its sight to a despised and neglected population. The initiatory rite rendered relapse impossible, and made the proselyte and his posterity true believers for ever. In this way Islam settled down on the richest alluvial province of India, the province which was capable of supporting the most rapid and densest increase of population. Compulsory conversions are occasionally recorded. But it was not to force that Islam owed its permanent success in Lower Bengal. It appealed to the people, and it derived the great mass of its converts from the poor. It brought in a higher conception of God, and a nobler idea of the brotherhood of man. It offered to the teeming low castes of Bengal, who had sat for ages abject on the outermost pale of the Hindu community, a free entrance into a new social organisation.” [914] The existence in Bengal of definite missionary efforts is said to be attested by certain legends of the zeal of private individuals on behalf of their religion, and the graves of some of these missionaries are still honoured, and are annually visited by hundreds of pilgrims. [915] One of the earliest of these was Shaykh Jalāl al-Dīn Tabrīzī, who died in A.D. 1244. He was a pupil of the great saint, Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī. In the course of his missionary journeys he visited Bengal, where a shrine to which is attached a rich endowment was erected in his honour, the real site of his tomb being unknown. Many miracles are ascribed to him; among others, that he converted a Hindu milkman to Islam by a single look. [916] In the nineteenth century there was a remarkable revival of the Muhammadan religion in Bengal, and several sects that owe their origin to the influence of the Wahhābī reformation, have sent their missionaries through the province purging out the remnants of Hindu superstitions, awakening religious zeal and spreading the faith among unbelievers. [917] Some account still remains to be given of Muslim missionaries who have laboured in parts of India other than those mentioned above. One of the earliest of these is Shaykh Ismāʻīl, one of the most famous of the Sayyids of Bukhārā, distinguished alike for his secular and religious learning; he is said to have been the first Muslim missionary who preached the faith of Islam in the city of Lahore, whither he came in the year A.D. 1005. Crowds flocked to listen to his sermons, and the number of his converts swelled rapidly day by day, and it is said that no unbeliever ever came into personal contact with him without being converted to the faith of Islam. [918]