Displacement

A third dimension of the Islamization process—the displacement of Bengali superhuman agencies from the local cosmology and their replacement by Islamic ones—is clearly visible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when waves of Islamic reform movements such as the Fara’izi and the Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah swept over the Bengali countryside. These movements aimed to strip from Bengali Islam all the indigenous beliefs and practices to which folk communities had been accommodated, and to instill among them an exclusive commitment to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad.

The most influential nineteenth-century reform movement, the Fara-‘idi, had been launched by Haji Shariat Allah (d. 1840), a man of humble rural origins who in 1799 made a pilgrimage to Mecca when only eighteen years of age. He then passed nineteen years in religious study in Islam’s holiest city at a time when Arabia itself had fallen under the spell of a zealous reform movement, Wahhabism. Returning to Bengal in 1818, the ḥājī found that customs that had seemed natural to him before his pilgrimage now appeared as grotesque aberrations from Islam as practiced in Wahhabi Arabia. From 1818 until his death in 1840, he tirelessly applied himself to reforming his Bengali co-religionists. In time, he passed into legend as an almost super-historical figure, a savior of Islam in Bengal,^[40] whose deeds a local bard versified around 1903–6:

	Where had you been     When Haji Shariat Allah came thither (to Bengal)?
	Who did abolish the custom of Fatihah,     The worship of shrines, and stop the corrupt Mullah?
	When he set his foot in Bengal     All shirk (polytheism) and bid‘at (sinful innovation) were      trampled down.
	All these bid‘at were then abolished
	And the sun of Islam rose high in the sky.[41]

In 1894 James Wise characterized the nineteenth-century reform movement as one of “ignorant and simple peasants, who of late years have been casting off the Hindu tinsel which has so long disfigured their religion.”^[42] But as the above poem shows, more was involved in Haji Shariat Allah’s movement than merely casting off “Hindu tinsel.” References to the ḥājī’s efforts to abolish the fātiḥa and the “worship of shrines,” and to inhibit the influence of “corrupt” mullās, point to an attempt to eliminate the very instruments and institutions by which Islam had originally taken root in the delta. Without the shrines whose establishment had been authorized by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century provincial Mughal officials, there would have been no institutional basis for mullās and other members of the religious gentry to establish the fātiḥa—that is, readings from the Qur’an—in the newly created settlements of the eastern delta’s expanding rice frontier.

Under the influence of the teachings of another Muslim reformist, Karamat ‘Ali (d. 1874), boatmen of Noakhali District who had hitherto been addressing their prayers to the saint Badar and to Panch Pir (the “five pīrs”), were soon addressing their prayers to Allah alone.^[43] Such activity on the divine level was paralleled by similar activity at the human level. Bengalis whose identity as Muslims had not previously been expressed in exclusivist terms now began adopting Arabic surnames, a sure sign of a deepening attachment to Islamic ideals. For example, the district gazetteer for Noakhali, published in 1911, notes that the “vast majority of the Shekhs and lower sections of the community are descended from the aboriginal races of the district,” and that Muslims “with surnames of Chand, Pal, and Dutt are to be found in the district to this day.”^[44] But by 1956 it was observed that among Muslims of that district such names had practically disappeared and, owing to “the influence of reforming priests,” had been replaced by Arabic surnames.^[45]

There is, then, no denying that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bengali Muslims became increasingly aware of the beliefs and practices then current in the Arab heartland, and that they attempted to integrate those beliefs and practices into their identity as Muslims.^[46] The factors contributing to this sense of awareness are well known: the assault on Islam mounted by Christian missionaries in India, the spread of reformist literature facilitated by print technology, political competition between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the context of colonial rule, steamship technology, and a quickened incidence of pilgrimage to Arabia. As the ethnographer H. H. Risley wrote in 1891: “Even the distant Mecca has been brought, by means of Mesrs. Cook’s steamers and return-tickets, within reach of the faithful in India; and the influence of Mahomedan missionaries and return pilgrims has made itself felt in a quiet but steady revival of orthodox usage in Eastern Bengal.”^[47]

It would be wrong, however, to think of movements to purify local cosmologies as phenomena confined to the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, or as functions of, or responses to, the advent of “modernism.”^[48] Both in the original rise of Islam in Arabia and in the subsequent growth of Islam in premodern Bengal, one finds movements comparable both socially and theologically to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In all three instances—in early Arabia, in premodern Bengal, and in modern Bengal—lesser superhuman agencies came to be absorbed under or into the sovereignty of a single deity, a dynamic process Max Weber called “religious rationalization.”^[49]

