Note 57 — Chapter IX · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

One of these Arab preachers, Pīr Mahābīr Khamdāyat, came as a missionary to the Deccan as early as A.D. 1304, and among the cultivating classes of Bījāpūr are to be found descendants of the Jains who were converted by him.57 About the close of the same century a celebrated saint of Gulbarga, Sayyid Muḥammad Gīsūdarāz,58 converted a number of Hindus of the Poona district, and twenty years later his labours were crowned with a like success in Belgaum.59 At Dahanu still reside the descendants of a relative of one of the greatest saints of Islam, Sayyid ʻAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī of Bag͟hdād; he came to Western India about the fifteenth century, and after making many converts in the Konkan, died and was buried at Dahanu.60 In the district of Dharwar, there are large numbers of weavers whose ancestors were converted by Hāshim Pīr Gujarātī, the religious teacher of the Bījāpūr king, Ibrāhīm ʻĀdil Shāh II, about the close of the sixteenth century. These men still regard the saint with special reverence and pay great respect to his descendants.61 The descendants of another saint, Shāh Muḥammad Ṣādiq Sarmast Ḥusaynī, are still found in Nasik; he is said to have been the most successful of Muhammadan missionaries; having come from Medina in 1568, he travelled over the greater part of Western India and finally settled at Nasik—in which district another very successful Muslim missionary, K͟hwājah Khunmir Ḥusaynī, had begun to labour about fifty years before.62 Two other Arab missionaries may be mentioned, the scene of whose proselytising efforts was laid in the district of Belgaum, namely Sayyid Muḥammad b. Sayyid ʻAlī and Sayyid ʻUmar ʻAydrūs Basheban.63