in theirreligion. Robert Orme wrote, "but the people clung to their pagodas; somepreachers were put to death, which increased the spirit of martyrdom . . . thereligious vexation continued. Labour left the field and industry the loom; untilthe decrease of the revenues drew representations from the governors of theprovinces."46 Edward Gibbon, however, saw such early conquerors as Mahmudof Ghazna as offering violence away from the battlefield to the religious proper-ties, the temples and idols, of the Hindus, rather than to their religion.

In 1793, however, Jonathan Duncan heard from the then Zamorin of Calicutan account of how, from April 1788, the Muslim ruler of Mysore, TIpu Sultan,despairing of subduing the Hindu population of Malabar by other means,enforced circumcision and the eating of beef first upon the Brahmans and thenupon the Nayars "in the combined view of indulging his zeal as a Mahommedan,


and at the same time rooting up as he fondly might imagine, the causes of thataversion which the Malabar Hindus had hitherto shewn to his government".47

Although the reported political nuance was preserved in papers on slavery laidbefore the House of Commons in 1834, and in F. W. Thomas's academically-written Le Bas prize essay of 1892,48 it disappeared in other accounts of TipuSultan's proselytizing activities in Malabar.49 Elsewhere, in Bengal, FrancisBuchanan-Hamilton recorded the tradition that Sultan Jalal al-din, himself aHindu convert, who ruled in Bengal between c. 1418 and c. 1431, forcibly con-verted Hindus to Islam.50 W. W. Hunter in his A statistical abstract of Bengalpublished in the 1870's recorded district British Collectors' beliefs that some ofthe Muslim populations committed to their charge had had forcibly convertedancestors. (In 1888, however, Hunter himself held forcible conversion in Indiaby powerful Muslim dynasties to be a popular fiction.) In his work on the Arabsin Sind, Sir Henry Miers Elliot believed that "the public tribunals" which, hesays, were in operation immediately after the Arab conquests in Sind, wereinstruments of forcible conversion. In the North-Western Provinces and in thePanjab, British civil servants reported many oral traditions of forcible conversionin the time of Aurangzib, but showed some scepticism about their authenticity,51

a scepticism which Sir Thomas Arnold was to pick up and amplify in 1896 in hisThe preaching of Islam.s2 But even he whose avowed intention was to portrayIslam as a peaceful missionary religion analagous to missionary Christianity ofthe 19th century, finds that "It is established without doubt that forced conver-sions have been made by Muhammadan rulers in India." Murray Titus in 1930 hadfewer inhibitions than Sir Thomas Arnold in accepting forcible conversion as anexplanation of the growth of Muslim numbers in India. Relying upon the trans-lations from Arabic and Persian histories in Elliot and Dowson, History of Indiaas told by her own historians, Titus provided a succinct catalogue of accounts offorcible conversion in medieval India, that is from the Arab invasion of Sind toAhmad Shah ' AbdalT's invasions of the Delhi territories in the middle of the 18thcentury.53 Without citation, Titus states that "Aurangzib is also known to havebrought about the forced conversion of certain Rajput tribes in the vicinity ofAgra, notably the group known as the MalkanasT

A genus of interpretation which, while distinguishable from that of physicalinducements to conversion, rests upon the assumption that Muslim rulers inIndia looked with more favour upon clients and subjects of their own religionthan upon those of another, is that which sees conversion as having occurred topromote or preserve the political interests of the convert or to promote or pre-serve an economic interest dependent for its continuance upon the decision ofa ruler. Among those who believed that (in Sir Thomas Arnold's words) "apowerful incentive to conversion was offered when adherence to an idolatroussystem stood in the way of advancement at the Muhammadan courts" werehistorians as widely separated in time as Robert Orme54 and W. H. Moreland.


The latter writes: "It is known for instance that some families which drew theirlivelihood from the public offices in the neighbourhood of Delhi quickly acceptedIslam."5S The areas of modern Uttar Pradesh and the eastern Panjab tend indeedto be the provenance of stories of conversion undergone to secure official favouror forebearance. G. Ricketts in his general report on the census of 1865 in theNorth-Western Provinces recorded a tradition that the cause of the conversion toIslam of an ancestor of a prominent zamindan family "was simply imprisonmentfor nonpayment of revenue to Delhi. He never paid but obtained his freedom byapostasy."56 This census report also speaks of conversion as "then the onlyremedy for the weak to get his share of zemindaree from a powerful co-parcener". Denzil Ibbetson, in his report on the census of 1881 in the Panjab,retails local tradition that in many instances the ancestor of the present Muslimbranch of a village community adopted Islam "to save the land of the village".57

This sharing of zamindan rights by Muslim and Hindu branches of the sametribe or family following many of the same customs in the same village was afamiliar feature of the rural scene; it nevertheless called forth one whimsicalexplanation which the students of the role of myth in history and society willwish to explain. A Collector of Muzaffarnagar, J. Martin, was quoted in the 1865census report for the North-Western Provinces as follows: "It is not uncommonto find half a village owned by Mahomedan and the other half by Hindoo Jats.The Mahomedans, however, attend the same ceremonies, consult the sameBrahmins as to auspicious days, seasons, etc. and practise many of the rules oftheir Hindoo brethren. This curious intermixture is accounted for by the necess-ity imposed upon all petitioners to the Court of Delhi of submitting to circum-cision before their prayers were heard by the Emperors."58 The pressures whichsome Indian landholders (and the British too) underwent during and after theMutiny and Rebellion of 1857 may have shaped the following explanation of theexistence of zamindan families divided in religion. In a settlement report for theFaizabad district, J. Woodburn is quoted to the effect that two zamindars "sayquite frankly that it was the custom . . . for each talukdar to have a son madeMahomedan in the hope that in the most disastrous case a bigoted Emperormight not wholly deprive the family of their lands, and that in more ordinarytimes they might have a near and certain friend privileged with the entree of theMusalman courts. Many talukdars, it is said, showed similar caution at a moremodern date by sending one relative to the British force and another to therebels to "mak siccar" [make sure] of safety, much as did the highlanders in theforty-five whichever side might win."59

In the third quarter of the 19th century, the period when, as a consequenceof the compilation of statistical accounts and gazetteers and the taking of cen-suses, an official sociology of India began to take shape, a supposition gainedground that some in India had become Muslims in order to "better" themselvesin society. Hindu society was seen as essentially a hierarchy of social aggregates,


each endogamous, each with its own rules of commensality, its own hereditaryoccupations and common ritual practices, and divided, the one higher from theother lower, by walls of at best mild distaste and at worst of brutally-expressedcontempt. This, "the caste system", could not be over-ridden but only over-reached — by the joining of that religious community, the Muslim, whose mem-bers (or some of them) enjoyed political power. W. R. Cornish, in his report onthe census in Madras in 1871, found that "to this day proselytism is going onamong the lower orders of society. It is especially active in Malabar where theslave castes [sic] of Hindus are numerous and treated with the utmost contumelyby the superior castes. Conversion to Mahomedanism in their case means a dis-tinct advance in the social scale."60 H. Beverley, the census commissioner for the1871 census in Bengal, recorded his belief that "the exclusive caste system ofHinduism, again, naturally encouraged the conversion of the lower orders from areligion under which they were no better than despised outcasts to one whichrecognised all men as equal."61 James Wise found it hard to believe that whenthe Muhammadan armies "poured" into Bengal, "they were not welcomed bythe hewers of wood and drawers of water and that many a Chandel or Kaibarttajoyfully embraced a religion that proclaimed the equality of all men and whichwas the religion of the race keeping in subjection their former oppressors".62 Inthe area of modern Uttar Pradesh, the Gazetteer of the Province ofOudh (1877)notes that conversion to Islam is a means of escape for the Koris and Chamars ofAwadh from a life of degradation as holders of the plough for their Chhattri andBrahman masters in the village.63 W. Crooke in his TheNorth-Western Provincesof India (1897) writes of the attraction which Islam's "freedom from the bond-age of caste" has for converts, and in 1921, in his introductory chapter "Eth-nography" to his edition of Ja'far Sharif's and W. Herklot's Islam in India, hestates that as more "untouchables" realize their "intolerable" position, so toothey turn to Islam as offering them "full franchise after conversion".64 SirThomas Arnold also found that, at the time he wrote, in Malabar the Muslimpopulation was "fast increasing through conversion from these lower castes, whothereby free themselves from such degrading oppression and raise themselves andtheir descendants in the social scale".65