The first of these, the rise of Islam in Arabia, established the model for the subsequent movements in Bengal, as in the Muslim world at large. Sources dating from the second through the seventh centuries reveal the gradual evolution of a monotheistic cult, heavily influenced by Jewish practice and Jewish apocalyptic thought, that in the time of Muhammad (d. 632) succeeded in absorbing neighboring pagan cults in the Arabian peninsula. As early as the second Christian century, a Nabataean inscription identified Allah as the patron deity of an Arab tribe in northwestern Arabia.^[50] By the fifth century, two centuries before Muhammad, a Greek source reports Arab communities in northern Arabia practicing a religion that, although corrupted by the influence of their pagan neighbors, resembled the religion of the Hebrews up to the days of Moses. They practiced circumcision like the Jews, refrained from eating pork, and observed “many other Jewish rites and customs.” The source adds that these Arabs had come into contact with Jews, from whom they learned of their descent from Abraham through Ishmael and Hagar.^[51] The earliest known biography of Muhammad, found in an Armenian chronicle dating from the 660s, describes the Arabian prophet as a merchant who restored the religion of Abraham among his people and led his believers into Palestine in order to recover the land God had promised them as descendants of Abraham.^[52]

Between the second and seventh centuries, then, Allah had grown from the patron deity of a second-century Arab tribe to, in Muhammad’s day, the high God of all Arabs, as well as the God of Abraham. This evolutionary process is also visible in the Qur’an. Before Muhammad’s mission, the tribes of western Arabia were already paying increasing attention to Allah at the expense of lesser divinities or tribal deities. By the time Muhammad began to preach, Allah had become identified as the “Lord of the Ka‘aba” (Qur’an 106:3), and hence the chief god of the pagan deities whose images were housed in the Meccan shrine. In some Qur’anic passages the existence of lesser divinities and angels was also affirmed, although their effectiveness as intercessors with Allah was denied.^[53] In others, however, Arab deities other than Allah were specifically dismissed as nothing “but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers, for which Allah hath revealed no warrant.”^[54] This latter passage indicates the triumph of the monotheistic ideal, the end point of an evolutionary process in which divinities other than Allah were not merely dismissed as ineffectual but denied altogether.

Such a process of religious rationalization was repeated in premodern Bengal, as seen especially in the Nabī-Baṃśa, the ambitious literary effort of Saiyid Sultan. This poet and local Sufi of the Chittagong region flourished toward the end of the sixteenth century, a time when the forested hinterland of the southeastern delta was only beginning to be touched by plow agriculture and intense exposure to the Qur’an. Characterized as a “national religious epic” for Bengali Muslims,^[55] the Nabī-Baṃśa is epic not only in its size—the work contains over twenty-two thousand rhymed couplets—but also in one of its principal aims: to treat the major deities of the Hindu pantheon, including Brahma, Vishnu, śiva, Rama, and Krishna, as successive prophets of God, followed in turn by Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.

In this respect we may compare Saiyid Sultan’s overall endeavor with that of the mid-eighth-century Arab writer Ibn Ishaq (d. ca. 767), author of the earliest Islamic biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Both men aimed at writing a universal history that began with Creation and continued through the life of the Prophet Muhammad. To this end both divided their works into two large sections: a first part detailing the lives of all the prophets preceding Muhammad—which in Ibn Ishaq’s work was entitled the Kitāb al-Mubtada’, “Book of Beginnings”—and a second part devoted exclusively to the Prophet Muhammad. This organization gave both works a powerful teleological trajectory. “By including all the world’s history,” writes the historian Gordon Newby, Ibn Ishaq’s Kitāb al-Mubtada’ “demonstrated that time’s course led to Islam, which embraced the prophets and holy men of Judaism and Christianity, and finally produced the regime of the Abbasids, whose empire embraced Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” Moreover, as a commentary on both the Bible and the Qur’an, the Kitāb al-Mubtada’ “fosters the Muslim claim that Islam is the heir to Judaism and Christianity.”^[56] In like fashion, the Nabī-Baṃśa, by commenting extensively on Vedic, Vaishnava, and śaiva divinities, in addition to biblical figures, fostered the claim that Islam was the heir, not only to Judaism and Christianity, but also to the religious traditions of pre-Muslim Bengal.

