Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/582

564 circumcised off hand the villages allotted to him m fief. But it was not to such measures that Islam owed its per manent success in Bengal. It appealed to the people, and it derived the great mass of its converts from among the poor. It brought in a truer conception of God, a nobler ideal of the life of man, and offered to the teeming low castes of Bengal, who had sat for ages despised and abject on the outermost pale of the Hindu community, free entrance into a new social organisation. So far as local tradition and the other fragmentary evidence which survives enable a modern inquirer to judge, the creed of Muhammad was here spread neither by violence nor by any ignoble means. It succeeded because it deserved to suc ceed. Nevertheless, it has conspicuously failed to alter the permanent religious conceptions of the people. The initiatory rite separated the Musalmans from the rest of the Bengali population, and elevated the heteroganous low-caste converts into a respectable community of their own. But the proselytes brought their old superstitions with them into their new faith. Their ancient rites and modss of religious thought reasserted themselves with an intensity that could not be suppressed, until the fierce white light of Semitic monotheism almost flickered out amid the fuligi nous exhalations of Hinduism. A local writer, speaking from personal acquaintance with the Musalman peasantry in the northern districts of Lower Bengal, states that not one in ten can recite the brief and simple kalmd or creed, whose constant repetition is a matter of almost unconscious habit with Muhammaclans. He describes them as &quot; a sect which observes none of the ceremonies of its faith, which is ignorant of the simplest formulas of its creed, which worships at the shrines of a rival religion, and tenaciously adheres to practices which were denounced as the foulest abominations by its founder.&quot; Fifty years ago these sen tences would have truly described the Muhammadan peasantry, not only in the northern districts, but through out all Lower Bengal. In the cities, or amid the serene palace life of the Musalman nobility and their religious foundations, a few Maulvis of piety and learning calmly carried on the routine of their faith. But the masses of the rural Musalmans had relapsed into something little better than a mongrel breed of circumcised low-caste Hindus. Since -then, one of those religious awakenings so character istic of India has passed over the Muhammadans of Bengal. Itinerant preachers, generally from the north, have wandered from district to district, calling on the people to return to the true faith, and denouncing God s wrath on the indif ferent and unrepentant. A great body of the Bengali Musalmans have purged themselves of the taint of Hin duism, and shaken off the yoke of ancient rural rites. The revival has had a threefold effect religious, social, and political. It has stimulated the religious instinct among an impressionable people, and produced an earnest desire to cleanse the worship of God and His prophet from idolatry. This stern rejection of ancient superstitions has widened the gulf between the Muhammadans and the Hindus. Fifty years ago the Bengali Musalmans were simply a recognised caste, less widely separated from the lower orders of the Hindus than the latter were from the Kulin Brahmans. There were certain essential points of difference, of a doctrinal sort, between the Hindu and Muhammadan villager ; but they had a great many rural customs and even religious rites in common. The Muhammadan hus bandman theoretically recognised the one Semitic God; but in a country subject to floods, famines, the devastations of banditti, and the ravages of wild beasts, he would have deemed it a simple policy to have neglected the Hindu festivals in honour of Krishna and Durga. The Bengali peasantry no longer look to their gods, but to the officer in chargs of the district, for protection ; and when he fails them, instead of offering expiatory sacrifices to Kali, they petition Government, or write violent letters to the verna cular press. The reformed Muhammadan husbandmen now stand aloof from the village rites of the Hindus. They have ceased to be merely a separate caste in the rural or ganisation, and have become a distinct community, keeping as much apart from their nominal co-religionists of the old unreformed faith as from the idolatrous Hindus. This social isolation from the surrounding Hindus is the second effect of the Musalman revival in Bengal. Its third result is political, and affects ourselves. A Muhammadan like a Christian revival strongly reasserts the duty of self- abnegation, and places a multitude of devoted instruments at the disposal of any man who can convince them that his schemes are identical with the will of God. But while a return to the primitive teachings of Christ means a return to a religion of humanity and love, a return to Muhamma dan first principles means a return to a religion of intoler ance and aggression. The very essence of Musalman Puritanism is abhorrence of the Infidel. The whole conception of Islam is that of a church either actively militant or conclusively triumphant forcibly converting the world, or ruling with a rod of iron the stiff-necked unbeliever. The actual state of India, where it is the Musalmans who are in subjection, and the unbeliever who governs them, is manifestly not in accord with the primitive ideal ; and many devout Muhammadans of the reformed faith have of late years endeavoured, by plots and frontier attacks, to remove this anomaly. The majority are not actively hostile, but they stand aloof from our institutions, and refuse to coalesce with the system which the British Government has imposed on Bengal. Their rebel camp beyond our frontier his forced us into three expedi tions, which has broken their military power; and the calm, inexorable action of the courts has stamped out tho chronic abetment of rebellion by Muhammadans within Bengal. Besides the 42 / millions aggregated under the name of Hindus, and the 20 millions of Musalmans, a great residue remains. These consist, with the exception of two very small bodies of Christians and Buddhists, of semi-aboriginal and distinctly non- Aryan races. They number over 3i millions, equalling almost exactly the population of Scot land. These peoples dwell, for the most part, among the lofty ranges and primeval forests which wall in Bengal on the north, east, and south-west, or upon the spurs and hilly outworks which these mountain systems have thrown forward upon the lowlands. Some of them represent the simplest types of social organisation known to modern research. Their rudimentary communities are separated by religion, custom, and language from each other and from the dwellers on the plains. Many of them, till lately, looked upon war as the normal condition of human society, and on peace as an unwelcome temporary break in their existence. For ages they have regarded the lowland Hindus as their natural enemies, and in turn have been dealt with as beasts of chase by the more civilised inhabi tants of the valleys. Within the present generation human sacrifice continued to be an obligatory rite among them a rite so deeply graven upon their village institutions, and so essential to the annually recurring festivals of their religious year, as to seriously occupy the Indian legis lature, and to require a special agency to suppress it. To this day instances of the detestable practice occur; and their extreme jealousy of anything like foreign rule renders it the wisest policy to leave them as much as possible under their own hamlet communities and petty chiefs. Nevertheless, they form the most hopeful ma terial yet discovered in Bengal for the humanising in fluences of Christianity, and of that higher level of 