"The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier"

I really enjoyed reading Richard Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. It is a fairly short book, at least by academic standards and certainly given the vast scope of the topic. For Eaton tries (fairly convincingly, I thought!) to answer a huge question: how did Islam take root so deeply and so (relatively) quickly in Bengal? [I should note that I don't currently have the book on me and so am writing this from memory, without citations.]

The question is definitely worth asking. As Eaton points out, Bengalis constitute the second-largest ethnic population of Muslims in the world, after Arabs. ("Indonesian", and "Bangladeshi", are nationalities, not ethnicities.) But Islam has been present in some parts of Bengal for less than 500 years. How did it so thoroughly become part of the landscape?

Eaton organizes his investigation around the concept of the frontier: the dividing line, the boundary between two domains that vary in a certain way. In the case of Bengal, he posits the existence of three different types of frontiers that intersected and interacted in fascinating ways: geographical, cultural, and political. With regard to the particular timespan he looks at, this manifests in the form of four different frontiers: the line that divides settled agriculture from forest; the line that separates Sanskrit(ized) civilization from non-Sanskrit(ized) civilization; the line between Islamic and non-Islamic civilization; and the line that divides Turko-Afghan (Islamic) political dispensations from the "Wild East".

Eaton tackles four of the most common theories about the Islam(ic)ization of Bengal, and discusses why each of them fails to explain the situation in its entirety. These theories are (I don't remember the exact names Eaton gives these theories):

• The Immigration theory: often espoused by the Muslim ashraf élite, and of particular interest to those who supported the creation of Pakistan, this posited that the Muslims of Bengal were non-Bengalis who immigrated from Central Asia or Arabia to the region.
• I'd like to know where you'd find a hundred million Central Asians who somehow migrated across the Indo-Gangetic plains, leaving no traces anywhere! This theory simply cannot explain the adoption of Islam by enormous swathes of the agrarian and artisanal classes.
• The Patronage theory: according to this, the people of Bengal converted to take advantage of the superior patronage afforded to Muslims over Hindus by the Muslim political dispensations that governed the region for five hundred years.
• Eaton notes that although Mughal and pre-Mughal rulers did offer more concessions to Muslims than to Hindus, there was absolutely nothing in early and middle Mughal administration that suggested that the empire saw it as its mission to convert people to Islam.
• Furthermore, this does not explain the vast difference in the rate of adoption of Islam between Delhi and Dhaka; surely whatever patronage one could gain by becoming Muslim would be even more concentrated in the heart of the empire than on the frontiers! This too cannot explain the vast scale of conversion.
• The Sword theory: a favorite of the Hindu right-wing and of some colonizing Orientialists with their own axes to grind, this is the age-old claim that Muslims converted vast populations under threat of execution.
• This is so deeply biased and flawed that I don't know where to start.
• It ignores the basic theological problem that you cannot become a Muslim under duress.
• It ignores historical facts about conversion from Spain to Iran (all through the region, it took hundreds of years before the majority of the population converted to Islam).
• It ignores the particular geographic distribution of Hindu and Muslim populations in Bengal.
• And finally, it cannot explain why, if conversion by the scimitar was indeed the case, Delhi was probably 80% Hindu in 1947.
• The Emancipation theory: popular within a few different circles (Muslims justifying the two-nation theory, Hindus of various castes arguing for against the caste system, British colonizers and Orientalists, etc.), this argues that Islam uniquely offered a liberating escape from the crushing shackles of the Hindu caste system.
• Unlike the other three theories, this has the "virtue" of at least pretending to address the question of the sheer extent of Islamization in Bengal. At least at first glance, it's plausible that Bengali peasants, in a collective act of rebellion against the evils of the Hindu caste system, decided to convert en masse to socially egalitarian Islam. This too, however, fails to explain the matter.
• For one, there is no evidence that oppression of the peasantry was that much worse in Bengal than, say, in South India (or, for that matter, that the Bengali peasant is somehow that much more capable of carrying out a collective f***-you in this fashion).
• More interestingly, Eaton shows that the areas with the deepest levels of adoption of Islam in Bengal all lie beyond the Sanskritic frontier, in places where there was little to no social stratification—in other words, not only is it not true that Bengali peasants converted to "escape" the caste system, but in fact Hindu-ized peasants were less likely to convert to Islam after all!

