Bengali Muslims (; ) [Mussalman also used in this work.] [Mussalman also used in this work.] are adherents of Islam who ethnically, linguistically and genealogically identify as Bengalis. Comprising over 70% of the global Bengali population, they are the second-largest ethnic group among Muslims after Arabs. Bengali Muslims make up the majority of Bangladesh's citizens, and are the largest religious minority in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam.
They speak or identify the Bengali language as their mother tongue. The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.
Due to its extensive trade contacts, Bengal has had a Muslim presence in the region since the early 8th century CE, but conquest of the Bengal region by the Delhi Sultanate brought Muslim rule to Bengal. The governors of the region soon broke away to form a Bengal Sultanate, which was a supreme power of the medieval Islamic East. European traders identified the Bengal Sultanate as "the richest country to trade with". The Sultans of Bengal promoted the development of Bengali as a language and the writing of Islamic literature in Bengali, paving the way for the development of a distinct Bengali Muslim culture, while many intellectuals and scholars from throughout the Muslim world migrated to Bengal.
Although Islamic culture had long developed in Bengal, it was after the Mughal Conquest of Bengal in the early 17th century and their subsequent attempt to expand cultivation in the still-forested eastern part of Bengal that a majority of Bengal would develop an Islamic identity. Mughal revenue policies encouraged Muslim adventurers to organise the development of agricultural societies among indigenous peoples with weak ties to Hinduism, who increasingly blended aspects of Islamic cosmology with folk religious worldviews and practices. Thus, the majority of the rural population of central, northern and eastern Bengal would develop an Islamic identity, and the majority of Bengali Muslims today descend from these indigenous peoples. This expansion of cultivation also led to tremendous economic growth, and the increasingly-independent Bengal Subah would be one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Bengal viceroy Muhammad Azam Shah assumed the imperial throne. Mughal Bengal became increasingly independent under the Nawabs of Bengal in the 18th century.
After the East India Company conquered Bengal from the Mughals in the 18th century, they implemented the Permanent Settlement, which led to the creation of a new class of mostly upper-caste Hindu zamindars, while putting additional burdens on the peasants, who were largely Muslims. Inspired by increasingly available travel to Arabia, religious revivalists such as Titumir and Haji Shariatullah urged an abandonment of perceived non-Islamic folk practices among the lower class Bengali Muslims, and later organised them in agitations against the zamindars and the East India Company.
In Bengal, the British Government organised the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which created a new Muslim-dominated province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, although this would be reversed in 1911. Starting in the early 20th century, British efforts to bring what they considered 'waste' land under cultivation resulted in the large-scale immigration of Bengali Muslim peasants to Lower Assam and Arakan in what would become Myanmar. Increasingly in the early 20th century, tensions between Bengali Muslims and Hindus, particularly Bengali Muslim resentment of landowning Hindus, resulted in widespread support among Bengali Muslims for a separate Pakistan, which near Partition resulted in widespread communal violence. After the Partition of India in 1947, they comprised the demographic majority of Pakistan until the independence of East Pakistan (historic East Bengal) as Bangladesh in 1971.
Identity A Bengali is a person of ethnic and linguistic heritage from the Bengal region in South Asia speaking the Indo-Aryan Bengali language. Islam arrived in the first millennium and influenced the native Bengali culture. The influx of Persian, Turkic, Arab and Mughal settlers contributed further diversity to the cultural development of the region. The Muslim population in Bengal further rose with the agricultural and administrative reforms during the Mughal period, particularly in eastern Bengal. Today, most Bengali Muslims live in the modern country of Bangladesh, the world's fourth largest Muslim-majority country, along with the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam.
The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. There are also minorities of Shias and Ahmadiyas, as well as people who identify as non-denominational (or "just a Muslim").
History
Early contacts Rice-cultivating communities existed in Bengal since the second millennium BCE. The region was home to a large agriculturalist population, marginally influenced by Dharmic religions. Buddhism influenced the region in the first millennium. The Bengali language developed from Apabhramsa, Sanskrit, Magadhi Prakrit between the 7th and 10th centuries. It once formed a single Indo-Aryan branch with Assamese and Oriya, before the languages became distinct.
