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Modern European and Muslim explanations of conversion to Islam in South Asia: A preliminary survey of the literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

P. Hardy
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Extract

Even among Muslims, the growth of Muslim population in South Asia excited little attention before the later 19th century when the British—Indian administration began to number the population of the Indian Empire according to declared or imputed religious allegiance. In medieval times, Muslim rulers and their aides, Muslim historians and literati, although often mindful that in “South Asia” they lived among a predominantly non-Muslim population, did not conceive the stability of Muslim dynastic rule or the continuation of political and financial advantages for Muslim élites, to be related to or dependent upon the size of the aggregate of those who would deem themselves as, and be regarded by others to be, Muslims. The very few references, over a period of 500 or 600 years, in the religious literature to “conversions” suggest in their contexts and perhaps in their very rarity, that the Muslim religious did not postulate the quality and strength of man's response in South Asia to the call of Islam to be proportionate to the numbers of those calling themselves, or called by others, Muslims.

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Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 109 , Issue 2 , July 1977 , pp. 177 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1977

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References

NOTES

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

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82 Ḥaqīqat-i Musalmānān-i Bangala, Calcutta, 1891, 113. The Urdu original appeared later in an English rendering by Muslims under the title The origin of the Musalmans of Bengal, Calcutta, 1895. This rendering significantly contains many nuances peculiar to the Victorian Englishman's conception of his own and of Indian society. Thus, when in the original such occupations as those of weaving or of washing clothes are listed, the enumeration in the translation is prefaced by interpolations such as “that is the lower orders” (pp. 108–9 of the text, p. 113 of the translation); sharīf Hindū is rendered as “a Hindu of superior caste”, text p. 67, tr. p. 61

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86 op. cit., 66, tr., 60.

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100 The Muslim community, 42–54 passim. The thesis that conversion should be seen as a gradual process of acculturation and gravitation has since received reinforcement in Eaton, Richard M., “Sufi folk literature and the expansion of Indian Islam”, History of Religions, XIV, 2, 11 1974, 117–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Eaton argues that the singing Ṣūfī folk songs by women at their household tasks suffused non-Muslim family life with Ṣūfī values.

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103 op. cit., 74.

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