The Deccan also was the scene of the successful labours of many Muslim missionaries. It has already been pointed out that from very early times Arab traders had visited the towns on the west coast; in the tenth century we are told that the Arabs were settled in large numbers in the towns of the Konkan, having intermarried with the women of the country and living under their own laws and religion. [878] Under the Muhammadan dynasties of the Bahmanid (1347–1490) and Bījāpūr (1489–1686) kings, a fresh impulse was given to Arab immigration, and with the trader and the soldier of fortune came the missionaries seeking to make spiritual conquests in the cause of Islam, and win over the unbelieving people of the country by their preaching and example, for of forcible conversions we have no record under the early Deccan dynasties, whose rule was characterised by a striking toleration. [879] One of these Arab preachers, Pīr Mahābīr Khamdāyat, came as a missionary to the Deccan as early as A.D. 1304, and among the cultivating classes of Bījāpūr are to be found descendants of the Jains who were converted by him. [880] About the close of the same century a celebrated saint of Gulbarga, Sayyid Muḥammad Gīsūdarāz, [881] converted a number of Hindus of the Poona district, and twenty years later his labours were crowned with a like success in Belgaum. [882] At Dahanu still reside the descendants of a relative of one of the greatest saints of Islam, Sayyid ʻAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī of Baghdād; he came to Western India about the fifteenth century, and after making many converts in the Konkan, died and was buried at Dahanu. [883] In the district of Dharwar, there are large numbers of weavers whose ancestors were converted by Hāshim Pīr Gujarātī, the religious teacher of the Bījāpūr king, Ibrāhīm ʻĀdil Shāh II, about the close of the sixteenth century. These men still regard the saint with special reverence and pay great respect to his descendants. [884] The descendants of another saint, Shāh Muḥammad Ṣādiq Sarmast Ḥusaynī, are still found in Nasik; he is said to have been the most successful of Muhammadan missionaries; having come from Medina in 1568, he travelled over the greater part of Western India and finally settled at Nasik—in which district another very successful Muslim missionary, Khwājah Khunmir Ḥusaynī, had begun to labour about fifty years before. [885] Two other Arab missionaries may be mentioned, the scene of whose proselytising efforts was laid in the district of Belgaum, namely Sayyid Muḥammad b. Sayyid ʻAlī and Sayyid ʻUmar ʻAydrūs Basheban. [886]