ABSTRACT
Recent Studies in Muslim societies, both historical and empirical, have brought about rather significant modifications and revisions in the understanding and perception of the process of Islamization in a given situation. Islamic mass movements in this region revealed clear affinity with the social meanings of conversion. Reasons other than strictly spiritual largely underlay the mass conversion process in South Asia, and Islamization in this context could, therefore, be deemed conterminous with conversion not so much in its usual spiritual sense as social. The absence of “horizontal group solidarity” and the “unusually fragmented character” of the depressed social groups rendered “collective action” on their part for amelioration of social conditions highly difficult. The lower delta is subjected to heavy rainfall and precariously open even now to the constant threat of cyclonic catas trophies. Its history down to the British period was largely marked by turbulence and rioting linked with the conditions of local geography.