A much-favoured species of explanation, falling within the genus of conver-sion for social considerations, is that of conversion undergone (usually, Euro-peans appear to assume, by an individual) in order to find fellowship and tostabilize social relationships. The earliest references by a European to this impul-sion towards conversion so far noticed are those in Jonathan Duncan's accountof the coastal region of Malabar prepared in 1793. In that account the expla-nation is offered not as Duncan's hypothesis, however, but as the observation ofan Arabic author, one "Zeirreddien Mukhdom" [Zayn al-dln] whose work[Tuhfat al-mujahidin] on the coming of Islam to the Malabar coast, Duncansays, was completed c. 987/1579—80. "If a person of the higher and one of the


lower [ranks] happen to meet or rather to approach each other, the proper dis-tance between them is known and defined; and if the distance be encroachedupon, he of the higher caste must bathe, nor can he touch food before under-going this purification." If he does so, he must flee, and if he does not, the ruleis to apprehend him and sell him to some mean person. "Otherwise he mayresort to the Moslems and possess the Islam or else become a Jogjn or a Fringyi.e. a Christian."66 Duncan also retailed the explanation given by a raja of theZamorin of Calicut's family of why Mapilla Muslims now (1793) outnumberedHindus and Nayars. It was the "nicety" of the latters' "observances" and "thefacility of losing caste: which drives the parties into the pale of Islamism".67 InDecember 1800 Francis Buchanan-Hamilton remarked of the same Malabarregion that many Namburis had lost caste by having committed murder or byhaving eaten forbidden things. "In such cases the children have in general becomeMussulmans."68

Francis Buchanan-Hamilton also provides us with an early example of conver-sion to Islam being explained as intended to repair the social consequences ofwhat a contributor to the 1901 Bengal Census Report was elegantly to term"love or lust". Buchanan-Hamilton thought that the most probable account ofwhy a Muslim dynasty is to be found ruling Cananore is that the old ruling family"afterwards were converted, owing to a young lady's having fallen in love with aMussulman. The children she had by him were of course outcasts from theHindus; but being heirs to the family it was adjudged prudent for the whole toembrace the faith of Mahomet in order to prevent the estate from reverting tothe Cherical Raja on the failure of heirs."69 From Bengal, J. C. Marshmaninstances a traditionary account of a Brahman, Kalapahar (probably in the serviceof Sulayman Karraril, Afghan ruler in Bengal from 1565 to 1572) becoming aMuslim in order to marry (according to the Islamic law) "a princess of Gaur"who had "become enamoured of him".70 For a lower social level, W. W. Hunter'sA statistical account of Bengal quoted a Deputy Collector's belief that the rareconversions to Islam in his district occurred mainly "through some intrigue inwhich the other party is a Musalman", whereat the Hindu is obliged to turnMuslim.71 Of the 40 conversions to Islam in the Twenty-four Parganas, listed inan appendix to the Bengal Census report of 1901,13 were of non-Muslim womenwho had fallen in love with Muslim men and five were of non-Muslim men whohad fallen in love with Muslim women. Two women in addition, it is said, becameMuslim after being seduced by rich Muslims.72

Two other species of European interpretation within the general mode ofexplaining conversion as easing social relationships have been encountered: con-version as a consequence of suffering famine, where the convert has lost caste byeating ritually impure food;73 and the conversion to Islam of an entire "socialaggregate" in order to enjoy some fellowship, however limited, with one's fellowvillagers. T. W. Arnold, in The preaching of Islam, quoted from the Report on


the Census of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1881) a statement that inthe villages of the Terai, in which the number of Hindus and Muslims happen tobe equally balanced, any increases in the predominance of Muslims is followedby disputes over cow-slaughter and other practices offensive to Hindu feeling.The Hindus gradually move away, leaving behind only the Chamar ploughmen inthe service of the Muslim peasants. The Chamars "eventually adopt the religionof their masters", in Arnold's words, "not from any conviction of its truth, butfrom the inconvenience their isolation entails".74

The last genus of European interpretation of conversion - last both in orderof deployment here and in order of appearance in the data examined - is that ofconversion by personal precept, example or charisma; that is, a genus embracinga scale of forms which includes active preaching, the bearing witness in one's lifeto the power of Allah and to the faith that one has, and belief in another's per-sonal spiritual power or efficacy in holiness, whether in life or in death. It is notpossible on present knowledge to be positive when this mode of conversion firstimpressed itself upon European commentators, but references (usually notmaking the above distinctions in form) begin to cluster together in the 1870'sand 1880's, in Panjab settlement reports and in Bombay district gazetteers inparticular. It was upon these that Arnold relied heavily for his data in Thepreaching of Islam. Thus, in 1878 a settlement report for the Montgomery dis-trict in the Panjab quoted a Lieut. Elphinstone as follows: "It [the town ofPakpattan] contains the tomb of the celebrated saint and martyr [sic] BabaFarid, who converted a great part of the southern Punjab to Muhammadanism,and whose miracles entitle him to a most distinguished place among the pirs ofthat religion."75 The settlement report for the Jhang district makes similar claimsfor Shaykh Farid al-din.76 In the Panjab census report for 1881, Ibbetson addsthe name of Baha al-Haqq of Multan to that of Baba Farid as the two saints towhom "the people of the western plains very generally attribute their conver-sion".77 The Bombay Gazetteer for Cutch, published in 1880, ascribes the con-version of the Cutchi Memons to witnessing the miracles of one Sayyid Yusufal-din, a descendant of Sayyid 'Abd al-Qadir JTlanT.78 Elsewhere in the BombayPresidency, Sayyid Muhammad Gesu Daraz is said to have converted Hinduweavers to Islam.79 In the North-Western Provinces data in an Azamgarh settle-ment report collected in 1868 included a tradition among Muslim zamindars ofthe district that "the teaching of some Moslem saint" had been responsible fortheir ancestors' conversion to Islam.80 In Bada'un, Shaykh Jalal al-din Tabrlzi,who later went to Bengal, is said with one look to have converted a Hindu milk-man. It was from this and much other material that Arnold reached his con-clusion that vast numbers of Indian Muslims are descendants of converts inwhose conversion force played no part and in which only the teaching and per-suasion of peaceful missionaries were at work. Murray Titus in 1930 was to giveslightly more stress than Arnold to the charismatic element in such conversions


(that is, where conversion occurs after the granting of prayers made at the tombsof saints),81 but it may be said with some confidence that the only Britishcommentator since Arnold to have added in writing a new form of explanationof conversion to Islam in India is Mr. Simon Digby in his unpublished paper"Encounters with jogis in Indian Sufi hagiography", where he discusses anecdotesof tournaments in magical powers between jogis and Sufis, where the defeat ofthe jogi is followed by his acceptance of Islam. As will be seen below, in twoarticles published in 1957 and 1963 Alessandro Bausani has ruminated ontypologies of conversion to Islam (among other religions), using data drawn fromIndian Islam, but he has rather given greater profundity to the existing taxonomyof conversion than added any new classes of explanation.

