are Sunnīs, but the greater part remain true to their original faith.” [902] Several small groups of Musalmans in Cutch and Gujarāt trace their conversion to Imām Shāh of Pīrāna, [903] who was actively engaged in missionary work during the latter half of the fifteenth century. He is said to have converted a large body of Hindu cultivators, by bringing about a fall of rain after two seasons of scarcity. On another occasion meeting a band of Hindu pilgrims passing through Pīrāna on their way to Benares, he offered to take them there; they agreed and in a moment were in the holy city, where they bathed in the Ganges and paid their vows; they then awoke to find themselves still in Pīrāna and adopted the faith of the saint who could perform such a miracle. He died in 1512 and his tomb in Pīrāna is still an object of pilgrimage for Hindus as well as for Muhammadans. [904] Many of the Cutch Musalmans that are of Hindu descent reverence as their spiritual leader Dāwal Shāh Pīr, whose real name was Malik ʻAbd al-Laṭīf, [905] the son of one of the nobles of Maḥmūd Bīgarah (1459–1511), the famous monarch of the Muhammadan dynasty of Gujarāt, to whose reign popular tradition assigns the date of the conversion of many Hindus. [906] It is in Bengal, however, that the Muhammadan missionaries in India have achieved their greatest success, as far as numbers are concerned. A Muhammadan kingdom was first founded here at the end of the twelfth century by Muḥammad Bakhtiyār Khiljī, who conquered Bihar and Bengal and made Gaur the capital of the latter province. The long continuance of the Muhammadan rule would naturally assist the spread of Islam, and though the Hindu rule was restored for ten years under the tolerant Rājā Kāns, whose rule is said to have been popular with his Muhammadan subjects, [907] his son, Jatmall, renounced the Hindu religion and became a Musalman. After his father’s death in 1414 he called together all the officers of the state and announced his intention of embracing Islam, and proclaimed that if the chiefs would not permit him to ascend the throne, he was ready to give it up to his brother; whereupon they declared that they would accept him as their king, whatever religion he might adopt. Accordingly, several learned men of the Muslim faith were summoned to witness the Raja renounce the Hindu religion and publicly profess his acceptance of Islam: he took the name of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Shāh, and according to tradition numerous conversions were made during his reign. [908] Many of these were however due to force, for his reign is signalised as being the only one in which any wholesale persecution of the subject Hindus is recorded, during the five centuries and a half of Muhammadan rule in Eastern Bengal. [909]