at first you stated that migration is NOT the cause for the preponderance of Muslims in Bengal. and then you said that the type of migration Eaton talks about is actually West-to-East migration within Bengal.
migration is a premium cause for the Muslim population in Bengal. the migrations from Central Asia and Persia-Afghanistan were in many successive waves throughout the centuries, as it happened for the rest of South Asia. each of these waves had this characteristic two components i.e. at first the colonizing force came and later the settlers who took up administrative positions, formed the military, gave dawah or engaged in trades. the West-East migration is not what the paragraph i quoted was referring to
I will make a separate thread on this migration issue.
What Eaton is saying is the migration is not the main determining factor for majority Muslim presence in eastern Bengal, because migration happened in other places in South Asia too which are geographically far way from Western South Asia (present day Pakistan). Even before Delhi Sultanate, areas in Pakistan's south have been within previous Muslim empires such as Khilafa Rashidun and Umayyad. So in Sindh and Balochistan Islamic rule was established by 711 AD. Whereas rest of Pakistan came under Ghaznavids by 997 AD. This is the reason why we see Muslim majority in those areas as they had more time for conversion and they are next door neighbor to Muslim West Asia.
From start of Delhi Sultanate with Ghorids in 1211 AD, most parts of rest of South Asia came under Muslim rule, but out of all these areas in South Asia, no place other than eastern Bengal, which is quite faraway from continuous areas of Muslim world, suddenly we see a Muslim majority area. This is Eaton's thesis, to find out the reason why we have this strange situation. The result of course is that during partition we became the most vocal Pakistan supporters and became separate from India as East Pakistan and now we have a country called Bangladesh. Precisely because of this strange phenomenon, close 180 million Bengal Muslims, roughly around 11-12% of global Muslim population is surrounded by a majority non-Muslim population and Bangladesh has such a precarious strategic and geopolitical situation.
From my reading of Eaton's book he makes several things clear:
- Migration of non South Asian Muslims happened in Bengal just like it did in other places of South Asia, during Delhi Sultanate
- but during Mughal era Bengal had a special agrarian expansion project, cutting off jungles to create rice fields from forested areas of eastern Bengal
- in this project, just like other efforts like expansionist war efforts in Southern Hindustan, Mughal's were aided by Rajputs as military allies and Marwary businessmen as money lenders and Hindu and Muslim local Zamindars as absentee landlords or main or sub leaseholder Zamindars, many of whom were former Mughal officials or soldiers
- in the field, the clearing group was led by Pirs or holy men, whereas the people that did the actual work were local fishermen who never before came in contact with Caste Hindu Brahmanic order, such as Adivashi also known and Charal or Chondal, eventually these people slowly became murids of the Pirs and came to the fold of Islam. In some places Mughal administration sponsored Mandirs as well, where these Adivashi's came within Hindu caste system as Shudra's or untouchables. The goal of the Mughals was to increase revenue and they were very religion neutral about accomplishing their imperial goals, as can be seen with their alliance and partnership with Hindu's which is not same as earlier Delhi Sultanate. I have a special explanation about this phenomenon, I believe this has to do it Mongol code of Yassa, first introduced by Chinggis Khaan who started the tradition of extreme tolerance towards all religion and the policy of no forcible conversion:
Yassa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- He [Chingis-Khan] ordered that all religions were to be respected and that no preference was to be shown to any of them. All this he commanded in order that it might be agreeable to Heaven. {al-Makrizi}
- Leaders of a religion, lawyers, physicians, scholars, preachers, monks, persons who are dedicated to religious practice, the Muezzin (this latter appearing to be from the later period of Khubilai Khan unless this was further translated there had been no specific reference made to any Muezzin and cities including mosques were levelled), physicians and those who bathe the bodies of the dead are to be freed from public charges. {Al-Makrizi}
Verkhovensky reports that the Yassa begins with an exhortation to honor men of all nations based upon their virtues. This pragmatic admonition is borne out by the ethnic mixture created by Genghis Khan in the Mongolian medieval army for purpose of unity (Ezent Gueligen Mongolyn), the United Mongol Warriors. The origin of the word Mongol, "mong", means "brave". Thus at the time it may have meant as much an army of "the brave", as an army from or made up of people from Mongolia.
- Genghis Khan consulted teachers of religions, such as imáms and probably rabbis and Christian priests, in compiling his law codex.
Chingiz Khan: The Life and Legacy of an Empire Builder - Anwarul Haque Haqqi - Google Books
Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals Part - II - Satish Chandra - Google Books
The net result is that in Bengal, migration of non-South Asian Muslims and South Asian Muslims of foreign origin (Ashraf) from outside Bengal, happened in much greater scale than in other areas of South Asia. The majority or the bulk of Muslims however were converted from local people, as they were the main work force working under these Muslim pirs. So I believe these Pirs, along with former Mughal officials and soldiers who become Zamindars and sub-lease holder petty Zamindars, are the ancestors of our rural gentry. while Urban Ashraf were exclusively of foreign origin from way back in Sultanate era, a class I believe became much bigger in Bengal than in other areas of South Asia, to run the Mughal agro-industrial project.
One of the difficulty is that most people in South Asia do not keep meticulous ancestry records such as those in Korean Chokbo for example:
Genealogy book - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But genetic tests are getting cheaper, so it will come in handy in the future to get much more detailed data for research in these areas. The other factor to keep in mind is that over time, specially during colonial era, many Ashraf (foreign origin Muslims) became poor and intermarried with converted non-Ashraf Muslims, making the population more and more homogeneous over time and making it difficult to visually detect foreign genetic markers.
I will open a separate thread on this migration issue and present the material from Eaton's book. If we go into this issue too much in this thread, which is mainly about language and scripts, it will clutter this thread too much. As you can see people are already complaining.