The structural similarity between the Kitāb al-Mubtada’ and the Nabī-Baṃśa arises from the similar historical circumstances in which the two works emerged. Both authors lived in frontier situations where religious and social boundaries were very much in flux and where Islam, though politically dominant, was new and demographically dwarfed by a majority of adherents to much older creeds. In both cases, moreover, the religious and social identity of the Muslim community had not yet fully crystallized and was still very much in the process of formation. Such “frontier” circumstances fostered a climate conducive to literary creativity,^[57] as both Ibn Ishaq and Saiyid Sultan felt it necessary to define the cultural identity of their own communities in relation to larger, non-Muslim societies. Both endeavored to specify the historical and cosmic roles played by prophets who had preceded and foreshadowed the prophetic career of Muhammad. Such a strategy not only established vital connections between the larger community and their own but, more important, asserted their own claims to primacy over the majority communities.

Ibn Ishaq wrote the bulk of his Kitāb al-Mubtada’ in Baghdad during the 760s. Located near the capital of the former Sasanian Persian dynasty, far to the north of what was then the Islamic heartland—Mecca and Medina in western Arabia—Baghdad in Ibn Ishaq’s day was still in a cultural frontier zone, where a good deal of interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims could and did take place. At that time Muslims comprised less than 10 percent of the population of Iraq and Iran, the remainder being mainly Christian, Jewish, or Zoroastrian.^[58] Since many figures from the Christian and Jewish scriptures also appear in the Qur’an, early Muslim scholars like Ibn Ishaq, desiring to form a fuller understanding of the Islamic revelation, took pains to collect lore concerning such biblical figures from representatives of the Jewish and Christian communities.^[59] These extra-Islamic materials were then fitted into an evolving conception of community, history, and prophethood that linked the new Muslim community to the older communities, while at the same time distinguishing the new from the older communities.

Thus by the eighth century the most creative forces that served to forge an Islamic cultural identity were no longer to be found in Islam’s original centers of Mecca and Medina, which had already become cities of shrines and reliquaries. Rather, the new religion’s most creative energies had by then passed to the north, where Arab Muslims encountered, and had to come to terms with, much older civilizations. But Baghdad would not for long remain a frontier society. Ibn Ishaq happened to live there during the culturally formative and doctrinally fluid moment just before Abbasid power was consolidated, before the schools of Islamic Law had crystallized, and before Baghdad itself had passed from a frontier town to a sprawling metropolis at the hub of a vital and expanding Islamic civilization. At this point, when most of Iraq, Syria, and Iran converted to Islam, concern with pre-Islamic history slackened, and the part of Ibn Ishaq’s work dealing with pre-Islamic prophets, the Kitāb al-Mubtada’, fell into disrepute, soon to disappear altogether from circulation.^[60]

Although separated from the Kitāb al-Mubtada’ by eight hundred years, Saiyid Sultan’s Nabī-Baṃśa appeared during a similar phase in the evolution of a Muslim community’s socioreligious self-consciousness. Hence we find in it a similar tendency simultaneously to associate Islam with earlier traditions and to dissociate it from them. Saiyid Sultan not only identified the God of Adam with the Sanskrit names Prabhu and Niraṇjan; he also identified the Islamic notion of a prophet (nabī), or a messenger sent down by God, with the Indian notion of an avatār, or an incarnation of a deity.^[61] The poet lays out these ideas at the very beginning of the epic. “As the butter is hidden in the milk,” he wrote, drawing on the rich imagery of India’s Puranic literature, “that is how Prabhu was co-existent with the Universe. He manifested himself in the shape of Muhammad, as his avatār.”^[62] The author also juxtaposed Indian with Sufi notions of divine activity. After expressing the Vaishnava sentiment that Krishna had been created “in order to manifest love (keli) at Vrindavan,” the poet expressed the Sufi sentiments that God (“Niraṇjan”) used to enjoy his own self by gazing at his reflected image in a mirror, and that before creating the sky and the angels he had created the “Light of Muhammad” (Nūr-i Muḥammad).^[63] Saiyid Sultan even understood the four Vedas as successive revelations sent down by God (“Niraṇjan,” “Kartār”), each one given to a different “great person” (mahājan). Accordingly, Brahmans had been created in order to teach about Niraṇjan and to explain the Vedas to the people.^[64] Rather than repudiating Bengal’s older religious and social worlds, then, the epic served to connect Islam with Bengal’s socioreligious past, or at least with that part of it represented in the high textual tradition of the Brahmans.