Eaton acknowledges that each of these theories may explain a few aspects of the spread of Islam, but points out that they cannot explain the situation in Bengal individually and collectively. Eaton's own explanation combines the ideas of the frontiers to come up with an answer.

• Geographically, the forces of nature have played a hugely important role in encouraging eastward migration. As the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta—perhaps the most fertile soil on earth—shifts eastwards, the soils on the east gain in fertility while the western regions show lower collectivity. There is, in other words, a general tendency for cultivators to migrate eastwards, converting dense jungle to green paddy fields.
• Culturally:
• Sanskritic civilization, in its competing Brahminical and Buddhist forms, showed a general eastward tendency right from Vedic times. Enormous work has been done on Vedic, Sanskrit, and Pali sources that all show that these two interrelated cultures constantly pushed eastwards from the time they entered South Asia. At the time of the arrival of Islam, this eastward migration had pushed all the way to somewhere near the current border between West Bengal and Bangladesh. This set up resilient social structures and encouraged groups to settle down and practice intensive agriculture.
• Islamic civilization was often spread by Ṣūfī orders in the region. Charismatic religious leaders were able and willing to penetrate impenetrable tropical jungles, thus bringing a religion of the Book to the aboriginal inhabitants and encouraging them to settle down. They were able to organize these communities to take up the incredibly brutal task of clearing dense, dangerous jungle and making it uniquely suitable for rice and jute cultivation.
• And politically, a variety of responses can be seen.
• The earliest Islamic administrations were essentially tiny groups of Turkic horse-lords who were most concerned about establishing their actual power in the region.
• This was followed by a few Bengali Islamic political dispensations that took in an increasing number of Bengali converts to Islam.
• For the Mughals, who are the last major political force Eaton examines, Bengal was mostly a wild frontier region where they were willing to let local entrepreneurs, whether Hindu or Muslim, take on the risk and reward of trying to bring the jungle under cultivation (a process that naturally produced enormous revenue gain for the empire). They thus provided the financial and administrative backing required to bring civilization to wild eastern Bengal.

In other words, the four distinct frontiers of the early Islamic period in Bengal were essentially consolidated into a single line: the line that separated Mughal, (mostly) Muslim agriculturalists from jungle-dwelling tribes worshipping indigenous gods.

It goes without saying that all of this is a highly over-simplified account of a complicated (but always clear and engaging) narrative that is backed by recourse to extensive quantitative sources. Eaton's book is a delight to read, and it's absolutely fascinating to see the complex forces at play over the course of history in this region. A wonderful read.

<UPDATE>

In his article "Islamic History as World History," Eaton notes that his idea—that Islam was able to acquire its deepest footholds in eastern Bengal where Sanskritic civilization had had a minimal presence—seems to hold for other parts of the region too.

Recent research suggest that the growth of sedentary agriculture in lightly Hinduized regions of India will tell us more about conversion than will the movement of medieval armies. For in both wings of India that became Muslim-majority regions—Bengal in the east, Punjab and Sind in the west—the growth of Muslim societies correlated with the adoption of sedentary agriculture. And both regions were still frontier societies where Hindu religious values and the hierarchic social ideals of Brahmin priests had not yet deeply penetrated.

Now in the same article, a few pages earlier, Eaton does note that "in 711 [Muslim navies] conquered and occupied the densely-populated Hindu-Buddhist society of Sind." He also writes more generally about the particular experience of Islam in India:

Where India is concerned, two lines of historical enquiry are discernible, one of them intellectual, the other social. The former consists of efforts to unravel the complex and fascinating ways that Muslims hailing from points to the west came to grips intellectually with India's highly developed Hindu-Buddhist systems of religion and thought. Arab rule in eighth century Sind having weakened and died [emphasis mine], it was left to Persianized Turks to establish a permanent Musli presence in India from the thirtheenth centuru. But what would the new ruling class, itself only recently converted to Islam in Central Asia, make of the land of the Buddha, Śiva, and the marvelous incarnations of Vishnu? And to what extent would Islam adapt or change in order to find for itself a niche in India's rich cultural universe?

The two points about Sind in this article suggest that the Islamization of Sind is a bit more problematic than a simple correlation with sedentary agriculture, but since I know nothing about the history of the region I will refrain from saying anything further on the topic and sounding like a complete idiot.

</UPDATE>