The material so far collected, with the writing of this paper in mind, on expla-nations by Muslims of conversion to Islam in India, is yet more limited than thatcollected on explanations by Europeans. Books and articles which, by beingwritten in, or later being translated into, English, suggest that their authorswished to obtrude their ideas upon an English-knowing readership and/or toinfluence rulers and administrators, have mainly been consulted.

The English-knowing Muslim of service, professional, and landlord familywho was able confidently to assert, or to take for granted, his descent from animmigrant ancestor, took little or no interest until the 20th century in theMuslims descended from indigenous converts to Islam. Only after a generation ofBritish talk of the political importance of "the Muhammadan community" inthe British empire in India, and after the British-sponsored all-India censusreports had revealed the size of that community and of the convert-descendedelement within it, did educated Muslims see the existence of large numbers ofSouth Asian Muslims of convert origin as a historical fact for the former them-selves, one which might define their own social existence and shape their ownaspirations to leadership. Earlier, such well-known self-appointed Muslim spokes-men as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Nawwab 'Abd al-Latlf of Bengal, and JusticeAmir 'All appear not to have mentioned the Indian Muslim convert explicitly,but to have referred vaguely and generically in Urdu to the 'awdmm, the com-monalty, or, in Victorian English, to the "lower classes" or "uneducated classesof Musalmans". It would seem that not until the 1920's did the English-knowingor English-educated Muslim, the Muslim who wished to enter into political dia-logue with his British rulers and who wished to promote a distinctively Muslimpolitical entity in an India moving on British-laid rails towards greater autonomy,if not independence, begin to claim the converted Indian Muslim as a feather inthe cap of Islam in India. In doing so, he found in Arnold's The preaching ofIslam a "custom-made" script. As for the period since Independence, bothPakistani and Indian Muslim writers continued to find inspiration and comfort,in their different ways, in the contemplation of the process of past conversionto Islam in the sub-continent; they have also offered the most sophisticated


discussions of and comments upon that process which have so far been published.In contrast to the period after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 (that

is, one in which Muslim political leaders needed to acquire voting Muslim sup-porters and other followers in a system of representative government, under afranchise in which the descendants of Muslim converts would be more likely tohave votes), in the 1890's (when the politics of the durbar still prevailed) we findone influential Muslim writer in Bengal thinking the Muslim convert in Bengal tobe a political liability. In 1891 Khondkar Fazl-i RabbT, diwdn to the Nawwab ofMurshTdabad, published Haqiqat-i Musalmdn-i Bangala, intended to bring the"ruin" (tibah) of "high Muslim families" (khwds khdnddnT musalmdnf2 to thenotice of the British-Indian government. That government had, Fazl-i RabbTargued, remained indifferent to the existence of such families and to their needfor entry into the public services on honourable, not to say advantageous, terms,partly through an official preference for Hindus. Moreover, it had recently, inthe person of Mr. Beverley, held Muslims up to ridicule by publishing the mis-taken belief that the overwhelming majority of Bengal's Muslims were descendedfrom low-caste Hindus who had embraced Islam. Such beliefs as Beverley'sencouraged the present indifference to the "high and ancient" Muslim of Bengal,who was therefore sinking lower for want of government employ. Once thegovernment was properly informed of the facts, to wit, that the generality (ak.sar)of the Muslims of Bengal was descended from immigrant Iranians, Afghans,Arabs, and Mughals, it might give the high and ancient families, descended fromsuch immigrants, their due.

In the course of his argument Fazl-i Rabbi showed a lack of fellowship forthat minority of Bengal's Muslims which, he conceded, was descended from con-verts following lowly occupations. However significant this may be for politicalhistory, more immediately we need to note, for their own sake, the points hemade, rhetorically phrased and in their specific context often specious, no doubt,against the favourite propositions of earlier European commentators on conver-sion. Why should, he argued, Mr. Beverley suppose that when Muslim conquerorsinvaded lower Bengal and found kam zdt Hindus (translated as "the lower ordersof Hindus")83 the object of contempt by the higher classes, they therefore easilyconverted them by force of the sword and the Qur'an, when in contrast theshanf Hunud (translated as "the higher order of Hindus"),84 who were moredirectly the political rivals of the Muslim invaders, escaped compulsory proselyt-ism. Against the theory that members of the lower occupational groups becameMuslim in order to secure their worldly profit or welfare {dunyawT bhald'T),Fazl-i Rabbi argued that the social position and the family status of a convertdid not change with conversion and that the convert could associate after con-version only with Muslims of the same station (daraja) as himself.8S "Doubtless",Fazl-i Rabbi said, "according to the religion of Islam, analagous to the Christians,all Musalmans are Musalmans" (mazhab-i Islam ke ruse bishakk migl 'isdyon ke


sab musalman musalman hain, significantly, perhaps, for future Indian Muslims'self-view, Englished as: "From a religious point of view, of course, all Musalmansstand on a footing of equality").86

Among Muslims outside lower Bengal, Fazl-i Rabbi's and Arnold's bookswere slow to prompt attention to the problem of conversion. S. Khuda Bukhsh,in his Essays Indian and Islamic (1912), grudgingly acknowledged, "Say whatyou will, the largest proportion of the Mahomedan population are Hindu con-verts to Islam."87 Until the 1920's, Indian Muslims gave little attention to theirmedieval history, whether they wrote in English or in Urdu. In the second decadeof the 20th century, A. B. M. HabTbullah tells us, the Urdu writer's vision wasstill dominated by "Pan-Islamism" and such writers "firmly maintained theirposition as a part of the [Islamic] world community, not specifically Indianor territorial in their affiliations, who had earned the love and respect of theHindus and with whom they thus had a long-standing friendship and commoninterest".88 (Perhaps this was why in his defence of AurangzTb in AurangzTb parek nazar (1912) Shibli did not touch on allegations that AurangzTb had forciblyconverted Hindus.) In the 1920's any Muslim reference to conversion wouldhave to be made against the background of the Mappilla outbreak of 1921 inMalabar, when Hindus were killed or forcibly circumcised, and of the shuddhi(purification) movement among Hindus of the United Provinces in particular,which aimed to prepare demi-converts such as the Malkana Rajputs for re-admission into the Hindu fold. Even in the increasingly acrid atmosphere of dis-illusion with Hindu—Muslim political partnership against the British, followingthe failure of the Khilafat and Non-co-operation movements, Muslims of national-ist sympathies such as A. Yusuf 'All and Muhammad HabTb treat conversionvery obliquely, not failing to stress the peaceful influence of the Sufis, and thatthe coming of Chishti saints was very different from the coming of Mahmud ofGhazna. For Sind, it is "difficult to say how the mass of the people were wonover to Islam".89