Indeed, the book’s very title—Nabī-Baṃśa means “the family of the Prophet”—points to the author’s overall effort to situate Muhammad within a wider “family” of Bengali deities and Hebrew prophets. Like family members pitching in to solve domestic problems, Islamic figures in the Nabī-Baṃśa occasionally appear for the purpose of resolving specifically Indian dilemmas or problematic outcomes. Even before creating man, wrote the poet, Niraṇjan created a prophet (nabī) to preach to the angels and demons because they had become forgetful of dharma, or “duty” as understood in classical Indian thought.^[65] And Adam himself was created from the soil of the earth goddess Kṣiti, mother of Sita, as a device for resolving the problematic conclusion of the popular epic Rāmāyaṇa. Upon hearing Kṣiti’s complaints concerning the shame suffered by her daughter Sita, whom people had falsely blamed for infidelity to Rama, Niraṇjan told the angels, “By means of Adam I will nurture Kṣiti; I will create Adam from the soil (mātī) of Kṣiti.”^[66]

But it would be wrong to consider the Nabī-Baṃśa a basically “Hindu” epic with a few important Islamic personages and terms simply added to it, or as a “syncretic” work that merely identifies foreign deities with local deities. For on fundamental points of theology, the poet clearly drew on Judeo-Islamic and not on Indic thought. For example, his contention that each nabī/avatār of God (i.e., “Niraṇjan”) had been given a scripture appropriate for his time, departed from the Indian conception of repeated incarnations of the divine and affirmed instead the Judeo-Islamic “once-only” conception of prophethood. Moreover, the epic did not subscribe to a view of cosmic history as oscillating between ages of splendor and ages of ruin in the cyclical manner characteristic of classical Indian thought. Rather, according to Saiyid Sultan, as religion in the time of each nabī/avatār became corrupt, God sent down later prophets with a view to propagating belief in one god, culminating in the last and most perfect nabī/avatār, Muhammad. Already in the four Vedas, the poet states, God (“Kartār”) had given witness to the certain coming of Muhammad’s prophetic mission.^[67]

The epic thus presents a linear conception of religious time that is not at all cyclical, but moves forward toward God’s final prophetic intervention in human affairs. It thus fully accords with the Qur’anic understanding of prophecy and of God’s role in human history. It is, of course, true that the poet identifies Allah with Niraṇjan, and nabī with avatār. But the Prophet Muhammad is seen as standing at the end of a long chain of Middle Eastern prophets and Indian divinities, with whom he is in no way confused or identified. By proclaiming the finality and superiority of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, then, Saiyid Sultan’s work provides the rationale for displacing all other nabī/avatārs from Bengal’s religious atmosphere. In this respect, Saiyid Sultan departed from the tradition of previous Bengali poets, who were content with merely including Allah in Bengali cosmologies, or with identifying Allah with deities in those cosmologies.

In fact, the poet explains the whole Hindu socioreligious order as it existed in his own day as the work of the fallen Islamic angel Iblis, or Satan. “The descendants of Cain,” he wrote, “indulged in worshiping idols (murti) in the shape of men, birds and pigs—all taught them by Iblis.”^[68] And it was Iblis who, on discovering the Vedas, had deliberately created an alternative, corrupted text, which the Brahmans unwittingly propagated among the people.^[69] On this basis, Brahmans were said to have misguidedly taught people, for example, to cremate their dead instead of returning them to the ground from which man was created.^[70] And it was from such corrupted scriptures that Brahmans got the idea of wearing unstitched clothing (i.e, the dhoti) instead of stitched clothing.^[71] For the use of stitched clothing had been taught by “Shish” (Seth in Genesis), the son of Adam and Eve after Abel’s death, from whom were descended the righteous people of the earth, the Muslims.^[72]

In short, far from describing Islamic superhuman agencies in Indian terms, the Nabī-Baṃśa does just the opposite: while Brahmans are portrayed as the unwitting teachers of a body of texts deliberately corrupted by Iblis, the rest of the Hindu social order is portrayed as descended from Cain, the misguided son of Adam and Eve. It was only from Adam and Eve’s other son, Shish, that a “rightly guided” community, the Muslim umma, would descend. The epic thus reflects a level of consciousness that had come to understand Islam as more than just another name for an already dense religious cosmology, and “Allah” as more than just another name for a familiar divinity. Rather, Saiyid Sultan, like the early Arab writer Ibn Ishaq, understood the advent of Islam as the inevitable result of a unique cosmic and historical process.