islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

Propagation of Islam: By Force or Peacefully?for their ancestor’s conversion to Islam. In Bada’un, Shaykh Jalal al-Din Tabrizi, who later wentto Bengal, is said with one look to have converted a Hindu milkman. It was from this and muchother material that Arnold reached his conclusion that vast number of Indian Muslims aredescendent of converts in whose conversion force played no part and in which only the teachingand persuasion of peaceful missionaries were at work. 230The major reference, on which Arnold based his conclusion that peaceful conversion by Sufis played majorrole in conversion to Islam, was a generic reference in the 1884 Bombay Gazetteer that Sufi saint Ma’bariKhandayat (Pir Ma’bari) came to the Deccan in about 1305 as a missionary and converted a large number ofJains to Islam. 231 This document gives no specifics on the means Pir Ma’bari employed in his conversion; thesame applies to other claims (these claims are often unsubstantiated and legendary in nature) cited above.However, older documentation on Pir Ma’bari by Muslim chroniclers, as studied by historian Richard Eaton,reveals the measures Pir Ma’bari had applied in converting the infidels. According to Muhammad IbrahimZubairi’s Rauzat al-Auliya (1825–26), Pir Ma’bari Khandayat came to the Deccan as a holy warrior:‘During the period of Ala al-Din Khalaji (Alauddin Khilji, d. 1316), the Shah of Delhi, he (PirMa’bari) accompanied the camp of the army of Islam in the year A.H. 710 (A.D. 1310–11) whenburied treasures of gold and silver came to the hands of Muslims and the victory of Islam waseffected.’ 232A hagiographic record adds:‘(Pir Ma’bari) came here and waged Jihad against the rajas and rebels (of Bijapur). And with hisiron bar, he broke the heads and necks of many rajas and drove them to the dust of defeat. Manyidolaters, who by the will of God had guidance and blessings, repented from their unbelief anderror, and by the hands of (Pir Ma’bari) came to Islam.’ 233Another tradition says that Pir Ma’bari had expelled a group of Brahmins from their village in Bijapur.Muslim literatures portray Pir Ma’bari as a fierce wager of Jihad against the infidels wielding an iron bar.This gave him his last name, Khandayat—literally meaning blunted bar.Eaton has particularly become an influential propagator of the paradigm that Islam was spreadpeacefully by the Sufis. He says that Islam came to areas, where Muslim powers could not reach, ‘with theappearance of anonymous, itinerant holy men whom the local population might associate with miraculouspower.’ Eaton then goes on to describe a popular Muslim folk-story in Bengal that a Muslim pir with occultpower appeared in a village, built a mosque, healed sick people with his miraculous power and his famespread far and wide. Thereupon, hundreds of people came to visit him with ‘presents of rice, fruits and otherdelicious food, goat, chickens and fowls,’ which he never touched but distributed among the poor. ‘Thishumane quality of the Sufis,’ asserts Eaton, made the mosque a centre of Islam from where it reached far andwide. 234One intriguing thing about Eaton is that his own research of the medieval literatures on Indian Sufis for hisPh.D. thesis, published in Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700, failed to find any trace of peace in the views andactions of Sufis and in their method of conversion. He found that all the revered Sufis, particularly the earlierones to arrive at Bijapur, were fierce Jihadis and persecutor of Hindus; an example, that of Pir Ma’bari, iscited above. His research outcome was so damning to his tendentious, love-stricken views about the Sufis that230. Hardy P (1979) Modern European and Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A PreliminarySurvey, In N. Levtzion ed., p. 85231. Arnold, p. 271232. Eaton RM (1978) Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700, Princeton University Press, p. 28233. Ibid, p. 30234. Eaton RM (2000) Essays on Islam and Indian History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, p. 3286