The Muhammad Avatara Salvation History Translation And The Making Of Bengali Islam Ayesha A Irani full chapter pdf docx

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The Muhammad Avatāra
The Muhammad Avatāra
Salvation History, Translation, and

the Making of Bengali Islam
AY E S H A A . I R A N I
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Irani, Ayesha A., author.
Title: The Muhammad Avatāra : salvation history, translation,
and the making of Bengali Islam / by Ayesha A. Irani.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016969 (print) | LCCN 2020016970 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190089221 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190089245 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Islam—Bangladesh. | Bangladesh—Civilization. |
Muhammad, Prophet, -632—Biography—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC BP63.B3 I78 2020 (print) | LCC BP63.B3 (ebook) |
DDC 297.095492—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016969
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016970
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190089221.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
In humble dedication
to the Rohingya of Arakan,
whose stories have been forgotten;
and to those who are working
to alleviate their unspeakable suffering
The past appears to be no longer written in granite but rather
in water; new constructions of it are periodically arising and
changing the course of politics and history.
—Aleida Assmann
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The magnanimity of many remarkable individuals has made this book

possible. My journey began at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had
arrived to study with the late Aditya Behl. Those years, when he opened up
the riches of medieval Indian literature to me, were simply exhilarating.
Aditya’s own work on the Sufi literature of Awadh claimed him completely,
and, after his untimely demise in 2009, his model remained a beacon for
me as I continued on my scholarly path without him.
My dissertation could not have been written were it not for the dedi-
cated guidance of my committee members. I am indebted to Jamal Elias
for taking me under his wing, even though my research was far along in
its conception. His astute supervision and generous support at this critical
juncture allowed me to bring my doctoral thesis to completion. Daud Ali
was also pivotal to sustaining my momentum after Aditya was gone. Rachel
Fell McDermott has been a gracious and giving guide through long years
of research and writing, both in graduate school and beyond. My scholar-
ship owes much to her meticulous scrutiny of my work and her cherished
friendship. Christian Lee Novetzke has steadfastly counseled me through
my graduate studies and career, and guided me through every stage of the
publication of this book. I am deeply grateful to both Rachel and Christian
for their unflagging support and sage advice over many years.
I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all those who taught
me at Penn and beyond: the late Ludo Rocher, who ushered me into Penn’s
portals, and to Rosane Rocher, Harunaga Isaacson, Barbara Von Schlegell,
x A cknowledgments
Everett Rowson, Haimanti Banerjee, Pardis Minuchehr, Negin Nabavi, the

late Alibha Dakshi, and Debangan Basu. Renata Holod gave me a lasting
passion for the art of the Islamic world. Even today I draw strength from
the memory of my time with her, and I thank her for her generosity. My
thanks also to Rupa Viswanath and Jody Chavez for their friendship and
support of my research at Penn.
At the University of Toronto, I was delighted to find the camaraderie
and intellectual association of Christoph Emmrich, Enrico Raffaelli, Srilata
Raman, Ajay Rao, Karen Ruffle, Walid Saleh, Maria Subtelny, Mohamad
Tavakoli-Targhi, and Shafique Virani. Christoph, Srilata, and Karen all
provided critical feedback at various stages in the writing of this book.
I would also like to thank Usman Hamid and Adil Mawani, then grad-
uate students at the University of Toronto, for their questions about and
thoughtful suggestions for my research. Likewise, I have felt blessed by
the kindness and unwavering support of my colleagues at the University
of Massachusetts Boston. Jean-Philippe Belleau, Christina Bobel, Elora
Chowdhury, Dolly Daftary, Alexander Des Forges, Sana Haroon, Kenneth
Rothwell, Rajini Srikanth, Lakshmi Srinivas, and Jason Von Ehrenkrook
have all cheered me on through the writing process. Terry Kawashima,
Chair of the Department of Asian Studies, has been steadfast in her sup-
port and encouragement of my work. Sana and Elora have read drafts of
various chapters and provided me with thoughtful suggestions. I have also
benefited from conversations with Thibaut d’Hubert of the University of
Chicago and Manan Ahmed at Columbia University. I am truly grateful for
the insights, encouragement, and friendship of all of my stellar colleagues.
Over the last year or so of writing this monograph, I had the great
pleasure of working on my draft chapters with four impressive scholars of
South Asia, who fed my imagination, while providing encouragement and
critique along the way. I extend my warmest thanks to Elora Chowdhury
(again), Sarah Pinto, Jyoti Puri, and Banu Subramaniam for their recep-
tivity, maturity and judgment, and sisterly conviviality.
It was under the discerning mentorship of Tony K. Stewart that this
monograph achieved its final form. Having carefully read my bloated
original manuscript, Tony provided me with a detailed map through
A cknowledgments xi
and out of the labyrinth of my own making. Were it not for his brilliance
and generosity, this book would never have come to press in a timely
fashion. At various points along the way, moreover, Tony freely shared
his understandings of the Nabīvaṃśa with me, challenging my thinking
and spurring me in new directions. Chapters 3 and 4 of this book owe
much to the discussions I have had with him over the years, particularly
to the workshop “Reconsidering the Non-Muslim Other: Internal and
External Religious Differentiation” he organized at Vanderbilt University
in 2013, and to the seminar at Brown University where he presented, in
2018, the central ideas of his latest masterpiece, Witness to Marvels: Sufism
and Literary Imagination. I benefited greatly from reading the manuscript
of this book.
An earlier iteration of Chapter 1 of this book was published in History
of Religions. I am grateful for the journal’s permission to adapt the article
for this book, to Wendy Doniger for her editorial support, and to John
Stratton Hawley and Tony Stewart for their valuable feedback on the ar-
ticle. Chapter 6, likewise, is a revised version of an essay first published in
The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Miʿrāj
Tales in 2010. My thanks to Indiana University Press for permission to
reuse and update this article for the book. I am grateful to the editors,
Christiane Gruber and Frederick Colby, who encouraged me to submit
my essay for this splendid volume.
I extend my special thanks to Cynthia Read, Salma Ismaiel, Brent
Matheny, Leslie Johnson, Preetham Raj, and Katherine Eirene Ulrich at
Oxford University Press, and the anonymous reviewers of my book man-
uscript, who each, in their own way, helped shepherd this book into pro-
duction. I am grateful to the artist, Anita Chowdry, for permitting me
to use her exquisite piece on the cover of my book. To the University of
Massachusetts Boston, my thanks for providing me with the subvention
necessary to bring this book to publication.
I have had the privilege of presenting my research on Islamic Bangla
literature to diverse audiences and received much invaluable feedback.
My thanks are due to the Department for the Study of Religion, the
Iranian Studies Seminar Series, and the Oriental Club at the University
xii A cknowledgments
of Toronto, and the Department of Asian Studies and the Junior

Faculty Research Seminar at the University of Massachusetts Boston
for opportunities to present my research; to the Dissertation to Book
Workshop sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies; to
Projit Mukharji for his invitation to the Liminal Deities Workshop
at McMaster University; to Wendy Doniger for including me in the
panel “Muslim-Hindu Literary Encounters in Early Modern South
Asia: Conversations with Aditya Behl” at the Annual Meeting of the
American Academy of Religion; to Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre
Papas, who invited me to Paris for the conference “A Worldwide
Literature: Jāmī (1414–1492) in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond”; to Rebecca
Manring for her invitation to the conference “Bengali Maṅgalakāvya and
Related Literature,” sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh
Studies; to Debojyoti Das for inviting me to the workshop “Connected
Landscapes: The Alternative Understanding of Asian Societies, History,
and Ecology,” and to Supriya Gandhi for her invitation to the work-
shop “Translation in Early Modern South Asia,” both at Yale; to Teena
Purohit and SherAli Tareen for their invitation to the conference
“Muslim Thought and Practice in South Asia,” at Boston University;
to Frank Korom for including me in the Greater Bengal Roundtable
Conference, sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies
and Boston University; to Yael Rice for inviting me to the symposium
on “Books and Print between Cultures, 1500–1900” at Amherst College;
to Benjamin Fleming for including me in “Intertwined Worlds: the 10th
Annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital
Age,” at the University of Pennsylvania; to Aniket De and Priyanka
Basu for their invitation to the symposium “Rethinking Folk Culture in
South Asia”; to Usman Hamid for including me in his panel “Devotion
to the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern South Asia” at the Annual
Meeting of the American Academy of Religion; to Rajarshi Ghose for
inviting me to present my research at the Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences Calcutta; and to Mohammad Nabeel Jafri and others for their
invitation to deliver the keynote address at the Fifth Biennial Graduate
Conference on South Asian Religions at the University of Toronto. Each
A cknowledgments xiii
one of these presentations helped me to refine my thinking, and for this

I am most appreciative.
I have benefited from the generosity of the University of Pennsylvania,
the University of Toronto, the University of Massachusetts Boston,
and several funding organizations who supported my graduate and
post-graduate research. I am particularly grateful for the University of
Pennsylvania’s William Penn scholarship, the Briton Martin fellowship,
and for Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships; the American
Institute of Bangladesh Studies Dissertation Fellowship; the Newcombe
Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship;
and the University of Toronto’s Connaught New Researcher Award. The
support of all of these institutes and funding organizations enabled me to
pursue my research single-mindedly.
The librarians of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of
Toronto, the Widener Library of Harvard University, and the British
Library have made my research a true delight. The superlative collections
on South Asia and the Middle East of the University of Pennsylvania, and
the extraordinary facilities they provided for my dissertation research
merit special mention. For their indefatigable efforts in tracing and scan-
ning endless numbers of obscure articles and book-chapters, I especially
wish to thank Sheila Ketchum, Coordinator for Books by Mail, and her
dedicated team of David “Lapis” Cohen, Ionelia Engel, Susan Gavin-
Leone, and Maryanna Kraft. I am deeply grateful for their expertise and
constant support through my graduate years, without which I could never
have written my dissertation. My thanks are also due to the Interlibrary
Loan staff at the University of Massachusetts Boston, who have worked
closely with me to further my research.
In Bangladesh, I was fortunate to receive the kind favor of many
individuals who opened up their homes and libraries to me. Mohammad
Abdul Kaium and Rajiya Sultana, my first teachers of Islamic Bangla lit-
erature; Nehal and Zahed Karim; Deoan Nurul Anoyar Hosen Caudhuri;
and Muhammed Sadique shared their knowledge with me and gifted
me with rare articles and books from their personal libraries. The late
Saiyad Hasan Imam Hoseni Chishti of Sultanshi, Habiganj, founder of
xiv A cknowledgments
the Mahākavi Saiyad Sultān Sāhitya o Gabeṣaṇa Pariṣad, and his nephew,
Saiyad Murad Ahmad, the younger brother of the custodian (motaoyāllī)
of the Mudarband shrine complex, spent long hours discussing their
family histories, their lives, and Sufi practices with me, and graciously
opened up their family shrines to me. I am beholden to them for receiving
me into their sacred spaces and households.
At Dhaka University, Perween Hasan, Kalpana Halder- Bhowmik,
Dulal Kanti Bhowmik, Monsur Musa, Ahmed Kabir, and Shahjahan Miya
shared their insights on Islamic Bengal and its literature with me. Shaheen
Sultana at the Dhaka University Library; Muhammad Abdul Awal Miah
and Mohoshin Ahmed Chowdhury at the Library of the Asiatic Society
of Bangladesh; Indra Kumar Simha of Comilla’s Ramamala Library; and
Muhammad Ishak Caudhuri of the Chittagong University Rare Books
Library made every effort to assist me. The latter also gave me the opportu-
nity to study an exquisite manuscript of the Nabīvaṃśa in his private collec-
tion. Additionally, he accompanied me to the villages in the Patiya district
where he had conducted ethnographic research on Saiyad Sultān. Jamal
Uddin, a journalist and the proprietor of Balaka Prakashana, provided
me with important materials on Chittagong’s history. The late Jahangir
Alam, Manager of the Ambrosia Guest House, Dhaka, and his dedicated
staff made me feel at home in Dhaka. To Nayan Talukdar, Khairulbhai,
Jamalbhai, and Quddusbhai, my heartfelt thanks for all of their generous
assistance in Dhanmondi and on my travels through Bangladesh. In
India, Hena Basu, in Kolkata, and Harisankar Chakraborty, the Deputy
Librarian of Tripura University, Agartala, helped source rare materials for
my research. To them, my gratitude.
I am grateful for the dear friends and accomplished colleagues who
have supported me along the way: Debangan and Srabani Basu, Aradhana
Behl, Amit Dey, Alberta Ferrario, Benjamin Fleming, Sudha Ganapathi,
Rajarshi Ghose, Walter Hakala, Epsita Halder, Brian Hatcher, Prashant
Keshavmurthy, Frank Korom, Minakshi Menon, Christopher Ryan
Perkins, Ronit Ricci, Yael Rice, Sunil Sharma, Harleen Singh, Pushkar
Sohoni, Narendra Subramanian, Eliza Tasbihi, and Fozia and Murtuza
Vasowalla. My father, Aspandiar Ardeshir Irani, was and will ever remain a
A cknowledgments xv
wellspring of inspiration to me in more ways than I can here convey. It was

