Note 40 — Chapter IX · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

But there would appear to be no record of the individuals who took part in the propaganda, except in the case of the historian ʻAbd al-Razzāq, who has himself left an account of his unsuccessful mission to the court of the Zamorin of Calicut. He was sent on this mission in the year 1441 by the Tīmūrid Shāh Ruk͟h Bahādur, in response to an appeal made by an ambassador who had been sent by the Zamorin of Calicut to this monarch. The ambassador was himself a Musalman and represented to the Sultan how excellent and meritorious an action it would be to send a special envoy to the Zamorin, “to invite him to accept Islam in accordance with the injunction ‘Summon thou to the ways of thy Lord with wisdom and with kindly warning,’40 and open the bolt of darkness and error that locked his benighted heart, and let the splendour of the light of the faith and the brightness of the sun of knowledge shine into the window of his soul.” ʻAbd al-Razzāq was chosen for this task and after an adventurous journey reached Calicut, but appears to have met with a cold reception, and after remaining there for about six months abandoned his original purposes and made his way back to K͟hurāsān, which he reached after an absence of three years.41