Islam In Bngladesh: NO CONVERSION

[Dhakai]

"This is a cockamamie history of the land called Bangla.
and so I am addressing some of your mistaken understanding of the history of our land.
Although you are not the only one who thinks Muslims of Bengal are all converted Hindus, this non-fact is used by by many, both Hindus and Muslims, to whip up communal feelings. Please understand that this idea -- mass conversion of Hindus into Muslims by force -- was never mentioned by anyone in India throughout the 500 years of Muslim
presence in India.
It was a malicious propaganda of Western writers. Edward Gibbon, Edwin Muir, etc. wrote histories depicting the marauding Arabs on horsebacks converting every heathen on sight at the point of their naked swords. Should you, any Bangalee or any Indian subscribe to this ugly racist propaganda with clear conscience? Before the advent of the British, no Hindu writer wrote of the Muslims in that language.
This image of Islam was on the minds of British census takers in 1872 -- the very first census in Bengal. When they were surprised to find the "enormous host of Muhammedans resident in Lower Bengal" and they could not distinguish them by physical features from the Hindus, they automatically assumed that they were converted Hindus.
Bankimchandra Chattopadhya, a writer, I admire because he was never persuaded easily by British racism, wrote a brilliant essay in his magazine, Bangadarshan,in 1880, protesting this stupid assumption. He proved, by a thorough scholarship (which is still upheld by modern historians of Bengal, namely Richard M. Eaton of University of Arizona) that conversion to Islam took place among people of native tribes who did not belong to mainstream Hinduism, whether upper or lower caste. In fact, Hinduism, which was relatively new in the region of Banga, and did not even exist in many parts of Bengal in those days. Other than immigrant Hindus from the South or other parts of India, most Hindus, upto the advent of Bakhtiar Khilji, were also natives who accepted the Brahminic centered system, got assimilated, or, in other words,became "converted" Hindus. Remember, Bengal was not a part of Aryabarta, it was not at the heartland of Arya Hindu area, it was outside the range of Arya Bhumi.
So, please, think first, where you got this distortion of
historical fact -- "80% of Muslims in Bengal were converted either by force or due to social discrimination." Think also, that our ideas of Hindu caste system are also distorted and derived from British
depiction of it, not by a realistic look at our own social and economic history.
I have written a long article in Bangla on this topic that was published in Ittefaq in Dhaka in the Ekushey Special Issue in 1998." By fMajid