But in the 1930's, and indeed right through to 1947, there is a more positiveassertion of the merits of Islam as a religion and that those who became Muslimsin India did so by reason of those merits. Already in 1931 Muhammad Nazim inhis The life and times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, while denying that Mahmudever forced any Hindu to abjure his religion, nevertheless lauds him for further-ing the mission of Islam in so far as "the preacher invariably followed in thewake of his victorious army".90 But although Muslim writers in the 1930's gen-erally agreed that Muslim rulers in India had not directly encouraged or enforcedconversion to Islam in India, they did not reach a consensus on how conversionhad otherwise come about. Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf, in his "Life and con-ditions of the people of Hindustan c. 1200-1500 A.D" (1935), thought thatmost of the lower classes of Muslims were originally Hindu converts, but thatchange of reEgion had not materially altered the social position of most. "With


his conversion to Islam, the average Muslim did not change his old environment,which was deeply influenced by caste distinctions and general social exclusive-ness."91 For all that, the introduction of Islam into "Hindustan" did tend tomodify "the rigidity of the caste system" and the status of the higher castes."The essentially proselytising nature of the faith of Islam, and the professions ofsocial equality and fraternity among its followers, opened its doors wide toreceive the lower castes of Hindu society. Its offer had an additional forcebecause it issued from those who ruled the destinies of India, and possessedunlimited resources. Some conspicuous examples of low class converts [who hadattained high military or administrative positions] had already shown to themass of Hindus how far a convert to Islam could climb the social ladder."92 It isnoteworthy that with all his respect for the religious integrity of the Sufi, Ashrafdoes not claim for him a major role in bringing people to Islam. For A. B. M.HabTbullah, however, it was "undeniable that the mysticism of the Sufi furnishedIslam's philosophical point of contact with Hinduism. It is through such contacts,fostered by the simplicity and broad humanism of the Sufi, that Islam obtainedits largest number of free converts and it is in this sense that he is considered amissionary."93 A little later HabTbullah adds the Sufi's "supposed miraculouspowers" and "Islam's social values and the material prospects it then held out",as well as the prospect of relief from those suffering from "Brahmanical caste-tyranny", to the list of forthcoming attractions for the convert.94 He dismissesas the "propaganda" of the early chroniclers any exultant claims that earlyTurkish Muslim rulers purged their conquests of idolatry and finds no referencesto forced conversions in the works of those chroniclers.

Although Muslim historical writing in India and in the Pakistan of 1947 sinceIndependence has not added to the genuses of explanation of conversion whichwere already on offer (they all appear again in M. Mujeeb's The Indian Muslims(1967)), it has added a number of significant elaborations, refinements, andqualifications likely to be influential in the future study of the subject. The lateS. M. Ikram in his religious history of the earlier medieval period, Ab-i Kausar(first published in 1940), distinguishes between the spread (tausV) and thepropagation (ishd'at) of Islam. The first occurred through Muslim settlementfrom outside India made in the wake of Muslim military conquest.95 Or it hadcome about through the conversion of those to whom Islamic equality (isldmTmasawat) and social freedom made an appeal.96 Thus far it would seem there isnothing new, an impression about to be confirmed when Ikram adds that theSufis were largely responsible for such conversion. But Ikram insisted that therole of the Sufi, and of the member of the "regular" mystical order in particular,in the process of conversion was indirect. The Sufis were much happier whenthey helped one who was already a Muslim to become a better Muslim thanwhen they saw a non-Muslim become a Muslim.97 Ikram quoted SayyidMuhammad Gesu Daraz as recognizing that the obstacles to conversion in India

EXPLANATIONS OF CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA 19 5

were social rather than spiritual98 — the opposition of the would-be convert'sbrethren, the reluctance to break extended family and caste ties. Ikram wasamong the first of the modern-educated Muslims who, from the 1940's, havedevoted themselves to the study of the Sufi malfuzdt ("utterances") and hagio-graphical literature and who have in consequence concluded that it was the per-sonality and the charisma rather than the precept of the Sufi that had made forconversion in medieval India.

Professor Ishtiyaq Husayn QurayshI offers, in his The Muslim community ofthe Indo-Pakistan subcontinent (610-1947), published in 1962, the most soph-isticated and sustained exposition so far of how peaceful conversion in India prob-ably came about. He dismisses forcible conversion and financial pressure, throughthe imposition of jizya upon non-Muslims, as major factors, and gives littleweight to such worldly motives as the prospect of official advancement and theretention of landholding rights." Its appeal as a religion won for Islam itsadherents in the subcontinent. But, QurayshI argues, those adherents often madetheir way to membership of the Muslim community by many by-paths, andmore as the eventual outcome of a process, perhaps extending over several gener-ations, which began as a loosening, rather than an abandoning, of old religiousand social ties, with no immediate entering into new ones with a known andestablished Muslim community. The thesis of a gradual and indirect conversionthrough an incomplete change of belief and fellowship might possibly have beenread into some of the earlier European comments on conversion; now, probablyfor the first time in Indo-Muslim studies.it was expounded. Qurayshl's argument,which refers mainly to Sind, runs as follows: at the time of Muhammad binQasim's conquest from A.D. 711, Sind was a largely Buddhist land; "the exampleof tolerance set by the Arabs seems to have inclined many a Buddhist hearttowards Islam"; the Arab making of Sind a centre of Islamic culture attractedthe Isma'TM missionary; the latter's technique was to introduce Isma'lB ideas intothe doctrines of the faith he sought to subvert, as, for example, by depicting toVaishnavites 'AIT as an incarnation of Vishnu; the Isma'Ifi missionary wouldalso create a sense of personal loyalty to himself as a person of exemplary charac-ter and thus the more easily take a disciple through "into full-fledged belief inthe teachings of Isma'TH Islam"; much later, from the 14th century, Sufi teachersgradually converted the Isma'Tlis in Sind into sunnis.100 QurayshI emphasizes thatconversion in Sind did not at first break all old social ties of clan and tribe, par-ticularly when conversion was of individuals. "Later when groups were convertedto Islam, the caste and tribal associations were severed", though they kept theircaste or tribal names.101 In his account of conversion to Islam in Bengal, QurayshIremarks that the "scripture" of the Dharma cult of Mahayana Buddhism, theShuniya purana, has interpolations, inserted after the Muslim conquests inBengal, suggesting that Buddhists in Bengal regarded Muslims as deliverers. TheDharma gajan also, QurayshI says, while it shows new understanding of Muslim


teachings, "contains sentiments of respect and admiration for Islam and a faithin its ultimate destiny . . . . Such sentiments themselves constitute almost a half-way house towards the acceptance of Islam."102 Qurayshl sees the Sufi in Bengalas an active missionary for Islam and an orthodox one; he denies that Sufis com-promised with Hindu beliefs and customs or adopted the Isma'ili technique ofgradual conversion, "but they were not totally unwilling to take account ofhuman psychology. They established their khdnqahs and shrines at places whichalready had a reputation for sanctity before Islam."103 Qurayshl also sees theSufis in Bengal as taking up the cause of persecuted neighbouring communitiessuffering at the hands of "harsh" Hindu governments.104 He implies that such"intervention against the tyranny of the Hindu rulers" by "warrior saints"indirectly earned converts for Islam.

Some Bengali Muslims, now citizens of Bangladesh, have also made interestingcontributions to our theme.105 Usually the thesis of indirect and peaceful con-version through the presence of Sufis is stressed.106 But M. R. Tarafdar in 1965in his Husain Shahi Bengal introduced what was, for modern published work byMuslims on Islam in Bengal, a new dimension. He suggested that in the area ofnorth and east Bengal, Islam sat quite lightly upon the tribal people of theTibeto-Burman group until orthodoxy was brought to bear on "the heart of theregion" by the "Wahhabi-Fara'idT movement of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies".107 While he agrees with the familiar view that these areas were "con-siderably free of Brahmanical influence", he writes only that "social repressionmight [my italics] have driven the local people to the fold of Islam". The valueof his book is that it suggests the existence in medieval Bengal of a world ofshifting beliefs and social allegiances, of religious questing, and of some socialand geographical mobility, a world of a genuine syncretism of belief and conductperhaps more variegated than elsewhere in the sub-continent, a world in whichthe institutions and teachings of formalist Islam did not penetrate "the riceswamps". It needs to be investigated, in district-based studies, whether such areligious and social world was, in the 19th century, more receptive to travellingrevivalists, than one in an area where the religious and social boundaries werehigher and more formal.