he who planted the first seeds of love of Persian literature in my heart. His
sudden passing in 2010 meant that he could not see the fruits of the tree he
had so lovingly tended. My beloved mother, Yasmin—my first teacher—
and my brother, Khushru, and his wife, Anuradha, have provided me
with the comfort of their wisdom and precious love. For them, I am ever
grateful. Kathleen, my mother-in-law, has been a source of inspiration for
me: her exemplary spirit and love of all things new have never failed to
energize me. Shaman and Roshan have enlivened this journey, providing
everything from happy distraction to thoughtful critique, and all the love
and patience they could muster in between. Shaman has indeed played a
pivotal role in the careful editing of my manuscript, of which he has indul-
gently read innumerable drafts. This project would not have been possible
without his abiding support. To Shaman and Roshan, my love and grati-
tude for their companionship on this long and winding road.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
AND OTHER CONVENTIONS
This monograph employs three systems of transliteration, all of which are

based upon the Library of Congress (LOC) romanization tables: for Bangla
and Avadhi, the LOC’s romanization system for “Sanskrit and Prakrit” has
been used, while for Persian and Arabic the separate LOC tables provided
for each of these languages have been employed.1
To respect Bangla’s dynamic connection to the two cosmopolitan lan-
guages of premodern Bengal—Sanskrit and Persian—certain conventions
have been adopted in transliterating Bangla. First, because of Bangla’s ge-
netic connection with Sanskrit and for purposes of easier identification of
Sanskrit loanwords (tatsama) in Bangla, the Sanskrit romanization system
has been used for the transliteration of Bangla. Orthographic distinction
between va and ba follows the etymology of the Bangla word in question.
Being a noun of Sanskritic origin, avatāra, for example, is romanized with
a va, while nabī and karibā, being an Arabic noun and a Bangla/Prakrit
verb respectively, are both romanized with a ba. Keeping in mind Bengali
sensibilities, exceptions have been made in the case of Baṅga, which is
romanized as such, rather than as Vaṅga; and with the modern Bengali
proper names Bandyopādhyāya, Banerjee, Basu, and so on, which are
commonly spelt with a “b” rather than a “v.” Second, to honor the Bangla
1. See “ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-

Roman Scripts,”
accessed here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html
xviii A N ote on T ransliteration and O ther C onventions
vernacular, I preferentially use Bangla forms of Arabo-Persian words

which occur in Islamic Bangla texts in discussions pertaining to this liter-
ature. Thus, I use “Āllā” rather than “Allāh,” “Korān” rather than “Qurʾān.”
Where confusion may arise, a Bangla term is provided with its Arabic or
Persian equivalent in parentheses in the first occurrence. In discussions
of medieval Islamic literature, Arabic and Persian proper nouns and
terms are provided in their romanized forms true to the transliteration
systems of each of these languages. Some degree of inconsistency is in-
evitable in discussions of Islamic Bangla texts in the context of medieval
Islamic literature and traditions. The following abbreviations have been
used throughout to indicate the relevant language, where confusion may
arise: Ar. for Arabic; Av. for Avadhi; B. for Bangla; and Pers. for Persian.
Third, in the case of Islamic Bangla proper names and terms of Arabo-
Persian origin, I drop the final inherent (and depending on the pronun-
ciation, occasionally the medial inherent or epenthetic) a. For instance,
the title Rasul Vijaya and the name Saiyad Sultān are transliterated thus,
instead of Rasula Vijaya and Saiyada Sulatāna. However, all such in-
herent vowels are retained in the citation of textual passages. Fourth, it
is also important to bear in mind that orthography in the middle Bangla
period is fluid; one word can be spelt in a number of different ways in
the manuscript tradition, with short and long vowels often being inter-
changeable. For instance, Ālī can also be spelt as Āli; nūra as nura. The
name of the Prophet of Islam can be spelt as “Mohāmmada” but also as
“Muhammada.” The name of the author of the Nabīvaṃśa may be spelt
“Chaiyada Cholatāna,” “Saiyada Sulatāna,” or “Chulatāna.” To avoid con-
fusion, in the latter two cases, I have used “Muhammad” in all discussions
pertaining to Islamic Bangla texts, and “Saiyad Sultān” throughout this
monograph. In translated passages, I have retained the orthography of
the middle Bangla as it is provided in Ahmad Sharif ’s critical edition of
the Nabīvaṃśa. It is noteworthy, however, that such critical editions them-
selves standardize middle Bangla orthography often to the variant that
most closely follows the sound of the Arabo-Persian word in question,
without systematically recording orthographic variants. So, at best, my
choice of variant reflects the critical edition rather than the many middle
A N ote on T ransliteration and O ther C onventions xix
Bangla variants of a particular Arabo-Persian word in the vast manuscript

tradition of the Nabīvaṃśa.
Transliteration of Bangla vowels follows the regular pattern, but with
the addition of three symbols drawn from conventions for Prakrit—ä, ï,
and ü—to accommodate the orthographic peculiarities of middle Bangla.
Verbs such as hao or haila, spelled with diphthongs in modern Bangla, are
in middle Bangla often spelled with two vowels, which I transliterate as
haä or haïla, respectively. Similarly, the verb form āchaüka, for instance,
is spelled with the medial vowels a and u rather than a diphthong, and is
transliterated as such. In addition, the characters ṛ and ṛh have been used
for retroflex consonants, as in bāṛi (“house”) or gāṛha (“dense”).
All proper names are provided in transliteration, except for those of
the well-known figures Muhammad Enamul Haq, Sukumar Sen, Ahmad
Sharif, and Rabindranath Tagore. For Bengali authors who also wrote in
English, I have used their own favored spellings of their names, rather than
transliterate these. Place names are provided in their standard modern
forms. The exceptions to this rule are Bangladeshi village names, which
I have chosen to provide in transliteration. Wherever relevant, premodern
forms of place names are also supplied in transliteration.
All titles of articles in Persian and Arabic are standardized to the LOC
system. This is particularly applicable to articles from the Encyclopedia of
Islam (Second Edition).
Concerning dating conventions, the abbreviation A.H. (anno Hegirae)
indicates the Islamic Hijrī calendar, which begins in the year 622 of the
Common Era. B.S. indicates bāṅgālā śaka, the approximate Common Era
date for which is calculated by the addition of 593. Names of individuals
are often followed by the years of their birth (b.) or death (d.) in the format
A.H./C.E., those of rulers by their regnal years (r.), and, in rare instances,
those of authors with their floruit (fl.).
A MAP OF MEDIEVAL BENGAL AND ARAKAN
KUCH BIHAR River

aputra
Brahm Sibsagar
Kuch Bihar
KAMPUR
MUGHAL
BENGAL
Sylhet
Rajmahal Gauda Mymensingh
Kangla
Ga SYLHET
ng Kheturi MANIPUR
es Habiganj
Ri
Murshidabad ver
Birbhum Dhaka TRIPURA
Katrabo Udaipur
Irrawaddy River
Navadvip
Satgaon Jalalpur Feni River
Jessore
Hooghly Paragalpur
Karnafuli River
Cakraśālā
Ava
Bay of
Bengal Naf River
ARAKAN
BURMESE
Mrauk U KINGDOM
Sandoway
INDIAN Pegu
OCEAN Bassein
0 85 170 Kilometers
0 85 170 Miles
Map of Arakan and Eastern South Asian in the Seventeenth Century

1
The Prophet of Light and Love

Nūr Muhammad in Bengal’s Mirror
A well-known seventeenth-century Bengali religious text opens with an

invocation of God and his creation. The author writes:
First I bow to the Lord, who is without beginning, a storehouse of riches,

he who created the fourteen realms in the blink of an eye.
He has neither beginning nor end, nor a fixed locus.
His unbroken form permeates all things.
He created the heavens, netherworlds, and the mortal world.
Adorning himself, he sports in various forms.
All know that he does not become manifest.
He takes the guise of the manifest in the hidden;
in the manifest, that of the hidden.
Whether or not the Word (śabada) takes on many forms,
it remains a single, congealed mass, devoid of vacant space.
Imperceptible in the perceptible, he rests imperceptibly.
Determining his unknown signs is utterly confounding.
No syllables can enunciate him; to contemplate him frustrates.
The void’s form emerges from the vessel (ghaṭa) of the void (śūnya).
Without Nirañjana, the Immaculate One, nothing is created therein.
Within form, the formless form ever rests.
The Muhammad Avatāra. Ayesha A. Irani, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190089221.003.0001.
2 T H E M U H A M M A D AVA TĀ R A
Form imbues fire with heat;

it perfuses the wind with cooling fragrance.
It assumes viscosity in earth’s clay,
while it makes its descent (avatari) into water as the turtle (kūrma).
Even as the sun’s rays suffuse the moonlight,
so too does Nirañjana permeate all things.
Even as butter inheres in cows’ milk,
so too is the Lord immanent in the world.1
Anyone conversant with the Indic world’s manifold cosmogonies will rec-
ognize the Vedic notion of creation through the Word and the division of
created beings into the fourteen worlds. They might recognize the Vaiṣṇava
formulation of Viṣṇu’s periodic descent to earth in order to restore right-
eousness, or the Buddhist idea of the primal void (śūnyatā), or even the
Sāṃkhya conception of the five elements (bhūta) that form creation’s ma-
terial basis. Yet this author does not write from the standpoint of a Vedic
theologian, nor a Vaiṣṇava, even though many Vaiṣṇava texts refer to their
supreme deity, Viṣṇu, as Nirañjana, the Immaculate One, and invoke his
ten avatāras, such as the Turtle (kūrma). Neither does he write as a follower
of the Buddhist or Dharma cults, nor as a promoter of Sāṃkhya philos-
ophy. The author reveals his perspective in the very next line:
Having taken the form of Muhammad—his own avatāra—

Nirañjana manifests his own portion (aṃśa) to propagate himself.
From time’s beginning to its end, the Creator
shall create messengers (paygāmbar) to rightly guide all peoples.2
The author is Saiyad Sultān, and his text, the Nabīvaṃśa (“Lineage of the
Prophet”), an epic work of some 17,396 couplets that chronicles the life of
Muhammad. Beginning with creation, it records the tales of his prophetic
1. I rely on Ahmad Sharif ’s critical edition of Saiyad Sultān’s Nabīvaṃśa (NV): Nabīvaṃśa of
Saiyad Sultān, in two volumes. NV 1:1–2. Hereafter the Nabīvaṃśa will be referred to as NV.
2. NV 1:2.
The Prophet of Light and Love 3
predecessors, Muhammad’s eventual birth and early years in Mecca, his

endeavor to come to terms with his prophetic mission and crucial role
in religious history, his persecution by the Meccans and emigration to
Medina, his numerous campaigns against the Meccans, his ultimate con-
quest of Mecca and establishment of Islam in his hometown, and, finally,
his unexpected demise shortly before his expedition to spread Islam be-
yond the Arabian peninsula. Saiyad Sultān was the first to write down
this story for the people of Bengal in their mother tongue. His efforts to
convince his people to turn to the one true God, forsaking all others, in
pivotal ways replicated Muhammad’s mission in the multireligious envi-
ronment of sixth-and seventh-century Arabia.
Sultān continues his praise of the Lord, employing Sāṃkhya conceptions
of the three guṇas, before invoking the various religious groups—Jaina,
Buddhist, and Vaiṣṇava—that were active in his world:
By harnessing the active principle (rajaḥ guṇa),

the Lord creates the world;
by means of the sentient principle (sattva guṇa),
he then maintains this world.
Through the principle of inertia (tamaḥ guṇa), he destroys the world.
Boundless is his glory through this triadic set.
He made some contented by nature,
for others he made the life of the sky-clad Jaina monk (digāmbarī);
some he made householders, while others wanderers.
He created the scholar to contemplate scripture (śāstra),
and fools to engage in vile behavior.
He created Buddhist monks, who must beg that they may eat,
and patrons to give them alms in charity.
He planted much love for one friend in another:
within both hearts, he quickened love for the other.
To produce, between foes, discord and amity,
to rouse between them dissent, disharmony,
he created Rāvaṇa to capture Jānakī,
and Rāma to slay the dreaded demons.

