Bengali Muslims

Bengali Muslims (Bengali: বাঙালি মুসলমান; pronounced [baŋali musɔlman]) are adherents of Islam who ethnically, linguistically and genealogically identify as Bengalis. Comprising over 70% of the global Bengali population, they are the second-largest ethnic group among Muslims after Arabs. Bengali Muslims make up the majority of Bangladesh's citizens, and are the largest minority in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam.

They speak or identify the Bengali language as their mother tongue. The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.

Due to its extensive trade contacts, Bengal has had a Muslim presence in the region since the early 8th century CE, but conquest of the Bengal region by the Delhi Sultanate brought Muslim rule to Bengal. The governors of the region soon broke away to form a Bengal Sultanate, which was a supreme power of the medieval Islamic East. European traders identified the Bengal Sultanate as "the richest country to trade with". The Sultans of Bengal promoted the development of Bengali as a language and the writing of Islamic literature in Bengali, paving the way for the development of a distinct Bengali Muslim culture, while many intellectuals and scholars from throughout the Muslim world migrated to Bengal.

Although Islamic culture had long developed in Bengal, it was after the Mughal Conquest of Bengal in the early 17th century and their subsequent attempt to expand cultivation in the still-forested eastern part of Bengal that a majority of Bengal would develop an Islamic identity. Mughal revenue policies encouraged Muslim adventurers to organise the development of agricultural societies among indigenous peoples with weak ties to Hinduism, who increasingly blended aspects of Islamic cosmology with folk religious worldviews and practices. Thus the majority of the rural population of central, northern and eastern Bengal would develop an Islamic identity, and the majority of Bengali Muslims today descend from these indigenous peoples. This expansion of cultivation also led to tremendous economic growth, and the increasingly-independent Bengal Subah would be one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Bengal viceroy Muhammad Azam Shah assumed the imperial throne. Mughal Bengal became increasingly independent under the Nawabs of Bengal in the 18th century.

After the East India Company conquered Bengal from the Mughals in the 18th century, they implemented the Permanent Settlement, which led to the creation of a new class of mostly upper-caste Hindu Zamindars, while putting additional burdens on the peasants, who were largely Muslims. Inspired by increasingly-available travel to Arabia, religious revivalists such as Titumir and Haji Shariatullah urged an abandonment of perceived non-Islamic folk practices among the lower class Bengali Muslims, and later organised them in agitations against the zamindars and the East India Company.

In Bengal, the British Government organised the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which created a new Muslim-dominated province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, although this would be reversed in 1911. Starting in the early 20th century, British efforts to bring what they considered 'waste' land under cultivation resulted in the large-scale immigration of Bengali Muslim peasants to Lower Assam and Arakan in what would become Myanmar. Increasingly in the early 20th century, tensions between Bengali Muslims and Hindus, particularly Bengali Muslim resentment of landowning Hindus, resulted in widespread support among Bengali Muslims for a separate Pakistan, which near Partition resulted in widespread communal violence. After the Partition of India in 1947, they comprised the demographic majority of Pakistan until the independence of East Pakistan (historic East Bengal) as Bangladesh in 1971.