Islamophobia can be defined as prejudice against the religion of Islam, Islamic identity, and Islamic customs. A recent UN vote called it “a new form of racism,” even though Islam encompasses a multitude of ethnic groups and schools of thought spanning the globe.
Islamophobia is indeed a problem and it does exist and many parts of the world are seeing a rise in Islamophobic sentiment.
It is necessary to strike at Islamophobic sentiment by nipping it in the bud. Take for example the case of Ram Madhav, a BJP politician who referred to the term “Bengali Muslim” as an “oxymoron” in his article about Bangladeshi secularism from November 11, 2021. Even an article about Sher-e-Bangla in a leading Bangladeshi newspaper referred to the term Bengali Muslim as an oxymoron.
This kind of characterization defies history and reality.
The Muslims of Bengal are the largest ethnic Muslim community outside the Arab world. The Bengali Muslim population is the product of centuries of Islamic history in Bengal. There is speculation that the first Muslims arrived in Bengal soon after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). A collection of Ummayad and Abbasid coins in the Bangladesh National Museum point to early trade links with the Islamic world.
By the 14th century, the territory of Bengal was fully absorbed into the Islamic world. At the time, Islamic kingdoms stretched from Muslim Spain in the west to Bengal in the east. Encyclopedia Iranica describes Islamic Bengal as the easternmost haven of Indo-Iranian culture.
Muslims began to produce literature in the Bengali language by the 15th century. A literary tradition called Dobhashi (literally meaning “two languages”) emerged and used both Bengali and Perso-Arabic words.
The Bengal Sultanate was evidently a maritime and mercantile empire. Evidence tells us that diplomats and merchants from Islamic Bengal travelled to China with a giraffe from Africa. Bengali merchants lived in Malacca. Bengal and the Maldives had a huge trade in shell currency. The Sultan of Bengal financed the construction of schools in the Hejaz region of Arabia, which is home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
There are records of diplomatic and literary correspondences between the Bengal Sultans and the rulers and poets of Iran, Egypt, Herat, and China.
The Persian poet Hafez wrote an ode to Bengal while exchanging letters with Sultan Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah. In Arakan, Bengal played a decisive role in ushering in the era of the kingdom of Mrauk-U. The modern-day Rohingya community is a product of the Bengal Sultanate's influence on Arakan.
The Bengal Sultanate has a glorious legacy. It employed Hindus in its government, and it was a melting pot of communities from around the world. After the Sultans, a confederation of 12 Muslim and Hindu zamindars, known as the Baro Bhuiyan, resisted Mughal expansion in eastern Bengal.
Mughal Bengal was consolidated by the 17th century. In The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, Richard M Eaton focuses on the conversion of Bengalis into Islam under Mughal rule. The expansion of farm-land by clearing forests and establishing Sufi-led villages played a key role in conversion. By the 19th century, the first census records showed a plurality of Muslims in greater Bengal.
It is thus a fallacy to consider Bengali Muslims as an oxymoron. Please know your history.
Umran Chowdhury works in the legal field.