Nirañjana created Hari in Vr̥ndāvana to delight
in the savor (rasa) of the art of love’s pleasures.
Once he created man, he brought forth woman,
to make both fulfilled by sexual union.
Having created good and evil upon earth,
he alone performs all deeds, never anyone else.
Know that all that is done is his very doing.
All that you see is nothing but Nirañjana.3
What we have here, then, is a traditional Indic account of creation, and

the unfolding of God’s purpose in human life through the cyclical advent
of his avatāras, who unfailingly rid the world of evil, restoring harmony
to humankind. But why does the author insert Muhammad into this char-
acteristically purāṇic account? And, if the author is writing an account of
Muhammad’s life, what does he hope to accomplish by invoking Rāma
and Kr̥ṣṇa? I will argue that Saiyad Sultān’s text was designed to persuade
the people of Bengal to convert to Islam. But conversion, in the NV, is not
cast as the adoption of a new religion through a break with the old. Rather,
it is the recuperation of one’s own lost religious heritage, a re-cognition of
the role of Bengal’s ancient gods and ancestors in Muhammad’s lineage.
Conversion, suggests Sultān, is nothing but a return to the fold.
The history of Muhammad that Sultān rewrites is, in fact, a translation
into Bangla of a wide range of Persian and Arabic texts in the medieval
Islamic Tales of the Prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ) genre. Like all such pre-
modern histories, whether Islamic or purāṇic, it adopts a historiographic
approach which I call “salvation history,” wherein all history is represented
as unfolding according to a cosmic plan.4 In seeking to make the life of
Muhammad and Islam comprehensible to a Bangla-speaking audience,
Sultān adopts a gamut of sophisticated tactics to rewrite Bengali history,
aiming to convince his audience—a decidedly non-Muslim audience—that
3. NV 1:2–3.
4. Hagen 2017, 3.
they have had and will continue to have a major role in the grand teleology
of Islam, if they can but recover their ways.
If the measure of a successful translation, as the NV itself proposes, is
its ability to convert new peoples to Islam, how does this text seek to attain
such a seemingly implausible desideratum? At stake here is not whether
a single text can indeed accomplish religious conversion, but rather, how
a text might harness the power of vernacular translation to inspire such
monumental societal change. I show how the translation of salvation
history has the potential to transform a people’s imagination by altering
the stories that matter, the cultural memories and myths that mold iden-
tity, and ultimately, the dogmas that are foundational to religious doc-
trine and faith. I explore the multiple ways in which translation infuses
new meaning into received traditions, the potential challenges the author
faces in doing so, and the interpretive procedures he mastered to create
a tour de force of missionary writing. Indeed, his translation is anything
but simple, for Sultān was attempting to naturalize an Arab prophet, and
his history and doctrines, into a Bengali universe. Though the author’s
translational strategies will begin by demonstrating how Muhammad and
Islam fit into the cultural and ideological landscape of Bengal, they will
end by displacing traditional understanding with a new reading of Bengal
and Bengalis into an all-encompassing Islamic world history.
But who was Saiyad Sultān, what world did he inhabit, and what spurred
him to take up his pen as a tool for social transformation?
A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF CAṬ Ṭ A GRĀ MA
Dating from around the time of the first Mughal conquest of Bengal
(Gauṛa) in 1574, European accounts present the earliest external evidence
of the conversion of east Bengal’s rural populations to Islam, a phenom-
enon that these observers considered to be relatively recent.5 Writing in
1599, Francis Fernandez, surveying the field for Jesuit missionary work,
5. Eaton 1993, 132–133.

found the population of Katrābo to be entirely Muslim. This town,

situated in today’s Rupganj subdistrict of Narayanganj, Bangladesh, was
then the fortified capital established by ʿĪsá Khān, leader of the so-called
Twelve Chieftains (bārabhūñā), militant landlords of the southeast delta,
who could not be easily subdued by the Mughals.6 Three decades before
Fernandez, Césare Federici, a Venetian traveler, observed that the people
of Sandvipa Island, in the Bay of Bengal just off the coast of Caṭṭagrāma
(Chittagong), were Muslim, and that “they and the people of Chatigan
[Chittagong] were both subjects to one King.”7 This ruler was most likely
the Afghan, Sulaymān Karrānī (r. 1565–1572); his son, Dāʾūd Karrānī, last
of the independent sultans of Gauṛa, would be routed by the forces of the
Mughal ruler, Akbar, in 1576, at the battle of Ṭaṇḍā.8
For the next forty years the Mughals fought to subjugate the rebel-
lious Afghan military chieftains, who attracted to their dissident cause
local landlords, Portuguese rebels, and tribal leaders.9 From 1583 onward,
the Mughals shifted the focus of their military attentions from what they
called Bangālah, essentially northwest Bengal, the site of Islamic rule since
1204, to the Bhāṭi, the vast low-lying deltaic territories that constituted east
Bengal.10 Then a hotbed of local resistance struggles against Mughal im-
perial authority, this was a region approximating the land mass of today’s
Bangladesh.11 The indefinite number of powerful landlords, who came
6. Hosten 1925, 59, and n. 29. ʿĪsá Khān died in September 1599, and his son, Mūsá Khān,
inherited the masnad of Sonargaon and took over the leadership of the Twelve Chieftains. For
more on ʿĪsá Khān and Katrābo, see A. B. M. Shamsuddin Ahmed 2014 and Husne Jahan 2014
respectively. While Eaton (1993, n. 34, 147) suggests that when Fernandez visited Katrābo ʿĪsá
Khān was still alive, Zami and Lorrea (2016, 245) suggest that Mūsá Khān, his son, had, by then,
taken over the reins of power.
7. Federici [1625] 1905, 138.
8. Karim 1992b, 28.
9. Eaton 1993, 142.
10. Throughout this monograph, I use the term “east Bengal,” in the manner of Eaton. “The
frontier between Mughal ‘Bhati’ and ‘Bangala’, ” as Eaton (1993, 146) specifies, “approximated
the present frontier between Bangladesh and West Bengal.” Cf. ibid. Map 4, 139. For the geog-
raphy of the Mughal subah of Bengal, see Sarkar (ed.), [1948] 2006, 235.
11. Eaton, 145–146.
to be referred to as the Twelve Chieftains,12 rallied around the intrepid

Bengali Muslim leader, ʿĪsá Khān, the most powerful of them; he himself
controlled vast lands that included half of modern Comilla, half of Dhaka,
the whole of Mymensingh, except for Susang, and probably portions of
Rangpur, Bogra, and Pabna.13 Adopting a strategy of alternate conciliation
with and resistance to the Mughals, ʿĪsá Khān asserted his power over the
region through his naval prowess. Only after his death in 1599 was Rājā
Mān Siṅgh, Akbar’s distinguished Rājput general, able to significantly dis-
sipate local resistance via his defeat of the Afghans now regathered under
the leadership of Dāʾūd, one of ʿĪsá’s sons.
It was eventually during the Mughal emperor Jahāngīr’s reign (r.
1605–1627) that the Bhāṭi under the rigorous governorship of Islām
Khān Chishtī (r. 1608–1613), came to be consolidated under Mughal
rule. Mainly on account of Islām Khān’s remarkable powers of negotia-
tion with local chieftains, by the time of Ibrāhīm Khān’s governorship (r.
1617–1624), Mūsá Khān, another of ʿĪsá Khān’s sons, and other chieftains
had all been effectively integrated into the Mughal imperial service, being
placated with leadership roles in major Mughal expeditions, such as that
against the Tripurā king.14 As Richard Eaton has shown, the time when
the Mughals were making inroads into southeast Bengal coincided with
the eastward movement of the Ganges-Padma river system, which created
new fertile lands in Noakhali, directly northwest of Chittagong.15 In addi-
tion to subduing the Twelve Chieftains, the Mughals, as Mirzā Nathan’s
Bahāristān-i ghaybī and recent scholarship have shown, were competing
with the Arakanese to gain access over the revenues of the fertile plains of
Noakhali.16
12. Concerning the term bārabhūñā, and its Assamese antecedents, as well as the possible iden-
tity of these chieftains and the areas they controlled, see Bhattasali 1928, 30–36.
13. Ibid., 33–34.
14. Eaton 1993, 155–156.
15. Ibid., 194–198.
16. Van Galen 2002, 156.
Our author, Saiyad Sultān, however, lived farther to the east and south
of Noakhali, in Caṭṭagrāma (Chittagong). Nearly three centuries before the
Mughals established control over the Bhāṭi, Chittagong had been under
the control of the Delhi sultanate, and later under the independent sultans
of Bengal. First captured during the reign of Fakhr al-Dīn Mubārak Shāh
(r. 1338–1349), it was held continuously, first by the Firūzshāhī sultans of
Delhi, and later by the sultans of Bengal up to the time of Rukn al-Dīn
Bārbak Shāh (r. 1459–1474).17 From the rise to power of Rājā Gaṇeśa in
circa 1418 until 1588, around the time of Saiyad Sultān’s postulated birth,
Chittagong was bitterly contested by the Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist
rulers of Gauṛa, Tripura, and Arakan respectively. This was so undoubt-
edly because of its coveted harbor, which opened access to the Bay of
Bengal’s bustling intercontinental trade.
The Buddhist rulers of Arakan owed their very existence to the Bengalis,
for it was the sultan of Gauṛa, Rājā Gaṇeśa, alias Jalāl al-Dīn (r. circa 1418–
1433), who sheltered the fleeing Nara Mit Lha, the aspiring ruler of the
newly emerging kingdom of Arakan. With the military support of his
Arakanese Muslim or Rohingya troops, Rājā Gaṇeśa’s successor Nāṣir al-
Dīn Māḥmūd (r. 1433–1459) re-established Nara Mit Lha, on a firmer footing
at Mrauk U, the Arakanese capital on the banks of the Kaladan River. From
the time of the rule of Nara Mit Lha’s brother, the kings of Arakan adopted
Muslim names in addition to their Pali titles.18 Though this dual titulature,
as Jacques Leider asserts, did not indicate Arakan’s political dependency
on Bengal,19 it suggests that the Arakanese had cultural aspirations to be-
come a part of the Persian ecumene. After 1439, Man Khari alias ʿAlī Khān
founded Rāmu, extending Arakanese control into the Chittagong region;20
he also conducted wars with the Rājās of Tripurā.21 While the Arakanese
held most of southern Chittagong during the restored Ilyās Shāhī dynasty
17. Karim 1992a, 174.

