Pre-600 C.E |
600-1200 C.E |
1200-1500 C.E |
1500-1800 C.E |
1800-Present |
Addendum: Segregation in Islamic Society |
Addendum: Incidences of Sufi appropriation of Hindu Spirituality |
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Sometime in 1243–44 C.E, residents of Lakhnauti, a city in northwestern Bengal, told a visiting historian of the dramatic events that had taken place there forty years earlier. At that time, the visitor was informed, a band of several hundred Turkish cavalry had ridden swiftly down the Gangetic Plain in the direction of the Bengal delta. Led by a ruthless officer named Muhammad Bakhtiyar, the men overran and destroyed venerable Buddhist monasteries in neighboring Bihar before turning their attention to the northwestern portion of the delta, and then ruled by a mild and generous Hindu monarch. Disguising themselves as horse dealers, Bakhtiyar and his men slipped into the royal city of Nadiya. Once inside, they rode straight to the king's palace, where they confronted the guards with brandished weapons. Utterly overwhelmed, for he had just sat down to dine, the Hindu monarch hastily departed through a back door and fled with many of his retainers to the forested hinterland of eastern Bengal, abandoning his kingdom altogether.
This coup d'état started an era, lasting over five centuries, during which most of Bengal was dominated by rulers professing the Islam. Eventually, in Bengal, those areas with a Muslim majority would form the eastern wing of Pakistan—since 1971, Bangladesh—whereas those parts of the province with a Muslim minority became the state of West Bengal within the Republic of India. In 1984 about 93 million of the 152 million Bengalis in Bangladesh and West Bengal were Muslims, and of the estimated 96.5 million people inhabiting Bangladesh, 81 million, or 83 percent, were Muslims; in fact, Bengalis today comprise the second largest Muslim ethnic population in the world, after the Arabs.
Enforcement of Islamic authourity over a Hindu society
The reliance on naked power of the new Islamic rulers of Bengal, or at least on its image, is seen in the earliest surviving Muslim Bengali monuments. Notable in this respect is the tower (minar) of Chhota Pandua, in southwestern Bengal near Calcutta. Built toward the end of the thirteenth century, when Turkish power was still being consolidated in that part of the delta, the tower of Chhota Pandua doubtless served the usual ritual purpose of calling the faithful to prayer, inasmuch as it is situated near a mosque. But its height and form suggest that it also served the political purpose of announcing victory over a conquered people. Precedents for such a monument, moreover, already existed in the Turkish architectural tradition. Bengal's earliest surviving mosques also convey the spirit of an alien ruling class simply transplanted to the delta from elsewhere. Constructed (or restored) in 1298 in Tribeni, a formerly important center of Hindu civilization in southwest Bengal, the mosque of Zafar Khan appears to replicate the aesthetic vision of early Indo-Turkish architecture as represented, for example, in the Begumpur mosque in Delhi (ce. 1343).
Clues to the circumstances surrounding the construction (or restoration) of the mosque are found in its dedicatory inscription:
"Zafar Khan, the lion of lions, has appeared,
By conquering the towns of India in every expedition, and by restoring
the decayed charitable institutions.
And he has destroyed the obdurate among Hindu infidels with his sword and spear,
and lavished the treasures of his wealth in (helping) the miserable".
Zafar Khan's claims to have destroyed "the obdurate among Hindu infidels" gains some credence from the mosque's inscription tablet, itself carved from materials of old ruined Hindu temples, while the mutilated figures of Hindu deities are found in the stone used in the monument proper. Near Zafar Khan's mosque stands another structure, built in 1313, which is said to be his tomb; its doorways were similarly reused from an earlier pre-Islamic monument, and embedded randomly on its exterior base are sculpted panels bearing Vaishnava subject matter.
Entrenchment of Islamic rule in Bengal
More accounts of Muhammad Bakhtiyar's 1204 C.E, capture of the Sena capital is that of the chronicler Minhaj al-Siraj, who visited Bengal forty years after the event and personally collected oral traditions concerning it. "After Muhammad Bakhtiyar possessed himself of that territory," wrote Minhaj, he left the city of Nudiah in desolation, and the place which is (now) Lakhnauti he made the seat of government. He brought the different parts of the territory under his sway, and instituted therein, in every part, the reading of the khutbah, and the coining of money; and, through his praiseworthy endeavours, and those of his Amirs, masjids [mosques], colleges, and madrassas(for Dervishes), were founded in those parts.
The passage clearly reveals the conquerors' notion of the proper instruments of political legitimacy: reciting the Friday sermon, striking coins, and raising monuments for the informal intelligentsia of Sufi Muslims and the formal intelligentsia of scholars, or 'ulama.
One of the clearest statements of the political vision of the Islamic invaders of Bengal was given by Fakhr al-Din Razi (1209 C.E) of Herat, a celebrated Islamic scholar and jurist who served several Khurasani princes, in particular those of the Ghurid dynasty of Turks. Inasmuch as Razi was at the height of his public career when his own patrons conquered North India (1193 C.E) and Bengal (1204 C.E) and had even been sent once on a mission to northwestern India himself (1184 C.E), it is probable that his political thought was familiar to the Ghurid conquerors of Bengal. Certainly, Razi and Muhammad Bakhtiyar inherited a shared tradition of political beliefs and symbols current in thirteenth-century Khurasan and the Perso-Islamic world generally.
