gypt and
Java. At the present day about one-fifth of the population are Moslim.
The strength of Islam in the Panjab is due to immigration as well as
conversion,[1164] but it was embraced by large numbers in Kashmir and
made rapid progress in Oudh and Eastern Bengal. The number of
Mohammedans in Bengal (twenty-five millions out of a total of
sixty-two in all India) is striking, seeing that the province is out
of touch with the chief Mohammedan centres, but is explicable by the
fact that Islam had to deal here not with an educated and organized
Hindu community but with imperfectly hinduized aboriginal races, who
welcomed a creed with no caste distinctions. Yet, apart from the
districts named, which lie on the natural line of march from the
Panjab down the Ganges to the sea, it made little progress. It has not
even conquered the slopes of the Himalayas or the country south of the
Jumna. If we deduct from the Mohammedan population the descendants of
Mohammedan immigrants and of those who, like the inhabitants of
Eastern Bengal, were not Hindus when they embraced the faith, the
impression produced by Islam on the religious thought of India is not
great, considering that for at least five centuries its temporal
supremacy was hardly contested.

It is not until the time of Kabir that we meet with a sect in which
Hindu and Mohammedan ideas are clearly blended, but it may be that the
theology of Ramanuja and Madhva, of the Lingayats and Sivaite sects of
the south, owes something to Islam. Its insistence on the unity and
personality of God may have vivified similar ideas existing within
Hinduism, but the expression which they found for themselves is not
Moslim in tone, just as nowadays the Arya Samaj is not European in
tone. Yet I think that the Arya Samaj would never have come into being
had not Hindus become conscious of certain strong points in European
religion. In the north it is natural that Moslim influence should not
have made itself felt at once. Islam came first as an enemy and a
raider and was no more sympathetic to the Brahmans than it was to the
Greek Church in Europe. Though Indian theism may sometimes seem
practically equivalent to Islam, yet it has a different and gentler
tone, and it often rests on the idea that God, the soul and matter are
all separate and eternal, an idea foreign to Mohammed's doctrine of
creation. But from the fifteenth century onwards we find a series
of sects which are obviously compromises