18. Leider 2002, 128–129; also see Qanungo 1988, 286.
19. Leider 2002, 129.
20 . Ibid.
21. Subrahmanyam 2002, 111.
(r. 1437–1487), numismatic evidence suggests that sultān Nāṣir al-Dīn

controlled the Chittagong port.22
It was the remarkable Arakanese ruler Man Pa (r. 1531–1553) who set
about consolidating his kingdom by warding off a major Burmese inva-
sion and subduing the Portuguese armada at Mrauk U in 1534. While east
Bengal was still being newly consolidated under the Delhi sultanate by Sher
Shāh Sūr, Man Pa established control in 1539–1540 over the Chittagong
port, probably until its capture in 1556 by the Tripurā king, Vijayamāṇikya
(r. circa 1536–1563), who then controlled the thriving port for the next ten
years.23 Arakanese sources boast of Man Pa’s establishment of a military
outpost in Dhaka, and his appointment of one of his sons as the governor
of Sylhet.24 He also built some of the most famous temples and pagodas
of Mrauk U and fortified the city with an impressive system of defenses.25
The reign of the warrior king, Man Phalaung (r. 1571–1593), finally
brought an end to Tripurā’s contestation of the Chittagong region; in 1586,
they fought off an attack by Amaramāṇikya, the Tripurā king, who had
earlier consorted with Chittagonian Muslims and the Portuguese, who had
sought his help. The Tripurā ruler was punished by the Arakanese, who
beat him back and pillaged his capital city, Udayapur; the king fled and
ultimately committed suicide. As the powers of the Tripurā rulers ebbed,
Bengal was captured by the Mughals, who consolidated their sovereignty
over Bengal over the course of four decades. During these years, while ʿĪsá
Khān and his allies resisted the Mughals, it was the Arakanese who gained
gradual control over Chittagong. Man Phalaung appointed one of his sons
as the first Arakanese governor of Chittagong.26 As Leider points out,
upto 1610, the governors of Chittagong bore the title of “king of the
West” (anauk-bhuran), underscoring an expansionist vision that
22. Qanungo 1988, 149–150.

23. Leider 2002, 131.
24. Ibid., 132.
25. Ibid., 131.
26. This paragraph is summarized from ibid., 133–134.
clearly went beyond Chittagong. The Arakanese governors had the

remarkable privilege of minting their own coins. While their power
seemed slightly diminished after 1612, they kept on adopting Indian
titles (alongside their Arakanese titles), long after the Arakanese
kings abandoned this custom.27
In the early sixteenth century, Arakanese rulers courted the Portuguese

for their trade;28 and by the early seventeenth, Portuguese missionaries,
who had by 1567 established a firm presence at Bengal’s trading centers
of Satgaon, Chittagong, and Pipli (now in India), began to erect churches
in Arakan.29 Fray Sebastien Manrique, who visited Chittagong in 1630,
reports that the Arakanese were “granted Bilatas or rent lands in the
Saccasalā [Cakraśālā] district,” the area of central Chittagong associ-
ated with Saiyad Sultān’s life.30 From missionary accounts we also learn
how, during the rule of Sirisudhamma/Salim Shah II (r. 1622–1639),
Portuguese mercenaries fought alongside the Arakanese “Maghs” in
raids against the Mughals.31 However, Portuguese meddling in the pol-
itics of the region was to the detriment not only of Arakanese expan-
sionism,32 but also to their own interests; they were punished first by the
Arakanese, resulting in a loss of their settlements at Arakan, Chittagong,
the island of Sandvīpa, and Jessore (Cāndikāna), and later, at Hughli, in
1632, by Qāsim Khān’s decimation of their settlement under Shāh Jahān’s
orders.33
During the reign of the controversial king Candasudhamma (r. 1652–
1684), Mrauk U reached the height of its expansionist ambitions and
27. Ibid., 134.

28. Ibid., 131.
29. Luard 1927, 1: xxiv–xxv.
30. Ibid., 1: 271.
31. See, for instance, the accounts of Fray Sebastien Manrique, the Portuguese missionary
deputed to Arakan between 1629–1637. Ibid., 1: 89.
32. Leider 2002, 131.
33. Luard 1927, 1: xxv–xxvii.
imperial splendor. At the apogee of territorial expansionism, the kingdom

of Arakan, before 1666, extended nearly up to Dhaka in the west.34 Well into
the second half of the seventeenth century, by fighting off the Portuguese
and the Mughals, they managed to retain their hold over the region up
to the Feni River in the north to Cap Negrais in the south.35 European
travelers to Mrauk U before 1666 liken it in prosperity and beauty to
contemporaneous Lisbon and Amsterdam.36 Architectural historians of
Arakan from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries com-
ment upon Mrauk U’s remarkable fortification and the grand scale of its
building projects, making it a world city.37
Living in the shadow of the sultans of Gauṛa, the Buddhist rulers of
Arakan had become would-be sultans, who aspired to cultivate a cosmo-
politan yet Islamicizing court, which drew upon the intellectual, adminis-
trative, and martial talents of numerous Bengali Muslims to enhance their
kingly authority and the prestige of their court.38 “In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries,” as Sanjay Subrahmanyam points out,
the polity [of Arakan] is the locus of highly complex cultural

flows and eddies, where the diplomatic correspondence was often
conducted in Persian or Portuguese, where the normal language of
the court and countryside was Arakanese (Magh), where a highly
sophisticated literature was also produced in Bengali, and where
titulature and some chronicles reflected a late efflorescence of
Pali.39
34. Raymond 2002, 177.

35. Leider 2002, 134.
36. Raymond 2002, 177.
37. Gutman 2002, 167.
38. The Arakanese court is comparable, for instance, with that of Vijayanagar. Its rulers took
the title of hindu-rāya-suratrāṇa, “Sultan among Hindu Kings,” in adopting this and other
processes of what Wagoner calls “Islamicization.” Wagoner 1996, 853 and 854.
39. Subrahmanyam 2002, 111.
The glittering court of Satuidhamma (r. 1645–1652) was the epitome of

such cosmopolitanism. It was here that Saiyad Ālāol, Saiyad Sultān’s junior
contemporary, a Bengali migrant from Faridpur,40 composed, among other
works, his Bengali renditions of Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī’s Padumāvat,
and Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma and Haft Paykar. In his description, Rosāṅga
(the Bengali version of Mrohaung, the later name for Mrauk U)41 drew
peoples from near and far:
Having heard of Rosāṅga’s pleasures, diverse peoples of various lands

flocked beneath the king’s [protective] shade:
Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Turks, Abyssinians, Byzantines (Rūmīs),
Khorāsānīs, and Uzbekīs all;
people of Lāhore, Multān, northern India (Hindis), Kashmir, the
Deccan, Sindh,
Kāmarūpa, and Baṅga;
the people of Khotan, Karṇāla, Malabar,42
Āceh, Koci, and residents of Karṇāṭaka;
numerous descendants of Śekhs and Saiyads,
Mughal and Paṭhān fighters,
Hindu Rājputs and various [other] races;
peoples of Ava,43 Burma, and Siam (Śāma),
the Kukis of Tripurā: how many races should I list?
Armenians, the Dutch, the Danes, the English,
Catalonians, and the French;
the Spanish, Germans, coladāra Christians,
the Portuguese and various races.
The armies of the Magas (i.e., the Arakanese) are in the forefront of
all battles;
40. Ālāol racanāvalī, “satera.” d’Hubert 2018, 30.

41. Ibid., “panera.” Concerning the various names of Mrauk U, cf. Gutman 2002, n. 2, 163.
42. Here I have favored Qanungo’s textual reading of the line over that provided in Ālāol
racanāvalī, 7. Qanungo 1988, n. 6, 290–291.
43. Ābdul Hak Caudhurī 1994, 15.
innumerable, army-camps [stretch] endlessly.

Temple priests (mahanta) and ministers, each one bearing royal
umbrellas,
serve the king in an honorable manner.44
In 1666, the kingdom of Arakan, which had until then presented a chal-
lenge to its two larger neighboring states, Bengal and Burma, saw a
sudden turn of fortunes. With the Mughal governor’s recapture in that
year of the entrepôt of Chittagong, which for centuries had been alter-
nately held by the Arakanese and the Bengalis, Arakan, heavily dependent
on Portuguese slave-hunters for its maritime trade in slaves, fell into de-
cline.45 By 1784, the kingdom was captured by the Burmese, never to re-
cover its sovereignty again.
In sum, from 1588 until its Mughal conquest in 1666, a period roughly
coinciding with Saiyad Sultān’s postulated lifespan (1580–1650), the region
of Chittagong, south of the River Feni, was controlled by the Theravāda
Buddhist kings of Arakan.46 Before Shāistā Khān, the Mughal gov-
ernor, finally brought this area under Mughal rule in 1666, it continued
to be governed by the Arakanese. This region included Parāgalpura on
the river’s southern banks (today’s Mirsarai district), a place that some
scholars have associated with Saiyad Sultān. Considering Chittagong’s
tumultuous past, these eight decades under Arakanese rule constituted
a brief moment of relative stability in Chittagong’s history. Various eco-
nomic and trade indicators show that during the first fifty years of this pe-
riod, Chittagong, over and above its existing economic importance as an
entrepôt, so flourished as an important center of rice and textile production
that it became the single most important source of revenue for the Arakanese
state.47 By Sultān’s time, Rosāṅga, the multicultural capital of Arakan, was
44. Translation mine. Padmāvatī in Ālāol Racanāvalī, 7.

45. Eaton 2002, 226–228.
46. For dates of the Arakanese control over this area, Leider 2002, 134 and Qanungo 1988, 175.
47. Van Galen 2002, 156–157.
inhabited by Afghan adventurers fleeing the Mughals, Portuguese pirates

whom the Arakanese depended upon for the slave trade that fueled their
agriculture and economy, and Bengali Muslims of varying socio-economic
backgrounds.
ISLAMIC BANGLA LITERATURE AND ISLAMIZATION
This was also the period when this vibrant, and now more stable, Arakan
witnessed the emergence and efflorescence of Islamic Bangla literature.48
Two nodal literary production centers emerged therein: the Chittagong
port-town and its environs, and the Arakanese court. The vast ma-
jority of these early-modern east Bengali Muslim authors, among whom
Saiyad Sultān was a pioneer, wrote independently. They were usually af-
filiated with local Sufi orders and were interested in transmitting Islamic
teachings to the local peoples, unlettered in Persian and Arabic. As a re-
sult, they were keenly involved in the translation of Perso-Arabic works
on Islamic and Sufi doctrine and ethics into Bangla.49 A select few, such as
Daulat Kāji and Saiyad Ālāol, gained patronage at Mrauk U’s court.50 The
literature produced for courtly patrons largely drew upon the Persian and
Avadhi Sufi storytelling traditions.
Whether in courtly circles or in rural Chittagong, Islamic Bangla texts
participated in an “oral-literate culture”:51 these texts were transmitted to
48. Determining the dating and historical chronology of Islamic Bangla texts remains an in-
complete task. In their efforts to affirm the cultural significance of this literature that had hith-
erto been neglected by Bengali literary historiographers, early Bangladeshi literary historians
had established dates for certain texts much earlier than the linguistic and historical evidence
warrants. This is the case, for instance, with Śāh Muhammad Sagīr’s Iusuph-Jalikhā, which up
until recently was considered to be the earliest Islamic Bangla text, dating from as early as the
late fifteenth century. More recent studies of the text shows that it should probably be dated
closer to the late sixteenth century. Irani 2018b.
49. For a survey of the literature produced by Bengali Muslim authors in the early modern pe-
riod, see Roy 1983.
50. On Ālāol’s poetry, see d’Hubert 2018.
51. This term was coined by V. Narayana Rao, cited in Orsini 2013, xiv.
literate and unlettered audiences alike via oral recitation and song; and
in tandem with oral transmission, these texts variously harnessed the
Bangla and Arabic scripts and the technologies of the early modern book
(pustaka/pustikā; puñthi/puthi; ketāb) for their circulation and preser-
vation. Most significantly for my account, the texts that emerged from
Arakanese Chittagong were constituted by and constitutive of the very
historical moment witnessed independently by Federici and Fernandez
during their travels through east Bengal: the most intense Islamization
of Chittagong’s rural populace, along with neighboring Noakhali, and
Rangpur and Pabna to its northwest. By 1872, when the British conducted
the first census, over 70% of eastern Bengal’s population was determined
to be Muslim.52
Much remains to be known concerning the Islamization of Bengal. The
pioneering scholars Asim Roy (1983) and Richard Eaton (1993) offer distinct
historical reconstructions of how and why conversion to Islam took place in
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Bengal. In Roy’s model, Islam came to
be established among the Bengali masses by “Muslim cultural mediators,”
via their production of a “syncretistic” literary tradition that combined
elements of Islam with local, non-Islamic religious doctrine.53 Though the
social background of these mediators remained obscure to Roy, he put for-
ward the thesis that they bridged, through their writings, the gap between
the “great” and “little” traditions of Islamic Bengal, between the Muslim
elites (ashrāf), whom he characterized as “exogenous,” “orthodox sunni”
Muslims, and the indigenous local peoples (ajlāk) who were newly adopting
Islam.54 Though Asim Roy’s survey of Islamic Bangla literature remains the
most comprehensive available in English, his mediatory, syncretistic model
has been superseded by other literary and historical perspectives.
Approaching the subject as a historian rather than scholar of litera-
ture, Richard Eaton’s reconstruction of Bengal’s Islamization continues
52. Eaton 1993, Map 3, 121.

