Incidences of Sufi appropriation of Hindu Spirituality for conversions

From the beginning of the Indo-Turkish encounter with Bengal, one section of Muslims sought to appropriate Hindu practices into Islam to gain popularity among the masses. Contemporary Muslims perceived northern Bengal generally, and especially Kamrup, lying between the Brahmaputra River and the hills of Bhutan, as a fabulous and mysterious place inhabited by expert practitioners of the occult, of yoga, and of magic. During his visit to Sylhet, Ibn Battuta noted that "the inhabitants of these mountains are noted”. Around 1595 the great Mughal administrative manual a'in-i Akbari described the inhabitants of Kamrup as "addicted to the practice of magic [jadugari].” Some twenty-five years later a Mughal officer serving in northern Bengal described the Khuntaghat region, in western Kamrup, as "notorious for magic and sorcery." And in 1662–63 another Mughal chronicler, referring to the entire Assam region, of which Kamrup is the western part, remarked that "the people of India have come to look upon the Assamese as sorcerers, and use the word 'Assam' in such formulas as dispel witchcraft."

Since Sufis were especially concerned with figuring out means and methods at converting local populations by being the "Good Cop" in the the "Good-Cop/Bad Cop technique, it is not surprising that they, among Muslims, were most attracted to the yogi traditions of Kamrup, as a tool to convert Hindus. Within the very first decade of the Turkish conquest, there began to circulate in the delta Persian and Arabic translations of a Sanskrit manual on tantric yoga entitled Amritakunda ("The Pool of Nectar"). According to the translated versions, the Sanskrit text had been composed by a Brahman yogi of Kamrup who the Muslims claimed, had converted to Islam and presented the work to the chief qazi, or judge, of Lakhnauti, Rukn al-Din Samarqandi (C.E 1218). The latter, in turn, is said to have made the first translations of the work into Arabic and Persian. While this last point is uncertain, there is no doubt that for the following five hundred years the Amritakunda, through its repeated translations into Arabic and Persian, circulated widely among Sufis of Bengal, and even throughout India. The North Indian Sufi Shaikh 'Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (C.E 1537) is known to have used the yogic ideas of the Amritakunda and to have taught them to his own disciples. In the mid seventeenth century, the Kashmiri author Muhsin Fani recorded that he had seen a Persian translation of the Amritakunda and in the same century the Anatolian Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Misri (C.E 1694) cited the Amritakunda as an important book for the study of yogic practices, noting that in India such practices had become partly taken over by Sufism.

In both its Persian and Arabic translations, the Bahr al-hayat survives as a manual of tantric yoga, with the first of its ten chapters affirming the characteristically tantric correspondence between parts of the human body and parts of the macrocosm, "where all that is large in the world discovers itself in the small." In the mid sixteenth century, there appeared in Gujarat a Persian recension of the Amr?takun?d?a under the title Bahr al-hayat, attributed to the Shattari shaikh Muhammad Ghauth of Gwalior (C.E 1563). A prologue to this version, written by a disciple of the shaikh, records how these yogic ideas were thought to have entered the Bengali Sufi tradition:

A second prologue to the Bahr al-hayat established a framework within which a text on yoga could be accommodated within classical Sufi lore. In it, the translator tells of once being in a country whose king summoned him and ordered that he undertake a great journey to a distant but fabulous realm. The king reminded the traveler that they were joined together by a covenant and that they would meet again at the end of the traveler's voyage. Then the translator/traveler describes the hardships he endured while on his journey: the two seas (the soul and nature), the seven mountains, the four passes, the three stations filled with dangers, and the path narrower than the eye of an ant. Ultimately, he reached the promised land, where he found a shaikh who mirrored or echoed each of his own moves and words. Realizing that the man was but his own reflection, the traveler remembered his covenant with his master, to whom he was now led. The story's climax is reached in the traveler's epiphanic self-discovery: "I found the king and minister in myself." The dominant motifs of this second prologue—the traveler, the arduous path with its temptations and dangers, and the ultimate realization that the goal is identified with the seeker—all show the influence of Sufi notions current in the thirteenth-century Perso-Islamic world. The placement of the yogic text immediately after this prologue suggests that the esoteric practices described therein constitute, in effect, the means to achieving the mystical goals stated in the second prologue.
Although some scholars have regarded the Bahr al-hayat as a work of religious syncretism, this judgment is difficult to sustain if by syncretism one means the production of a new synthesis out of two or more antithetical elements. Rather, the work consists of two independent and self-contained worldviews placed alongside one another—a technical manual of yoga preceded by a Sufi allegory—with later editors or translators going to some lengths to stress their points of coincidence. Although Islamic terms and superhuman agencies are generously sprinkled through the main text, allusions to Islamic lore serve ultimately to buttress or illustrate thoroughly Indian concepts. Here, at least, yoga and Sufi ideas resisted true fusion.

Nonetheless the book's popularity illustrates the Sufis' considerable fascination with the esoteric practices of Bengal's indigenous culture and its appropriation it order to further spread the Islamic propaganda. The renowned Shattari saint Shaikh Muhammad Ghauth even traveled from Gwalior in Upper India to Kamrup in order to study the esoteric knowledge that Muslims had identified with that region. In doing so he was following a tradition of Sufis of the Shattari order, whose founder, Shah 'Abd Allah Shattari (C.E 1485), included Bengal on his journey from Central Asia through India.