The phenomenon in India of "conversion" to Islam has, then, been com-mented upon by (18th-century) men of letters, official historiographers, travel-lers, civil servants writing in the line of duty, missionaries, amateur ethnologists,and general historians of the whole sub-continent, of a province or of a district.This commentary was, however, a matter of incidental or peripheral, not ofcentral, concern. The manner of approach to the question has been that of theopen-cast mining company out for the quick scoop. Medieval Persian histories(sometimes wrongly translated), legendary tales, hagiography assumed to havebeen written as history, what some British Collector's "native" subordinate orinformant told him and he reported to the Census Commissioner, contemporary

i


observation, assumptions about the general philosophy of Islam and of the likelybehaviour of Muslims as such, they could all be used to fuel an interpretation,without need to separate out the slack. Or one could just sit by an empty fire-place and spin a "just-so" story and indulge in what Evans-Pritchard has called108

the "if I were a horse" mode of introspective explanation. For example, in theImperial Gazetteer of India (1881), W. W. Hunter states that Islam appealed tothe poor in Bengal because it "brought in a truer conception of God, a noblerideal of the life of man; and offered to the teeming low castes of Bengal who hadsat for ages despised and abject on the outermost pale of the Hindu community,free entrance into a new social organisation. It succeeded because it deserved tosucceed."109

Most of the European commentators who have been noticed, started out withthe assumption that a "true" conversion in religion was one where an innerchange of mind and heart towards the "truth" occurred. They would, one con-cludes from the general tenor of their remarks, have assented to the "spiritual"conception of religion implicit in Max Muller's definition of a missionary religion,a definition quoted by T. W. Arnold on the opening page of The preaching ofIslam with evident approval, as one which "cannot rest unless it manifests itselfin thought, word and deed, which is not satisfied till it has carried its message toevery human soul". Arnold indeed describes Islam in bringing the message of theOne God to the people of Arabia as "an eternal and life-bringing truth".110

Nevertheless, many European observers recognized, perception overcoming predi-lection, that this "model" of religion and of religious conversion was not themeaningful model for Indian Islam. Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson declared in1881 that change of religion in India meant a change rather of the communitywith which the convert shall claim fellowship, than of conduct and inner life.Later in the same Panjab census report, Ibbetson recorded that the only changeconversion made in the life of a Muslim convert in the east Panjab was that "heshaved his scalp lock and the upper edge of his moustache, repeated the Muslimcreed in the mosque and added the Muslim to the Hindu wedding ceremony."111

The manner in which European writers before Arnold (other than those whowrote up material for gazetteers of districts where Isma'lRs or some prominentSufi saints had been active) stressed traditions of change of fellowship for politi-cal, economic or social reasons and called such change conversion, suggests thatthey too knew that they had entered a new religious world, one for them intelli-gible at least, if not particularly admirable.

That world is the one of religion as a social belonging112 more than (not "ratherthan") a set of beliefs. In this world, most European commentators, other thanArnold, saw Islam as a form of social belonging ready, indeed required by Allah,to use worldly inducements to gather men unto it and into it. In this contextmost European commentators betray that for them Islam in India is an expressionof that primary monotheism (as opposed to the secondary monotheism of


modern [not pre-Reformation] Christianity) of which Alessandro Bausani writesin two articles to which, as they refer in part to India, attention is now directed.In the first, "Note per una tipologia del monoteismo", Professor Bausani arguesthat, despite the efforts of Arnold to prove otherwise, Islam is a monotheism ofa nation, of a holy nation, united not by blood but by allegiance to a new"state faith" seeking the political submission of other "holy nations" to it.113 Inthe second article, "Can monotheism be taught?", he points a distinction betweena primary monotheism with its ethic of power and will, and a secondary mono-theism with its ethic of the "fermentation" of a spirit in the heart and mind ofthe individual. "The truth (haqq) of Islam", writes Bausani, "is not, or is notchiefly, a theoretical truth, but also and prevalently, law and customs felt asgiven by God, and obviously cannot be spread through personal persuasion, butonly through the physical conquest of the region to be converted . . . the Truthis not, for Islam, a theology, is not a knowledge that brings salvation to thesingle, but a true attitude or behaviour of an entire society . . . . This cannot betaught personally, but only, more or less violently, imposed."114 Bausani regardsMuslim India as a laboratory for the study of different aspects of conversion.For him, Isma'TH conversions in Sind and Gujarat were examples of a success forsecondary monotheism which had penetrated the hearts of the converted partlybecause with it the Isma'TE missionaries had been prepared to accept the con-vert's continued outward conformity to local non-Muslim custom. But elsewherein areas of Muslim political power, Bausani regards the Sufis as having perfectedthe inwardly lukewarm conversion of the first generation of converts firstinduced to make an outward show of Islam by the presence of Muslim politicalauthority, and then both protected and controlled in that outward show by thatauthority.115 The Muslim community in India in those areas where a Muslime"lite has assumed political power is thus a community of public witnesses to anacceptance of servanthood of God which inwardly the individual witness at firstmay not understand and may not feel, but may come to do so after furthereducation and training by his religiously more instructed brethren. A publicshow of obedience to God's requirements is sufficient to ensure acceptance intoa great fellowship or brotherhood which includes all those in India seen to per-form the necessary acts of public obedience. In Bausani's terms, they enter thatsegment of the Islamic "nazione sacra" which is the Indian Muslim community.This community must, in its sphere, shoulder the responsibility laid upon theentire Islamic umma by God to command this world for God.

Those who have considered politics to be first and all else second in the sub-continent, have tended to see conversion to Islam as (inter alia) an act of join-ing the Indian Muslim community, that is a great and distinct religious fellow-ship, aspiring to command the Indian world as one community spread all overIndia. Thus the existence of such a fellowship is assumed by W. W. Hunter in1871 in his famous The Indian Musalmans: "The whole community has been


agitated by the greatest State Question that ever occupies the thoughts of apeople . . . . Somehow or other every Musalman seems to have found himselfcalled upon to declare his faith; to state, in the face of his co-religionists, whetherhe will or will not contribute to the Traitor's Camp on our Frontier."116 OtherBritish officials with a weaker interest in politics have written as though inbecoming a Muslim in Bengal (for example) the convert joined a region-widereligious fellowship.117 But the closer observers came to the people, the more thefellowship, which the convert joined, contracted in membership, in character,and in aspiration before their eyes. Let a quotation from James Wise's accountof the Muslims of east Bengal make the point: "The Bediyas were outcasteHindus thirty years ago [c. 1850], but a Mulla now ministers to them, circum-cision is practised, the Ramazan fast is kept up and the regular prayers offeredup; but they cannot enter the public mosque or find a place in the public grave-yard. From a social point of view they are still aliens with whom no gentle-man will associate or eat. The treatment of the Chandal by the Sudra is in norespect more rigorous or harsh than that of the Bediyas by the upper ranks ofMuhammadans."118 In the Panjab of 1881, Ibbetson found that actual humanrelationships had drained the terms Muslim and Hindu of almost all meaning:"The fact is that the people are bound by social and tribal custom far more thanby any rules of religion. Where the whole tone and feeling of the countryside isIndian, as it is in the Eastern Punjab, the Musulman is simply the Hindu with adifference. Where that tone and feeling is that of the country beyond the Indus,as it is on the Punjab frontier, the Hindu even is almost as the Musulman. Thedifference is national rather than religious."119