53. Roy 1983, 72.
54. Ibid., 70–71.
to hold salience. His “frontier” model proposes a coincidence between

the riverine, agrarian, and Islamic frontiers within the political context
of Mughal Bengal. While the river systems of the Bengal delta drifted
eastward, the Mughals, in order to increase their tax-base, provided land
grants to local pioneers prepared to clear the forested hinterland of the
eastern delta. Many of these men were Muslims, who participated in the
transformation of the frontier landscape by professing an Islam that came
to be identified as “a religion of the axe and plough, as well as a religion of
‘the Book’. ”55 If they offered the bounties of agrarian cultivation to local
peoples, they also built village mosques and local Korān (Ar. Qurʾān)
schools, which became the nodal points of Islamic identity and its ar-
ticulation in the east.56 As a result of such pragmatic interventions that
improved the lives of frontier peoples, many such pioneers came to be es-
tablished in local memory as charismatic guides, pīrs. For these reasons,
Eaton explains, pīr-worship was a pervasive feature of eastern Bengal’s
religious landscape.57
In my study, I strive to refine our understanding of Bengal’s Islamization
by foregrounding the first major work of Islamic doctrine to be written for
Bengalis in their mother tongue. Rather than writing a history of how
conversion to Islam “happened” in Bengal—a “factual” history pieced to-
gether from epigraphic, documentary, art-historical, geographical, archae-
ological, and other evidence—I focus on Saiyad Sultān’s NV to uncover
how conversion was remembered and represented to have happened.58 In
other words, a central premise of this book is that the study of Saiyad
Sultān’s “mnemohistory” of conversion to Islam in the medieval period,
and examination of his salvation history in mnemohistorical terms in the
broader context of Islamic historiographical traditions, shed new light on
55. Eaton 2003, 20.

56. For a description of one such traditional village mosque and Korān school in a modern-day
Sylheti village, see the Conclusion of this monograph.
57. Eaton 1993.
58. On “factuality” and “actuality” in historicizing the past, see Jan Assmann 1998, 9–10.
the Islamization of Bengal itself.59 A term coined by Jan Assmann to define

a relatively new sub-field of history that he pioneered, “mnemohistory”
enables us to examine Sultān’s “recourse to a past” to identify what is
of “significance and relevance” to his present.60 We see in this recourse
Sultān’s aspirations for his and subsequent generations. For Sultān’s pre-
sent does not merely ‘receive’ the past, as Assmann emphasizes, but is
‘haunted’ by it, while the past, in turn, “is modeled, invented, reinvented,
and reconstructed by the present.”61
Sultān’s mnemohistory of Islam’s spread, as detailed in Chapter 3, is
characterized by the effective translation of the Qurʾān. Herein we find
the foundational inspiration for Sultān’s own enterprise of translation. He
embarks upon his composition because of belief in the power of vernac-
ular translation of the Qurʾān for drawing new peoples to the faith. At
a broader level, though, the NV is a salvation history, and its study, in
mnemohistorical terms, is also an examination of how Muslim intellectuals
have remembered their religious past, and the role of translators in its
periodic renewal, from the earliest Islamic period to Sultān’s own time.
Mnemohistory opens out the possibility of “survey[ing] the story-lines
of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and
discontinuities of reading the past.”62 We examine why certain mythical
traditions of the past live on in Sultān’s salvation history, why others were
“forgotten,” and why new ones took their place. We see how translation,
and the multifarious levels of meaning-making it offers, is mobilized to
rewrite Islamic salvation history in a manner that makes it relevant to
Bengalis.
Sultān’s translation is not a mere expression of hope for the conversion of
non-Muslim Bengalis to Islam, but rather, I argue, a form of social action.
The NV simultaneously emplots conversion within the historiographic
59. Ibid., 9.
60 . Ibid.
61 . Ibid.
62 . Ibid.
process, while sowing the seeds of ideas that, ultimately, expand the
Bengali hinduāni (Indic and Hindu) imagination, opening it out for the
reception of new musalmāni ideas and beliefs.63 In exploring translation
as “both an aesthetic and a politic of communication,” as Vincent Rafael
has observed about the Christian evangelical context, I thus hope to reveal
“the ideological structure” of Islamic missionary practice and identity-
building activities, crucial to my reconstruction of the role of Muslim
Bengali intellectuals in the rooting of Islam in Bengal.64
But what exactly is known about Saiyad Sultān?
LITERARY PORTRAITS OF THE AUTHOR
This is how a famous disciple of his describes him:
In Āmir Hocan’s line was born a repository of virtue:

an expert in all the scriptures, an ocean of the nine rasas.
His beautiful body is like the dark new raincloud;
in charity, he is the heavenly wishing tree, the kalpataru, itself;
in steadfastness, the very earth.
His face is more radiant than the full moon;
his eyes like lotus-petals;
his smile, sweet and gentle, is ambrosial.
Pīr Śāh Sultān is an ocean of grace: affectionate lord to his servants,
and in virtue, a veritable jewel mine.65
Couched in the topoi of classical Sanskrit literature, this eulogy, in the vein
of both Perso-Arabic encomia to God, the Prophet, kings, and pīrs, and
63. Concerning the term hinduāni as it is used in Sultān’s writing, see Chapter 3.
64. Rafael 1988, 22.
65. My translation of a passage quoted in Karim and Sharif 1960, 349–350 from a manuscript
of the Maktul Hosen of Muhammad Khān (No. 346, Ms. 554, in the Munshi Abdul Karim
Collection). Cf. similar manuscripts quoted by Karim and Sharif 1960, 354–355, 371.
vandanās to the deity, or to the saints in South Asian hagiographies,66 shows

how Muhammad Khān chooses to enshrine the memory of his master,
Saiyad Sultān. A prominent poet in his own right, Muhammad Khān wrote
Maktul Hosen,67 “The Slain Hosen,” the first work in Bangla on the battle
of Karbalā, which has been hailed as “the prototype of all Bangla poems
on the Karbalā stories.”68 Of significant social standing, Muhammad Khān
was Saiyad Sultān’s chief disciple,69 and was a descendant, seven genera-
tions removed, of Rāstī Khān, the governor of Chittagong under the later
Ilyās Shāhī ruler, Rukn al-Dīn Bārbak Shāh. Rāstī Khān is mentioned in
Muhammad Khān’s family tree as Cāṭigrāma deśapati, presumably the de
facto independent ruler of northern Chittagong under Bārbak Shāh’s rule.70
A few tidbits on the historical Sultān can perhaps be gleaned even from
this hyperbolic tribute to his master: Sultān was considered to be a pīr, a
venerable Sufi master, by his disciples; he was considered to possess vast
scriptural knowledge; and he was dark-skinned, hence most likely a native
of Bengal. A passage from a manuscript of the Kiyāmatnāmā (the last sec-
tion of the Maktul Hosen) informs us that Muhammad Khān composed
his work at the behest of his master:
The Nabīvaṃśa was composed by an eminent man (puruṣa

pradhāna). He narrated all that arose in the beginning. No sooner
did he finish composing “The Death of the Prophet” than he ordered
me to compose the conclusion. To respect his command, I thought
66. Concerning such eulogies in South Asian hagiographies, see W. L. Smith 2000, Chapter Six.
67. The title has many variants in the scribal tradition: Muktul Hocaen, Maktul Hocen, Muktāla
Hochana, etc. Manuscripts of Maktul Hosen, Karim and Sharif 1960, 344–360.
68. Ibid., 345.
69. It is the literary historian Muhammad Śahīdullāh who is credited with determining the
master-disciple relationship between Saiyad Sultān and Muhammad Khān. Haq [1957] 1991, 295.
70. For Muhammad Khān’s family tree, see Karim 1964, 154. Sharif 1962, 211. Also see Satya-Kali
Vivāda Saṃvāda of Muhammad Khān, 101–110. Concerning Rāstī Khān, see Qanungo 1988,
154. The a.h. 878/1474 c.e. inscription at the Rāstī Khān mosque, in Jobrā village, Hāthahazāri,
Chittagong, identifies Rāstī Khān as Majlis-i Aʿlá, “the exalted governor” of Rukn al-Dīn Bārbak
Shāh in Chittagong. Karim 1992a, 173–174.
to compose a padāvalī on the tales of the four companions. Having

completed the description of the two brothers, I retold the accounts
of doomsday. In conclusion, I composed a section on the vision of
the Lord. Beyond this, there can be no more to say. If one were to
join the two pāncālikās together, one could thread together the ac-
counts of the beginning and the end.71
Muhammad Khān’s Maktul Hosen is a voluminous work in eleven cantos

concerning the tales of the first four caliphs, the story of the two brothers,
Hāsan and Hosen, at Karbalā, and the eschaton, which he completed in
1646 C.E. He thus takes upon himself to bring his master’s work to what
he considered to be its logical conclusion.72 To my mind, however, Sultān’s
NV is a complete work. The title itself, “Lineage of the Prophet,” is appro-
priate to the author’s chosen subject, a universal history of the Prophet
Muhammad. In his conclusion to the NV, Sultān does appear to allude to
future projects, specifically mentioning the possibility of his composing
“another book” (bhinna eka pustaka) when the opportunity arises.73 While
this suggests that he considered the NV to be complete, it does not ne-
gate the possibility that Saiyad Sultān later asked his disciple, Muhammad
Khān, to carry forward his literary legacy by taking up the projects he
himself was either unable or unwilling to work on.
In Muhammad Khān’s homage to his master, we see the beginnings
of an hagiographic tradition surrounding Sultān, which gathers fur-
ther significance in the early-modern Bangla literary tradition, wherein
Sultān is hailed as a kavi guru, teacher of poets. Khān immortalizes his
master not merely for his erudition, but for his spiritual authority as pīr.
He legitimates his own writings, thus, by placing them within the literary
71. This is my translation of a passage from Maktul Hosen quoted in Haq [1957] 1991, 296–297.
Cf. also tāhāna ādeśa mālya sireta dhariā | mohāmmada khāne kahe pāñcāli raciā || aparādha
māgī āmhi gunigana pāe | doṣa teji guna vicāribā sarvvathāe || Maktul Hosen of Mohamad Khān
quoted in Karim and Sharif 1960, No. 346, Ms. 554, 349–350.
72. For the chapter outline of the Maktul Hosen, see Haq [1957] 1991, 326. See also Maktul
Hosen, quoted in Sharif [1972] 2006, 71–72. For further details on Khān’s work, see Karim and
Sharif 1960, 344–367; and Haq [1957] 1991, 321–328.
73. NV 2:547.
and spiritual genealogy of a local pīr-author, who provides his stamp of

