HISTORY OF ISLAM IN BANGLADESH
Islam is the largest and state religion of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. According to the 2022 census, Bangladesh had a population of about 150 million Muslims or 91% of its total population of 165 million. Muslims of Bangladesh are predominantly native Bengali Muslims. The majority of Bangladeshis are Sunni and follow the Hanafi school of Fiqh. Bangladesh is a de facto Islamic country. The Bengal region was a supreme power of the medieval Islamic East. In the late 7th century, Muslims from Arabia established commercial as well as religious connections within the Bengal region, mainly through the coastal regions as traders, primarily via the ports of Chittagong.
In the early 13th century, Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji conquered Western and part of Northern Bengal and established the first Muslim kingdom in Bengal. During the 13th century, Sufi missionaries, mystics, and saints began to preach Islam in villages.
The Islamic Bengal Sultanate was founded by Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah, who united Bengal on an ethnolinguistic platform. Bengal reached its golden age during the Bengal Sultanate’s prosperous ruling period. Subsequently, Bengal Viceroy Muhammad Azam Shah assumed the imperial throne. Mughal Bengal became increasingly independent under the Nawabs of Bengal in the 18th century.
The Buddhist Pala Empire enjoyed relations with the Arab Abbasid Caliphate. Islam first appeared in Bengal before Pala rule as a result of increased trade with the early Arab Muslim merchants in places such as the port of Chittagong. Around this time, the Arab geographer Al-Masudi, author of “The Meadows of Gold,” traveled to the region where he noticed a Muslim community of inhabitants residing in the region. Other authentications of the Arab traders’ presence in the region were the writings of Arab geographers found on the Meghna River, located near Sandwip on the Bay of Bengal.
This evidence suggests that the Arab traders had arrived along the Bengal coast long before the Turkic conquest. The Arab writers also knew about the kingdoms of Sharup and Rumi, the latter being identified with the empire of Davapala of the Pala Empire.
The earliest mosque in South Asia is possibly in Lalmohanhat, a district in Rangpur, built during or just after the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime. In addition to trade, Islam was also being introduced to the people of Bengal through the migration of missionaries prior to conquest. Arab navigation eastwards was the result of the Muslim reign in North India.
The earliest known Sufi missionaries were Syed Shah Sufi Antia and his students, most notably Shah Sultan Rumi, who arrived in 1053 CE. Rumi settled in present-day Netrokona, Mymensingh, where he influenced the local ruler and population to embrace Islam. The first Muslim conquest of Bengal was undertaken by the forces of General Bakhtiyar Khilji in the 13th century.
This opened the doors for Muslim influence in the region for hundreds of years up until the present day. Many of the people of Bengal began accepting Islam through the influx of missionaries following this conquest. Sultan Balkhi and Shah Muhammad Roos settled in the present-day Rajshahi division in Northern Bengal, preaching to the communities there.
Numerous small sultanates emerged in the region. During the reign of the Sultan of Lakhnauti, Shamsuddin Firuz Shah, much of present-day Satgaon, Sonargaon, and Mymensingh came under Muslim dominion. A community of 13 Muslim families, headed by Burhanuddin, resided in the northeastern city of Srihatta, now known as Sylhet, claiming their descent to have arrived from Chittagong.
Sylhet was ruled by an oppressive king known for practicing black magic called Gor Gobind. Gobind was known to be disrespectful and intolerant of other faiths practiced in Sylhet, such as Islam, Buddhism, and certain Hindu denominations different from his own, often getting into war with neighboring states such as Jaintia and the Khasi.
After being informed of Raja Gobind’s oppressive regime in Sylhet, Firuz Shah sent numerous forces led by his nephew Sikandar Ghazi and subsequently his military commander-in-chief Sayyid Nasiruddin to conquer Sylhet. By the year 1303, over 300 Sufi preachers, led by Shah Jalal, aided the conquest and confirmed a victory. Following the conquest, Jalal disseminated his followers across different parts of Bengal to spread Islam. Jalal is now a household name among Muslims in Bangladesh.
In pre-Mughal times, there is less evidence for widespread adoption of Islam in what is now Bangladesh. The mention of Muslims there was usually in reference to an urban elite. Ibn Battuta met with Shah Jalal in Sylhet and noted that the inhabitants of the plains were still Hindu.
In 1591, Venetian traveler Cesare Federici mentioned Sandwip near Chittagong as having an entirely Muslim population. The 17th-century European travelers generally understood Islam as being implanted after the Mughal conquest.
During the Mughal Empire, much of the region of what is now East Bengal was still heavily forested but highly fertile. The Mughals incentivized the bringing of this land under cultivation, and so peasants were incentivized to bring the land under cultivation. These peasants were primarily led by Muslim leaders, and so Islam became the main religion in the delta.
Most of the Zamindars in the modern Barisal division, for instance, were upper-caste Hindus who subcontracted actual jungle clearance work to a Muslim Pir, which is a Sufi spiritual leader. In other instances, Pirs themselves would organize the locals to clear the jungle and then contact the Mughal to gain legitimacy.
In other instances, such as the densely forested interior of Chittagong, Muslims came from indigenous tribes who never followed Hindu rituals. The population of Bangladesh has gone up from 28.92 million in 1901 to 150.36 million in 2022. The Muslim percentage has also increased from 66.1% in 1901 to 91.4% in 2022.
Estimations also show that over 1 million Rohingya Muslim refugees live in Bangladesh, who came during the period of 2016 to 2017 during the genocide of Muslims by the extreme Buddhist army in Myanmar. Bangladesh has a rich Islamic history and can often be looked down upon or ignored by many other Muslims. They are a people who have contributed so much to the world, and this needs to be highlighted. Which country would you like to see a blog on next? Let us know in the comments.