Centuries prior to the advent of Islam into the region, Bengal was a major centre of Buddhism on the Indian Subcontinent. The area was under the rule of the Buddhist Pala Empire for several centuries until its collapse and subsequent conquest by the Hindu Sena Empire in the 1170s. This was an era of significant Buddhist-Brahmin religious conflict as they represented diametrically opposite camps in the Dharmic tradition with the Buddhist focus on equality threatening the Brahmin caste-based power structure. In the preceding centuries Buddhism underwent a slow decline as Hindu kingdom gradually enveloped Buddhists states in the area and began of process of "de-Buddification" manifested by the reframing of Buddhist figures as Hindu avatars and the reincorporation of resistant Buddhist subjects into lower castes in society. As the Pala Empire's base of power was in Northern and Eastern Bengal, it is likely that these were areas with large Buddhist majorities which were likely heavily subjugated the Sena Empire.
Historical evidences suggest the early Muslim traders and merchants visited Bengal while traversing the Silk Road in the first millennium. One of the earliest mosques in South Asia is under excavation in northern Bangladesh, indicating the presence of Muslims in the area around the lifetime of Muhammad. Starting in the 9th century, Muslim merchants increased trade with Bengali seaports. Islam first appeared in Bengal during Pala rule, as a result of increased trade between Bengal and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate. Coins of the Abbasid Caliphate have been discovered in many parts of the region. The people of Samatata, in southeastern Bengal, during the 10th-century were of various religious backgrounds. During this time, Arab geographer Al-Masudi, who authored The Meadows of Gold, travelled to the region and noticed a Muslim community of inhabitants.
In addition to trade, Islam was also being introduced to the people of Bengal through the migration of Sufi missionaries prior to conquest. The earliest known Sufi missionaries were Syed Shah Surkhul Antia and his students, most notably Shah Sultan Rumi, in the 11th century. Rumi settled in present-day Netrokona, Mymensingh where he influenced the local ruler and population to embrace Islam.
Early Islamic kingdoms
While Bengal was under the Hindu Sena Empire, subsequent Muslim conquests helped spread Islam throughout the region. Bakhtiyar Khalji, a Turkic Muslim general, defeated king Lakshman Sen in 1206 CE and annexed large parts of Bengal to the Delhi Sultanate. Khalji also mounted an invasion of Tibet. Following this initial conquest, an influx of missionaries arrived in Bengal and many Bengalis began to adopt Islam as their way of life. Sultan Balkhi and Shah Makhdum Rupos settled in the present-day Rajshahi Division in northern Bengal, preaching to the communities there. A community of 13 Muslim families headed by Burhanuddin also existed in the northeastern Hindu city of Srihatta (Sylhet), claiming their descendants to have arrived from Chittagong. By 1303, hundreds of Sufi preachers led by Shah Jalal aided the Muslim rulers in Bengal to conquer Sylhet, turning the town into Jalal's headquarters for religious activities. Following the conquest, Jalal disseminated his followers across different parts of Bengal to spread Islam, and became a household name among Bengali Muslims.
Bengal Sultanate
The establishment of a single united Bengal Sultanate in 1352 by Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah finally gave rise to a "Bengali" sociolinguistic identity. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty acknowledged Muslim scholarship, and this transcended ethnic background. Usman Serajuddin, also known as Akhi Siraj Bengali, was a native of Gaur in western Bengal and became the Sultanate's court scholar during Ilyas Shah's reign. Alongside Persian and Arabic, the sovereign Sunni Muslim nation-state also enabled the language of the Bengali people to gain patronage and support, contrary to previous states which exclusively favoured Sanskrit, Pali and Persian."What is more significant, a contemporary Chinese traveler reported that although Persian was understood by some in the court, the language in universal use there was Bengali. This points to the waning, although certainly not yet the disappearance, of the sort of foreign mentality that the Muslim ruling class in Bengal had exhibited since its arrival over two centuries earlier. It also points to the survival, and now the triumph, of local Bengali culture at the highest level of official society." The converted Sultan Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah funded the construction of Islamic seminaries as far as Mecca and Madina in the Middle East. The people of Arabia came to know these institutions as al-Madaris al-Bangaliyyah (Bengali madrasas).