In his Jami' al-'ulum Razi formulated the following propositions:
The world is a garden, whose gardener is the dawlat [state];
The state is the sultan whose guardian is the shari'a [Islamic law];
The Law is a policy, which is protected by the mulk [kingdom];
The kingdom is a city, brought into being by the lashkar [army];
The army is made secure by mal [wealth];
Wealth is gathered from the ra'iyat [subjects];
The subjects are made servants by 'adl [justice];
Justice is the axis of the prosperity of the 'alam [world].
Far from mere platitudes about how kings ought to behave, these propositions present a unified Islamic theory of a society's moral, political, and economic basis—a worldview at once integrated, symmetrical, and dogmatic.
Sufis of Bengal
The Sufi orders that migrated to Bengal under the patronage of Islamic rulers,
were instrumental in bringing about massive social upheavals. In the first two
centuries of Islamic rule, five major Sufi orders had been established and local
Hindu and Buddhist population coerced into Islam in large numbers. Most Sufi
Muslim orders were led by Persian or Central Asian missionaries, who faced persecution
under Sunni Islamic rulers in their native land. Most of these men belonged
to three organized Sufi brotherhoods, the Suhawardi, the Firdausi, and
the Chishti orders.
The political role played by these Sufi Muslims in Bengal was shaped by ideas
of virulent and dangerous Sufi authorities that had otherwise failed to evolve
in the contemporary Persian-speaking Islamic world in the Middle East and Central
Asia but showed its efficiency by converting non Muslims in these frontier areas
of Caliphate control..
Shaikh Jalal al –Din Tabrizi
Shaikh Jalal al-Din Tabrizi (d. 1244–45), was one of the earliest-known
Sufis of Bengal. The earliest notice of him appears in the Siyar al-‘arifin,
a compendium of Sufi biographies compiled around 1530–36, three centuries
after the shaikh’s lifetime. According to this account, after initially
studying Sufism in his native Tabriz (in northwestern Iran), Jalal al-Din Tabrizi
left around 1228 for Baghdad, where he studied for seven years with the renowned
mystic Shaikh Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi. When the latter died in 1235, Jalal
al-Din Tabrizi traveled to India and, not finding a warm welcome in the court
of Delhi, eventually moved on to Lakhnauti, then the remote provincial capital
of Bengal. There he remained until his death ten years later.
“When he went to Bengal,” the account records, "There
was also there a (river) port called Deva Mahal, where an infidel had built
a temple at great cost. The shaikh destroyed that temple and in its place constructed
a (Sufi) rest-house [takya]. There, he made many infidels into Muslims. Today
[i.e., 1530–36 C.E], his tomb is located at the very site of that temple,
and half the income of that port is dedicated to the upkeep of the public kitchen
there".
Shah Jalal Mujarrad
Shah Jalal Mujarrad (d. 1346 C.E), is Bengal’s best-known Muslim so-called
'saint’. His biography was first recorded in the mid sixteenth century
by a certain Shaikh ‘Ali (1562 C.E), a descendant of one of Shah Jalal’s
companions. According to this account, Shah Jalal had been born in Turkestan,
where he became a spiritual disciple of Saiyid Ahmad Yasawi, one of the founders
of the Central Asian Sufi tradition. The account then casts the shaikh’s
expedition to India in the framework of holy war, mentioning both his (lesser)
war against the infidel and his (greater) war against the lower self. “One
day,” the biographer recorded, "Shah Jalal represented
to his bright-souled pir [i.e., Ahmad Yasawi] that his ambition was that just
as with the guidance of the master he had achieved a certain amount of success
in the Higher (spiritual) jihad, similarly with the help of his object-fulfilling
courage he should achieve the desire of his heart in the Lesser (material) jihad,
and wherever there may be a Dar-ul-harb [i.e., Land of non-Islam],
in attempting its conquest he may attain the rank of a ghazi or a shahid [martyr].
The revered pir accepted his request and sent 700 of his senior fortunate disciples…along
with him. Wherever they had a fight with the enemies, they unfurled the banner
of victory".
After reaching the Indian subcontinent, he and his band of followers are said
to have drifted to Sylhet, on the easternmost edge of the Bengal delta. “In
these far-flung campaigns,” the narrative continued, “they
had no means of subsistence, except the booty, but they lived in splendour.
Whenever any valley or cattle were acquired, they were charged with the responsibility
of propagation and teaching of Islam. In short, [Shah Jalal] reached Srihatta
(Sylhet), one of the areas of the province of Bengal, with 313 persons. [After
defeating the ruler of the area] all the region fell into the hands of the conquerors
of the spiritual and the material worlds. Shaikh [Jalal] Mujarrad, making a
portion for everybody, made it their allowance and permitted them to get married.”
In modern Bangladesh Islamists present Shah Jalal as someone who brought about a break between Bengal’s Hindu past and its Muslim future, and to this end a parallel is drawn between the career of the saint and that of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad. The number of companions said to have accompanied Shah Jalal to Bengal, 313, corresponds precisely to the number of companions who are thought to have accompanied Muhammad at the Battle of Badr in A.D. 624, the first major battle in Muhammad’s career and a crucial event in launching Islam as a world religion. The story thus has an obvious ideological propaganda value to it.