authority for Khān’s own literary endeavors. By ostensibly providing in-
struction to his student to carry forward his literary project, Sultān too
ensures that his legacy is sustained and extended, at least into the suc-
ceeding generation.
The only self-description Saiyad Sultān himself has ostensibly left be-
hind is embedded in the opening lines of a single manuscript of the
NV held in an unknown private collection. Translated here into prose,
this crucial autobiographical passage, found only in this unique man-
uscript,74 has become the elusive basis for all scholarly debate con-
cerning Sultān’s dates and birthplace, a subject that I have elaborated
upon elsewhere:75
74. I have yet to set eyes on the manuscript that contains this significant, oft-quoted passage.
Most of this passage, which Haq reproduced from a manuscript of the Śab-i merāj, was first
cited by him in Haq [1934] 1997, 315–316. (The longer passage provided here is quoted from
Haq [1957] 1991, 294–295.) From this article (Haq [1934] 1997, 314), it would seem that the
manuscript in question was in the private collection of Ābdul Karim Sāhityaviśārada. However,
an examination of the manuscripts in his collection in the Dhaka University archives shows
that this is not the case. Sharif also quotes the passage ([1972] 2006, 66), citing Sharif 1958, 551,
raising the hope, thereby, that the manuscript cataloged as No. 490, Ms. 433 therein, would con-
tain the said passage. Close examination of the manuscript, however, reveals that beyond the
opening two couplets, which Sharif quotes correctly, the essential next few couplets, beginning
with ebe pustakera kathā. . . . and ending with sahāya rasūla yāra taribe sāgara, were errone-
ously ascribed to this manuscript. While Sharif also quotes this passage in his introductions to
volumes one and two of the NV, the passage is nowhere to be found in the critical edition itself.
Sharif, introduction, NV 1:9, and introduction, NV 2:7. An editorial note in Sharif 1958 (44)
mentions that this kālajñāpaka śloka (the verse that intimates the date of composition) was col-
lected by Muhammad Enamul Haq. Later (ibid., 251) another editorial note about this manu-
script mentions: Puthiṭi mālikera kāchei rahiyā giyāche. Tini hātachārā karite cāhena nāi. (“The
manuscript has remained with the owner; he did not wish to relinquish it.” Translation mine.)
For these reasons, it is highly probable that this manuscript was in the private collection of
Muhammad Enamul Haq. Haq’s manuscript collection was posthumously donated by his son,
Ibne Inam, to the Jahangirnagar University. While this collection had not been cataloged by
the university, when I visited in December 2014, I was able to examine the manuscripts in this
collection in person. I was unable to locate the concerned manuscript among the thirty or so
manuscripts that comprised this collection at Jahangirnagar University. The Dhaka University
manuscript archives were then in the process of digitizing this collection at Jahangirnagar
University. An appendix of a list of public and private manuscript collections in East Pakistan
and West Bengal found in Sharif (1958, 704), however, records that Muhammad Enamul Haq’s
private collection comprised one hundred and twenty-five manuscripts. It is uncertain where
the remaining manuscripts of this important collection are currently located.
75. Irani 2019.
Know that Āllā’s glories are too boundless to communicate. First,

I salute the formless Lord. I shall proclaim all that was in the begin-
ning. Second, shall I speak of Khodā’s messenger, widely known in
the world as Nūr Muhammad. Third, I salute all the companions;
fourth, I bow to the pīrs and messengers. I shall now attempt to speak
about this book, even though I’m not capable of bearing in mind
all that is to be conveyed. Obeying the Commander (laśkar) Parāgal
Khān’s orders, Kavīndra [Parameśvaradāsa, the poet] thoughtfully
narrated the tales of the Mahābhārata. Hindus and Muslims, thus,
read it in every household. None listen to the tales of Khodā and the
messenger. The year/s (abda) calculated via the addition (yoga) of
graha śata and rasa has/have passed. [Yet] no one has told these tales
in the local language. In Arabic and Persian, there are many books.
The learned understand these, not the ignorant. Feeling pained, I in-
ternally resolved to speak a great deal about the tales of the mes-
senger. In the settlement of learned men of the Commander’s town
(laśkarera pura), I am but a fool, a descendant of a saiyad. I ask for
forgiveness at the feet of the learned. If they find fault, let them for-
give me, and not complain. Says Saiyad Sultān, why do you worry
yourself to death? Those who have the messenger for assistance will
cross the ocean.76
This passage reveals several details about the author, some of which re-
call snippets of information supplied by Muhammad Khān’s portrait.
Sultān appears to be impressed by Kavīndra Parameśvaradāsa’s Bangla
abridgment of the Mahābhārata, which, to his chagrin, is popular even
among Muslims. Parameśvaradāsa wrote this work under the patronage
of Commander Parāgal Khān—the son of Rāstī Khān,77 and governor of
Caṭṭagrāma under ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ḥusayn Shāh (r. 1493–1519). This Rāstī
Khān, as seen earlier, is also the ancestor of Sultān’s disciple, Muhammad
76. Haq [1957] 1991, 294–295; translation mine.

77. Mahābhārata of Kavīndra Parameśvaradāsa, 1:5.
Khān. We learn that Sultān came from a line of saiyads and lived in the
Commander’s town in a settlement of ālims, men learned in the Islamic
sciences. It might be safe to infer, thus, that he belonged to a family of local
Muslim elites, who were socially prominent and well-connected. Unlike
the poet Parameśvaradāsa, Sultān’s status allows him to become an inde-
pendent author, whose only allegiance is to his Sufi master, Śāh Hosen.
Most importantly, we have here laid out for us, a classical feature of pre-
modern Islamic works wherein the author presents his ostensible reasons
for the composition of his work (sabab-i taʾlīf-i kitāb). He resolves to create
a text to popularize the traditions of Āllā and his messenger among native
Bengalis, to whom Arabic and Persian texts are linguistically inaccessible.
Confusion reigns in scholarship on the meaning of the controversial
chronogram supplied in the passage above. Most interpretations treat
abda as a singular noun. But the most thoughtful and plausible reading
of this chronogram has been provided by Sukhamay Mukhopadhyay,
who treats it as a plural noun.78 In his opinion, these lines suggest that
the NV is based upon an Arabic text on the Prophet Muḥammad com-
posed 906 years ago, which had not been translated into the deśī up until
Sultān’s time. While Mukhopadhyay was unable to identify the Arabic text
in question, his interpretation of the chronogram brings up the prom-
ising possibility that the text this NV manuscript refers to is Muḥammad
ibn Isḥāq’s renowned Sīrat Rasūl Allāh. Ibn Isḥāq was born circa 85/704,
and according to tradition, died in 150/767.79 From this emerges an in-
triguing, and in my view potentially compelling, scenario: that the prob-
lematic couplet makes reference to Ibn Isḥāq’s death date, and that the NV
was completed just prior to Muhammad Khān’s 1056/1646 Maktul Hosen,
in the same year or the year prior. For if Ibn Isḥāq died in a.h. 150, adding
Mukhopadhyay’s 906 to this (assumed to be hijrī years) would yield a.h.
1056, that is, 1646 c.e. Admittedly, this would leave a short window of time
78. Mukhopadhyay 1974, 191–193.

79. The earliest extant manuscript (riwāya) of Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra was written in Medina by Ibrāhīm
ibn Saʿd (110–184). Guillaume (1955) 2004, xxx.
for Muhammad Khān to complete his work, but there is no reason to rule
this out.
A crucial piece of evidence used to determine Sultān’s floruit is evinced
by a chronogram supplied by a manuscript of Muhammad Khān’s Maktul
Hosen.80 This chronogram supplies both the śaka date and the hijrī date, a
doubly verifiable, definitive date for the completion of the Maktul Hosen: 1567
Śaka (1646 c.e.) and a.h. 1056 (1646 c.e.).81 Given that Muhammad Khān
professes to have composed this work, when the NV was completed, we
can conclude that the terminus ad quem of Sultān’s floruit can be taken to
be 1645. Based upon Muhammad Khān’s descriptions of his master as a
youthful-looking man, moreover, I suggest that the earliest possible date for
Sultan’s birth could be 1580 or so, making him, at the most, sixty-five years of
age when he completed his NV.82 Furthermore, as I have shown elsewhere,
this suggested date of birth corroborates well with Saiyad Sultān’s possible
contemporaries in Muhammad Khān’s family tree.83
A significant piece of internal evidence appears to bolster a seventeenth-
century dating for the NV. The author states that the reason why he
excludes the tale-cycle of Yūsuf from his tales of the prophets is that it
is already well-known to local peoples. While it is certainly possible that
oral accounts of the Yūsuf tale were in circulation, intertextual evidence,
examined in detail in Chapter 5, suggests that Sultān was likely familiar
with Śāh Muhammad Sagīr’s Iusuph-Jalikhā, the earliest extant Bangla
80. Here I concur with the view first put forward by Āsāddar Ālī; Ālī 1979, republished in
1990, 122.
81. Haq [1957] 1991, 326–327. Concerning the manuscript from which this colophon is taken,
see Karim 1914/1321 B.S., Ms. 241, 161. This manuscript, according to Eaton (1993, 294), is pre-
served in the National Museum Dhaka, Ms. No. 2826, Acc. No. 6634. I have personally seen
this manuscript on display in the National Museum Dhaka, but was not given permission to
examine it in person. The Śaka or Śakābda calendar (not to be confused with the Bāṅgālā Śaka
(B.S.) of Baṅgābda calendar), produces an approximate Common Era date by the addition of
78. Bhattacharjee 1978, Pariśiṣṭa Ga.
82. Ālī 1990, 124.
83. Irani 2019.
retelling of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā.84 Sagīr’s translation