However much their own presuppositions caused them to deny the quality of"true" conversion to a change of fellowship in furtherance (for example) of asexual intrigue, and however much they might be disposed to regard those whochanged to making an outward profession of Islam as hungry for power ratherthan for salvation, European commentators did not deny to such changes thecharacter of "conversion", presumably because they could be classified as trans-fers of outward allegiance from one or more tutelary non-human power orpowers to another or to others. Nor did their own preferences for a "spiritual"dynamic of conversion prevent them from stressing a different dynamic whichthey believed to be peculiar to India, namely the dynamic of the urge for a safesocial haven. For most European observers, India was the land of fellowships butnot of fellowship, that is the land of stratified, mutually exclusive social aggre-gates separated by distaste ritually sanctified; in such an environment, there wasno honour or security for the individual who could not find fellowship withothers for such necessary activities of life as the sexual and the occupational, orfor the group which could not establish its own exclusive aggregate. Such estab-lishment could be helped by the patronage and, perhaps, protection of the localholder of physical power, who, in the period of the sultanates or of the Mughals,


could be a Muslim. Physical persuasion by the ruling Muslim power, conversionby the precept and example of saints, the steady attraction of a politically suc-cessful and dominant religious cult whose adherents were in control of a region'sphysical resources, a religious syncretism which might prepare the way for grad-ual conversion: India could show all these facets of a process of Islamization, asdid that Asia Minor which Speros Vyronis has studied. But peculiar to India bycomparison, was conversion induced by tremors within a highly stratified prestigesociety in which, even after Muslim conquest, prestige did not belong exclusivelyto the possessors of physical power, but also to those, the Brahmans, who werethe guardians of "a cultural vision", and that a non-Muslim one.

But although Europeans felt the tremors, their seismographs were not sensitiveenough, or sufficiently well located, to record exactly where the tremors hadoccurred or which "faults" were responsible. There have been no microcosmicstudies of conversion in process; perhaps the nearest British commentators havecome to a "field study", was in requesting reports on the causes of conversions,currently occurring in Bengal, for the census of 1901. But what Gait, the CensusCommissioner, published was either a list of converts by name in a district ofover a million population, with a reported reason for each conversion, or thebiased assessments of Hindu or Muslim informants, or such tantalizing rumoursas "the Kayasths are said to be secretly Muslims, but remain so for fear of com-plete excommunication by their families."120 Politics have probably now putpaid to any prospect of researchers investigating or observing conversions toIslam in the republics of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Explanations of conversion in medieval times fail to carry all the convictionthey might because they so often rest upon an approach to historical data thatpre-dates the age of B. G. Niebuhr at least —i.e. attention only to the literalmeaning of a report. For example, James Wise in 1883 accepts without com-ment121 the stories of forcible conversion by Jalal al-din, ruler in Bengal (c.1418—c. 1431), in the 18th-centuryRiyaz al-sala.(Tn. (H. Blochmann had already,in 1873, drawn attention to discrepancies between the "legendary" material inthis late source and that to be found in earlier Persian histories.122) Then, too,although Arnold was sceptical of the many stories of conversion under pressureto Islam in the time of AurangzTb, he did not extend the same questioning spirittowards stories of peaceful conversion by saints. (In 1965, Dr. S. A. A. Rizvi wasto suggest that zarriinddrs retailed these stories in order, in the period when theBritish were making revenue settlements, to establish their proprietory rightsover larger areas of land by an assertion of superior ancestry through connexionwith Muslim saints.123)

Bernard Conn has suggested124 that, by the end of the 19th century, anaccepted view of the structure of Indian society had emerged among Europeanobservers. This accepted view was of Indian society as loosely grouped into fouror five varnas or classes, each with its general duty and (for the first four) rights,


and then as more tightly grouped into jats or named endogamous social aggre-gates, engaged in roughly the same occupation, with some myths and rituals incommon and having, as an aggregate, a known and recognized status in relationto other jats in the region. The actual day-to-day working relationships of mem-bers of different jats, or of the same jat, were not, for whatever reason, theobject of attention. Where conversion in order to "improve" a social situationwas thought to have occurred, the social context was conceived as one deter-mined and defined by the existence of jats. Perhaps such a mental image ofIndian society is at the bottom of the puzzlement sometimes shown by Britishobservers when they encountered social aggregates which, in all respects otherthan the religious, looked like jats and yet were split into Hindu and Muslim seg-ments. Such puzzlement might well find relief in acceptance of some of themore esoteric explanations offered by "native" informants, such as the require-ment of circumcised petitioners at the court of Delhi. (This is, of course, purespeculation.)

Paradoxically, while the grain of their data induced European observers toaccept changes in social belonging as "conversion", Muslims have, at least sincethe publication of Arnold's The preaching of Islam, shown in their enthusiasmfor the role of saints in conversion that they accepted modern Christian para-digms of "true" conversion as a change of heart or mind in individuals. But sucha statement is more valid for Muslims writing before 1947 than after; although itis certainly still valid for Muslims writing in the Republic of India. The Pakistanis,Dr. Ikram and Professor QurayshT, have laid more stress on the role of temporalpower in creating a total Islamic environment as a pre-condition of the fosteringof the right attitude and state of mind in individuals.

What has been almost totally lacking in the modern interpretation of conver-sion to Islam in South Asia is assessment of the role of the accounts or expla-nations offered, in the society in which they circulated. To the author's know-ledge there have been but Dr Rizvi's aside (see above, p. 200) to the effect thatzamindars wishing to assert their position in local society at the time whenBritish officials were making revenue settlement claimed conversion of theirancestors by some great Muslim figure centuries earlier; and Dr. YohannanFriedmann's article "Qissat ShakarwatT Farmad: A tradition concerning theintroduction of Islam to Malabar".12S Dr. Friedmann suggests that the circulationof the story of the conversion of King Shakarwati by the Prophet Muhammadhimself after the former had seen the Prophet's miracle of splitting the moon,and of the account of the foundation of mosques and the appointment of qadisin Malabar by the king's emissaries, expresses the desire of the Mapillas to showthat their conversion took place at a very early stage of Islamic history, com-pared, say, to that of the descendants of the Turkish and Afghan conquerors ofnorth India. Dr. Friedmann also suggests that one of the purposes of the circu-lation of this tradition was to establish the ancient rights of the Muslim families


who held Islamic judicial positions in Malabar. One may well speculate toowhether the hypotheses of modern commentators and scholars are themselvesessays in conversion, albeit not wholly conscious or deliberate ones: the conver-sion of agents of the East India Company or of the Crown to particular concep-tions of their interests and their duties in India; the conversion of South AsianMuslims to particular conceptions of their future relationships with each otherand with non-Muslims; or, to look into an area of inquiry not here entered,namely that of Hindus' interpretations of conversion to Islam, the conversion ofHindus to particular conceptions of their future relationships with Muslims.

NOTES

1 The author was prompted to this particular undertaking by the stimulating Seminaron Conversion to Islam led by Professor N. Levtzion and held at the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies, London University, under the auspices of the Centre of International andArea Studies, in the academic session 1972-3.

