Rather later in the same century, a native of Persian ʻIrāq, by name Abū ʻAlī Qalandar, came into India and took up his residence at Panipat, where he died at the ripe age of 100, in A.D. 1324. The Muslim Rajputs of this city, numbering about 300 males, are descended from a certain Amīr Singh who was converted by this saint. His tomb is still held in honour and is visited by many pilgrims. Another such was Shaykh Jalāl al-Dīn, a Persian who came into India about the latter half of the fourteenth century and settled down at Silhaṭ, in Lower Assam, in order to convert the people of these parts to Islam. He achieved a great reputation as a holy man, and his proselytising labours were crowned with eminent success. [925] In more recent years there have been abundant witnesses for Islam seeking to spread this faith in India—and with very considerable success; the second half of the nineteenth century especially witnessed a great revival of missionary activity, the number of annual conversions being variously estimated at ten, fifty, one hundred and six hundred thousand. [926] But it is difficult to obtain accurate information on account of the peculiarly individualistic character of Muslim missionary work and the absence of any central organisation or of anything in the way of missionary reports, and the success that attends the labours of Muslim preachers is sometimes much exaggerated, e.g. in the Panjāb a certain Ḥājī Muḥammad is said to have converted as many as 200,000 Hindus, [927] and a mawlavī in Bangalore boasted that in five years he had made as many as 1000 converts in this city and its suburbs. But that there are Muslim missionaries engaged in active and successful propagandist labours is undoubted, and the following examples are typical of the period referred to. Mawlavī Baqā Ḥusayn Khān, an itinerant preacher, in the course of several years converted 228 persons, residents of Bombay, Cawnpore, Ajmīr, and other cities. Mawlavī Ḥasan ʻAlī converted twenty-five persons, twelve in Poona, the rest in Ḥaydarabad and other parts of India. [928] In the district of Khandesh, in the Bombay Presidency, the preaching of the Qāḍī of Nasirabad, Sayyid Safdar ʻAlī, won over to Islam a large body of artisans, who follow the trade of armourers or blacksmiths. [929] A number of persons of the same trade, who form a small community of about 200 souls in the district of Nasik, were converted in a curious way about 1870. The Presbyterian missionaries of Nasik had for a long time been trying to convert them from Hinduism, and they were in a state of hesitation as to whether or not to embrace Christianity when a Muhammadan faqīr from Bombay, who was well acquainted with their habits of thought, expounded to them the doctrines of Islam and succeeded in winning them over to that faith. [930]