Note 1 — Chapter IX · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

But among the sixty-six millions of Indian Musalmans there are vast numbers of converts or descendants of converts, in whose conversion force played no part and the only influences at work were the teaching and persuasion of peaceful missionaries. This class of converts forms a very distinct group by itself which can be distinguished from that of the forcibly converted and the other heterogeneous elements of which Muslim India is made up. The entire community may be roughly divided into those of foreign race who brought their faith into the country along with them, and those who have been converted from one of the previous religions of the country under various inducements and at many different periods of history. The foreign settlement consists of three main bodies: first, and numerically the most important, are the immigrants from across the north-west frontier, who are found chiefly in Sind and the Panjāb; next come the descendants of the court and armies of the various Muhammadan dynasties, mainly in Upper India and to a much smaller extent in the Deccan; lastly, all along the west coast are settlements probably of Arab descent, whose original founders came to India by sea.1 But the number of families of foreign origin that actually settled in India is nowhere great except in the Panjāb and its neighbourhood. More than half the Muslim population of India has indeed assumed appellations of distinctly foreign races, such as Shayk͟h, Beg, K͟hān, and even Sayyid, but the greater portion of them are local converts or descendants of converts, who have taken the title of the person of highest rank amongst those by whom they were converted or have affiliated themselves to the aristocracy of Islam on even less plausible grounds.2 Of this latter section of the community—the converted natives of the country—part no doubt owed their change of religion to force and official pressure, but by far the majority of them entered the pale of Islam of their own free will. The history of the proselytising movements and the social influences that brought about their conversion has hitherto received very little attention, and most of the commonly accessible histories of the Muhammadans in India, whether written by European or by native authors, are mere chronicles of wars, campaigns and the achievements of princes, in which little mention of the religious life of the time finds a place, unless it has taken the form of fanaticism or intolerance. From the biographies of the Muslim saints, however, and from local traditions, something may be learned of the missionary work that was carried on quite independently of the political life of the country. But before dealing with these it is proposed to give an account of the official propagation of Islam and of the part played by the Muhammadan rulers in the spread of their faith.