was probably composed toward the end of the sixteenth century.85 I argue
that Sultān took Sagīr’s aesthetic choice of representing the pious Yūsuf as
the antithesis of the purportedly profligate Kr̥ṣṇa into new, polemical, and
iconoclastic directions. While dispensing entirely with the well-known
tale-cycle of the prophet Yūsuf, Sultān replaces it with the tale of the god-
turned-prophet Kr̥ṣṇa.
Sultān’s invective against Kr̥ṣṇa, moreover, seen in his account of
Hari, would only have been necessary at a time when Vaiṣṇavism was
perceived as a potent threat to Islam. Although Vaiṣṇavism was a long-
standing religious tradition in Bengal, it was not driven by a missionizing
impetus until it was newly charged in the sixteenth century by the char-
ismatic founder of the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava movement, Kr̥ṣṇa Caitanya
(1486–1534). As I argue in Chapter 5, the inaugural Kheturi festival, or-
ganized sometime between 1615 and 1620, and then celebrated annually
in years to come, was a historic moment in the consolidation and spread
of the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava movement in east Bengal. It was in the early
seventeenth-century that Gauṛīya missionizing activities were at their
peak, making them the greatest rivals of Islam in the region. In my view,
Sultān’s strong polemic against the Vaiṣṇavas, discussed in Chapter 5,
suggests that the NV was written in the post-Kheturi period of Gauṛīya
Vaiṣṇavism’s missionary expansion and consolidation, most likely
situating it sometime between 1620 and 1645. Such a reading thus allows
us to determine Sultān’s floruit to be 1620–1645.
Over the last several decades, Saiyad Sultān’s legacy has become
embroiled in regional controversies, wherein modern Chittagonian and
Sylheti groups of scholars and the faithful have sought to claim him to
84 Since the Bangla consonants cha and sa are used interchangeably in middle Bangla orthog-
raphy, as are the Bangla vowels a and o, and i and e, “Sagīr” is alternatively spelt as “Chagīr,”
“Iusupha” as “Iuchupha,” and “Jalikhā” as “Jolekhā” or “Jolikhā.”
85. For a discussion of the dating of Sagīr’s work, see Irani 2018b.
bolster the prestige of their respective regions.86 Through these claims and
counter-claims, more heat than light has been generated about Sultān’s
birthplace and time, a subject that I have discussed in detail elsewhere.87
Concerning the geography of Saiyad Sultān’s life, consideration of all the
evidence scholarship has brought to light favors the author’s association
with medieval Cakraśālā of Chittagong. As earlier seen, the ancestors
of Sultān’s chief disciple, Muhammad Khān, were important figures in
the history of Chittagong during the Bārbak Shāhī and Ḥusayn Shāhī
periods. Parāgal Khān and his son, Rāstī Khān, and their descendants
administered the two regions of Chittagong: Parāgalpura in the north, just
south of the Feni River in today’s Mirsarai district, and the principality of
Cakraśālā, in central Chittagong, which, under the Arakanese, spanned
the region between the Karṇaphuli and Mātāmuhuri rivers, and bordered
on the medieval principality of Cākariā. M. E. Haq and Ahmad Sharif
identified the laśkarera pura of Sultān’s verse to refer to Parāgalpura, in
north Chittagong. No local histories about the author, however, have been
found in this area. Given that the poet Muhammad Mukīm associates
Saiyad Sultān and his descendants with Cakraśālā,88 it seems possible, as
Muhammad Śahīdullāh suggests, that laśkarera pura referred to Cakraśālā,
which was governed by the Arakanese representative, who probably bore
the title of “Laśkar.”89 As I explore elsewhere, local legends collected from
86. For scholarship on Saiyad Sultān’s legacy in Chittagong, see mainly M. E. Haq [1934/1341
B.S.] 1997/1404 B.S.; Sharif (1972/1379 B.S.) 2006. For Sylheti counter-claims to his legacy, see
Ālī 1990/1397 B.S., first published in 1979/1386 B.S.; Islam 1999 and [1981/1388 B.S.] 1990/1397
B.S.; Ābdullāh forthcoming; and Hosenī Ciśtī 1987/1394 B.S. See also Bhattacharjee 1944–1945/
1351–1352 B.S.
87. Irani 2019.
88. ebe praṇāmiba āmi pūrva kavi jāna | pīra mīra cakraśālā chaida cholatāna || mohāmmada
khāna vitarpaṇa daulata kājivara | ehi tina āra eka āche tatpara || gauravāsi raila āsi rosāṅgera
ṭhāma | kavi guru mohākavi ālāola nāma || Mukīm’s couplets cited in Sharif ([1972] 2006, 57; cf.
Karim and Sharif 1960, 88–89, and Śahīdullāh [1965] 2002, 100. Mukīm also writes: cakraśālā
bhūmi mauddhe pīra jādā ṭhāma | chaida cholatāna vaṃśe sāhādallā nāma || eke tāna bhrātr̥putra
dutīye jāmātā | sarva śāstra viśārada śarīyata jñātā || tāna putra śrī chaida mohāmmada chaïda
| nijapīra sthāne dui haïla murīda || Satya-Kali Vivāda-Saṃvāda of Muhammad Khān, 112. Cf.
Karim and Sharif 1960, 85; and see Sharif [1972] 2006, 57.
89. Śahīdullāh [1965] 2002, 101.
two villages in modern-day Patiya district (medieval Cakraśālā) corrob-

orate the holy man Saiyad Sultān’s enduring connection to this region in
community memory, bolstering the case for Saiyad Sultān’s association
with Cakraśālā over that of Parāgalpura.90 Since the time of Rāstī Khān’s
son, Mīnā Khān, Cakraśālā had been a seat of administration for the de
facto governor of Ḥusayn Shāhī Chittagong, and though these regions
were past their heyday by Sultān’s time, it seems likely that they retained
a significant population of Muslim elites. During the Mughal period,
Cakraśālā was broken down into smaller sub-units (ṭhāṇas) and is today
reduced to a small village in present-day Patiya.91 Local histories of Saiyad
Sultān associate him with Baṛaliyā village in Patiya, where he is said to
have established his homestead.92
With this brief historical background of the author in mind, let us re-
turn to Sultān’s amazing story of creation.
INSCRIBING ISLAM IN THE BENGALI RELIGIOUS

LANDSCAPE
Let us return to Sultān’s invocation to reconsider how Sultān inscribes

Islam into the Bengali religious landscape. Sultān commenced his nar-
rative with prayerful praise of Prabhu Nirañjana, the Immaculate Lord.
His eulogy transposes the encapsulated form of the Persian ḥamd and
90. Irani forthcoming.

91. Qanungo 1988, 78–79 and 627–628. According to Luard’s note in his translation of Travels
of Fray Manrique, Cakraśālā, known to the Portuguese as Saccasalā, is “the present district
of Sacannya or Sat-Kannya, lying between Ramu and Chittagong. It stretches north-east to
Comilla, south to Halabun near Cox’s Bazaar and the east of Chittagong.” Luard 1927, 1: n. 5, 89.
92. Irani forthcoming. Of decidedly Buddhist nomenclature, the principality of Cakraśālā, is
considered to be an important Buddhist center in local tradition, a region where the Buddha al-
legedly established Dharmacakras. Qanungo 1988, 81. It is relevant to note here that Unainpurā,
Baṛaliyā’s neighboring village, houses a Theravāda temple and is the seat of the supreme patri-
arch of the Buddhists of Bangladesh, H. H. Saṃgharāja Dharmasena Mahāthera.
naʿt—the encomiums to God and the Prophet, respectively, with which

Persian narrative poems (mas̱navī) begin93—into the locally available
Indic maṅgalācaraṇa or Bengali vandanā, the invocation to the deity that
opens most Bangla narrative texts. The poetic form of the Persian mas̱navī
is translated into the Bangla payāra, which, like the mas̱navī, is composed
of a series of rhyming couplets with the end-rhyme (aa, bb, cc, dd, and so
on) and possesses metric qualities that make it conducive to a declama-
tory, sonorous, and quick-paced narrative rendition used in epic poetry.94
While emulating the Persian praise poems, Sultān’s Bangla counterpart,
like that of the coeval Punjabi qiṣṣa tradition, is considerably truncated
in form.95 Yet the tasks it accomplishes are several. In addition to its li-
turgical function of soliciting the blessings of the deity for the auspicious
inauguration of the literary enterprise at hand, the Bangla hāmd functions
narratologically as a prologue. Here it encapsulates key cosmogonical and
prophetological themes, while coincidentally supplying a sampler of the
NV’s distinctive rhetorical strategies. Drawing upon purāṇic cosmology,
the prologue traces the creation by Prabhu Nirañjana of the triple world,96
which consists of the fourteen realms (bhuvana or loka): the seven heavens
(ākāśa or svarga), including the earth (martyaloka, the lowest heaven),
and the seven netherworlds (pātāla).97 While finding a suitable purāṇic
equivalent in the bhuvanas or lokas, Sultān’s “fourteen realms” refer to
the Islamic cosmological strata of the seven heavens and the seven earths
represented in the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ accounts.98 Āllā’s omnipotence is such,
as Sultān explains, following the eleventh-century Persian qiṣaṣ author
93. In imitating the Persian poet Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw was the first to introduce the narrative
convention of the Persian invocations to God and the Prophet (ḥamd and naʿt respectively) into
the mas̱navīs of the Indian subcontinent. Mir 2006, 738.
94. For a definition of the mas̱navī, see Rypka et al. 1968, 98.
95. On the Punjabi qiṣṣa tradition that began in the sixteenth century and for examples of
invocations peculiar to the Punjabi qiṣṣa, see Mir 2010, 152–155.
96. Concerning the choice of name for the creator, see below.
97. Rocher 1986, 130–131.
98. ʿArāʾis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ of al-Thaʿlabī, trans. Brinner, 10–13 and 19–24. Qiṣaṣ al-
anbiyāʾ of al-Kisāʾī, trans. Thackston, 1997.
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Title: Rogues and vagabonds
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROGUES

AND VAGABONDS ***
Transcriber’s Note
See end of this document for details of corrections and other changes.
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
COMPTON MACKENZIE
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
Rogues and Vagabonds
Fairy Gold
Coral
Santa Claus in Summer
The Heavenly Ladder
The Old Men of the Sea
The Altar Steps
Parson’s Progress
Rich Relations
The Seven Ages of Women
Sylvia Scarlett
Poor Relations
Sylvia and Michael
The Vanity Girl
Carnival
Plashers Mead
Sinister Street
Youth’s Encounter
The Passionate Elopement
By
COMPTON MACKENZIE
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ON MURRAY HILL : : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To A. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Neptune’s Grotto 11
II The Factory 26
III The Proposal 36
IV Married Life 43
V Tintacks in Brigham 55
VI The Diorama 74
VII True Love 83
VIII Rogues and Vagabonds 96
IX A Merry Christmas 110
X The Pantomime 121
XI The End of the Harlequinade 127
XII Looking for Work 135
XIII Lebanon House 144
XIV Letizia the First 163
XV The Tunnel 172
XVI Blackboy Passage 182
XVII The Two Roads 195
XVIII Triennial 215
XIX Nancy’s Contralto 222
XX Southward 232
XXI Classic Grief 240
XXII Sorrento 248
XXIII Cœur de Lion 267
XXIV Decennial 274
XXV The Common Chord 286
CHAPTER I NEPTUNE’S GROTTO
SUPERIOR
FIRE WORKS
at the
NEPTUNE’S GROTTO
Tavern and Tea Gardens
PIMLICO
on Thursday Evening, 20th, July, 1829.
By
MADAME ORIANO
The Celebrated Pyrotechnic to HIS MAJESTY
The Exhibition will include
A Grand Display of various kinds of
WATER FIRE WORKS

On the Grosvenor Basin.
ORDER OF FIRING
1. A Battery of Maroons, or imitation Cannon
2. A Bengal Light
3. Sky Rockets
4. A Saxon Wheel
5. Tourbillions
6. Phenomenon Box and Mime
7. Line Rockets
8. A Metamorphose with alternate changes, and a
beautiful display of Chinese Lattice Work
9. Sky Rockets
10. Horizontal Wheel with Roman Candles and Mine
11. Tourbillions
12. A regulating piece in two mutations, displaying a
Vertical Wheel changing to five Vertical Wheels and
a figure piece in Straw and brilliant fires
13. Grand Battery of Roman Candles & Italian
Streamers
14. A regulating piece in four mutations displaying a
Vertical Wheel changing to a Pyramid of Wheels, a
Brilliant Sun, and a superb shower of fire
15. Sky rockets
GRAND FINALE
MADEMOISELLE LETIZIA ORIANO
Will with a temerity hitherto unknown in the blazing
annals of her profession slide down an inclined rope 350
feet high, erected on the firework platform, wreathed in
Fizgigs and Fiery Serpents and accompanied by the
awful thunder of a Battery of Maroons.
Admission 1s each
Gardens open at half-past seven, and commences at