2 Quoted in H. Beverley, Report on the Census of Bengal, 1872, Calcutta, 1872, 130.3 A history of the military transactions of the British nation from the year MDCCXL V,

I, London, 1763, 24.4 Mr. J. H. Grose, A voyage to the East Indies, 3rd ed., I, London, 1772, 337.5 William Robertson, An historical disquisition concerning knowledge which the ancients

had of India, London, 1791, 230.6 The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, ch. lxv, Modern Library edition, III, New

York, n.d., 661.7 Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, par-

ticularly with respect to morals. House of Commons Papers, etc. (East India Company).Fourth Part: Session 24 Nov.-22 July 1812-1813, X, p. 69 of volume numbering.

8 The modem part of an universal history, VI, Book IX, ch. 3, "The inhabitants ofHindustan", London, 1759, 240.

9 Robert Orme, Military transactions, 24.10 Luke Scrafton, Reflections on the government of Hindustan, London, 1763, 21.11 Robert Orme, General idea of the government and people of Indostan, printed in

Historical fragments of the Mogul Empire, London, 1805 ed., 422.12 The modern part of an universal history, Book IX, 240.13 Scrafton, Reflections, 18-19; see also p. 21 for a comparison of these converts with

those the Portuguese make to their religion.14 R. Montgomery Martin, The history, antiquities, topography, and statistics of Eastern

India, II, London, 1838, p. 19 of "Appendix of Statistical Tables". (Martin's work, whencompared with the original Buchanan-Hamilton MSS in the India Office Library, proves tobe a collection of bowdlerized transcripts of the originals.)

15 e.g. Martin, II, 445, for Bengal; Francis Buchanan, A journey from Madras throughthe countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, II, London, 1807,420,426.

16 Jonathan Duncan, "Historical remarks on the coast of Malabar", Asiatick Researches,V, 1799,7-8,16,33.

17 Vol. II, London, 1841, 239.18 3rd ed., London, 1953, 190-3. (First published 1936.)19 Vol. XIII, Tirhut and Champaran, London, 1877,49; Vol. XVIII,Districts ofCuttack

andBalasore, London, 1877, 80, 278. These are admittedly not districts of "Bengal proper",but over a decade later at a lecture entitled "The religions of India" given at the RoyalSociety of Arts Hunter was still quoting other civil servants' reports that since 1872 in bothBengal and the North-Western Provinces "no" conversions "can have taken place since1872". Cf. The Times for 25 February 1888, 5, col. 4.


20 The preaching of Islam, Westminster, 1896 , 2 3 2 - 8 passim.21 W. Crooke, The North Western Provinces of India, L o n d o n , 1897 , 2 6 1 . I t should be

remarked tha t those who advance such explanat ions have never yet d o n e so on the basis of acomparison of the bi r th and child-survival rates among those groups of Muslims who eatmeat , practise widow-remarriage or polygamy, and those (and they are m a n y in India) whodo not.

22 Appendix II: Extracts from district reports regarding causes of conversion toMuhammadanism, in Census of India, 1901, VI: The Lower Provinces of Bengal and theirfeudatories. Parti: Report, Calcutta, 1902.

23 Medieval India under Muhammadan rule (A.D. 712-1764), London, 1903,4.24 Sayyid Muhammad Miyan, 'Ulamd'-ihaqq, II, Delhi, 1948, 340-1." Haqiqat, 109; English rendering, Calcutta, 1895, 113.26 In his Essays Indian and Islamic, London , 1912 , 266 .27 The making of India, London, 1925,14, 89.28 For example, Zahiruddin Faruki, Aurangzib and his times, Bombay, 1935, 188;

Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf, "Life and conditions of the people of Hindustan (1200-1550A.D.) (Mainly based on Islamic sources)", JASB, (Letters), 1935, 191; Suleyman Nadawi,"Muslim colonies in India before the Muslim conquest",IC, July 1935,439.

29 Sir Henry Elliot, Appendix to The Arabs in Sind (Vol. Ill, Part 1 of the Historians ofIndia, Cape Town, 1853), 1.

30 The Imperial Gazetteer of India, II, London, 1881, 18.31 Dictionary of Islam, London, 1895, 710.32 Murray T. Titmjndian Islam, London, 1930, 31.33 Charles Grant, Observations, 41 and 68 of volume pagination.34 William Watts, Memoirs of the revolution in Bengal, London, 1764, 3, 4.35 William Hunter, "Narrative of a journey from Agra to Oujein", Asiatick Researches,

VI, 1799, 11.36 Vol. VI, Book IX, 252.37 Grose, A voyage to the East Indies, I, 131.

George Campbell,Modem India, London, 1852, 17.James Wise, Notes on the races, castes, and trades of Eastern Bengal, printed but not

published, London, 1883, 8. Twelve copies only were printed.Quentin Craufurd, Sketches, 79,94.History of India, II, London, 1893,48.Indian Islam, 15.History of India, I, London, 1841, 513.Sir Alfred Lyall, "The^ religious situation in India" (first published in Fortnightly

Review, 1872), in Asiatic studies, London, 1881, 289.45 Medieval India under Muhammadan rule, 6 3 .46 Robe r t O r m e , Historical fragments of the Mogul Empire, London , 1782 , 102.47 J o n a t h a n Duncan , "Historical remarks on the coast of Malabar", 3 3 .48 (House of Commons ) Papers relative to slavery in India: Accounts and papers. (2)

Colonies, 1834 , XLIV, 179 ; F . W. Thomas , The mutual influence of Muhammadans andHindus, Cambridge, 1892 , 8 3 .

49 e.g. Francis Buchanan , A journey from Madras, I, 7 0 ; Walter Hamil ton, The East IndiaGazetteer, London , 1 8 1 5 , article "Canara ( S o u t h ) " , 2 2 7 .

50 R. Montgomery Mart in, The history etc. of eastern Bengal, II, London , 1838 , 6 1 8 .51 J. P . Hewet t , Statistical, descriptive, and historical account of the North-Western

Provinces of India, XIV, Part 3 , " J a u n p u r " , Allahabad, 1 8 8 4 , 4 7 .52 Preaching, 214-5.53 Indian Islam, 30-4.54 Historical fragments, 102 .55 Short history of India, 192.56 The Census of the North-Western Provinces, 1865, I: General Report, Supplement t o

Appendix B , Allahabad, 1867 , 130 .57 Census of the Punjab, 1881,1: Report, Calcut ta , 1883 , 142.


58 Census of the North-Westem Provinces, 1865, p. 5 of Appendix B.59 A. F. Millett, Report on the settlement of the land revenue of the Fyzabad District,

Allahabad, 1880, 263.60 W. R. Cornish, Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871,1, Madras, 1874,

109.61 Report on the Census of Bengal, 1872, Calcutta, 1872, 132.62 Notes, 5.63 Vol. I, Lucknow, 1877, xxiii-xxiv.a W. Crooke, The North-Westem Provinces of India, London, 1897, 260; Ja'far Sharif,

Islam in India: or Qanun-i Islam (ed. W. Crooke), Oxford, 1921, 4.65 Preaching, 2 2 0 .66 Jonathan Duncan, "Historical remarks on the coast of Malabar", 16. The Arabic

original has been printed in: Historia dos Portugueses no Malabar por Zinadlm, manuscriptoarabo do seculo XVI publicado e traduzido por David Lopes, Lisboa, 1898; see Arabic text,pp. 31-2 (Portuguese translation, pp. 29-30); cf. also S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar,"Tuhfat al-Mujahidln: An historical work translated into English", Annals of OrientalResearch, University of Madras (Islamic section), VI, 1, 1941-2,47-8.

