Religion, Landscape and Material Culture in Pre-modern South Asia by Tilottama Mukherjee

Author:Tilottama Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000847291
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Accounts of Miraculous Conversion

There is a general belief in a dominant historiographical tradition that early mystic records did not refer to a single case of conversion.22 However, the Chishti texts of the Delhi Sultanate present the image of the shaikh as the primary agent for proselytisation and propagation of Islam. The Sufi shaikhs such as Mu‘in-ud-Din Sijzi, Jalal-ud-Din Tabrezi,23 Farid-ud-Din Ganj-i-Shakar, Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki and Saiyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani24 are chiefly portrayed as the propagators of Islam in north India. Caste oppression and the drawing capability that egalitarian Islam might have,25 or for that matter economic and political dimensions, are not mentioned in the literature as factors for conversion. The one recurrent motive for the conversion of individuals and at times of the entire locality or town is the attraction to the miracle-working shaikh. Most cases of mass conversion are shown to be the outcome of oppositional encounters of the visiting shaikh with the local holy man, generally, a yogi, in full view of the public, in which the former emerges victorious and establishes his authority. In the subsequent pages, we shall relate some wonderful stories of conversion and discuss the accounts of the shaikh’s role in the diffusion of Islam as recorded in our texts.

The accounts of conversion are generally the sequel to the outcome of the contests involving the visiting shaikh and a local challenger, or yogi visiting the jama‘at-khana of the shaikh to test his spiritual accomplishments, or the shaikh’s thaumaturgic role such as his revival of the dead and protection from malevolent supernatural beings. We have classified the anecdotes of conversion in our texts in three broad rubrics: (a) individual conversion, (b) group conversion and (c) forced conversion.

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