Nine o’clock precisely.
“Neptune’s Grotto” was one of the many pleasure-gardens that in

the days when the Londoner was comparatively a free man helped
to amuse his leisure. Yet even by the ninth year of the reign of King
George IV most of the famous resorts of the preceding century had
already been built over, and now that Lord Grosvenor was
developing the Manor of Ebury (Buckingham Palace appearing fixed
as the metropolitan abode of the Sovereign) “Neptune’s Grotto” was
likely to vanish soon and leave no more trace of its sparkling life than
the smoke of a spent rocket. Indeed, change was already menacing.
For two years Cubitt, the famous builder, had been filling up the
swampy land between Vauxhall Bridge Road and Ranelagh with the
soil he had excavated in the construction of St. Katharine’s Docks.
His cadaverous grey plastered terraces were creeping nearer every
week. Willow Walk, a low-lying footpath between the cuts of the
Chelsea Water Works, in a cottage hard by which Jerry Abershaw
and Gentleman James Maclaine the highwaymen once lodged,
would soon be turned into the haggard Warwick Street we know to-
day. The last osier bed would ultimately be replaced by the greasy
aucubas of Eccleston Square, and Lupus Street would lie heavy on
ancient gardens. The turnpike at Ebury Bridge had been gone these
four years; the old country road to Chelsea would within a lustrum be
lined by houses on either side and become Buckingham Palace
Road. Even the great basin of the Grosvenor Canal would run dry at
last and breed from its mud Victoria Station.
However, in 1829 “Neptune’s Grotto” still remained much as it had
been for over a century. The house of mellow red brick was covered
with lattice-work, which on this warm July evening was all fragrant
and ablow with climbing roses. Only the box trees had changed the
pattern of their topiary. In place of earlier warriors or statesmen you
would have found Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington at this
date, the general more freshly trimmed than the admiral, but likely to
go unpruned in the years of his unpopularity that were coming. His
sacred Majesty King George III had been allowed to sprout into the
rounder bulk of his sacred Majesty King George IV, but the new
portrait was hardly more attractive than the blowsy original. The
garden paths were bordered with stocks and hollyhocks. There were
bowling-greens and fishponds, and a dark alley in emulation of the
notorious dark alley of Vauxhall. Most of these amenities, however,
had been made familiar by a score of other pleasure-gardens all
over London. What gave “Neptune’s Grotto” its peculiar charm was
the wide green lawn running down to the edge of the great reservoir.
In the middle of this was the grotto itself, under the ferny arches of
which an orchestra of Tritons languorously invited the little world of
pleasure to the waltz, or more energetically commanded it to the
gallopade. The firework platform was built out over the water on
piles; and the lawn was surrounded on three sides by small alcoves
lined with oyster shells, in some of which the lightest footstep on a
concealed mechanism would cause to spring up a dolphin, or a
mermaid, a harlequin or a Mother Shipton, startling intruders for the
maiden who first encountered them, so startling that she would
usually fling herself into the arms of the beau in escort and require to
be restored with various liquors much to the satisfaction of Mr.
Seedwell, the owner of the gardens.
High tortoiseshell combs and full curled hair, wide skirts of Gros de
Naples flounced and pinked and scalloped and fluted, white
stockings and slippers of yellow prunella, Leghorn hats of
transparent crape bound with lavender sarsenet or puffed with small
bouquets of marabout, bonnets of jonquil-yellow with waving ostrich
plumes, bonnets of marshmallow-rose with ribbons of lilac and
hortensia floating loose, double Vandyke collars of Indian muslin,
grass-green parasols and purple reticules, leg-of-mutton sleeves and
satin roulades, pelisses and pèlerines most fashionably of
camelopard-yellow, ivory shoulders, Canezon spencers and gauze
capotes, fichus of ethereal-blue barège, laughter and whispers and
murmurs and music (ah, yes, no doubt and plenty of simpers too),
where now trains thunder past filled with jaded suburbans, whose
faces peep from the windows as their owners wonder if the new film
at the picture-theatre will be worth the trouble of visiting after tea in
our modish contemporary shades of nude, French nude, sunburn,
and flesh. Would that Stephenson had never cursed humanity with
his steam-engine, and would that this tale might never creep nearer
to the present than that July night of 1829! Alas, it has more to do
with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fluttered
out like moths in that summer dusk to watch Madame Oriano’s
fireworks; and these at whom you gaze for the moment are but
creatures in a prologue who will all be ghosts long before the last
page is written.
However, here come those ghosts, still very much alive and
shilling in hand, some from Knightsbridge, some from Chelsea, some
from Westminster. “Strombolo House,” which used to charge half-a-
crown for its fireworks, so famous were they, is closed. To be sure
the “Monster” is still open, but there are no fireworks in the
entertainment there to-night; a performing bear is all that the
“Monster” can offer to-night. The “Orange Tea Gardens” are gone for
good: St. Barnabas’ Pimlico, will occupy their site, and on it cause as
much religious rowdiness in another twenty years as ever there was
of secular rowdiness in the past. “Jenny’s Whim” hard by the old
turnpike has already been covered with builder Cubitt’s beastly
foundations. There is no longer much competition with “Neptune’s
Grotto” in the manor of Ebury. A few pause in Vauxhall Bridge Road
when they see the hackney-coaches filled with merry parties bound
for the most famous gardens of all; but they decide to visit them
another evening, and they cross the road to Willow Walk, where one
remembers seeing Jerry Abershaw’s body swinging from the gibbet
on Putney Common and that scarcely thirty years ago, and another
marvels at the way the new houses are springing up all round. Some
shake their heads over Reform, but most of them whisper of
pleasure and of love while ghostly moths spin beside the path, and
the bats are seen hawking against the luminous west and the dog-
star which was glimmering long before his fellows is already dancing
like a diamond in the south.
While the public was strolling on its way to “Neptune’s Grotto,”
within the gardens themselves Mr. Seedwell, the proprietor, and
Madame Oriano made a final inspection of the firework platform.
“You think she can do it?” he was saying.
“Offa coursa she can do it,” Madame replied sharply.
Mr. Seedwell shook his head in grave doubt. Weighing eighteen
stone and a bit over he found it hard to put himself in Mademoiselle
Letizia’s place.
“I don’t want an accident,” he explained. “The magistrates are only
too glad of an excuse to close us down these days.”
“Dere willa not be no accident,” Madame Oriano assured him.
And Mr. Seedwell, looking at the raven-haired and raven-beaked
and raven-eyed woman beside him, took her word for it and went off
to see that all was ready inside the house for the entertainment of his
guests.
Madame Oriano squeezed a handful of her yellow satin gown.
“Bagnato!”[1] she murmured to herself. Then looking across to one
of the alcoves she called out in a shrill harsh voice, “Caleb! Caleb
Fuller!”
[1] Wet.
A beetle could not have left his carapace more unwillingly than
Caleb Fuller that alcove. He was a young man—certainly not more
than twenty-five, perhaps not as much—whose lumpish and pasty
face suggested at first an extreme dulness of mind until one looked a
little closer and perceived a pair of glittering granite-grey eyes that
animated the whole countenance with an expression that passed
beyond cunning and touched intelligence. Beside the dragon-fly
vividness of his employer he appeared, as he shambled across the
lawn to hear what she wanted of him, like an awkward underground
insect, with his turgid rump and thin legs in tight pantaloons and his
ill-fitting tail-coat of rusty black.
“Dissa English cleemat non è possibile,” Madame shrilled.
“Everyting willa be wet before we beginna to fire.”
“It’s the heavy dew,” said Caleb.
“Oh, diavolo! What do it matter which it is, if de fireworks will alla
be—how you say—spilt?”
“Spoilt,” he corrected gloomily.
“Che lingua di animali, questa English linguage! Where issa John
Gumm?”
“In the tap-room,” Caleb informed her.
“Drinking! Drinking,” she shrilled. “Why you don’ta to keep him
notta to drink before we are finished?”
John Gumm who was Madame’s chief firer had already imperilled
by his habits several of her performances.
“Somebody musta go and putta clothes on de fireworks. Non
voglio che abbiamo un fiasco,[2] I don’ta wish it. You hear me,
Caleb?”
[2] “I do not want us to have a fiasco.”
Caleb was used to these outbursts of nervous anxiety before

every display, and on most evenings he would have humoured
Madame by bullying the various assistants and have enjoyed giving
such an exhibition of his authority. But this evening he would not
have been sorry to see the damp air make the whole display such a
fiasco as Madame feared, for he bitterly resented the public
appearance of Letizia Oriano, not so much for the danger of the
proposed feat, but for the gratification the sight of her shapely legs
would afford the crowd. In fact when Madame had summoned him to
her side, he was actually engaged in a bitter argument with Letizia
herself and had even gone so far as to beg her to defy her mother
and refuse to make the fire-clad descent.
“There won’t be enough dew to prevent the firing,” he argued.
“And more’s the pity,” he added, gathering boldness as jealousy
began once more to rack him. “More’s the pity, I say, when you’re
letting your only child expose her—expose herself to danger.” He
managed to gulp back the words he just lacked the courage to fling
at her, and though his heart beat “Jezebel! Jezebel!” he dared not
say it out.
“Dere is nottings dangerous,” she snapped. “She has walked the
slacka rope and the tighta rope since she was a bambina. Her fazer
has learnt her to do it.”
Caleb groaned within himself. Letizia’s father was as mythical and
as many-sided as Proteus. Italian prince, English nobleman, play-
actor, ballet-master, acrobat, with as many aliases as a thief, he was
whatever Madame chose he should be to suit her immediate

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The Muhammad Avat■ra: Salvation

History, Translation, and the Making of

Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain

The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and

From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the

Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics,

Letters to the Lost (Whispers of Salvation Book 2) N.E.

Enabling the Internet of Things: Fundamentals, Design

Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the

Pandemonium, A Sourcebook on the Tragedy of Husayn

Salvation History, Translation, and

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

The magnanimity of many remarkable individuals has made this book

Everett Rowson, Haimanti Banerjee, Pardis Minuchehr, Negin Nabavi, the

of Toronto, and the Department of Asian Studies and the Junior

one of these presentations helped me to refine my thinking, and for this

wellspring of inspiration to me in more ways than I can here convey. It was

This monograph employs three systems of transliteration, all of which are

1. See “ALA-​LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-​

vernacular, I preferentially use Bangla forms of Arabo-​Persian words

Bangla variants of a particular Arabo-​Persian word in the vast manuscript

KUCH BIHAR River

Map of Arakan and Eastern South Asian in the Seventeenth Century

The Prophet of Light and Love

A well-​known seventeenth-​century Bengali religious text opens with an

First I bow to the Lord, who is without beginning, a storehouse of riches,

Form imbues fire with heat;

Having taken the form of Muhammad—​his own avatāra—​

predecessors, Muhammad’s eventual birth and early years in Mecca, his

By harnessing the active principle (rajaḥ guṇa),

and Rāma to slay the dreaded demons.

What we have here, then, is a traditional Indic account of creation, and

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF CAṬ Ṭ A GRĀ MA

5. Eaton 1993, 132–​133.

found the population of Katrābo to be entirely Muslim. This town,

to be referred to as the Twelve Chieftains,12 rallied around the intrepid

17. Karim 1992a, 174.

(r. 1437–​1487), numismatic evidence suggests that sultān Nāṣir al-​Dīn

22. Qanungo 1988, 149–​150.

clearly went beyond Chittagong. The Arakanese governors had the

In the early sixteenth century, Arakanese rulers courted the Portuguese

27. Ibid., 134.

imperial splendor. At the apogee of territorial expansionism, the kingdom

the polity [of Arakan] is the locus of highly complex cultural

34. Raymond 2002, 177.

The glittering court of Satuidhamma (r. 1645–1652) was the epitome of

Having heard of Rosāṅga’s pleasures, diverse peoples of various lands

40. Ālāol racanāvalī, “satera.” d’Hubert 2018, 30.

innumerable, army-​camps [stretch] endlessly.

44. Translation mine. Padmāvatī in Ālāol Racanāvalī, 7.

inhabited by Afghan adventurers fleeing the Mughals, Portuguese pirates

ISLAMIC BANGLA LITERATURE AND ISLAMIZATION

52. Eaton 1993, Map 3, 121.

to hold salience. His “frontier” model proposes a coincidence between

55. Eaton 2003, 20.

the Islamization of Bengal itself.59 A term coined by Jan Assmann to define

LITERARY PORTRAITS OF THE AUTHOR

This is how a famous disciple of his describes him:

In Āmir Hocan’s line was born a repository of virtue:

vandanās to the deity, or to the saints in South Asian hagiographies,66 shows

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. See “ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-

vernacular, I preferentially use Bangla forms of Arabo-Persian words

Bangla variants of a particular Arabo-Persian word in the vast manuscript

A well-known seventeenth-century Bengali religious text opens with an

Having taken the form of Muhammad—his own avatāra—

5. Eaton 1993, 132–133.

(r. 1437–1487), numismatic evidence suggests that sultān Nāṣir al-Dīn

22. Qanungo 1988, 149–150.

innumerable, army-camps [stretch] endlessly.

and spiritual genealogy of a local pīr-author, who provides his stamp of

76. Haq [1957] 1991, 294–295; translation mine.

78. Mukhopadhyay 1974, 191–193.

retelling of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā.84 Sagīr’s translation

two villages in modern-day Patiya district (medieval Cakraśālā) corrob-

naʿt—the encomiums to God and the Prophet, respectively, with which