The Coming of Islam to Sylhet

The spread of Islam through the great well-watered land of Bengal, in the far east of the Indian subcontinent, owed much, like its spread through Southeast Asia, to the work not of armies but of holy men, the Sufi saints and preachers who settled among the people, taught the faith by word and example, and won them to Islam by their sanctity. The most revered of these in eastern Bengal is Shah Jalal (rahimahu Allah), the Sufi shaykh associated with the coming of Islam to the region of Sylhet, who by tradition came with a band of companions, took part in the establishment of Muslim rule there in the early fourteenth century, and then settled as a holy man whose hermitage became a centre of devotion and a fountainhead of the faith for the surrounding country, a land of flooded rice-fields, ponds and rivers running out to the blue hills of the frontier. So great was Shah Jalal's fame for austerity, sanctity and miracle that it reached far across the Muslim world, and when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta journeyed through Bengal about 1346 he made a long and difficult journey through the mountains and waterways expressly to visit the aged shaykh in his hermitage and to receive his blessing, leaving an account that is one of the earliest records of him. The work of Shah Jalal and the many other saints of Bengal began a history that would make the Bengal delta, today divided between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, one of the most populous Muslim lands on earth. This scene depicts the wetland country of Sylhet and the hermitage of the saint at the coming of Islam. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.