67 Duncan, "Historical r emarks" , 16 n .68 A journey from Madras, I I , 4 2 6 .69 ibid., 553.70 J. C. Marshman, Outline history of Bengal, 5th ed., Serampore, 1844, 24. (The first

edition was published in 1838.)71 W. W. Hunter, A statistical account of Bengal, IX: District of Murshidabad and Pabna,

London, 1876,61.72 Appendix II: Extracts from district reports regarding the causes of conversion to

Muhammadanism, x-xii.73 e.g. Buchanan-Hami l ton MSS, Gorakhpur district ( India Office Library MSS E U R D .

91 (K 168/1)), p. 97 of Part II, "The people"; Appendix II: Extracts from district reportsregarding the causes of conversion to Muhammadanism, Census of India, 1901, IV: Bengal,Part I: Report, p. xviii of Appendix.

74 Preaching, 2 3 9 .75 C. A. Roe and W. E. Purser, Report on the revised settlement of the Montgomery dis-

trict in the Mooltan Division of the Punjab, Lahore, 1878,42-3.76 E. B. Steedman, Report on the revised settlement of the Jhang district of the Punjab,

1874-1880, Lahore, 1882, 33.77 Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson, Report on the Census of the Punjab taken on 17 Feb.

iSSi, I, Calcutta, 1883, 142.78 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, V: Cutch, Palanpur, and Mahi Kaitha, Bombay ,

1880,89,93.79 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, col . XXI , "Be lgaum" , Bombay , 1884, 2 1 8 .80 Report on the settlement operations in the district ofAzamgarh, Allahabad, 1881, 35.81 cf. Arnold, Preaching, 238, with Titus, Indian Islam, 52-3 . But Titus uses the same

historical material from a gazetteer of the North-Western Provinces, merely adding a mentionof his own observation of Hindus paying their devotions at Muslim shrines.

82 Haqiqat-i Musalmdndn-i Bangala, Calcut ta , 1 8 9 1 , 113 . The Urdu original appearedlater in an English rendering b y Muslims under t h e title The origin of the Musalmans ofBengal, Calcut ta , 1895 . This rendering significantly conta ins m a n y nuances peculiar to theVictorian Englishman's concept ion of his own and of Indian society. Thus , when in theoriginal such occupat ions as those of weaving or of washing clothes are listed, t h e enumer-at ion in the translat ion is prefaced b y in terpola t ions such as " t h a t is the lower o r d e r s " (pp.108-9 of the text, p. 113 of the translation); shanf Hindu is rendered as "a Hindu ofsuperior caste", text p. 67, tr. p. 61

83 Translation, The origin of the Musalmans of Bengal, b y Khondka r Fuzl i Rubbee ,Calcutta, 1895,58.

84 loc. cit .85 Haqiqat, 66-7, tr., 6 0 - 1 .


86 op. cit., 66, tr., 60.87 " T h o u g h t s on the present s i tua t ion" , in Essays Indian and Islamic, 266 .88 A. B. M. Habibu l lah , "His tor ica l wr i t ing in U r d u : A survey of t e n d e n c i e s " , in C. H.

Philips (ed.) , Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, L o n d o n , 1 9 6 1 , 4 9 2 .89 A. Yusuf AH, The making of India, L o n d o n , 1925 , 8 9 ; Muhammad Habib , Mahmud

ofGhazna, Aligarh, 1927 , 8 3 ; and idem, "The Arab conques t of S ind" , IC, October 1929 ,6 1 1 .

90 Muhammad Nazim, The life and times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, Cambridge,1931,161.

91 Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf, "Life and conditions of the people of Hindustan (1200-1550 A.D.), art. cit. n. 28 above.

art. cit., 194.A. B. M. Habibullah, The foundation of Muslim rule in India, Lahore, 1945, 282.op. cit., 283.

95 Ab-i Kausar, 7th printing, Lahore, 1968, 189-90."' op. cit., 385.

op. cit., 191.op. cit., 195.The Muslim community of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent (610-1947), 's-Graven-

hage, 1962, 75-8.100 The Muslim community, 4 2 - 5 4 passim. The thesis tha t conversion should be seen as

a gradual process of accul tura t ion and gravitation has since received reinforcement inRichard M. Ea ton , "Sufi folk l i terature and the expansion of Indian Is lam", History ofReligions, XIV, 2, November 1974, 117-27. Eaton argues that the singing oiSufi folk songsby women at their household tasks suffused non-Muslim family life with Stiff values.

101 The Muslim community, 50.102 op. cit., 7 0 - 1 .103 op. cit., 74.104 loc. cit. Qurayshi's supporting citation from Sir Jadunath Sarker (ed.), The history of

Bengal, II: Muslim Period, Dacca, 1947, 68, 70, does not, however, carry the meaning orsignificance he suggests.

105 N o t so, however , M u h a m m a d Abdur R a h i m , Social and cultural history of Bengal,Volume I, 1201-1576, Karachi, 1963, 55-68, where on the basis of unverified figures fornumbers of settlers of different ethnic groups from outside India, multiplied by a whollyspeculative figure for the rate of natural increase founded on a belief, derived from two16th-century references, that polygamy was general among all classes of Bengal's Muslims,the author arrives at the conclusion that only 35 per cent of the Bengali Muslim populationis descended from converts from the lower ranks of Hindu society. Rahim ignores E. A.Gait's discussion of Fazl-i Rabbi's similar (but not similarly-based) contentions.

106 For example, by Abdul Karim, Social history of the Muslims in Bengal, Dacca, 1959,134-9.

107 Momtazur Rahman Tarafdar, Hussain ShahiBengal, Dacca, 1965, 18-19.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of primitive religion, Oxford, 1965, 24.W. W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, II, London, 1881, 16.

1 Preaching, 2.Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson, Report on the Census of the Panjab taken on the 17th

Feb. 1881,1, Calcutta, 1883, 178.112 With acknowledgements to J. Duncan M. Derrett, Religion, law, and the state in

India, London, 1968, 58.1 ' 3 A. Bausani, "Note per una tipologia del monoteismo". Studi e Material! di Storia delle

Religioni, XXVIII, 1957, 81.114 Alessandro Bausani, "Can monotheism be taught?", Numen, X, December 1963,

174-5.115 art. cit., 165.116 W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musulmans, London, 1871, 10-11.117 H. heveiley, Report of the Census of Bengal, 1872, 132, 133, 134.


118 (The late) Dr. James Wise, "The Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal", JASB, LXIII,Part HI, 1,1894,61.

1 ' ' Report on the Census of the Punjab ,178.120 Appendix II: Extracts from district reports regarding causes of conversion to

Muhammadanism, to the Census of India, 1901, VI : The Lower Provinces of Bengal andtheir feudatories, Part I: The Report, b y E. A. Gait , Calcut ta , 1902 , p . xvii of Append ix II.

121 James Wise, Notes on the races, castes, and trades of Eastern Bengal, 2.122 H. Blochmann, "Contributions to the geography and history of Bengal", originally

printed in JASB, XLII, 1873, Part I, No. 3, and reprinted by the Asiatic Society (Calcutta),1968 (pp. 56, 58-61).

123 Saiyid A t h a r A b b a s Rizvi, Muslim revivalist movements in Northern India, Agra,1965, 18.

124 Bernard S. Cohn , "No te s on the his tory of the s tudy of Indian society and cu l tu re" ,in Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn (eds.) , Structure and change in Indian society,Chicago, 1968, 23-4.

125 Israel Oriental Studies, V, 1975, 233-58 (the article includes the Arabic text of thestory).

modern european and muslim explanations of conversion to islam in south asia: a preliminary survey...

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